FDR's secretary of labor fought for workers

09/01/2008
 

Born in Boston in 1880, Frances Perkins descended from sturdy Maine stock; her ancestors were farmers and craftsmen. But while she was raised in comfort as the daughter of a well-to-do Republican businessman, Perkins forged a life as a champion of the American worker, ultimately serving as Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of labor for 12 years.
After graduation from Mt. Holyoke in 1902, she learned the hardships of factory workers' lives while working at settlement houses that catered to the poor. It was a time when men, women and children worked in sweatshop conditions for endless hours and low wages. Workers were harassed and punished for attempting to organize. Perkins lobbied the New York state Legislature successfully for a bill to limit to 54 hours the workweek for women and children. She was then appointed by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to the top post in the New York state's labor department.

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 was a crucial experience for Perkins. She witnessed the tragedy, in which fire spread throughout the factory, a New York tenement building that lacked fire escapes, killing 146 of the company's young, immigrant workers. Many of the deaths occurred when workers leapt from ninth-floor windows.

The fire became a compelling symbol of the need for better working conditions for America's laborers; the event, said Perkins, remained "seared on my mind as well as my heart -- a never-to-be-forgotten reminder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy."

When Roosevelt was elected president, he appointed Perkins his secretary of labor, the first woman to hold a cabinet position. According to a Perkins biography on the AFL-CIO Web site, she was instrumental in much landmark New Deal labor legislation, including the National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act), "which gave workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established for the first time a minimum wage and a maximum workweek for men and women." Perkins was also head of the committee that developed the Social Security Act, passed in 1935.

After resigning her cabinet position, Perkins went on to serve as head of the U.S. delegation to the 1945 Paris conference of the International Labor Organization and as a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. At her death, she was buried at her family's plot in the midcoast Maine town of Newcastle.

In commemoration of Labor Day today, we present a 1933 column, "The cost of a $5 dress," that Perkins wrote for the journal "Survey Graphic." She writes about sweatshops and the products sweatshop workers produced -- an issue still relevant at a time in this country when major retailers have been accused of buying goods from overseas sweatshops as well as sweatshops in New York City and Los Angeles.

-- The editors