The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2018 | Page 27

insurance and this is his most enduring legacy. Until the invasion of Normandy,
industrial accidents killed more Home Front workers than soldiers in combat. 30
According to National Parks Service literature, “Kaiser realized that only a healthy
workforce could meet the deadlines and construction needs of wartime America.” 31
He began offering medical insurance to his employees three decades
earlier when Kaiser construction crews built the Los Angeles Aqueduct across the
Mojave Desert, where there was no access to medical care. Kaiser established a
clinic for his workers and paid the salaries of the doctors by deducting 50 cents
from every worker’s weekly paycheck. For many workers, this was the first time
they had ever seen a doctor. When an influenza and pneumonia epidemic broke out
in the East Bay, he established the Permanente Health Plan in 1942. 32 The plan
instituted a revolutionary idea, pre-paid medical care for workers, which, after the
war was expanded to include their families as well. Today, Kaiser’s industrial
empire has disappeared, except for Kaiser Permanente, which is among the
nation’s largest and most influential health maintenance organizations. 33
In addition to health care for his workers, Kaiser also instituted childcare,
which became a significant issue as Richmond’s population quadrupled from
24,000 to 100,000 between 1941 and 1944. 34 This growth quickly overwhelmed
Richmond’s housing, roads, community services and, for the first time in the
nation’s history, its childcare organizations. Newspaper articles about child abuse
and neglect by defense-worker parents expressed growing anxiety about the new
role of working parents. 35 Local authorities refused to take responsibility for
childcare because they were afraid that it would become their permanent
function. 36 Frustrated by the lack of local programs, Kaiser, with the help of the
federal government, established day care centers for his workers.
The Maritime Commission developed the Ruth Powers Child
Development Centers staffed by child welfare experts from the University of
California at Berkeley. 37 The centers were revolutionary in that they provided 24-
hour service. Notices on breakroom bulletin boards, company newsletters, and the
local newspaper trumpeted these centers and their convenient locations near the
shipyards. Between 1943 and 1944, more than 700 children participated in the
program that included well-balanced hot meals, healthcare, and optional family
counseling. 38 Although the Ruth Powers Center fulfilled a wartime need and
closed before war’s end, its legacy lives on in the hundreds of day-care centers and
preschools operating in the East Bay today.
World War II was the driving force of geographic, economic, and social
restructuring of the East Bay in the twentieth century. War mobilization created
new defense industries with massive labor requirements that the pre-war natives of
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