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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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to deciding how you guard an extractor, a washing machine, she didn't know anything. But she knew all about the water on the floors, how the girls got wet and got pneumonia and colds. Water on the floors came to be a very important item and that was her contribution. The experts wouldn't have thought about that.

As always, I consulted John Sullivan about people when we didn't have a bona fide union. When we had a bona fide union, I sent for them; their president or head and I would talk over who were the best people in the union. By that they mean the most competent, not necessarily the highest officer. We used to get an awful funny situation because there were just enough unions where there wasn't anybody available, so that John Sullivan would say, “Well, why don't you put Johnny Gild on?” Johnny Gild was a bricklayer by trade, and I don't think he'd laid a brick in many a year. He was elderly and I guess not much good as a bricklayer. He'd therefore been a worker in the bricklayer's union and kind of hang around. They had to look out for him. Whenever John Sullivan had to find a job for Johnny Gild, he'd put him on a code committee. We had him on innumerable code committees where he contributed nothing, except that he sat there and represented labor.





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