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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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The most helpful man, curiously, on that whole committee, to me, --well, there were several very helpful men. One of them was the French employer delegate. He was a man from the chemical industries. I have his name somewhere, because we corresponded and he came to see me. He came to call on me in Washington, a year or so later. He was very intelligent. I don't know whether he had a great industry or not, but he was not by any means a reactionary who wanted to have nothing done. He just wanted it done sensibly. He wanted a practical code. He didn't want a lot of requirements that couldn't be enforced.

You see, the real problem--and he agreed with us on this -- was that there were a couple of people from the French Department of Labor who fought to have a very elaborate code, so elaborate that it could never be understood or enforced. This is what is the trouble with the whole French Government technique. They make their code, they make their requirements, so elaborate. They name everything--great alphabetical lists. And nobody can ever enforce it. Nobody can live up to it, There's no flexibility. There's no way of getting the result without going through all the rigamarole of so many inches and so many feet and so many revolutions per minute--all that kind of thing.

The man who represented that Department was just





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