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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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So the Department of Labor had to plan for these emergencies and had to plan for war. I should put that in two parts. We never allowed ourselves to say in 1940 and '41 that we were getting ready for American entrance into the war, but the changes in our economy were bound to be very great even though we might never have entered the war. We also had to keep in mind that we might be drawn into it. After Land Lease began, after it was obvious that we were beginning to be the “arsenal of democracy”, one realized more and more that we were already in an emergency operation. But we began to plan for it in'39.

I quote the statistical changes that we made, because that was really the key to it all. The Bureau of Labor Statistics was the key to what the Department of Labor would have to do. Its first service to all the rest of the government would be to know what was going to be needed in the way of materials and manpower and operations and expansion, as well as cost of living and all that sort of thing, and what was going to be needed in the way of wages, what wage changes were going to be, what modifications in the hours law there would have to be. You got that through the studies of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rather than through the enforcement machanism of the Wage-Hour Act, although they participated.





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