What Have We Learned? The Woman With the List

One Person, One List, One Rewrite

Last month we covered the bloodiest era in American labor history. Haymarket. Homestead. Pullman. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Workers died in the streets, in factories, on railroad tracks. 

Each tragedy produced outrage. Some produced commissions. A few produced laws.

But one produced a notable woman: Frances Perkins.

Perkins produced the architecture of the modern employer-employee compact in America. Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, the end of child labor, workers' compensation, the Federal protection of collective bargaining rights. The scale of that achievement is difficult to overstate! 

If you've ever received an overtime check, retired with a pension, or sent your 14-year-old to school instead of a factory, you're living inside the system Frances Perkins built.

Most people have never heard her name. Yet the same questions Perkins confronted - who is protected, who is excluded, and who is accountable when work becomes unsafe - have returned in a new form in the age of AI.

From Witness to Architect

We described the Triangle Shirtwaist fire last month. What we didn't cover is what happened to one specific witness.

Frances Perkins was 31, having tea near Washington Square, when she ran toward the fire engines. She watched 47 workers jump from the eighth and ninth floors to their deaths. Locked doors, a collapsed fire escape, no sprinklers. 146 dead in eighteen minutes (New York State Department of Labor). She later called it "the day the New Deal was born."

But Perkins wasn't a bystander who happened to be nearby. She'd already spent a decade at Hull House in Chicago, earned a master's in sociology from Columbia, and lobbied Albany for fire safety codes and limits on working hours. She had the policy knowledge, political relationships, and investigative skills to channel the moment before the moment arrived (Frances Perkins Center).

A thousand people witnessed that fire. One of them had spent a decade learning how to turn what she saw into law. That's the difference.

After the fire, Perkins helped investigate nearly 2,000 factories across New York State (AFL-CIO). Between 1911 and 1914, more than 30 new labor laws passed, entirely rewriting the state's labor code (OSHA Education Center). This became the prototype. Perkins essentially beta-tested the New Deal in New York two decades before it went federal.

The List

Here's the part that should be taught in every business school and HR certification program.

In February 1933, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor, the first woman ever appointed to a presidential cabinet. Instead of simply accepting, she showed up with conditions (Frances Perkins Center):

• A 40-hour workweek

• A minimum wage

• Unemployment compensation

• Worker's compensation

• Abolition of child labor

• Direct federal aid to states for unemployment relief

• Social Security

• A revitalized federal employment service

• Universal health insurance

"Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before," she told Roosevelt. 

Roosevelt agreed to every item. Over the next 12 years, Perkins delivered on all but one: universal health insurance. (We're still working on that, unfortunately - ninety-three years later.)

A 1944 Collier's profile described her accomplishments as "not so much the Roosevelt New Deal, as the Perkins New Deal." She served Roosevelt's entire presidency, the longest-serving Secretary of Labor in American history (Library of Congress).

She did all of this while privately managing her husband's long-term mental health treatment, a fact she kept hidden because public knowledge of it would have ended her career.

What She Built (and Who She Left Out)

The specifics matter, because these aren't abstract policy achievements. They are the floor beneath every employment relationship in America.

Social Security Act (1935): Retirement pensions, unemployment insurance, survivor benefits. Perkins chaired the committee that designed it. Before this law, growing old or losing your job in America meant, for most people, poverty with no safety net. Today Social Security provides income to roughly 67 million Americans monthly.

Fair Labor Standards Act (1938): Federal minimum wage, overtime protections, a ban on child labor in interstate commerce. Before this, twelve-hour days were common and children worked in mines (Smithsonian).

National Labor Relations Act (1935): The legal right to organize and bargain collectively. Before this, employers could fire, blacklist, or assault workers for attempting to organize.

She also quietly used her authority over immigration to save thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, admitting over 50,000 immigrants for permanent residency by 1937, two-thirds of whom were Jewish (Library of Congress).

Now the hard part.

Perkins was a brilliant strategist. And part of that strategy involved a deliberate exclusion. To get Southern Democrats to vote for Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act, agricultural and domestic workers were carved out. These exclusions disproportionately affected Black workers in the South, along with many immigrant and Mexican American workers concentrated in agricultural and domestic labor. This was not really an oversight but rather a political bargain, and Perkins understood exactly what it meant: that millions of workers would remain outside the protections she was creating.

The architect of the modern labor compact also designed its most consequential gap. We'll explore the full story next month, but to tell the Perkins story without naming this trade-off would be to commit a parallel omission - to celebrate the protections won without acknowledging those deliberately left outside them. 

Every system carries the fingerprints of the compromises that made it possible. The same pattern persists today. Gig workers, independent contractors, warehouse workers, and employees managed by algorithms often fall outside protections designed for an earlier economy. The categories have changed. The logic of exclusion has not. 

The Pattern (It Keeps Repeating)

The Perkins story points to a cycle we keep pointing to in our series:

Catastrophe makes invisible conditions visible. The Triangle fire put locked doors and child labor on front pages. On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,134 garment workers. Most were young women earning $12 a week. Inspectors had found structural cracks the day before. Factory owners ordered workers back in anyway. Managers threatened to withhold wages from anyone who refused (EBSCO Research Starters). The parallels to Triangle are almost unbearable. A century apart. Same economics.

A conscientious individual (or coalition) translates outrage into systems. Perkins had the moral compass, skills and relationships before the fire happened. Bangladesh didn't have a ready domestic “Perkins”. What it had was international pressure from brands facing a PR crisis. The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety was signed within months. Bangladesh amended its labor law twice. Over 80% of its garment factories are now internationally safety-compliant (Al Jazeera). Real progress. But driven by consumer outrage, not domestic political will. That distinction matters for durability.

Reforms become the new baseline. Then they erode. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009. Private-sector union membership sits at 6% (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The 40-hour week is increasingly theoretical for salaried workers with smartphones. Human Rights Watch reported in 2023 that many US brands still haven't joined the Bangladesh Accord.

Catastrophe, reform, complacency, repeat.

The Factory Floor Is Now an Algorithm

The physical factory floor that killed Triangle and Rana Plaza workers still exists. Amazon warehouse injury rates are roughly twice the non-Amazon warehouse average (National Employment Law Project). In December 2024, OSHA reached a corporate-wide settlement requiring Amazon to assess ergonomic risk across all facilities (U.S. Department of Labor). Workers at robotic fulfillment centers were expected to process 400 items per hour versus 100 at non-robotic sites. The robots didn't replace dangerous work. They compressed the remaining human work until it broke people faster. In governance terms, the issue is no longer whether organizations use these technologies, but who is accountable when efficiency gains come at the expense of worker well-being.

But the new factory floor is also invisible. It's algorithmic management. AI-powered hiring screens. Automated performance scoring. "Bossware" that tracks keystrokes and sentiment. As we covered in February, 78% of companies use employee monitoring tools. The Triangle workers' doors were locked from the outside. Today's algorithmic workers can't see the walls.

The Perkins Question for 2026: Who's Going to Build It?

As of early 2026, over 45 states have proposed AI-related employment bills. Illinois requires worker notification when AI is used in employment decisions. Colorado's AI Act takes effect June 30, 2026, creating a risk-based framework for "high-risk" AI systems (National Law Review). New York City's Local Law 144 mandates annual bias audits of automated hiring tools. The EU AI Act's high-risk obligations, including human oversight and worker notification requirements for employment AI, arrive in August 2026 (Ogletree Deakins).

At the federal level, the current administration has signaled skepticism toward state-level AI regulation. A December 2025 executive order directed agencies to review state AI laws deemed "inconsistent" with national policy.

What most commentary misses is the absence of a comprehensive federal framework is not just a compliance headache it may also be an opening for change.

Perkins didn't wait for federal consensus either. She built at the state level first. New York became the lab. Then the lab went national.

Right now, organizations have more room to lead than they will once regulations harden. Companies that establish their own standards for algorithmic transparency, bias auditing, and human oversight are not just reducing future compliance risk; they are writing the norms that regulators will eventually codify. This is exactly what happened in the 1920s: the companies and states that developed the strongest worker protections became the templates for federal law.

The business case is not separate from the ethical case. Organizations that proactively govern AI are likely to experience lower legal risk, stronger employee trust, better retention, and more sustainable productivity. The same was true of the reforms Perkins championed: what began as a moral imperative ultimately became a driver of economic stability and long-term value creation.

"When will the government tell us what to do?" is the wrong question. We should be asking "What standards are you willing to set before anyone makes you?"

That's a Perkins move.

Your Sphere of Influence

Perkins had a list of non-negotiables. She was prepared. She had the moment. She used all three. You probably aren't going to rewrite federal labor law this quarter. But Perkins didn't start there either.

What Perkins Did	What You Might Try
Investigated actual conditions before proposing reforms	Audit one AI-powered system in your organization for its impact on worker outcomes. Not the vendor's claims. Your own data.
Made accepting her role conditional on specific commitments	Before accepting your next role or mandate, identify your non-negotiables for how workers will be treated. Write them down.
Used state-level experiments as federal prototypes	If your state is considering AI employment legislation, submit a comment during the rulemaking period. These are public and surprisingly influential.
Built coalitions across political factions	Connect with HR peers in your industry to share findings on algorithmic management before vendors and lobbyists define the conversation.
Documented everything	Start tracking how AI tools in your workplace affect different worker populations. The data you don't collect now is the evidence you can't use later.

The Question That Still Lingers

Perkins walked toward a burning building in 1911 and spent 54 years turning what she saw into law.

Today's equivalent isn't a single building on fire. It's a slow accumulation of invisible harms: algorithmic injuries, pervasive surveillance,, classification fictions, and the steady erosion of worker protections in the name of  "productivity."

Perkins knew exactly what she would demand before she walked into Roosevelt's office. She had a list. She had the evidence. She had the relationships. And she had the moral clarity to insist.

What's on your list?

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This is the fourth post in our 2026 series "What Have We Learned?" Subscribe to receive monthly explorations of how America has defined what employers and employees owe each other, and what you can do about it.