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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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experts?” they had asked.

“Yes, there are people who are quite expert,” they had been told. “There is ‘such and such’ a firm where they've had an expert for years and they practically don't have any trouble there. They've worked out a very fine relationship with labor.”

“All right, if there are such things, the army will hire them.”

So the army and the navy both hired a lot of people and called them labor relations experts. Hardly any of them had any experience whatever in the field. One of them, I remember, was Joe Miller, a newspaper reporter, whose sole contact with labor relations had been that for about a year previous to that time he had been assigned by some newspaper that he worked for to report strikes. He was trying to take private lessons from Louis Stark. He was always running to Louis Stark asking questions, “What does this mean? Who is this? What is that? What do I do now? Why does this man butt into this strike?” and so forth. Well, Joe Miller really knew more about labor relations than most of the people that the army hired, and that was the total of his experience.

Most of them had no experience at all. As I remember them, they were very largely young lawyers. Some of them had, I suppose, some industrial experience, but not very many





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