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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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for twenty years, would be all right. The average would bring about justice, but in these critical situations I think it was a mistake.

The whole pattern of the Defense Mediation Board was very complicated. They had never gotten very good control of the situation. By this time the CIO had arisen and we had this double union problem. That, of course, was what created the great dissension between the labor members, and it was also what made this question of union security so vital. Each of the labor groups wanted to be able to have the employers maintain the contract with the union that was then in the plant, and not allow the other union to come stealing in and organize it away. It was really the rivalry between the two groups which went on all through the war, but was somewhat mitigated out of, I think, patriotic feelings on the part of the labor people, and also by the fact that the expansion of employment was so great that the new union, the new organization group, the CIO, was gathering in numbers so fast that it didn't have that desperate feeling of necessity to break up old AF of L unions. They sort of let up on it because they had plenty to do with what they already had.

However, as soon as the Defense Mediation Board broke up we knew that we must have another one, that we must invent something else. If it hadn't been for Pearl Harbor we wouldn't have called it a War Labor Board. We would have given it some





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