Frances “Fanny” Perkins did not step into the halls of power in 1933 to decorate a Cabinet photo. She stepped in carrying fire.
That’s precisely why Fanny is not just a hero for the labor movement, but a personal hero of mine and an inspiration to every girl and woman who refuses to abide by the limits society imposes on them.
The first woman to serve in a U.S. Cabinet brought not just a resume but a moral compass: the conviction that workers’ lives should not be ground down for profit. She turned catastrophe, the Great Depression, into opportunity: Social Security, a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, a ban on child labor, safety standards that meant people could leave work alive.
If Labor Day is a mirror, this year it reflects Perkins’ unfinished fight. The climate crisis is the new Great Depression of labor, testing whether our legal scaffolding can carry the weight of 120-degree heat waves, megastorms, and wildfire smoke choking job sites. And feminism is still the fault line—because the workers most endangered by both climate change and economic precarity are still overwhelmingly women: teachers, nurses, caregivers, service-sector workers, migrant mothers in the fields.
The climate shift in labor’s frontlines
Every major win this past year came with a climate undertow. When Teamsters won heat protections in their historic UPS contract, they weren’t bargaining in the abstract — they were bargaining for survival in the hottest summer on record. OSHA’s proposed heat standard could finally make “water, rest, shade” a legal right, not a lucky accident. At Kaiser Permanente, health-care workers forced executives to recognize that unsafe staffing and climate-driven surges in patient loads are two sides of the same coin.
Auto workers, too, reframed the EV transition not as a threat, but as a demand: If this industry is going green, it must also go union. Shawn Fain’s United Auto Workers victory in Chattanooga cracked the door to organizing the South, and the looming BlueOval battery vote in Kentucky will test whether the clean-energy economy is also a just economy. Climate change has always been a labor issue; workers are now saying it out loud.
The feminist labor that still holds us up
Perkins knew that feminism wasn’t a sidebar to labor — it was labor. She had seen the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, where 146 workers, mostly immigrant women, died because factory doors were locked. That memory shaped her entire life’s work. Today, the echoes are everywhere: women leading Starbucks stores into union drives, nurses striking for safe ratios, flight attendants demanding not only pay but climate safety on planes that are increasingly turbulent skies.
And yet, the structures remain tilted. Care work — the jobs that make every other job possible — is still treated as disposable. Child-care and elder-care workers, mostly women of color, remain underpaid, understaffed, and overlooked. Statehouses in Iowa, Arkansas, Florida, and elsewhere are even weakening child-labor laws, dragging us backward into the very world Perkins fought to escape. To talk about labor without feminism is to miss the heart of the struggle.
What Perkins would tell us now
If Frances Perkins were alive today, she would see the storm lines clearly. She would insist that a livable climate is a labor right, not a side campaign. She would remind us that every feminist victory — from maternity leave to harassment protections — was wrestled from the same hands that fought to keep wages low. And she would push us toward acceleration:
Climate as workplace law. Finalize and enforce a national heat standard. Guarantee smoke protection for outdoor workers. Recognize climate migration as a labor issue, not a border panic.
Care as infrastructure. Fund child care, elder care, and nursing as public goods. Raise wages in feminized sectors until the work reflects its actual value.
Feminism as labor policy. Protect reproductive freedom as a working condition, because control over your body is control over your livelihood.
Power as prevention. Strengthen the right to organize so workers can respond to crises faster than courts and Congress ever will.
The lesson for Labor Day
Labor Day was never meant to be a holiday of nostalgia. It was meant to be a holiday of reckoning — what we’ve done, what we haven’t, and what we owe each other. Perkins left us a house: Social Security, the minimum wage, overtime, child-labor bans. But the roof is leaking under the weight of a hotter world. And the foundation still doesn’t value women’s work, even though women’s work holds up the house.
This Labor Day, honoring Frances Perkins means more than cutting a ribbon at her new national monument in Maine. It means picking up her tools, in a climate-stricken, care-starved, still-unfinished America, and building the next floor.
Good to remember Frances Perkins. Thank you
Frances Perkins deserves to be every American's hero and role model. It is a national shame that so relatively few of us have so much as heard of her.