Frances Perkins

Hello! My name is Frances Perkins. I was born a long time ago, on April 10th, 1880, in Boston, Massachusetts. Even as a young girl, I was full of questions. I loved to learn, and I was lucky enough to go to college at a time when not many women did. I attended Mount Holyoke College, and one of my professors gave our class an assignment that changed my life. We had to visit the nearby factories and see how people worked. What I saw made me sad and worried. People, including children, were working long, long hours in unsafe buildings for very little money. I knew right then that I wanted to spend my life helping them.

After college, I moved to New York City to become a social worker, someone who helps people in the community. Then, on March 25th, 1911, a terrible thing happened that I would never forget. I was having tea with friends when we heard fire bells ringing loudly. We ran outside and saw a horrible fire at a place called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The factory was on the top floors of a tall building, and the workers were trapped inside because the owners had locked some of the doors to keep them from taking breaks. I stood on the street below and watched, helpless, as people struggled to escape. That day, 146 people lost their lives. Seeing that tragedy with my own eyes made me make a promise to myself: I would do everything in my power to make sure something like that never happened again. I began working with the government in New York to create new laws to make workplaces safer for everyone.

My work got noticed! In 1933, a man who would soon become president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked me to be his Secretary of Labor. This was a huge deal! No woman had ever been part of the president's main team, called the Cabinet, before. I would be the very first. I told President Roosevelt I would only take the job if he supported my ideas. I wanted to create laws for a minimum wage, so people would be paid a fair amount for their work. I wanted to set a limit on how many hours people could work in a week, so they had time to rest and be with their families. I also wanted to end child labor and create a system to help people who were old or had lost their jobs. He agreed! It was a time of great trouble in America called the Great Depression, when many people were out of work, and we had a lot to do. As Secretary of Labor, I helped create many new programs to help working families get back on their feet.

Of all the things I worked on, I am most proud of helping to create Social Security in 1935. Before then, when people got too old to work, they often had no money to live on and no way to take care of themselves. Social Security created a promise from the government to help support them. It also provided help for people who were unemployed or had disabilities that kept them from working. A few years later, we passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. This law set the first national minimum wage and established the 40-hour work week, which is still common today. My dream of making life safer and fairer for American workers was coming true. I served as Secretary of Labor for twelve years, longer than anyone else ever has.

After I left my job in the government in 1945, I spent many years teaching at universities and sharing my stories with young people, hoping to inspire them. I lived to be 85 years old. Today, when you hear about the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, or Social Security, you can remember the work that I and many others did. I believed that the government could be a force for good in people's lives, and I am proud that my work continues to help families all across America every single day.