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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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piled up in the sink, the water didn't run and hadn't run for days. You had to go down to the street hydrant to get water. I'll never forget the nurse saying when a woman was very sick, “For heaven's sake, wash up the dishes, and then wash up the children.” I would go down and heat the water on a little gas stove, putting a quarter in the slot, washing the dishes and washing the children. Then she said, “Now wash up father.” He was drunk, vomiting - terrible!

I said to her, “Why don't you let him rot?”

She said to me, “We have to straighten this family out. This woman's very sick.”

I had just become aware of those things, and heard Gertrude Barnum's ardent appeal to prejudice on their part, as I see it now - “Your bosses are pressing you down. Why not join the union?” This was her line. It wasn't the class struggle argument in the Marxian sense - I don't think she'd read Karl Marx. It was the typical, old-fashioned English trade unionist approach, who had also not read Marx. It was the approach of a few people getting together, binding themselves together, not selling each other down the river, not letting each other down, telling the bosses they wouldn't work unless they paid them a decent wage, gave them reasonable hours and did not make them pay for





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