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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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States, by some untoward event or situation now unknown, will be drawn into this struggle. We must begin to make our plans definitely to see what ought to be done first. What are the things we can drop, or set aside, or modify? What changes in law should be made, or, better still, what changes or modifications of our basic law can be made by executive order?

From the first I always held, and the people in my department agreed with me, that we must not permit changes in law, because they're hard to get rid of once you've got them, but rather think ahead for, and provide for, executive orders which would set aside, or reinforce, or modify the precedents of certain parts of the law. For instance, there was the business with regard to the law dealing with the hours of labor and overtime, and all that kind of thing. There were the laws with regard to minimum wages too. As soon as the European war began, minimum wages at twenty-five cents an hour, which had been the law passed by Congress, ceased to have any meaning at all. They raced way ahead of it. The problem began to be runaway wages, wages rising so high that labor markets were disturbed. One could forsee that. People who were in the minimum wage industries were just leaving to go somewhere else where there was a higher wage offered, because heavy industry employment began to





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