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

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 542

boys in New York rig up and expect us to live with. They don't seem to understand. They can sit there in their offices and do a lot of figuring, and thoy don't seem to realise that we here, who have to turn out rubber tires and hot water bottles, have to deal with common ordinary people who haven't got such fancy mathematics in them. We just can't live with it. I don't know what they were thinking about when they did this. But, of course, I work for the company and a company man shouldn't say all this.”

He was trying to illuminate the situation for me. He understood why the men were so mad.

Well, of course, wat they did then was unprecedented, although curiously it didn't create any great irritation in Akron. That was what interested me. You know how much irritation the sit-down strikes caused two years later when they broke out in General Motors. But in Akron they just sat down in front of their machines and folded their arms. They wouldn't work. They just folded their arms, said they weren't going to do any more work until this was corrected. They weren't going to work when they didn't know what their wages were going to be. They were working for wages and they had to know what the wages, were. That was all there was to it. They





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