Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 912

have joined it with the Employment Service, because I knew that the business of giving away other people's money is so much more attractive a job for a public official than going out and digging to find a job for a jobless man, when there aren't any jobs, that the delightful task of giving out unemployment insurance, acting as a kind of a judge, saying, “Yes, you're entitled to it,” or “No, you're not entitled to it,” would simply overshadow the hard, difficult, scrabbly job of trying to find work for people.

I learned this out of having participated in this thoroughly delightful business of distributing workman's compensation to injured workmen. You get a sense of personal charity, although it isn't your money that's being given away. You're so glad that you are able to be the instrument of doing something kind and helpful for the injured men. But when it comes to going out, walking up and down the sidewalks, climbing stairs, putting on your spectacles, looking into the insides of machines, figuring ways to rig up machine guards, that's an awful hard job. The people who do workman's compensation wouldn't do it well at all. They would always be too busy in their offices giving out workman's compensation. You have to have an entirely different set of people to do it. We used to call them factory inspectors. They never saw the injured workmen, but their duty was to see that the machinery was fixed up. If there was an accident in a place that was supposed to be inspected twice a year, a serious accident due





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help