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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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of Commerce, but the appropriate social forces—to take care of children, to provide food supply, to be in charge of children's emergency kitchens and feeding enterprises, and so on.

It's an invaluable list. So late as the time I left that Labor Department, they were keeping it corrected up to date, for no other reason than, as Katharine Lenroot said, “Now that we have this, went to all this agony to get it and have it, it might be useful to us or to somebody else at any time. It's no great trouble. It takes a very small amount of clerical work annually to keep that list corrected as to the membership, location, and so on.”

The Children's Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Standards worked together on a project to set up standards well in advance for what we could foresee plainly would be the demand for greater employment of young persons—that is, persons who ordinarily would be expected to remain in school. If wages were high and the laws permitted it, boys of fifteen and sixteen, and girls too, would be invited into industries, and they would go. We recognized the hazards that there were, both in the matter of exhaustion and fatigue, and also in the matter of dangerous machinery and accidents, to inexperienced and young people. So we drew up a set of standards.





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