Frances Perkins and the New Deal

On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was witness to one of the most tragic industrial accidents in American History, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. That day, she witnessed the horror as 47 workers, mostly young women, jumped from the upper floors to their deaths from the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. building. She recalled how workers hung out of the windows and she could hear the helpless firemen yelling to the workers not to jump, since the emergency nets could not catch anyone at that height. The ladders from the fire trucks could not reach the 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building, and many workers who did not safely exit through the elevators or through the roof, perished in the fire. In all, 146 people died that day. Perkins was deeply shaken by this event:

"There was a stricken conscience of public guilt and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building which we had accepted or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by this sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.”

The next year, Al Smith appointed Perkins as Executive Secretary of the Committee on Safety, established to recommend practices to prevent another tragedy in the city’s factories. She became an expert witness and investigator for the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, leading legislators on inspections of state’s factories and worksites. The Commission’s work resulted in the most comprehensive set of laws governing workplace health and safety in the nation.

Thirteen of the seventeen bills the commission spearheaded became law between 1912 through 1914. These stricter codes for factory safety and health laws included measures requiring better fire safety efforts, more adequate factory ventilation, improved sanitation and machine guarding, safe operation of elevators, and special measures for foundries, bakeries, stores, and other establishments (DOL).