Erik Loomis

Back tomorrow to discuss the Lordstown strike of 1972 and that moment when workers asked for something different than a life on the assembly line.

Joe Biden created the Frances Perkins National Monument at her home in Maine to honor her. I'm sure Herr Trump and his fascist friends are making sure to strip any information that would actually tell us about this amazing woman from the site.

Truman named her to the United States Civil Service Commission in 1946. She worked in that role until 1953, when she became a lecturer at the new Cornell School of Industrial Relations. She died in 1965 at the age of 85.

She stepped down in June 1945. She then wrote a biography of FDR that was published in 1946.

Perkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes were the only cabinet members to serve all 12 years of Roosevelt’s administration, although Henry Wallace served the administration as Agriculture Secretary, Vice-President, and Commerce Secretary during the entirety of the administration as well.

She famously called General Motors head Alfred Sloan in the middle of the night once, yelling at him for not settling with the United Auto Workers. She said, “You don’t deserve to be counted among decent men. You’ll go to hell when you die.”

She refused to deport the radical International Longshore and Warehouse Union head Harry Bridges in 1939, angering congressional conservatives, but she faced no real pressure to step down.

She also chaired the President’s Committee on Economic Security, which oversaw all the New Deal’s economic legislation goals.

Perkins’ primary role as Secretary of Labor for FDR was helping to write much of his key legislation to benefit the millions of impoverished Americans in the Great Depression. This included the Social Security Act of 1935.

She would be centrally involved in getting much of this passed. She brought a young Harry Hopkins from New York to help with the federal employment programs, particularly the Federal Employee Relief Administration, which he headed.

She had a strong agenda for what she wanted to see the Democrats do while she was in the Cabinet–create a 40-hour workweek, federal unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, the abolition of child labor, federal employment of the unemployed, and national health insurance.

She also wasn’t a union member. Most people who had held the job of Secretary of Labor had been unionists, and with the Democratic Party far closer to organized labor than Republicans, this was expected.

When Roosevelt named Perkins Secretary of Labor it was remarkable for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that she was a woman, an unprecedented step (I don’t believe a woman had even been considered for a Cabinet position before this).

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became governor after Smith, he named Perkins state Industrial Commissioner that oversaw the state’s labor department and the two of them worked together to fight against the deepening Great Depression.

This made Perkins a national leader on labor reform. Perkins became a close ally of Al Smith and was his leading labor advisor while governor of New York.

Al Smith and Robert Wagner took Perkins’ suggestion to create the Factory Investigative Commission that led to the passage of 15 new bills by 1915 to make workplaces safer.

New York City cleaned up its fire building codes, prohibited smoking in factories, and required new fire suppression techniques and technologies.

There she led an investigation into workplace and fire safety, connecting it to the larger exploitation of workers’ lives. She convinced Al Smith and other leading New York politicians to enter the workplaces themselves, leading to major changes as they were shocked with what they discovered.

Already committed to improving workers’ lives, she became a national leader in fighting to ensure nothing like this would ever happen again. She became Executive Secretary of the Citizens’ Committee on Safety.

On March 25, 1911, Perkins happened to be in the vicinity of the Triangle Fire. She ran over to the site of the fire and watched 146 people die to make clothing she may have been wearing.

She then moved to New York to complete a master’s degree at Columbia on childhood malnutrition. In 1910, she became the Executive Secretary of the New York City Consumers League, where she lobbied for all sorts of reforms to American working class exploitation.

In 1907, she took a job in Philadelphia with an organization dedicated to stopping newly arrived immigrants to the city from ending up in prostitution, while also studying as a graduate student in the Wharton School.

There she volunteered at Hull House and Chicago Commons, gaining experience in fighting for the working class that would mark her life.

They invited NCL founder Florence Kelley to speak and this experience changed Perkins’ life. She graduated from college in 1902 and moved to Chicago to teach at a girls’ school against her family’s wishes.

Building on the legacies of older pioneering Progressive women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, Perkins worked in the settlement house movement after graduating from Mount Holyoke. While there, in 1902, she was involved in founding a chapter of the National Consumers League.

Born in 1880, Perkins attended college at Mount Holyoke and became a prototypical Progressive reformer, upper-middle class, well-educated, and seeking to do well in a world that often blocked educated women from both marriage and work.

This Day in Labor History: March 4, 1933. The newly inaugurated president Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominated Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor. This first female cabinet member in American history was an amazing fighter for the working class and let's talk about her!!!!!

You know the Republican Party is filled with extremely stupid people when this fucking guy is all over the media as a Republican spokesman.

Pentagon releases names of troops killed in drone strike in Kuwait The Pentagon has released the names of four of the six service members who have been killed in the Iran war, saying they died in a drone strike in Kuwait.All four Army Reserve soldiers were killed Sun...

These soldiers were murdered by Donald Trump.

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Back tomorrow to discuss Frances Perkins.