When Wilson got pulled into World War I a few years later, the Labor Department assumed a high profile as it worked to put the nation’s wartime labor policies on a solid footing.
Following Wilson’s presidency, the Republican administrations of Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were less inclined to have activist Labor Departments. During Harding’s term the Department shifted its focus to enforcing tighter immigration laws and the deportation of undesirable aliens. To that end, Harding’s Labor Secretary, James J. Davis, established a Border Patrol.
It wasn’t until the country’s plunge into the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President that the pendulum swung back to a progressive stance. The policy changes were dramatic, and so was one personnel appointment. Roosevelt tapped the first woman ever to serve in the Cabinet. His new Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, was about to set the world afire with a long list of reforms.
In fact, it was a fire 20 years earlier that had ignited her career as a social reformer. On March 25, 1911, Perkins had been meeting a friend for tea in New York City when she heard horse-pulled fire wagons racing down the street. She went outside to see what was going on and bore horrified witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory going up in flames. The factory workers – mostly young immigrant women – were trapped on the top floors of the 10-story building. They were unable to escape because their managers had adopted the practice of locking access to the stairwells to keep their workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The women’s only option for escaping the flames was to jump, and no one survived that fall. One hundred forty-six people perished that day.
From that point on, Perkins dedicated her career to worker safety. She worked for years at the state level in New York, and when she got to Washington D.C., she was ready to institute bold reforms in her new position as Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor.
She started within the Department itself, abolishing segregation in the lunchrooms and getting rid of the harsh tactics that the Bureau of Immigration had been allowed to use in tracking down and deporting aliens.
On a national scale, she set about to abolish child labor. She set up a free, nationwide employment service to help the millions of people who were out of work find jobs. She developed the Civilian Conservation Corps, a public works relief program that offered employment and training to young men in exchange for working on conservation projects in national parks and forests.
Perkins thought it was time for workers to be guaranteed a minimum wage and the right to overtime pay. She wanted to establish unemployment insurance so that people who lost their jobs could have a safety net of temporary benefits.
And if people became too old or sick to work, she wanted them to have a guaranteed pension – this became Social Security.
Perkins served throughout Roosevelt’s entire time in office, spending more years as Secretary of Labor than anybody else to serve in that position before or since.
Today the Washington D.C. headquarters of the Department of Labor is located in the Frances Perkins Building.