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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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organize themselves, first, with public employment offices of one kind or another, where unemployed persons could be assigned to what work was available; secondly, to pool all the jobs there were so that the unemployed might have access to them. They should do that whether they were serious jobs, or whether they were household chores, clean-up and repair jobs.

We had a very interesting time with the following recommendation. Rochester took the lead with it and the Rochester people were extremely good about it. We appealed to the various industries not to close down departments or sections, but to shorten the hours, even shortening the number of days in the week, in order to spread the work, Quite a movement began to spread the work. Instead of laying off five hundred people in one department, or scattered throughout the plant, they just put everybody on a five-day week, or everybody on a four-day week if it was bad enough. That is, whatever money you had going in to payroll should be divided between the people who worked there.

There were certain industries that told us, in response to our inquiries, that they would not have any unemployment. They were positive they wouldn't. That wasn't a total industry, but a particular plant, really. Invariably they





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