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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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I think Davis remained Chairman all the way through. Of course, Davis had been my original suggestion. I was the one who knew him. I was always suggesting him for things, and I thought very well of him. Still do. However, in this particular activity of the war Labor Board I thought he moved over into a rather doctrinaire position. I don't know that he could have helped it. The really hard workers on this Board were some of the academic people, and the academic people always tend to see these labor relations in a nice, neat set of categories, where you can have a policy. They're always airing their minds about how there should be a policy, when actually in truth and in reality there cannot be a fixed policy, because the labor movement was then - I don't know about its situation now (1954) - still too inchoate, too uncentralized, too unselfconscious to be able to respond effectively to a policy. It's a batch of individuals who don't understand each other very well, who haven't much in common, but who have enough in common in emotion and desire to have more money to hold them together if the right kind of group leadership and group excitement is applied. It's the same way with regard to employers. The employers of this country were not then, and are not now, organized at all.





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