The Whistleblower Who Was Silenced by the State
Blanche Mason, a deputy labor commissioner, accused Washington's governor and his labor chief of burying her reports on the exploitation of working women to protect big business interests.
Mrs. Blanche Mason, that ardent advocate of the rights of the working girl, has come and gone. Her story of Governor M. E. Hay’s perfidy and blindness to his political interests touched the hearts of her hearers. According to this lady, from the very moment of her appointment as deputy labor commissioner under Commissioner Hubbard, she was ordered to keep her hands off the big interests. She went ahead and brought charge after charge against violators of the eight-hour law for women, only to have Hay and Hubbard throw her data into the waste-basket with the admonition 'to do nothing to hurt the political standing of the governor with the big interests.' Her report of her work—one of the most comprehensive ever written in regard to actual conditions of the working girl—was thrown into Hubbard’s waste-basket with the statement that he would incorporate these matters in his report, which he never did. Mrs. Mason was hampered at every turn by both the governor and Commissioner Hubbard.
“She was ordered to keep her hands off the big interests.”
The tension between state regulators and the business interests they are tasked to oversee remains a defining feature of Washington politics. Mason’s struggle for labor enforcement mirrors contemporary debates over the efficacy and independence of the Department of Labor and Industries.
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