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

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 564

organized way of determining whether they were veterans, whether they were local residents, whether they were heads of families, whether they had dependents, and so on.

The development of the employment service throughout this period was extremely interesting. We had to expand our employment service terrifically. We began to call it the National Re-Employment Service to distinguish it from the United States Employment Service. We gave it that name, though that wasn't its official name. We hoped to develop the United States Employment Service, under the Wagner- Peyser Act, into a proper federal-state cooperating employment service. This temporary emergency National Re-Employment Service was made necessary, first, to recruit, analyse, ship and process the CCC, and then to see that people applying for WPA jobs were taken in the order of their Congressional precedence.

Frank Persons ran both of these. We were developing the USES in a small way at same time that we were building the National Re-Employment Service in an enormous way. Most of the employees in the National Re-Employment Service were themselves men out of work - men and women - whom we put to work in the employment service, taking them off the relief rolls, taking them off the unemployed lots who couldn't earn a living any other way. They did heroic work. They did





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