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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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amortizing the debt over all the months of the year. The theory was the that transportation of men and women to their jobs was important and that the habits of the country had become such that they went in automobiles rather than on public transportation. There had always been a transportation item on the list, but it had been the price of carfare— streetcar carfare, subway carfare, and even short-distance train fares. But the automobile, of course, let workmen come from a much wider range. It is true that they did have to use automobiles to get to work.

The cost of living index never had anything to do with what wages should be. That's a new-fangled idea. That was an idea that some of the CIO unions developed only in the last seven or eight years, postwar. The purpose of the index was just to know what the cost of living was, just to have that information published. The early ideas of how it was to be done were undoubtedly gathered from the English and German methods of doing this. I really don't know what the idea was of those who started doing it, but presumably it was so that they might know what it cost to live in America. You can't find out whether it costs $16.20 a week to live, or whether it costs $42.00 a week to live, but you can find an index. You can say, “This level, as of 1913, s 100. If the prices of these articles goes up





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