Frances Perkins was a Mainer at heart. I am encouraged when I review her life and accomplishments. Imagine this! She was U.S. Secretary of Labor for the 12 years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and the first woman to hold a Cabinet post. She accomplished much in her life that today we take for granted. Born in Boston in 1880, Perkins grew up in a comfortable middle-class Republican family descended from a long line of Maine farmers and craftsmen. The family was from New Castle, Maine and she was buried there in 1965.
She became a champion for workers after a tragic experience in 1911, when she watched helplessly as 146 workers, mostly young women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Many, she remembered, clasped their hands in prayer before leaping to their deaths from the upper-floor windows of a tenement building that lacked fire escapes. It was, as Perkins later explained, “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.”
So inspired, she entered politics and started making changes. Serving as Secretary of the New York Consumers’ League, she succeeded in passing a bill limiting the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. She also became active in the women’s suffrage movement, marching in suffrage parades and giving street-corner speeches.
In 1918, Perkins became the first female member of the New York State Industrial Commission, and in 1929, the new governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Perkins Industrial Commissioner of the State of New York. Known as a master deal-maker, she won landmark progressive reforms, including expanded factory investigations, reduction of the workweek for women to 48 hours and new state minimum wage & unemployment insurance laws.
Roosevelt brought her into federal service in 1933 as Secretary of Labor. There she was instrumental in the drafting of FDR’s New Deal legislation, including federal minimum wage laws. And, her work on the Committee on Economic Security, ultimately resulted in the Social Security Act of 1935.
In 1938, Perkins convinced Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act. The main objective of the act was to eliminate “labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers.” The act established maximum working hours of 44 a week for the first year, 42 for the second, and 40 thereafter. Minimum wages of 25 cents an hour were established for the first year, 30 cents for the second, and 40 cents over a period of the next six years. The Fair Labor Standards Act also prohibited child labor in inter-state commerce.
Those were momentous accomplishments in one person’s life. And we have gone even further in improving labor conditions in the almost 70 years since that decisive act was passed. Reflecting on her life, I have new appreciation for the progressive labor changes that we have actually managed to bring about in less than a century.
Much as we may bemoan the situations we now face, if history is any indicator, we will also accomplish much in the coming 100 years. The improvements we fight for today, the effort to bring about a living wage as a minimum wage, to provide health care for all, to have international trade agreements contingent upon workers’ rights, environmental standards and the right to representation, stand a good chance of being realized.
Take heart, friends, and continue your efforts. Call for your absentee ballot today and vote early. Pick a campaign and get to work on it now. It’s worth all the effort. Frances Perkins would be proud of you Mainers.
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