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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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supply corps. Brehon Somervell was the head of the supply corps at that time and he was really a very good man, but, like all army people, he did it all with perfectly logical reasoning and very, clear, direct orders. The orders were to got the goods produced and keep them moving.

Somervell was sold the idea, I suppose by us as well as by other people - and certainly the War Department was sold the idea by the Labor Department - that strikes and industrial disputes often arise out of conditions that are remediable and ought to be remedied. If they are remedied promptly, the dispute or trouble won't arise. You shouldn't hit the ceiling and say that people are traitors if there's a stoppage of work, but the thing to do is to remove the cause of the trouble, adjust the items that are making bad feeling and are leading to the stoppage.

That was a hard doctrine for the army to accept in time of war. They couldn't really see that anything could be regarded as a sufficient reason for stopping work. I don't think they ever really accepted the idea, but they said, “All right, we will cooperate in the removal of these obstacles, and if we must foresee them, all right, we will foresee them.”

The result was that they went ahead and assumed that labot relations experts could be bought for a dime a dozen in the open market. “Are there such things as labor relations





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