Frances Perkins: Early Work and the Triangle Fire

In Chicago, Frances Perkins worked at Chicago Commons and Hull House, two of the oldest and most well-known settlement houses in the country. She considered her time at Hull House life changing. She saw the hardships facing the working class first-hand and came to realize how difficult it was to unravel the social problems of the country. To take on this monumental task, the settlement houses provided a myriad of social services including job training, health services, food, child care, and even a savings bank.

In 1907, she began her career in social work in Philadelphia, where she simultaneously studied sociology and economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. At the Philadelphia Hull House, Perkins sought out young women that were being trafficked into prostitution and helped them find a safe place to live and work. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University, focusing her master’s thesis on childhood malnutrition in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen.

In 1910, Frances Perkins became executive secretary of the NYC Consumers League, an organization that fought for workers’ rights and protections. Their mission was to cut the vicious circle of poverty, sickness, and social evils through implementation of a short work day and a living wage. Much of her work was in Albany, where she worked with then Assemblyman Al Smith, Senator Robert Wagner, and even making connections with corrupt Tammany Hall officials. Perkins became an effective lobbyist for labor and social reforms during this time.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was witness to one of the most tragic industrial accidents in American History, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. That day, she witnessed the horror as 47 workers, mostly young women, jumped from the upper floors to their deaths from the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. building. She recalled how workers hung out of the windows and she could hear the helpless firemen yelling to the workers not to jump, since the emergency nets could not catch anyone at that height. The ladders from the fire trucks could not reach the 9^th and 10^th floors of the Asch Building, and many workers who did not safely exit through the elevators or through the roof, perished in the fire. In all, 146 people died that day. Perkins was deeply shaken by this event:

"There was a stricken conscience of public guilt and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building which we had accepted or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.”

The next year, Al Smith appointed Perkins as Executive Secretary of the Committee on Safety, established to recommend practices to prevent another tragedy in the city’s factories. She became an expert witness and investigator for the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, leading legislators on inspections of state’s factories and worksites. The Commission’s work resulted in the most comprehensive set of laws governing workplace health and safety in the nation.

Thirteen of the seventeen bills the commission spearheaded became law between 1912 through 1914. These stricter codes for factory safety and health laws included measures requiring better fire safety efforts, more adequate factory ventilation, improved sanitation and machine guarding, safe operation of elevators, and special measures for foundries, bakeries, stores, and other establishments. (DOL)