A Look Back on 100+ Years of Advocacy

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“To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”

–Florence Kelley, first General Secretary, National Consumers League

For more than 100 years, the National Consumers League has followed these founding principles: That the working conditions we accept for our fellow citizens should be reflected by our purchases, and that consumers should demand safety and reliability from the goods and services they buy.

Promoting a fair marketplace for workers and consumers was the reason for the League’s founding in 1899 and still guides us into our second century.

NCL’s Early Years

During the late 19th century’s Progressive Era, social justice movements emerged to protect the interests and promote justice for working people. As part of that movement, the National Consumers League was chartered in 1899 by two of America’s leading social reformers Jane Addams and Josephine Lowell. These two women were pioneers in achieving many social reforms in communities and workplaces across the country. Under the direction of its first general secretary, Florence Kelley, the National Consumer’s league exposed child labor and other scandalous working conditions. Kelley was to become one of the most influential and effective social reformers of the 20th century. During the early 1900s, she led the League in its efforts to:

  • protect in-home workers, often including whole families, from terrible exploitation by employers
  • promote the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906
  • write and then champion state minimum wage laws for women
  • defend and ultimately convince the US Supreme Court to uphold a 10-hour work day law in the landmark Muller v. Oregon case of 1908
  • advocate for creation of a federal Children’s Bureau and federal child labor restrictions

Along with New Jersey Consumers League Director Katherine Wiley and Louis Brandeis (who later became a Supreme Court justice), Kelley achieved a lifetime’s worth of accomplishments in her 33 years as leader of the League. She worked alongside many other reform-minded women and men to achieve her goals and served as inspiration and mentor to FDR’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to serve in as a cabinet member and a close confidant and influential advisor to the FDR.

Mid-Century Challenges

The leadership of the National Consumers League struggled to contend with Kelley’s death in 1932, facing the burden of maintaining the group’s vigor after losing its long-time leader. Lucy Randolph Mason directed the League for the next five years, and Mary Dublin (Keyserling) directed from 1938-1940. In 1939 Dr. Caroline Ware began advising Dublin regarding activities in Washington, D.C. under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

With first lady Eleanor Roosevelt serving as vice president of the League and testifying on behalf of the organization on numerous occasions, during this time the League focused on passage of the 1938 federal Fair Labor Standards Act. This comprehensive, landmark legislation addressed issues the NCL had raised since its inception including child labor, minimum wage, restrictions on hours worked, and industrial homework. Taking advantage of the expanding definition of social welfare as seen through the ideas of the Roosevelt administration, the League also advocated for:

  • national health insurance
  • improved food and drug safety laws
  • federal pesticide monitoring
  • social security legislation especially for the elderly or disabled
  • unemployment insurance

From 1943-1958 Elizabeth Magee directed the NCL, transferring the group’s office to Cleveland, Ohio, her home. Magee placed new emphasis on:

  • health assistance for migratory workers
  • Medicare and Medicaid
  • wholesome meat and poultry
  • Truth-in-Packaging legislation
  • food additive and color testing
  • worker safety in atomic industries

During the 1970s and 80s, NCL Executive Director Sandra Willett (Jackson) increased attention to consumer education through the “Assertive Consumer” project. The League also promoted consumer participation in government decision-making, which helped open the doors of federal agencies to consumers and their views. During this period, such national figures as Esther Peterson served as vice president of the League. Peterson, a renowned labor and consumer leader, regularly testified on behalf of the League. Peterson became head of the White House Office of Consumer Affairs under President Jimmy Carter and had served as consumer advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson before that.

The 1980s saw significant changes develop in the nation’s health care system. Responding to the need to provide consumers with useful information about these changes, the League, under Barbara Warden’s leadership, organized a major Consumer Health Care Conference, launched a series of consumer health care guides, and established a Medicare education program. The League also:

  • supported enhanced enforcement powers for the Federal Trade Commission
  • opposed the revival of industrial homework sweatshops
  • defended Social Security and Medicare

Under the direction of Linda Golodner (1985 – 2007), the League expanded significantly, continuing to develop its consumer education programs and increase its activism in opposing exploitative child and sweatshop labor. In the late 80s, the group established both the Alliance Against Fraud in Telemarketing and the Child Labor Coalition. The Alliance led to the League’s long-term program, the National Fraud Information Center (later called NCL’s Fraud Center, now simply www.Fraud.org), established in 1992 to assist consumers directly with telemarketing fraud inquiries. Under Golodner, NCL took over the LifeSmarts program, the Ultimate Consumer Challenge, a fast, fun, gameshow-style Internet based consumer education competition for teens and tweens. (Complete information can be found at www.LifeSmarts.org.)

The 21st Century and Beyond

Under the leadership of Sally Greenberg, Executive Director (2007 – present), NCL is focused on four key priority areas: fraud, child labor, LifeSmarts, and health care reform, while continuing to promote a range of additional general protections for consumers and workers. NCL has been instrumental in uniting consumer and labor groups on issues of common interest and in leading the call on Congress and the President to adopt pro-consumer policies, including reinstating the Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House.

Today, the NCL:

  • spearheads efforts to promote the safe use of medication, including convening a multi-faceted, multi-stakeholder campaign to promote better medication adherence (ensuring that patients adhere to their medication regimen) in conjunction and with the support of a federal agency
  • comments frequently on matters of concern to consumers and workers before the Department of Agriculture, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Labor
  • promotes better working conditions for migrant farmworker families and teen workers, both internationally and at home through the Child Labor Coalition
  • is fighting to improve product safety, as well as misleading or confusing labeling on food and beverage products
  • maintains several consumer-friendly Web sites, where consumers may download current publications and alerts on current issues ranging from avoiding fraud to maintaining one’s mortgage, to understanding bloodthinners.
  • participates in the Safe Food Coalition, which promotes effective meat and poultry inspection
  • distributes tens of thousands of publications annually, on topics including food and drug interaction, safe over-the-counter medication use, budgeting and credit, and telephone service
  • convenes a consumer-labor coalition that meets regularly, bringing union and consumer groups together for discussions and joint activities of concern to workers and consumers.

As the League enters its second century, it faces many of the same questions of social justice and consumer protection that Florence Kelley confronted in 1899, except now the marketplace is global in a way that neither Kelley nor her colleagues could have imagined. How do we eliminate child labor? How do we ensure food safety? What is a decent minimum wage for workers? How can privacy be effectively protected?

These questions and the new ones that will inevitably arise will challenge the National Consumers League in its next 100 years. We look forward to building the organization and meeting the challenges facing consumers and workers today.

Early Days: Investigate, Agitate, and Legislate, by Author and Journalist Kirstin Downey

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OUR BEGINNINGS

The National Consumers League (NCL) got its start in the 1890s when a little boy fell ill in the dead of winter.

Josephine Shaw Lowell, a Massachusetts social reformer working with the poor, learned that an 11-year-old retail worker had contracted pneumonia after working six days a week, from early morning to midnight, during the Christmas shopping season. By January, he was still clinging to life on a hospital cot in New York City.

In those years, there were few legal limitations on work hours or restrictions against employing children, who were paid lower wages than adults.

The situation opened Lowell’s eyes to an ugly reality. As America industrialized, while some became wealthier, workers were being asked to work longer and harder, without rest breaks and safety precautions to protect their health.

Josephine Shaw Lowell (1843-1905) Source: Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Incensed by the boy’s plight, Lowell called a meeting at her home, asking her friends— including women trade unionists, retail workers, and merchants—to join together to find ways to improve working conditions in New York City. They started planning for a program to convince employers to treat their workers more humanely.

Lowell and her friends quickly realized that voluntary measures would not suffice in the battle against abusive working conditions. They began organizing groups across a handful of cities to discuss the issues, investigate conditions in their communities, and push for legislative change. They called themselves the Consumers League because they hoped to use their combined power as customers to push businesses into improving conditions for workers.

According to Lowell, their efforts were “part of a historical continuum in women’s activism, invoking women’s patriotic refusal to buy British goods in the revolutionary era and female abolitionists’ boycotts of slave-made goods,” wrote author Landon R. Y. Storrs in her book, Civilizing Capitalism.

In 1905, Lowell died, but the torch had already been passed to Florence Kelley, a Quaker from Philadelphia who had been living in Chicago and who stepped forward and became the group’s executive secretary. The group was formally chartered in 1899.

Eventually, NCL began to press for federal legislation that would include adoption of minimum wage laws, limits on hours, unemployment insurance, and food and safety regulations. In fact, the work NCL did would establish the foundation for what would, some three decades after Lowell’s death, become known as America’s New Deal.

NCL’s fight against abusive child labor, sparked when a boy got sick from overwork more than 125 years ago, is ongoing.

FLORENCE KELLEY

Florence Kelley (1859-1932).
Photo by Underwood & Underwood Studios, New York

The National Consumers League (NCL) was originally based in individual city or state chapters, starting with the founding organization in New York City. But it became increasingly obvious that the organization needed to be national in scope, not just local.

This transformation was carried out by Florence Kelley, a lawyer and workplace reformer living in Chicago at Hull House, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams. She had joined the League early, spearheading an Illinois chapter.

Knowledgeable and visionary, she had served as the state’s tough-minded chief factory investigator during the administration of Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld, a progressive reformer. However, Altgeld lost his reelection campaign, and Kelley found herself out of a job as well.

One of NCL’s most active supporters, John Graham Brooks, a sociologist and labor investigator, seized this opportunity and traveled to Chicago to invite Kelley to become secretary of the new national venture. In addition to her professional training and experience, Kelley had an unusual political background that made her invaluable to that effort.

Her father, William D. Kelley, had been a 15- term U.S. congressman from Pennsylvania who had, at one point, served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He was a Republican who had been a friend of Abraham Lincoln. This meant that Kelley’s political views in many ways paralleled those of the League’s founders and that she also possessed intimate, firsthand knowledge about how legislation is proposed, defended, and passed. She was no stranger to Washington.

Kelley was immediately intrigued by Brooks’s offer, as she believed change was in the air.

“In all directions there were in those days stirrings of curiosity, and actual promise of sustained interest in the conditions of labor of women and children,” Kelley later recalled in a magazine article published in 1929. “Only organizations on a national scale were lacking.”

She was hooked. She accepted the position on May 1, 1899, and moved to New York City. The new group was formed, first known as the National Federation of Consumers Leagues, and later simplified to the National Consumers League. It set up its headquarters at the United Charities Building at 105 E. 22nd Street, surrounded by like-minded reform groups.

Factory Inspectors Past and Present. From left to right: Miss Ella Haas, State Factory Inspector, Dayton, Ohio. Miss
Mary Malone, State Inspector Ten-Hour Law, Delaware. Mrs. Florence Kelley, Chief State Factory Inspector of
Illinois, 1893-97. Miss Jean Gordon, Factories Inspector, Parish of New Orleans, 1908. Miss Madge Nave, Factory
Inspector, Louisville, Kentucky. Mrs. Martha D. Gould, Factories Inspector, Parish of New Orleans. Photo by Lewis W.
Hines, March 1914

Kelley leaped into action. When she launched the national group, it had only four regional chapters—New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. But Kelley was magnetic and energetic, and she soon attracted other supporters. She traveled indefatigably to spread the word, carrying her own suitcase and lodging in spartan hotels to save money. In 1903, she spoke at 130 meetings in 19 states; in 1904, she addressed 108 gatherings in 14 states. By 1912, the league had grown to include 56 branches in 19 states, with 39 college branches as well, according to NCL’s annual reports for those years.

Kelley also found time to advance civil rights. Her name can be found in the original charter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, now known as the NAACP, and was a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, promoting women’s right to vote.

Kelley and her fellow social justice advocates worked together to confront issues on many fronts—child labor, tenement work, unsanitary and unsafe working conditions, excessive work hours, and low wages. They also addressed food-safety issues, including lobbying against the sale of contaminated food and adulterated drugs, laws to require pasteurization of milk, and broad access to typhoid vaccinations.

Their motto: “Investigate, agitate, legislate.” 

By 1906, they had racked up a string of successes. They had helped establish the U.S. Children’s Bureau, which studied and reported on children’s well-being, including exposing worrisomely high infant and maternal mortality rates. They played a major role in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both signed into law in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Kelley and her colleagues pressed lawmakers to pass legislation that would outlaw the worst of the problems they uncovered. They fought most of the battles at the state level, looking for every way they could make small improvements, reducing hours in one place from 60 to 54 and raising the permissible age for child labor from 12 years to 14.

But they also despaired as some of their greatest legislative victories were overturned as unconstitutional by the federal courts. In the 1920s, amid a conservative backlash that sought to undo many of their successes, the legal challenges were mounting, and even Kelley, indomitable as she was, was growing weary.

That’s when another of NCL’s guiding lights came to the public forefront: A young social worker named Frances Perkins, who had worked in the League’s New York office from 1910 to 1912, took the training she had received from Kelley and began building on what she had learned.

Perkins would help vault NCL into the national arena and turn the legislative victories they had achieved on the state level into enduring federal statutes.

FRANCES PERKINS

Frances Perkins (1880-1965), Source: francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/

During the three decades that she ran the National Consumers League (NCL), Florence Kelley crisscrossed the country, talking to audiences everywhere about working conditions in industrializing America while seeking to recruit people who would join her efforts to find remedies for problems she felt were threatening human life, dignity, and happiness.

During one swing through New England in 1902, she was invited to speak to a group that included a young woman student at Mount Holyoke College named Fannie Coralie Perkins, the middle-class daughter of a stationery store owner. Perkins was enthralled by Kelley’s speech, and she quickly enrolled as a member of the group. After graduating from college, Perkins found her way to Chicago to Hull House, where Kelley had lived and worked and where social reformers were working to better the lot of the working poor. The young social worker was consciously modeling her life on Kelley.

A few years later, after completing a master’s degree at Columbia University, Perkins was hired as director of NCL’s New York City office, which was also the hub for the national organization. There, she worked directly alongside Kelley, learning from and being mentored by her. Perkins, who by then had changed her first name from Fannie to Frances, remained on NCL’s payroll for about two years.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in which 146 seamstresses died, mostly immigrants, many jumping from the upper two floors of a ten-story building. March 25, 1911

In that job, Perkins won state legislation giving most women in New York a 54-hour workweek, an important and valuable reform for employees who had been required to work many more hours each week. She also began a comprehensive study of workplace fire hazards, which caused numerous fatalities annually.

Perkins gradually became Kelley’s most important acolyte. Smart and hardworking, but more diplomatic than the fiery Mrs. Kelley, Perkins ended up being recruited for a series of government jobs administering labor law and doing exactly the kind of work that Kelley had envisioned could bring genuine improvements to the American workplace. 

Triangle Shirtwaist fire victims in coffins on the sidewalk, March 25, 1911

Perkins shot into the political limelight in March 1911 in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which tore through a high-rise industrial building in Greenwich Village and killed some 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women—some only 14 years old. They had been trapped inside because the doors were locked to prevent theft. Perkins had been visiting a friend nearby when the fire erupted, and she was an eyewitness to the disaster.

A handful of New York City activists, funded by wealthy philanthropists, decided to create a new advocacy group called the Committee on Safety to look into the causes of the inferno. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who knew of and admired Perkins’s record of success in the state legislature, suggested her as the best person to head the fledgling organization. As Kelley did in her own life, Perkins threw herself into action.

Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins before her address to the Conference of Industry and Labor Today. Photo by Harris & Ewing, December 11, 1936

As secretary of the Committee on Safety, Perkins sought to keep the accident alive in people’s minds while she worked with industrial safety experts to devise reforms that could minimize the death toll from workplace fires and other industrial accidents. Her friends from NCL, including Kelley, testified as to the poor conditions they had observed in factories, canneries, and retail stores.

With the support of legislative allies, Perkins helped arrange and conduct hearings across the state over the next four years to illuminate these problems and explain the legal fixes that could make workplaces safer. Their work ultimately included establishing building occupancy limits, requiring fire escapes and exit signs, and encouraging the installation of sprinkler systems that reduced the chances that people trapped in fires would die. These ideas spread across the country and then across the globe.

One of Perkins’s friends in the state legislature, Al Smith, rode these popular legislative successes to victory as governor of the state, and he appointed Perkins to a series of state administrative positions overseeing labor law. Then, when another ally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), became governor of the state, he placed Perkins in the top job as New York state industrial commissioner. Perkins was able to oversee the administration of the laws she had helped to draft to make sure they worked properly and effectively.

In 1929, as she was inducted into office as industrial commissioner, Perkins wrote to thank Kelley for believing in her. “To the very last ounce of my ability, I shall try to do what you expect of me, and partly I shall try because it is you who is expecting so much,” she wrote. “Your demand for good work and results has always been an inspiration, quite as much of an inspiration, I think, as your continual stream of new ideas!”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law while Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins looks on, 1935.
Source: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/perkins

Kelley told Perkins she was confident that Perkins would make a difference. “There will be less death, misery and poverty because you are at the helm,” she wrote her.

In 1932, FDR was elected president, and he named Perkins his secretary of labor. She warned him that she would not take the job unless he permitted her to do her best to enact a much more expansive suite of labor reforms—many of which had been the long-held dreams of Kelley and her friends at the League—on the national level. He agreed. She stayed by FDR’s side in the cabinet, a close ally to the president, for the next 12 years.

Now, Perkins was in a position to help implement the proposals, with active lobbying support from NCL. Kelley’s draft plan for aid to people who lost their jobs— something she had been working on in the 1920s—became known as unemployment insurance. It became federal law as part of the Social Security Act, which passed in 1935. Child and maternity programs of the kinds Kelley had long advocated found permanent funding through the same programs, along with old-age pensions.

In 1937, the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act brought new benefits to millions of workers in the form of a minimum wage, work-hour limitations, and a federal ban on child labor. Perkins was disappointed that some worker groups didn’t initially get coverage, and she and the League set to work broadening eligibility so that more people would be included—ultimately, that challenge was passed down to future generations to accomplish.

Kelley never saw the fruits of her labors. She succumbed to illness and old age, dying in 1932 at the age of 75, never knowing that her protégé would soon find the means to implement so many of their dreams.

But Kelley’s memory and the importance of what she had accomplished proved inspirational to League backers. In 1939, Perkins gave a keynote address to NCL allies who had gathered at the Hotel Astor in New York City.

Perkins told them that she had been honored to be elevated to the posts of New York state industrial commissioner and then U.S. secretary of labor, but that she believed, in fact, it was NCL that deserved the credit.

“I wasn’t the person who was appointed … but it was the Consumers League who was appointed, and that I was merely the symbol who happened to be at hand, able and willing to serve at the moment,” she told the group.

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– Kirstin Downey is a member of NCL’s Board of Directors and author of “The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience,” Nan Talese/ Doubleday Publishing, 2009. Sources: “How the New Christmas Was Born,” Florence Kelley, Harper’s Bazaar, 1911, National Consumers League collection, Library of Congress; “50 Years—The National Consumers League,” by Josephine Goldmark, The Survey, December 1949, NCL collection, Library of Congress; Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Yale University, 1995; Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, Landon R. Y. Storrs, The University of North Carolina Press, 2000; “Thirty Years of the Consumers’ League,” Florence Kelley, The Survey, Nov. 15, 1929, National Consumers League Collection, Library of Congress; NCL annual reports, 1903 to 1916, Library of Congress; The Woman Behind the New Deal, 2009; Florence Kelley to Frances Perkins Jan. 17, 1929, and Frances Perkins to Florence Kelley, Jan. 30, 1929, NCL collection, Library of Congress; NCL Thirty-Ninth annual meeting, Dec. 8, 1939, NCL collection, Library of Congress.

Safety at Sea

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When the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, the public collectively gasped in horror at news accounts of how nearly 1,500 people had died in the icy waters, amid a shortage of workable lifeboats that might have carried them to safety.

The Titanic wasn’t the only maritime disaster that killed scores of people. In fact, for centuries, cargo and passenger ships had been allowed to put to sea without adequate lifeboats to carry not just passengers, but also their crews.

In the previous decade, similar disasters had stolen hundreds of lives. When the Rio de Janeiro sank off San Francisco in 1901, 128 died. When the Slocum went down in the East River in 1904, 1,021 perished.

But the Titanic disaster, which involved many wealthy and famous people, galvanized attention in a new way, and in 1915, the U.S. Congress passed the Safety at Sea legislation, often called the Magna Carta of the Seas, that had been years in the making. It required vessels to carry an adequate number of properly equipped lifeboats and a sufficient crew to man them. It also limited work hours for sailors and abolished the ancient practice of imprisonment for desertion.

In the decades leading up to this crucial legislation, only one outside organization actively lobbied Congress to pass the law— the National Consumers League (NCL). While shipowners and sailors’ unions wrestled over what provisions should be included in the bill, and while maritime companies vociferously opposed changes they said would be costly, NCL was the only voice advocating for the human lives of both the passengers and the crews.

Soon after the disaster, Florence Kelley, NCL’s general secretary, had been told that the lifeboats on the Titanic had failed because when the ship listed on its side, the lifeboats couldn’t be launched because they lacked a simple mechanical part, a davit, that would have allowed them to be lowered securely into the sea. Frances Perkins later recalled that Kelley “saw red” when she learned that fact and had promptly contacted Andrew Furuseth, the head of the International Seamen’s Union, to offer her help in lobbying for the Safety at Sea legislation.

Kelley and Perkins both came to admire Furuseth, a widely respected labor leader who was known for his frugal living in support of the cause of improving the lives of low-paid sailors he represented.

The League voted to endorse the Safety at Sea legislation, and Kelley went to Washington to lobby for it. In 1913, she explained in the League’s annual report why she had chosen to do so.

“What has the Consumers League to do with safety at sea?” she recalled being asked by Sen. Theodore Burton of Ohio, one of the Senate panelists who investigated the disaster and questioned the League’s participation in testifying about it afterward.

“The answer is obvious,” she told the League. “The National Consumers League counts among its members men and women who travel by sea for business or pleasure. They remember the Bourgogne, the Republic, the Titanic, the Volturno, the Monroe. They are horrified by the Empress of Ireland disaster. They prefer not to be drowned.”

Moreover, she said, the League looked not just at risks to passengers, but also risks to the affected workers.

“These members recognize, too, that on shipboard, they are served by stewards and stewardesses, cooks, stokers and seamen, in a far closer human relation than that which they have long acknowledged towards girls who sell them umbrellas and gloves in stores, or men and women who fashion their garments in tailor shops. And members of the Consumers League accept their responsibility for taking a full share in demanding the common safety. There are, moreover, the thousands of humble fellow passengers who travel by steerage, voiceless and powerless to provide for their own safety.”

In 1914, Kelley testified in support of the bill by describing her own terrifying experience at sea. She had been traveling back to the United States from a conference in Brussels on a ship called the Kroonland when one of the ship’s engines broke down in very high seas. Simultaneously, they were wired to rush back to try to save another ship, the Volturno, that had caught on fire and was sinking. As they approached the stricken Volturno, Kelley could hear its passengers screaming in German for assistance: “Help us, we’re dying!”

But although the Kroonland had 34 lifeboats to rescue people, the vessel did not have enough trained crew members to send them out, and only three boats, manned by volunteers, set out in the heavy seas to make the rescues. They managed to save 88 people, including a number of children, she told lawmakers, but more than 135 people died because neither ship had been well enough prepared to handle emergencies at sea.

Furuseth came to view Kelley and Perkins as real allies in the push for higher safety standards. He later told Congress that the reformers had used the Triangle fire and Titanic disasters to help push for lasting solutions to old problems.

“No one will claim that it is safe to crowd people into a theater or a shirtwaist factory and then to lock the doors,” he told lawmakers later. “Is it not even more dangerous to jam a steamer full of passengers and then to send it out of harbor without having on board the means whereby they may be taken off and safely in case of need?”

In 1923, as NCL confronted a conservative wall of opposition in Washington, DC, to its other efforts and faced a number of daunting setbacks, NCL President John R. Commons, the progressive thinker and labor historian from Wisconsin, recounted the Safety at Sea legislation as one of the group’s signature achievements, noting the success with which NCL had collaborated with the International Seamen’s Union to gain passage of the bill.

By the time Furuseth, the grizzled and weather- beaten old mariner, died in 1938, Kelley had been dead for six years. But he entrusted his funeral to Perkins, and she arranged for his body to be laid out in state at the Department of Labor building. He was the first labor leader to be so honored, according to the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. Furuseth had 71 honorary pallbearers, and among them was Secretary of Labor Perkins.

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– NCL board member Kirstin Downey, author of “The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience,” Nan Talese/ Doubleday Publishing, 2009.

Sources: The Seamen’s Bill: Hearings Held Before the Committee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Part 2, 1914; “In memory of the Emancipator of Seamen: Andrew Furuseth, 150th Anniversary,” Brotherhood of the Sea, West Coast Sailors, March 12, 2004; NCL annual reports 1913, 1914-1916, NCL collection, Library of Congress; NCL annual meeting, 1923, NCL Collection, Library of Commons; International Conference on Safety at Sea: Messages From the President of the United States, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914.

NCL’s Legacy of Activism

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It was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who proudly served as Vice President of the National Consumers League and represented the organization in meetings and testimony, who astutely observed, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” And, in so many ways, that sentiment captures the 125-year history of NCL, an organization that has consistently said, on behalf of consumers and workers, that we do not give our consent to hazardous working conditions, inadequate wages and benefits, unsafe foods, lack of access to health care, substandard products, and discrimination of any sort.

From its origins taking on the horrific working conditions prevalent during the height of American industrialization at the start of the 20th century to its work today addressing consumer fraud and barriers to health care and coverage, the National Consumer League’s history reflects an unwavering mission to improve the lives of consumers and workers and promote social and economic justice.

Looking at the successes achieved by NCL throughout its history and tracing them back to transformative legislative and legal victories won by Florence Kelley and Francis Perkins, the linkage between past and present is evident time and time again in NCL’s work.

● Today’s efforts to make food and alcohol labeling more transparent have their origins in NCL’s early support for President Theodore Roosevelt’s consumer safety bills, a hallmark of his legacy. And, after Upton Sinclair’s landmark book The Jungle revealed the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in meat packing plants, NCL made cleaning up those workplaces a priority as well. NCL played a critical role in the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act in 1906 and maintained this progress throughout its history, working for the passage of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, the Meat Inspection Act of 1967, and the Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1968.

New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909

● NCL’s global leadership in combating child labor has its roots in NCL’s work from its earliest days to achieve a fair, safe, and humane workplace. In the organization’s first years, Florence Kelley created the “White Label” campaign, encouraging consumers to shop at businesses that had earned the label by treating workers fairly (also, the racial discrimination Kelley witnessed in her investigations led her to join like-minded Americans in the founding of the NAACP). NCL successfully encouraged the Supreme Court to uphold an Oregon law limiting workdays to 10 hours and scored one of its most significant victories in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, establishing a minimum wage, overtime pay, and laws on child labor. Supporting the fair treatment of workers is a pillar of NCL’s work. NCL’s support for ending the “subminimum tipped wage” and NCL’s recent lawsuit against Starbucks challenging their claims about ethical sourcing are just the latest iterations of a practice that began with Florence Kelley’s “White Label.” 

Child laborers in textile mills, Macon, Georgia.
Photo by Lewis W. Hines, 1909

● Health and economic security have always been NCL priorities. Today’s work improving access to affordable healthcare and coverage, addressing medical debt, and providing expertise on medication safety can be traced all the way back to 1903 when Florence Kelley led a grassroots campaign that resulted in the creation of the Children’s Bureau. The Children’s Bureau was a precursor to the Social Security Act of 1935, which was intended to support the Children’s Bureau’s work and create old-age financial benefits. During the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, NCL advocated for unemployment insurance, national health insurance, and expanding Social Security to include disability benefits. NCL has been a fierce defender of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, fighting efforts to roll back health protections for seniors and the economically vulnerable.

● NCL believes that knowledgeable consumers can be more effective participants in the marketplace and that being armed with information can help people make better purchasing decisions and be better able to protect themselves. The organization’s work in this area traces back to the early 1900s and NCL’s crusading work to make people more aware of companies paying poverty wages, demanding excessive work hours, and not alleviating hazardous working conditions. Over the years, this has led to program initiatives providing consumers with education on matters like product safety, how to maintain good credit and avoid debt, and how to protect themselves against fraud. NCL’s Fraud. org website played a critical role in combating the scams that have proliferated in the internet age. Today, through its LifeSmarts program, NCL is preparing middle and high school students to be informed consumers.

Three boys shoveling Zinc ore, Aurora,
Missouri. Photo by Lewis W. Hines, 1910

● Protecting lives and safety is an imperative that spans NCL’s 125-year legacy and shapes its current work. After the Titanic sank, NCL worked with the Seaman’s Union and Congress to pass landmark maritime safety legislation. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York went up in flames, killing 146 workers who could not escape through locked exit doors. NCL’s Executive Secretary Francis Perkins was having tea a short distance away when the fire broke out and arrived to see women and girls jumping to their deaths from nine stories. Afterwards, she worked tirelessly, demanding research into building fires and industrial accidents and advocating for building safety reforms. Today, in its work to improve airline safety and mandate rear- facing backup cameras in cars, NCL is dedicated to preventing similar tragedies from happening.

● From its beginning, NCL has always insisted that the value of every person must be recognized, and that the pursuit of social justice is paramount. Before the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote, Florence Kelley and the National Consumers League were a leading voice for women’s suffrage, with Kelley pointing out that the inability to defend her interests at the polls lowered her value “as a human being and consequently as a worker.” Over a century later, NCL continues to advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion and against any form of discrimination, applying this conviction in a variety of areas from hiring and promotion practices to medical research to access to credit and financial services.

The history of NCL and the women who led the organization is inspiring and inextricably tied to the gains we have made as a society over 125 years. Perhaps most importantly, NCL’s past successes continue to inform and direct the initiatives and priorities of today, ensuring that consumers continue to have a meaningful voice in the decisions that affect their present and future. 

Jennie Rizzandi, age 9, helps her parents finish garments, New York City. Photo by Lewis W. Hines, 1913

Charting Our Future: Evolving Frontiers of Engagement

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For 125 years, America’s longest-standing consumer advocacy organization has made certain that the perspectives of consumers and workers play an important role in shaping government policies and business practices. The mission that began in 1899 continues today, but it involves taking on new and emerging challenges in a rapidly changing world.

A VIGILANT FOE AGAINST FRAUD 

Fraudsters get more clever every day. They take advantage of emerging technologies. They master new ways to use social engineering to exploit their victims. There are entire camps in other countries populated by victims of illegal trafficking who are kept against their will and forced to engage in activities to defraud Americans.

For every step they take, however, the National Consumers League is there to combat their scams and protect vulnerable consumers.

In 2024, scammers posing as law enforcement pressured
consumers to convert money into gold bars and hand
them over for ‘safe keeping’

NCL’s fight against fraud has three components. The first component is consumer education, utilizing interviews with media outlets, podcasts, and the organization’s Fraud.org website, to help people become more aware of the multiple ways in which scammers operate.

The second component is the far-reaching network NCL has built with law enforcement and partners in consumer-focused agencies. In 1992, NCL launched the National Fraud Information Center, which is Fraud.org. This website welcomes 100,000 unique visitors a year and has collected thousands of consumer complaints that are shared with a network of more than 200 law enforcement partners. Through its consumer education efforts and direct counseling support, Fraud. org has helped millions of consumers protect themselves and their loved ones against treacherous scams.

The third component is policy advocacy, because it is impossible for all consumers to keep up with the plethora of fraudulent activities. NCL has cracked down on the financial system’s more insecure payment methods, making it more difficult for bad actors to take advantage of them. NCL is expanding these efforts to focus on fraud related to gift cards, peer-to-peer payment apps, and cryptocurrency exchanges, to shut off criminal enterprises.

NCL’s anti-fraud work is victim-focused. For too long, fraud victims have been stigmatized, with blame placed on them instead of the criminals. For decades, victims felt they were at fault for being scammed. NCL has made it a priority to change the way the media and policymakers speak about fraud, making it clear that this is a crime and that we should not blame the victims who need to be supported.

NCL has been a powerful voice for airline passengers and safety

ADVOCATING FOR ACCESSIBLE, AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE 

Healthcare in the United States is incredibly complex with many moving parts. For NCL, it boils down to a simple and essential principle —every person should have access to affordable, high-quality care.

Today, consumers and patients can face a bewildering array of barriers standing between them and the care they need. NCL has been their ally, testifying frequently against unreasonable policies like care-delaying prior authorization, step therapy practices that force patients to fail with insurer-preferred treatments before they can get what they need, and the measures taken by pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, to steer patients to higher-priced, profit-generating medications. NCL has been a strong advocate for a well-functioning healthcare marketplace, one that offers consumers genuine choice and the information essential to make educated decisions to protect and strengthen their health.

This emphasis on access includes a strong focus on reproductive health and opposing the multiple efforts in Washington, DC and state capitals to block women from utilizing critically-important services. Today, NCL is adhering as strongly as ever to a philosophy integral to its founding, that women must be free to make their own choices.

During the COVID pandemic, NCL prioritized another aspect of its healthcare advocacy efforts, combating misinformation and building confidence in public health efforts. Today, public health is under relentless attack with the public being bombarded with false claims about vaccines and services vital to protecting population health and well-being. During the pandemic, NCL played an important role in getting vaccine misinformation removed from public platforms and continues this work today, partnering with multiple organizations in the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science.

NCL will continue to champion healthcare policies that fall in the intersection of innovation, affordability, accessibility, and equity. This work manifests in multiple ways, from focusing on access to affordable biosimilar medications to educating consumers on how artificial intelligence can be utilized to strengthen health care efficacy.

To proactively help patients protect their own health, NCL’s Script Your Future initiative will continue to elevate public awareness about the importance of medication adherence.

World Day Against Child Labor on Capitol Hill, 2017 (L to R) Reid Maki,
Director of Child Labor Advocacy and Coordinator of the Child Labor
Coalition, Melyssa Sperber, Humanity United, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Kailash Satyarthi, Anjali Kochar, Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation of
America, Jo Becker, Human Rights Watch

PROTECTING CHILDREN 

Consider these recent scenarios: a child suffering chemical burns from working with caustic chemicals in an agricultural processing plant; another experiencing severe injuries from getting his arm caught in a conveyor belt; children falling asleep in school after having worked an overnight shift.

Fighting exploitative and dangerous child labor has been critical to the National Consumer League’s history and is integral to its current and future mission. Along the way, the League has won major victories in the early part of the 20th century through passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and its protections against child labor.

An important part of this work is raising public awareness. Most people believe that child labor is a problem of society’s early industrial age when, in fact, 160 million children globally are engaged in labor inappropriate for their young ages and, while there was 20 years of progress in which those numbers were going down, they have recently been creeping back up. That makes NCL’s work so very important.

This work has been both offensive and defensive—fighting to close loopholes in the law that allows employers to have children as young as 12 work long hours in back- breaking and sometimes hazardous jobs while, at the same time, fighting efforts in Congress and the states that would further loosen these laws and enable enterprises facing labor shortages to further exploit minors.

There have been important victories – for example, achieving a ban on kids applying hazardous pesticides, and preventing proposed regulations that would allow children to operate difficult patient lifts in nursing homes without supervision – but the work continues, beginning with raising public visibility.

NCL is the driving force in making the public more aware of the pervasiveness of child labor, working closely with journalists who are producing exposés on the issue and shining a spotlight on farms and processing plants that are exposing children to hazardous labor resulting in serious, life-threatening injuries. In 2023, NCL interviewed with over 120 media outlets, elevating the visibility that helps drive public policy.

And that public policy is percolating. NCL is working closely with members of Congress to raise the currently-too-low fines imposed on employers that violate child labor laws and is forming partnerships in multiple states to fight ongoing efforts by trade associations to weaken the existing laws and regulations protecting children.

Building potent partnerships is at the core of NCL’s work. The organization created the Child Labor Coalition, bringing together nearly 40 major organizations and is currently managing the Campaign to End U.S. Child Labor, engaging on initiatives such as banning child labor in domestic tobacco production.

EMPOWERING TODAY’S AND TOMORROW’S CONSUMERS 

Letting kids be kids and not fodder for a global economy in search of working bodies will continue to be at the core of NCL’s mission. These are challenging times for consumers. In recent years, changing regulations and the growth of corporate oligopolies have made households feel like the deck is stacked against them. NCL is an ally to consumers nationwide, making sure they are protected against unfair and predatory practices and working to improve their lives while, at the same time, preparing future generations of consumers to be better empowered to protect themselves.

NCL has exerted its influence with a broad array of industries, such as the airline industry where NCL has fought for the establishment of stronger protections for airline passengers, getting family seating fees outlawed, rules to keep vouchers from expiring, and enabling those experiencing canceled and delayed flights to receive swifter refunds.

For fifteen years, NCL has taken on the fight for a fairer live event industry, fighting back against monopolistic ticketing giants and unscrupulous ticket resellers. Thanks to NCL’s advocacy, “ticket bots” were outlawed by Congress. And we are now on the cusp of making fans’ biggest gripe—out-of-control add-on ticket fees—a thing of the past.

From advocating for the use of technology to make automobiles safer to pressing for regulations to ensure the safety of CBD products, NCL will continue to insist that corporations and government make the consumer interest a priority.

NCL’s focus is not only on protecting consumers today, but in forging new generations of consumers well equipped to navigate an increasingly complex environment.

Now in its 30th year, the LifeSmarts program educates young people throughout the country and introduces them to the consumer movement. Structured as a fun competition to engage both students and teachers, LifeSmarts gives the next generation real- world knowledge on subjects including personal finance, consumer rights and responsibilities, environment, technology, and workplace health and safety, while also focusing on current issues like medication safety and reducing food waste.

LifeSmarts participants take what they learn and share it with peers, parents, and even grandparents. There are households across the country more financially secure today because of what students have taken away from the LifeSmarts program.

As a former winner from Frederick County, Maryland said, “I use LifeSmarts lessons every day, in every purchase I make from grocery shopping to car buying, when I compare terms on a credit card or find the best interest rates on loans. I learned how to spot email scams, fake websites, and probably a hundred other things I didn’t even realize I learned in LifeSmarts.”