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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Our whole Conciliation Service was involved in this. We were trying to think out what should be done, ought to be done, and could be done with regard to labor relations. During World War I there had been a very chaotic state with regard to labor relations, although it never reached very great proportions. They finally had a kind of labor relations board set up, which arbitrarily passed upon questions submitted to it, or intervened in matters that were not submitted. By persuasion, I think, rather than any other way, they managed to get most of it thought, but the problem never became very acute. William Z. Ripley was a member of the board. They wrote a report in which they made some recommendations. That report, of course, had been filed at the time, and I don't suppose anybody even read it. It was a report written after the fact. The war was over, somebody wrote a report, it was filed in the Department of Labor, with a copy, I suppose, going to the President, and it was somewhere with President Wilson's papers.

Charlie Wyzanski, who was Solicitor of the Department of Labor, took this matter of restudying the projects of the department very seriously. He went at it like a student and tried to dig up everything that we ought to be thinking about, what there was known, what past generations had evolved.





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