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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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pick up at once, as, of course, war orders from European combatants began to come, by one device or another, into American manufacturing hand. You didn't want to repeal the Wage-Hour act, but you wanted to put in some modifications by executive order and prepare to make rulings on what was to be considered overtime, what was to be considered one day of rest in seven.

When it came to operations, we had the most terrible time getting regulations out on the one day of rest in seven, because it's a good principle, but there's always a certain group of people who say, “What do you mean? The soldiers on the front don't have one day of rest in seven. Nobody stops fighting because it's the day off.” Yet if you were to get full production, you knew you had to give people time off.

I began to prepare for all these things in the Department of Labor way back in the fall of '39 with a certainty in my own mind that this was not going to be a brief war, that it was going to be an all-out European war, and that the chances of our being drawn into it were very considerable. I didn't know anything about the military forces. I didn't know anything about the military strategy. I was drawing my conclusions only from the dreadful disillusionment that I had had at the time of the First World War.





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