Frances Perkins, Secretary if Labor (Friday's Labor Folklore)

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Thank you Frances Perkins! First Woman Cabinet Secretary Longest-serving Secretary of Labor Key Architect of the New Deal

"I came to Washington to work for God, FDR and the millions of forgotten, plain common working men."

Born in Boston, Mass. (1880) and graduated high school in Worcester. Earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Mount Holyoke College where she became involved in progressive politics and the suffrage movement. Held a variety of teaching positions and volunteered at settlement houses, including Hull House in Chicago, where she worked with Jane Addams. She moved to Philadelphia where she worked as a social worker and enrolled in the Wharton School where she studied economics. Moved to Greenwich Village, where she attended Columbia University, earning a master's degree in 1910. She became active in the suffrage movement, speaking on street corners and attending protests.

Achieved statewide prominence as head of the New York office of the National Consumers League where she lobbied for better working hours and conditions. As a professor of sociology she taught classes at Adelphi College. She witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a pivotal event in her life. As the appointed head of the Committee on Safety of the City of New York she promoted fire safety; in 1912 she was instrumental in getting the New York legislature to pass a "54-hour bill" capping the number of hours women and children could work.

She married Paul Caldwell Wilson, an economist and was insistent on keeping her birth name. Gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, in 1916. Throughout the remainder of her marriage her husband would be institutionalized frequently for mental illness. She supported herself and raised their young daughter alone. In 1929 New York governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as the state's Industrial Commissioner where she championed the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workplace health and safety and an end to child labor. In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the Secretary of Labor becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States. She helped shape the New Deal, working to design and implement the Social Security Act of 1935.

She helped millions of people get back to work during the Great Depression and she fought for the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Was the longest-serving Secretary of Labor (12 years) whose successful programs were supported consistently by President Roosevelt. Following her career in government service she remained active as a teacher and lecturer until her death in 1965, at age 85. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter named the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor as "The Frances Perkins Department of Labor Building." On Dec. 16, 2024 President Joe Biden designated the Frances Perkins Homestead National Historic Landmark in Newcastle, Maine. President Biden's designation was issued as he directed in Executive Order 14121, Recognizing and Honoring Women's History (March 27, 2024).

In 1933, Roosevelt summoned Perkins to ask her to join his cabinet. Perkins presented Roosevelt with a long list of labor programs for which she would fight, from Social Security to minimum wage. "Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before," she told Roosevelt. "You know that, don’t you?" (Wikipedia)

from the play I Am Not Content an Hour with Frances Perkins by Stephen LaRocque ------------------------ A staged reading by Kathie Mack (video : 1.51 min.)

Thank You Frances Perkins (song : 2.21 min.) by Austin Moffa

Friday's Labor Folklore Saul Schniderman, Editor forward to a friend

Sources from which I summarized, paraphrased or quoted directly: Wikipedia, "President Biden designates Frances Perkins homestead as new national monument," press release, 12/16/2022; Executive Order 14121, Section 3a report, Dec. 2024; Hall of Secretaries, U. S. Dept. of Labor.

The US Working-Class Depression: "Let's all pretend we couldn't see it coming."

How is the working-class Depression of 2020 similar to the other 47 financial downturns in US history? 

Downturns are frequently precipitated by poor economic and cultural practices and preceded by lots of signals: over-speculation, overuse of resources, oversupplies of goods, and exploitation of labor. What I see are many poor practices brought on by corruption--with overconsumption, climate change, growing inequality, and moral degeneration at the root.

The "disrupters" (21st century robber barons) have enabled an alienating and anomic system that is highly dysfunctional for most of the planet, using "algorithms of oppression." And this cannot be solved with data alchemy, marketing, and other forms of sophistry.

Put down your iPhone for a minute and ponder these rhetorical questions:

• How did people not know that another economic crisis was around the corner?
• Doesn't anyone have a sense of US economic history?
• Doesn't anybody read? Even a little?
• Wasn't it only a dozen years ago that we faced a similar crisis?  
  

Warm Koolaid (2016) signified corporate America's use of myths and distractions to sedate the masses. 

How long have we known about all of this dysfunction? Academics have known about the effects of global climate change and growing US inequality since at least the 1980s. The Panic of 2020 should be a lesson so that we don't have a larger economic, social and environmental collapse in the future.

Who will hear the warnings and do something constructive for our future? Or is this Covid crisis another opportunity for the rich to cash in on the tragedy?

The answer lies, in part, to an ignorance of history and science, and oversupply of low-grade information, poor critical thinking skills, and lots of distractions. That's in addition to the massive greed and ill will by the rich and powerful.

US downturns are baked into this oppressive system. And crises are used to further exploit working families. With climate change and a half century of increasing inequality, these situations are likely to worsen.

"An economy based on mass deception, exploitation, degradation and oppression, violence, war, and massive environmental destruction...is unsustainable."

Workers will resist and fight oppression; they always do, but will they have a voice as the US faces another self-induced crisis, as trillions are doled out to those who already have trillions?

Here are the dates of the largest economic downturns.

1797-1800

1807–1814

1819–1824

1837–1843

1857–1860

1873–1879 (The Long Depression)

1893–1896 (The Long Depression)

1907–1908

1918–1921 (World War I, Spanish Flu, Panic of 1920-21)

1929–1933 (Stock Market Crash, Great Depression)

1937–1938 (Great Depression)

Feb-Oct 1945

Nov 1948–Oct 1949

July 1953–May 1954

Aug 1957–April 1958

April 1960–Feb 1961

Dec 1969–Nov 1970

Nov. 1973– March 1975

Jan-July 1980

July 1981–Nov 1982

July 1990–March 1991

Mar-Nov 2001

December 2007 – June 2009 (The Great Recession)

March 2020-

We live in an economic system that is unsustainable, unjust, and exploitative. While many of us in academia and the thought industry have known this for decades, those with greater wisdom have known for centuries. Techies and disrupters think it can all be solved with technology, not with profound wisdom. The ultimate in hubris and reductionism. We have to change the system politically, socially, and culturally. We have to be wiser.

How do we do that, radically change society, when our economic system has driven us in the wrong direction for so long? Some of these lessons can be learned from working class history, but they have to be applied with wisdom.