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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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on strike, they're not going to go back the next day, except in the rarest instances.” Of course, there was always pressure on them to go back.

I suppose, all told, there were a good many stoppages of work, and by this time we had come to the point where everybody was keeping track of the number of stoppages of work, publishing them, and telling the President, “We can't get these ships built. We can't get these planes built. We've had too many stoppages of work.” It sounded perfectly terrible, when actually there weren't any mere in proportion to the number of persons employed than we always had. As a matter of fact, there were fewer. If you'll read the reports of the Secretary of Labor for these years, and the figures put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you'll see that the number of man hours lost in proportion to the total working force is tiny during this period in comparison to any other period. Although there were a considerable number of strikes they were very short and didn't involve many people. So if we had been riding easy, we wouldn't have paid any attention to it, but we were riding very hard. Everybody was very self-conscious about this. Everybody was very conscious that labor was holding this up. Labor was holding up the war effort. That was the accusation - “labor is holding up the war effort.” Labor had been getting some breaks in the previous ten years, and therefore there was a good deal





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