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

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 731

I afterwards thought it was a pretty good idea. It's the same plan upon which the Civil Service Commission is now organized. The advantages of a one-headed agency for purely administrative functioning is very obvious. One person arranges it, sees that everything gets done, mails the letters, hires the employees, fires them and assigns them. But if you've got quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative functions, it isn't proper that they should be exercised by one person. There should be some kind of a forum, some kind of a body, not necessarily representative of any economic element in society, but representative of different points of view. All quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions should be performed by them. They should be consulted about such appointments like the head of the Legal Division or like the Chief of the Bureau of Workmen's Compensation, officers who would be in charge of carrying out the policies of the Board with regard to the legal interpretation of the Workmen's Compensation Law, or the Chief Factory Inspector, and the positions of persons who acted as Referees under Workmen's Compensation or Referees under the appeal on labor and factory law. We were consulted and had a voice in their appointment, but we couldn't hire an office boy or buy a sheet of paper.





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