Frances Perkins: People at Work

OUR idea of what constitutes social good has advanced with the procession of the ages, from those desperate times when just to keep body and soul together was an achievement, to the great present when "good" includes an agreeable, stable civilization accessible to all, the opportunity of each to develop his particular genius and the privilege of mutual usefulness. This is a strictly modern possibility due to machinery and its allied production methods. It could not have been dreamed of before the Industrial Revolution-before Watt had made it possible for steam to turn factory wheels. This possibility of social good rests upon the machine, but it is not likely to be achieved except by a people of awakened conscience a people with a sense of right and wrong, capable of continual increase of knowledge and understanding of their own economic and social life and processes and with a purpose to achieve the right. The years since 1929 when the sudden change in business and industrial life brought economic questions sharply to the attention of the people of this country have been a period of greatly accentuated popular interest in the economic factors entering into the depression. The human results of the economic situation become tragically obvious to most Americans. For the understanding of intricate economic causes only a few were well equipped. It has been a period of questioning and inquiry on the part of people not trained in the techniques of statistics or in the logic and data of the field of knowledge known as economics. A great mass of correspondence and questionings have come to me from people who are trying as honest amateurs to think in this field for the purpose of acquiring for themselves a suitable basis for political, moral and ethical judgments rather than in the hope of gaining a complete or profound economic analysis and understanding of the situation. The American people are at this time, through the mechanism of public discussion coming to desire and to get this increasing knowledge of their economic and social life. There are signs of an awakened conscience in many quarters and of the exercising of moral judgments in this field. The observation of human misery under the terms of the depression has brought a sense of brotherhood, and political expression tends to move toward this concept of human relations. This book is the result of numberless conversations and informal discussions in the past five years with people who are trying to acquire a certain vicarious experience of these aspects of life as they present themselves to the wage-earner groups and of the problems which a machine type of mass production industry offers not only to the wage-earners who work in that industry but to the whole civilization which rests upon it.