She watched 146 workers die in a fire, then rewrote American labor law.
On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was having tea near Washington Square in New York City when she heard fire engines. She ran toward the Asch Building and arrived in time to see workers leaping from the upper floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Forty-seven people jumped. In all, 146 died.1 The doors had been locked by management to prevent unauthorized breaks.
Perkins later called that afternoon "the day the New Deal was born."2 Within a year, she was serving as executive secretary of the Committee on Safety of the City of New York, investigating factory conditions across the state.
In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Perkins to join his cabinet as Secretary of Labor. Before accepting, she presented him with a list of policy priorities, including a forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, abolition of child labor, and Social Security. She told him her acceptance was conditional on his support for every item. He agreed.3
Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. She held the position for twelve years, longer than any other Secretary of Labor before or since.4
She chaired the Committee on Economic Security, which drafted the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935.5 She oversaw the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the first federal minimum wage and prohibited child labor in most industries.6
At the time of Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, a Collier’s magazine profile described her accomplishments as "not so much the Roosevelt New Deal, as the Perkins New Deal."7
After leaving the cabinet in 1945, Perkins served on the U.S. Civil Service Commission until 1952. She then lectured at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations until two weeks before her death in 1965, at the age of eighty-five.8