President Roosevelt’s first 100 days became legendary for the passage of 15 major laws, setting a benchmark for future administrations. Perkins guided the Federal Emergency Relief Administration that provided $500 million in initial aid. A lover of the outdoors, Roosevelt also tasked her with creating the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to employ young men. They planted more than two billion trees and created 800 state parks. The CCC hired 200,000 Black men, whose unemployment rate was 30 to 60 percent greater than for white workers. Perkins organized the Division of Negro Labor and threatened to suspend the CCC program in Georgia because of discrimination. As the industrial relations specialist Henry Guzda wrote in Monthly Labor Review, “The black-oriented programs and policies initiated under Perkins’ direction seem modest by today’s standards… But the programs she started left a legacy for programs of the 1960s and 1970s.”
During the Great Depression, older people were the first to lose their jobs, and 30 to 50 percent sought financial support from their families. Perkins knew Roosevelt didn’t want to encourage the laziness that, rightly or wrongly, was associated with government handouts. With the Social Security Act, workers received money as an earned benefit in retirement. The legislation faced pushback from both sides of the political sphere. As Peskin said, “This was not accepted wisdom at that time. This was a novel, radical approach.”
As Berg wrote, if Social Security was Perkins’ pride, the Fair Labor Standards Act was her joy. The Act that set the groundwork for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), covering 12 million people, increasing wages for 300,000 people, and decreasing work hours for a million workers, who were guaranteed overtime pay. More significantly, it also changed many Americans’ lifestyles, mandating regular rest and leisure.
There was one goal on Perkins’ list, however, that she couldn’t accomplish: universal health insurance. The American Medical Association lobbied against its inclusion in the Social Security Act, but Perkins hoped it would be amended later. An increasingly booming economy and a decreased wartime workforce popularized offering private insurance as an incentive for potential employees, effectively blocking national single-payer insurance.
Perkins also struggled to garner support for German-Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. During this time, the Immigration Service was housed inside the Department of Labor. Perkins previously saved the International Labor Organization (ILO) by aiding persecuted European labor leaders in seeking asylum in Canada. But she had little power to fight restrictive immigration laws passed in the 1920s. The historian Bat-Ami Zucker wrote in American Jewish History that Perkins “was an exception to the indifference and often patronizing attitudes within government circles towards the suffering of Jewish refugees.” Battling nationalist attitudes that still hold sway in parts of the U.S.—unfounded fears of immigrants stealing jobs and spreading dangerous religious ideologies—Perkins helped some 20,000-30,000 Jews enter on visitor visas, and rescued around 400 Jewish children. She intervened in hundreds of individual cases, from Sigmund Freud to the Von Trapp family.