What Perkins Built

The Fire

On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at approximately 4:40 in the afternoon, a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Asch Building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in lower Manhattan, in the factory of the Triangle Waist Company.¹ The factory occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the building. It employed roughly five hundred workers, the substantial majority of them young immigrant women — predominantly Jewish and Italian, ages fourteen through twenty-three — who produced the high-collared women’s blouses (called “shirtwaists”) that were a dominant fashion item of the period. The factory’s working conditions were standard for the New York garment industry of the early 1910s: long hours, piecework wages, restrictions on bathroom breaks, fines for damaged materials, and a managerial practice of locking the stairwell doors from the outside during shifts to prevent unauthorized breaks and to ensure that workers did not steal materials at the end of the day.

The fire spread rapidly through the eighth floor’s stockpiled fabric and finished garments. The eighth-floor workers were able to evacuate; most of the ninth-floor workers were not. The locked doors blocked the principal stairwell exit. The single fire escape, which had been installed as a code-mandated minimum rather than as a functional egress, partially collapsed under the weight of the workers attempting to descend. The elevators ran for several trips before the cables failed; many workers were trapped in the elevator shafts when they fell. By approximately 5:15 in the afternoon, the fire had been brought under control by the New York Fire Department. The casualty count, established over the subsequent days, was 146 dead, most of them young women, most of them having either burned to death in the building or jumped from the eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-floor windows in attempts to reach the street nine floors below.

The fire occurred on a Saturday afternoon when the streets around Washington Square were busy with weekend foot traffic. Among the witnesses on the sidewalk was Frances Perkins. She had been having tea with friends at the Henry Street Settlement office on Washington Place when the fire alarm was sounded. She ran to the scene. She watched, from the sidewalk on Washington Place, the workers jumping from the upper-floor windows. She subsequently described the experience in her memoirs, in interviews with biographers across the next fifty years, and in the speeches she gave at every Triangle commemoration event she attended for the rest of her life. The line that has been most quoted from those subsequent statements is: I felt I must sear it not only on my mind but on my heart forever.²

Perkins was, in March 1911, thirty years old. She had been a reformer for the better part of a decade — settlement-house work in Chicago and New York, statistical research for the New York Consumers’ League, organizing on tenement-house conditions and child labor restrictions. She had a master’s degree in political science from Columbia (1910) and was working as the executive secretary of the New York Consumers’ League under the leadership of Florence Kelley. The work had been substantive but had not yet had a focusing institutional center. The fire, in her subsequent account, provided the focusing center. The next three decades of her career are the working out of the analytical and institutional implications of what she had watched on the afternoon of March 25, 1911.

The Commission

Within three months of the fire, the New York State Legislature established a Factory Investigating Commission, charged with investigating the conditions that had produced the disaster and recommending corrective legislation.³ The Commission was institutionally led by Al Smith, the future governor and four-term presidential candidate, and Robert F. Wagner, the future U.S. senator and principal congressional sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act. Perkins was hired as the Commission’s chief investigator. She held the position through the Commission’s four-year operational period (1911–1915).

The Commission’s mandate was broad. Across the four years, its investigators inspected approximately 1,800 industrial establishments across New York State; held public hearings in eighteen cities; produced four extensive reports running to several thousand pages; and recommended, in the aggregate, thirty-two specific legislative changes to New York’s industrial code.⁴ Twenty-five of those recommendations were enacted, in roughly their proposed form, between 1912 and 1916. The substantive content covered fire safety, building egress, working hours (especially for women and children), child labor restrictions, sanitation, ventilation, machine guarding, and worker compensation. The Commission’s legislative output became, across the next decade, the model for industrial-safety legislation in approximately twenty other states. By 1920, the New York industrial code, substantially as the Commission had reformed it, was the most comprehensive in the United States and was used as a reference standard for federal regulation across the subsequent two decades.

For Perkins specifically, the Commission was the institutional training that determined the rest of her career. The work taught her, in operational detail, three things she would carry through her subsequent forty years in public service. The first was the empirical-investigative method — the practice of grounding policy proposals in detailed observation of working conditions, conducted by trained investigators, documented at length, and presented to legislative bodies in the form of specific factual claims that elected officials could not easily dismiss. Perkins’s later work as Industrial Commissioner of New York and as U.S. Secretary of Labor consistently used the same method. The second was the political-coalition-building required to convert investigation into legislation: the recognition that empirical findings alone do not produce statutes, and that the conversion requires sustained engagement with the elected officials, the labor leaders, the business associations, and the public-opinion infrastructure that surrounds any legislative process. The third was the relationship between crisis and opportunity in legislative reform — the specific observation that political conditions for major structural intervention typically arrive in narrow windows after public events that crystallize attention, and that the policy proposals must be designed and ready before the windows open.

This third lesson is the lesson the platform of The Intelligent Party most directly inherits, and it is the substantive contribution of Perkins’s late career.

The State Years

Across the period from 1918 through 1933, Perkins held a sequence of positions in New York State government that progressively expanded her operational scope and institutional authority. Governor Al Smith appointed her to the New York Industrial Commission in 1919, where she served as a commissioner through 1922. Governor Franklin Roosevelt appointed her Industrial Commissioner of New York — the principal labor-and-employment regulator of the state — in 1929; she held that position through January 1933, when Roosevelt’s transition to the presidency moved her to Washington.⁵ During her four years as Industrial Commissioner, she managed the New York State workforce response to the early years of the Great Depression — the unemployment-statistics infrastructure she built during the period was the principal source of the federal data Roosevelt would use after his inauguration to justify the New Deal interventions, because the comparable federal infrastructure did not yet exist.

The state years served, for Perkins, as the institutional preparation for the federal work that followed. She had run a labor-and-employment regulator covering the largest single industrial workforce in the country across the worst economic crisis in American history; she had managed unemployment-insurance proposals through the New York State Legislature (the New York unemployment-insurance act of 1935, which became the model for the federal Social Security Act provisions on unemployment, was substantially her drafting); she had built operational relationships with the labor unions, business associations, and academic policy infrastructure that the subsequent New Deal coordination would require.

When Roosevelt offered Perkins the position of U.S. Secretary of Labor in February 1933, she had been preparing for the substantive work of the office for twenty-two years.

The Condition

Roosevelt’s offer of the Labor Secretary post was made in a private meeting at his New York City home on February 22, 1933 — twelve days before his inauguration. The meeting has been documented in Perkins’s memoirs, in Roosevelt’s biographical literature, and in the subsequent biographical work on Perkins.⁶ The substantive content of the conversation is the substantive content of what the New Deal labor settlement would attempt to accomplish.

Perkins did not accept the position immediately. She told Roosevelt that she would only accept the position if he agreed, in advance, to support the legislative program she believed the labor crisis required. She enumerated the program in the meeting. The program had six principal components, as she recorded them in her memoirs:

1. A federal minimum wage
2. A federal maximum-hours statute (the forty-hour week)
3. The abolition of child labor in interstate commerce
4. Old-age insurance (what would become the Social Security retirement system)
5. Unemployment insurance (what would become the Social Security unemployment system)
6. Federal aid to the states for direct relief to the unemployed

She did not include national health insurance in the original list, though she had been advocating for it through the 1920s. She believed, in February 1933, that the political conditions for health insurance were not present, and that including it in the conditions of acceptance would risk the rest of the program. The judgment turned out to be substantially correct: the Wagner-Murray-Dingell health-insurance bills of the 1940s, which Perkins did support, did not pass; the principal post-war attempt at national health insurance failed under Truman; the partial implementation that became Medicare and Medicaid did not advance until 1965, nearly two decades after Perkins left the Labor Department. The exclusion was tactical, not principled.

Roosevelt agreed to the program. Perkins took the position. The agreement was the substantive content of the legislative work the Labor Department conducted across the subsequent twelve years.

The Architecture

The Social Security Act of 1935 is the central legislative achievement of Perkins’s tenure and the principal institutional precedent for the platform of The Intelligent Party. The Act’s drafting process, which she chaired through the Committee on Economic Security between June 1934 and January 1935, has been documented at length in the policy literature.⁷ The Committee was nominally headed by Perkins as Labor Secretary; its operational drafting work was conducted by Edwin Witte, a Wisconsin economist who was the Committee’s executive director, and by a small staff that included Wilbur Cohen (who would later be a principal architect of Medicare under Johnson) and Arthur Altmeyer (who would become the first Commissioner of Social Security). The Committee delivered its report to Roosevelt on January 15, 1935; the legislative draft was sent to Congress on January 17; the bill passed the House on April 19 and the Senate on June 19; it was signed by Roosevelt on August 14.

The Act, as enacted, established a federal old-age pension funded by a payroll tax on workers and employers, a federal-state unemployment-insurance system funded by an employer payroll tax, federal grants to the states for aid to dependent children and to the elderly poor not covered by old-age insurance, and federal grants for public-health services and aid to the blind. The Act’s structure was, in its specific institutional form, different from the proposal Paine had advanced in Agrarian Justice (essay 26 of this collection): the funding was contributory rather than property-based; the framing was insurance rather than property-rights settlement; the eligibility was tied to employment history rather than to citizenship. These were tactical choices Perkins and the Committee made deliberately, on the explicit theory that contributory framing would make the program more politically defensible against subsequent attempts at repeal. The judgment was correct in its specific historical instance — Social Security has proven the most politically resilient federal program of the twentieth century, surviving administrations openly hostile to its core provisions — but it has had long consequences for the conceptual architecture of American social insurance, which has been organized around earned-benefit framing rather than around the property-rights framing Paine had advanced.

The Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of June 30, 1936, applied federal labor standards (eight-hour day, forty-hour week, minimum wage, child-labor restrictions) to all federal contracts over $10,000. The Act was less famous than the Social Security Act but established the precedent for federal labor regulation through procurement-conditioning that subsequent administrations across the twentieth century used extensively.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of June 25, 1938, was the legislative completion of the program Perkins had named in her February 1933 meeting with Roosevelt. The Act established the federal minimum wage at $0.25 per hour, the standard workweek at forty hours with overtime pay required beyond, and the prohibition of child labor in interstate commerce. The Act passed Congress with substantial difficulty — the original bill had been introduced in 1937 and was repeatedly weakened in committee before final passage; the 1938 enactment was substantially a compromise version of the original program. The compromise, however, established the federal regulatory authority over labor standards that all subsequent federal labor legislation has been built on.

The Social Security Act, the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, in their collective operational form, constituted the institutional infrastructure of the New Deal labor settlement. Perkins was the principal designer of all three. She also held the Labor Department position through the wartime labor-management arrangements that followed (the no-strike pledges, the wage-and-price stabilization, the manpower-allocation systems), which were operationally distinct from the New Deal architecture but built on its institutional foundation. She left the Labor Department in June 1945, after twelve years and four months in the position, the longest tenure of any Labor Secretary in the history of the office.

The Theory of Reform

Perkins’s late writing — particularly the 1946 memoir The Roosevelt I Knew and the lectures she gave at Cornell University across the 1950s and early 1960s — articulates a specific theory of how structural reform happens in the United States.⁸ The theory has three components, drawn directly from her Triangle-through-FLSA experience.

The first component is that political conditions for major structural reform arrive in narrow windows after events that crystallize public attention on a specific failure. The Triangle fire was such an event in 1911. The Great Depression was such an event in 1933. The events themselves are not produced by reformers; they are the contingent failures of the existing system. What reformers can do is be present at the moment the events occur, and have policy proposals that are designed, drafted, and politically defensible in the form they will need to take when the legislative window opens.

The second component is that the policy proposals must be designed during the years before the event, not in the weeks after. The 1935 Social Security Act drew on roughly three decades of state-level legislative experimentation (Wisconsin’s unemployment-compensation work, the various state old-age pension programs, the Massachusetts industrial-accident system) plus the European social-insurance precedents (Bismarck’s 1880s German programs, the British 1911 National Insurance Act). The federal architecture Witte and Perkins assembled was an integration of pre-existing institutional models. It could not have been designed from scratch in the months between the 1934 midterms and the bill’s introduction in January 1935. The design work had been distributed across thirty years of subnational policy practice; the federal moment used it.

The third component is that the political coalition required to enact the reform must be assembled before the legislative window opens, not after. The Social Security Act required, for its passage, a coalition that included organized labor (which Perkins had worked with for two decades), the academic policy infrastructure (which Witte and the Committee for Economic Security represented), the state-level Democratic machines (which Smith and Wagner had built), the white Southern congressional caucus (which the Roosevelt administration negotiated with through specific legislative compromises that excluded agricultural and domestic workers from coverage), and the public-opinion infrastructure that supported the legislation against organized opposition from the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Liberty League. The coalition had been assembled across the preceding decade. The 1935 legislative window used the coalition that had already been built.

These three components together constitute Perkins’s theory of how major structural reform happens. The platform of The Intelligent Party operates on her theory, and the theory is the most directly relevant single contribution of her work to the contemporary moment.

What This Platform Inherits

The substantive program of The Intelligent Party — Country Profit Sharing, the Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax, AI Tiering — is the contemporary analog of the Social Security Act, the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, designed against the specific structural conditions of the AI transition rather than against the conditions of the post-Triangle industrial economy. The mapping is direct and Perkins-shaped:

Country Profit Sharing is the contemporary analog of the Social Security old-age insurance system, redesigned as a citizenship-based dividend rather than as a contributory pension. The redesign is necessary because the AI transition will produce labor-force-participation patterns that the contributory framework cannot accommodate; substantial fractions of the working-age population will not have the employment histories required to generate the contributory record on which Social Security is calculated. CPS converts the institutional structure to a citizenship base. The principle — that every citizen is entitled to a material floor below which the conditions of free citizenship cannot be sustained — is directly Perkins’s principle, redesigned for an economy in which the contributory framework will not work.

The Tiered Profit-Ratio Tax is the contemporary analog of the Walsh-Healey procurement-conditioning approach: a federal regulatory authority operating on the corporate-tax side rather than the procurement side, applying progressive rates against the productivity-per-employee ratio that captures the AI premium. The institutional principle — that federal regulatory authority can attach conditions to corporate activity in ways that subsequent administrations cannot easily reverse — is the principle Walsh-Healey established. The Tiered tax is the contemporary application of that principle.

AI Tiering is the contemporary analog of the Fair Labor Standards Act: a federal regulatory framework that classifies activity by risk category and assigns regulatory obligations proportional to the category. FLSA established federal authority over working hours, child labor, and minimum wage; AI Tiering establishes federal authority over the deployment of cognitive technology systems whose downstream effects on workers and citizens require oversight. The institutional precedent — that the federal government can establish category-based regulatory authority over previously-unregulated economic activity — is the precedent the FLSA established.

The Perkins precedent provides the platform with three operational lessons that the other voices in this collection do not provide as directly. The first is that ambitious structural reform is implementable when the design work has been done and the coalition has been built before the political window opens. The second is that the design must be specific to the conditions of the moment in which it will be enacted, not abstracted from them; the policy proposals of 1928 would not have been the right proposals for 1935, and the 1935 proposals were not designed to be the right proposals for 2026. The third is that the implementation must be defended, across decades, against organized attempts at repeal — and that the institutional design must anticipate the repeal attempts. Perkins designed Social Security with the contributory framing partly because she was already thinking about the political economy of its long-term defense; the design has held for ninety years against substantial sustained opposition.

The Window

Perkins lived to see most of the New Deal labor settlement she had designed continue to operate across the post-war period. She died in 1965, age eighty-five, having served on the Cornell faculty in her later years and having continued to write and lecture on the relationship between political economy and structural reform until her last months. She did not live to see the labor-share decline that began in the late 1970s, the wealth concentration that intensified across the 1980s and 1990s, or the cybernetic deployment that produced the contemporary inequality crisis. The settlement she had built held through her lifetime; it began to be dismantled and unwound in the decades after her death.

What her work demonstrated, and what the platform of The Intelligent Party operates on, is that the windows for major structural reform are real and recurring. They are produced by the contingent failures of the existing institutional arrangement; they are not commanded by the reformers who use them. The political work, in the years before a window opens, is to design the institutional architecture, build the coalition, and assemble the operational infrastructure required to use the window when it arrives. The legislative work, when the window opens, is to execute the proposals that have been prepared.

The window for the AI-transition settlement has not yet opened. The conditions that will produce it — the structural unemployment of the credentialed professional class, the visible capture of the productivity premium by a small number of platform firms, the political crisis that will follow when the displacement reaches sufficient scale — are the conditions the platform has been preparing for. The proposals are designed. The coalition is being built. The institutional infrastructure is being assembled. When the window opens, the platform’s work will be to use it.

She showed how. The remaining work is ours.

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