Born in Boston, Mass. (1880) and graduated high school in Worcester. Earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Mount Holyoke College where she became involved in progressive politics and the suffrage movement.
Held a variety of teaching positions and volunteered at settlement houses, including Hull House in Chicago, where she worked with Jane Addams. She moved to Philadelphia where she worked as a social worker and enrolled in the Wharton School where she studied economics.
Moved to Greenwich Village, where she attended Columbia University, earning a master's degree in 1910. She became active in the suffrage movement, speaking on street corners and attending protests.
Achieved statewide prominence as head of the New York office of the National Consumers League where she lobbied for better working hours and conditions. As a professor of sociology she taught classes at Adelphi College.
She witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a pivotal event in her life. As the appointed head of the Committee on Safety of the City of New York she promoted fire safety; in 1912 she was instrumental in getting the New York legislature to pass a "54-hour bill" capping the number of hours women and children could work.
She married Paul Caldwell Wilson, an economist and was insistent on keeping her birth name. Gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, in 1916. Throughout the remainder of her marriage her husband would be institutionalized frequently for mental illness. She supported herself and raised their young daughter alone.
In 1929 New York governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as the state's Industrial Commissioner where she championed the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, workplace health and safety and an end to child labor.
In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her the Secretary of Labor becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States. She helped shape the New Deal, working to design and implement the Social Security Act of 1935.
She helped millions of people get back to work during the Great Depression and she fought for the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively.
Was the longest-serving Secretary of Labor (12 years) whose successful programs were supported consistently by President Roosevelt.
Following her career in government service she remained active as a teacher and lecturer until her death in 1965, at age 85.
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter named the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor as "The Frances Perkins Department of Labor Building." On Dec. 16, 2024 President Joe Biden designated the Frances Perkins Homestead National Historic Landmark in Newcastle, Maine. President Biden's designation was issued as he directed in Executive Order 14121, Recognizing and Honoring Women's History (March 27, 2024).
In 1933, Roosevelt summoned Perkins to ask her to join his cabinet. Perkins presented Roosevelt with a long list of labor programs for which she would fight, from Social Security to minimum wage. "Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before," she told Roosevelt. "You know that, don’t you?" (Wikipedia)
Sources from which I summarized, paraphrased or quoted directly:
Wikipedia, "President Biden designates Frances Perkins homestead as new national monument," press release, 12/16/2022; Executive Order 14121, Section 3a report, Dec. 2024; Hall of Secretaries, U. S. Dept. of Labor.
According to his bio at SHRM, Johny C. Taylor Jr. has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp,
Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm, and Compass Group USA. Most recently,
Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy
Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on
Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump
Administration.
An African American man whose salary at SHRM is greater than $1.3 million a year, Taylor has been a proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace. But as the chief executive of SHRM, he would be an opponent of unions.
Guild,
formerly known as Guild Education, works for Fortune 500 companies like
Walmart, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, and Chipotle to train and retrain
workers as the workforce is systematically reduced through technology. Guild has been in financial decline after being lauded by Forbes and other business media.
If he is selected for the Department of Labor or any other government post, we'll have
to see if Mr. Taylor's work at SHRM, Guild, or his other board seats affects
management decisions, especially if the organization he manages is forced to downsize.
But we haven't examined higher education as part of the establishment. Like the establishment that students of the 1960s talked about as something not to trust. The trustees, endowment managers, foundation presidents, accreditors, bankers, bond raters, CEOs and CFOs who make the decisions that affect how higher ed operates and who at the same time work to make consumers, workers, and activists invisible.
To say we cannot trust US higher
education administrators and business leaders may sound passe, or
something that only extremists of the Left or Right might say, but it
isn't, and more folks are seeing that.
Examining US higher education
needs to be assessed more deeply (like Craig Steven Wilder, Davarian Baldwin, and Gary Roth have done) and more comprehensively (like Marc Bousquet), and it needs to be explained to the People. It's something few have endeavored, because it isn't
profitable, not even for tenure in some cases.
Without our own sustainable business model, the Higher Education Inquirer will continue writing (and prompt others to write) stories significant to workers and consumers, the folks who deserve to be enlightened and who deserve to tell their stories.
And as long as we can, the Higher Education Inquirer will ask the Establishment for answers that only they know, something few others are willing to do.
