President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on the most ambitious pro-union platform since Franklin Roosevelt. Labor activists hope that he’ll also pick the most pro-worker secretary of labor since FDR selected Frances Perkins for the job.
The one leading candidate who best fits that description is California Labor Secretary Julie Su, whose candidacy is being avidly promoted by the state’s labor and immigrant rights activists. Like Perkins, Su became an acclaimed public figure as an advocate for immigrant sweatshop workers and has spent her career fighting for workers’ rights and a fair economy. And like Perkins, Su has been witness to an almost unfathomable outrage inflicted on workers.
Perkins, the nation’s first female Cabinet member, held the post from 1933 to 1945, during the Great Depression and World War II. She was the longest-serving and most influential labor secretary in the nation’s history. Perkins championed many of the New Deal’s boldest programs, including Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to unionize.
Perkins grew up in a comfortable middle-class Republican household, but while attending Mount Holyoke College, she was deeply influenced by an economic-history course that required her to visit factories in the nearby industrial city of Holyoke and interview workers about their working conditions. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and worked at Hull House, a pioneering social agency that helped immigrants living in slums and toiling in sweatshops. One of her duties was to try to collect wages for workers who had been cheated by their employers, a responsibility that took her into the homes of the city’s poorest residents.
In March 1911, the 30-year-old Perkins witnessed firsthand the fire that engulfed the top floors of a ten-story building housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of New York City’s largest garment factories, which employed immigrant young women and girls in overcrowded conditions.
Perkins saw workers huddled on the top floors unable to escape because the exit doors had been locked from the outside and there were no fire escapes. She saw other workers hanging from the windows by their hands, clinging desperately. She noticed that the city fire truck ladders could not reach the top floors, and she witnessed the awful sight of workers jumping or falling to their deaths. In total, 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died in the Triangle Fire. The experience of witnessing that tragedy, 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.” She subsequently advocated successfully for pioneering worker-safety laws in New York state and…
Read More: Will California’s Julie Su Be Biden’s Labor Secretary?