Frances Perkins Quotes

Workers-rights advocate and United States Secretary of Labor 1933–1945

Frances Perkins (April 10, 1882 – May 14, 1965) was U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945. She was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet and was largely responsible for the U.S. adoption of social security, unemployment insurance, the federal minimum wage, and federal laws regulating child labor.
During her term as Secretary of Labor, Perkins executed the , the and its successor the , plus the labor portion of the . With the Social Security Act she established , pensions for the many uncovered elderly Americans and welfare for the poorest Americans. She pushed to reduce workplace accidents and helped craft laws against child labor. Through the , she established the first minimum wage and laws for American workers and defined the standard forty-hour work week. She formed governmental policy for working with labor unions and helped to alleviate strikes by way of the United States Conciliation Service. Perkins dealt with many labor questions during World War II when skilled labor was vital and women were moving into formerly male jobs. She is the subject of the documentary film "Summoned: Frances Perkins and the General Welfare" (2020).

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Fannie Coralie Perkins

Alternative Names: Frances Coralie Perkins • Frances Perkins Wilson

From Wikidata (CC0)

Everybody who jumped, and a good many did jump from the 9th and 10th floors, was killed. The other people who died were all people who were burned or smothered by the smoke in the factory itself.

[T]his was a terrible accident; 147 young people, they were all young men and women, were killed, lost their lives and a number of others were badly injured. Some of them were injured after the fire in the elevator shaft had gone out. Of course the boys that ran the elevator had gone... fled. Some of the people tried to get out by jumping into the elevator shaft and grabbing the cables and letting themselves down... Some of them fell, some of them were awkward and... couldn't hold on. Some of them merely blistered their hands, took the skin and flesh off their hands coming down on the cables and there were a number of people sadly injured.

1911... was the year of the great Triangle Fire in New York City, a terrible industrial accident which burned out the contents of a 9th and 10th floor loft building factory... It caught on fire and the blaze spread very rapidly. There was only one means of exit available, the other two means of exits were the elevator which was ablaze almost immediately as the flames got into this open shaft and spread from floor to floor and the second exit was locked. It was an exit to the roof... it would have saved most of the people in that building if it had not been locked.
It had been locked by the employer himself because he feared... he would be robbed either by his employees or by the outsider.

The quality of his being one with his people, of having no artificial or natural barriers between him and them, made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being or thinking of being a dictator.

He didn’t like concentrated responsibility. Agreement with other people who he thought were good, right minded, and trying to do the right thing by the world was almost as necessary to him as air to breathe.

As a student and professional social worker, I was taking an active part in proposals to use... legislative authority... to correct social abuses—long hours, low wages, bad housing, child labor, and unsanitary conditions.

Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people 's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation.

The process of recovery is not a simple one. ... We cannot be satisfied merely with makeshift arrangements which will tide us over the present emergencies. We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent, as far as it is humanly possible to do so, their recurrence in the future.