Making Both Ends Meet: The income and outlay of New York working girls
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Title: Making Both Ends Meet: The income and outlay of New York working girls
Author: Sue Ainslie Clark
Edith Wyatt
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MAKING BOTH ENDS MEET
The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls
by
SUE AINSLIE CLARK and EDITH WYATT
New York
The Macmillan Company
1911
[Illustration: Photograph by Lewis Hine]
TO
FLORENCE KELLEY
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED
PREFACE
This book is composed of the economic records of self-supporting women
living away from home in New York. Their chronicles were given to the
National Consumers' League simply as a testimony to truth; and it is
simply as a testimony to truth that these narratives are reprinted here.
The League's inquiry was initiated because, three years ago in the study
of the establishment of a minimum wage, only very little information was
obtainable as to the relation between the income and the outlay of
self-supporting women workers. The inquiry was conducted for a year and a
half by Mrs. Sue Ainslie Clark, who obtained the workers' budgets as they
were available from young women interviewed in their rooms, boarding
places, and hotels, and at night schools and clubs. After Mrs. Clark had
collected and written these accounts, I supplemented them further in the
same manner; and rearranged them in a series of articles for Mr. S.S.
McClure. The budgets fell naturally into certain industrial divisions;
but, as will be seen from the nature of the inquiry, the records were not
exhaustive trade-studies of the several trades in which the workers were
engaged. They constituted rather an accurate kinetoscope view of the
yearly lives of chance passing workers in those trades. Wherever the
facts ascertained seemed to warrant it, however, they were so focussed as
to express definitely and clearly the wisdom of some industrial change.
In two instances in the course of the serial publication of the budgets
such industrial changes were undertaken and are now in progress. The firm
of Macy & Co. in New York has inaugurated a monthly day of rest, with
pay, for all permanent women-employees who wish this privilege. The
change was made first in one department and then extended through a plan
supplied by the National Civic Federation to all the departments of the
store.
The Manhattan Laundrymen's Association, the Brooklyn Laundrymen's
Association, and the Laundrymen's Association of New York State held a
conference with the Consumers' League after the publication of the
Laundry report, and asked to cooperate with the League in obtaining the
establishment of a ten-hour day in the trade, additional factory
inspection, and the placing of hotels and hospital laundries under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Labor. Largely through the efforts of
the Laundrymen's Association of New York State, a bill defining as a
factory any place where laundry work is done by mechanical power passed
both houses of the last legislature at Albany. A standard for a fair
house was discussed and agreed upon at the conference. It is the
intention of the League to publish within the year a white list of the
New York steam laundries conforming to this standard in wages, hours, and
sanitation.
The New York of the workers is not the New York best known to the country
at large. The New York of Broadway, the New York of Fifth Avenue, of
Central Park, of Wall Street, of Tammany Hall,--these are by-words of
common reference; and when two years ago the daily press printed the news
of the strike of thirty thousand shirt-waist makers in the metropolis,
many persons realized, perhaps for the first time, the presence of a new
and different New York--the New York of the city's great working
population. The scene of these budgets is a corner of this New York.
The authors of the book are many more than its writers whose names appear
upon the title-page. The second chapter is chiefly the word-of-mouth tale
of Natalya Perovskaya, one of the shirt-waist workers, a household tale
of adventure repeated just as it was told to the present writer and to
her hostess' family and other visitors during a call on the East Side on
a warm summer evening. The sixth chapter is almost entirely the
contribution of Miss Carola Woerishofer, Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood,
and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins, three young college-bred women from Bryn
Mawr, Smith, and Wellesley, respectively, who made an inquiry for the
National Consumers' League in the hospital, hotel, and commercial steam
laundries of New York. The fifth chapter is composed largely from a
chronicle of the New York cloak makers' strike written by Dr. Henry
Moskowitz, one of the most efficient leaders in attaining the final
settlement last fall between the employers and the seventy thousand
members of the Cloak Makers' Union. Mr. Frederick Winston Taylor gave the
definition of "Scientific Management" which prefaces the last chapter. It
is a pleasure to acknowledge help of several kinds received from Mrs.
Florence Kelley, Miss Perkins, and Miss Johnson of the Consumers' League;
from Miss Neumann, of the Woman's Trade-Union League; from Miss Pauline
and Josephine Goldmark, and Mr. Louis p. Brandeis; from Miss Willa
Siebert Cather of _McClure's Magazine_; and from Mr. S.S. McClure.
To record rightly any little corner of contemporary history is a communal
rather than an individual piece of work. While no title so pompous as
that of a cathedral could possibly be applied except with great absurdity
to any magazine article, least of all to these quiet, journalistic
records, yet the writing of any sincere journalistic article is more
comparable, perhaps, to cathedral work than to any sort of craft in
expression. If the account is to have any genuine social value as a
narrative of contemporary truth, it will be evolved as the product of
numerous human intelligences and responsibilities. Especially is this
true of any synthesis of facts which must be derived, so to speak, from
many authors, from many authentic sources.
Unstandardized conditions in women's work are so frequently mentioned in
the first six chapters that their connection with the last chapter will
be sufficiently clear. What is the way out of the unstandardized and
unsatisfactory conditions obtaining for multitudes of women workers?
Legislation is undoubtedly one way out. Trade organization is undoubtedly
one way out. But legislation is ineffectual unless it is strongly backed
by conscientious inspection and powerful enforcement. In the great
garment-trade strikes in New York, in spite of their victories, the trade
orders have gone in such numbers to other cities that neither the spirit
of the shirt-waist makers' strike nor the wisdom of the Cloak Makers'
Preferential Union Agreement have since availed to provide sufficient
employment for the workers. Further, neither legislation nor trade
organization are permanently valuable unless they are informed by justice
and understanding. In the same manner, unless it is informed by these
qualities, the new plan of management outlined in the last chapter is
incapable of any lasting and far-reaching industrial deliverance. But it
provides a way out, hitherto untried. With an account of this way as it
appears to-day our book ends, as a testimony to living facts can only
end, not with the hard-and-fast wall of dogma, but with an open door.
EDITH WYATT.
CHICAGO, March 19, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK SALESWOMEN
CHAPTER II
THE SHIRT-WAIST MAKERS' STRIKE
CHAPTER III
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS.
(UNSKILLED AND SEASONAL WORK)
CHAPTER IV
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS.
(MONOTONY AND FATIGUE IN SPEEDING)
CHAPTER V
THE CLOAK MAKERS' STRIKE AND THE PREFERENTIAL UNION SHOP
CHAPTER VI
WOMEN LAUNDRY WORKERS IN NEW YORK
CHAPTER VII
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AS APPLIED TO WOMEN'S WORK
CHAPTER I
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK SALESWOMEN
I
One of the most significant features of the common history of this
generation is the fact that nearly six million women are now gainfully
employed in this country. From time immemorial, women have, indeed,
worked, so that it is not quite as if an entire sex, living at ease at
home heretofore, had suddenly been thrown into an unwonted activity, as
many quoters of the census seem to believe. For the domestic labor in
which women have always engaged may be as severe and prolonged as
commercial labor. But not until recently have women been employed in
multitudes for wages, under many of the same conditions as men,
irrespective of the fact that their powers are different by nature from
those of men, and should, in reason, for themselves, for their children,
and for every one, indeed, be conserved by different industrial
regulations.
What, then, are the fortunes of some of these multitudes of women
gainfully employed? What do they give in their work? What do they get
from it? Clearly ascertained information on those points has been meagre.
About two years ago the National Consumers' League, through the
initiative of its Secretary, Mrs. Florence Kelley, started an inquiry on
the subject of the standard of living among self-supporting women workers
in many fields, away from home in New York. Among these workers were
saleswomen, waist-makers, hat makers, cloak finishers, textile workers in
silk, hosiery, and carpets, tobacco workers, machine tenders, packers of
candy, drugs, biscuits, and olives, laundry workers, hand embroiderers,
milliners, and dressmakers.
The Consumers' League had printed for this purpose a series of questions
arranged in two parts. The first part covered the character of each
girl's work--the nature of her occupation, wages, hours, overtime work,
overtime compensation, fines, and idleness. The second part of the
questions dealt with the worker's expenses--her outlay for shelter, food,
clothing, rest and recreation, and her effort to maintain her strength
and energy. In this way the League's inquiry on income and outlay was so
arranged as to ascertain, not only the worker's gain and expense in
money, but, as far as possible, her gain and expense in health and
vitality. The inquiry was conducted for a year and a half by Mrs. Sue
Ainslie Clark.[1]
The account of the income and outlay of self-supporting women away from
home in New York may be divided, for purposes of record, into the
chronicles of saleswomen, shirt-waist makers, women workers whose
industry involves tension, such as machine operatives, and women workers
whose industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength, such
as laundry workers.
Among these the narrative of the trade fortunes of some New York
saleswomen is placed first. Mrs. Clark's inquiry concerning the income
and outlay of saleswomen has been supplemented by portions of the
records of another investigator for the League, Miss Marjorie Johnson,
who worked in one of the department stores during the Christmas rush of
1909-1910.
Further informal reports made by the shop-girls in the early summer of
1910 proved that the income and expenditures of women workers in the
stores had remained practically unchanged since the winter of Mrs.
Clark's report.
So that it would seem that the budgets, records of the investigator, and
statements given by the young women interviewed last June may be
reasonably regarded as the most truthful composite photograph obtainable
of the trade fortunes of the army of the New York department-store girls
to-day.[2]
The limitations of such an inquiry are clear. The thousands of women
employed in the New York department stores are of many kinds. From the
point of view of describing personality and character, one might as
intelligently make an inquiry among wives, with the intent of
ascertaining typical wives. The trade and living conditions accurately
stated in the industrial records obtained have undoubtedly, however,
certain common features.
Among the fifty saleswomen's histories collected at random in stores of
various grades, those that follow, with the statements modifying them,
seem to express most clearly and fairly, in the order followed, these
common features--low wages, casual employment, heavy required expense in
laundry and dress, semidependence, uneven promotion, lack of training,
absence of normal pleasure, long hours of standing, and an excess of
seasonal work.
One of the first saleswomen who told the League her experience in her
work was Lucy Cleaver, a young American woman of twenty-five, who had
entered one of the New York department stores at the age of twenty, at a
salary of $4.50 a week.
II
In the course of the five years of her employment her salary had been
raised one dollar. She stood for nine hours every day. If, in dull
moments of trade, when no customers were near, she made use of the seats
lawfully provided for employees, she was at once ordered by a
floor-walker to do something that required standing.
During the week before Christmas, she worked standing over fourteen hours
every day, from eight to twelve-fifteen in the morning, one to six in
the afternoon, and half past six in the evening till half past eleven at
night. So painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long
periods that some of the girls forego eating at noon in order to give
themselves the temporary relief of a foot-bath. For this overtime the
store gave her $20, presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas
gift.
The management also allowed a week's vacation with pay in the summer-time
and presented a gift of $10.
After five years in this position she had a disagreement with the
floor-walker and was summarily dismissed.
She then spent over a month in futile searching for employment, and
finally obtained a position as a stock girl in a Sixth Avenue suit store
at $4 a week, a sum less than the wage for which she had begun work five
years before. Within a few weeks, dullness of trade had caused her
dismissal. She was again facing indefinite unemployment.
Her income for the year had been $281. She lived in a large, pleasant
home for girls, where she paid only $2.50 a week for board and a room
shared with her sister. Without the philanthropy of the home, she could
not have made both ends meet. It was fifteen minutes' walk from the
store, and by taking this walk twice a day she saved carfare and the
price of luncheon. She did her own washing, and as she could not spend
any further energy in sewing, she bought cheap ready-made clothes. This
she found a great expense. Cheap waists wear out very rapidly. In the
year she had bought 24 at 98 cents each. Here is her account, as nearly
as she had kept it and recalled it for a year: a coat, $10; 4 hats, $17;
2 pairs of shoes, $5; 24 waists at 98 cents, $23.52; 2 skirts, $4.98;
underwear, $2; board, $130; doctor, $2; total, $194.50. This leaves a
balance of $86.50. This money had paid for necessaries not
itemized,--stockings, heavy winter underwear, petticoats, carfare,
vacation expenses, every little gift she had made, and all recreation.
She belonged to no benefit societies, and she had not been able to save
money in any way, even with the assistance given by the home. So much for
her financial income and outlay.
After giving practically all her time and force to her work, she had not
received a return sufficient to conserve her health in the future, or
even to support her in the present without the help of philanthropy. She
was ill, anæmic, nervous, and broken in health.
Before adding the next budget, two points in Lucy Cleaver's outlay
should, perhaps, be emphasized in the interest of common sense. The first
is the remarkable folly of purchasing 24 waists at 98 cents each. In an
estimate of the cost of clothing, made by one of the working girls' clubs
of St. George's last year,[3] the girls agreed that comfort and a
presentable appearance could be maintained, so far as expenditure for
waists was concerned, on $8.50 a year. This amount allowed for five
shirt-waists at $1.20 apiece, and one net waist at $2.50.
In extenuation of Lucy Cleaver's weak judgment as a waist purchaser, and
the poor child's one absurd excess, it must, however, be said that the
habit of buying many articles of poor quality, instead of fewer articles
of better quality, is frequently a matter, not of choice, but of
necessity. The cheap, hand-to-mouth buying which proves paradoxically so
expensive in the end is no doubt often caused by the simple fact that
the purchaser has not, at the time the purchase is made, any more money
to offer. Whatever your wisdom, you cannot buy a waist for $1.20 if you
possess at the moment only 98 cents. The St. George's girls made their
accounts on a basis of an income of $8 a week. Lucy Cleaver never had an
income of more than $5.50 a week, and sometimes had less. The fact that
she spent nearly three times as much as they did on this one item of
expenditure, and yet never could have "one net waist at $2.50" for festal
occasions, is worthy of notice.
The other point that should be emphasized is the fact that she did her
own washing. The more accurate statement would be that she did her own
laundry, including the processes, not only of rubbing the clothes clean,
but of boiling, starching, bluing, and ironing. This, after a day of
standing in other employment, is a vital strain more severe than may
perhaps be readily realized. Saleswomen and shop-girls have not the
powerful wrists and muscular waists of accustomed washerwomen, and are in
most instances no better fitted to perform laundry work than washerwomen
would be to make sales and invoice stock. But custom requires exactly the
same freshness in a saleswoman's shirt-waist, ties, and collars as in
those of women of the largest income. The amount the girls of the St.
George's Working Club found it absolutely necessary to spend in a year
for laundering clothes was almost half as much as the amount spent for
lodging and nearly two-thirds as much as the amount originally spent for
clothing.
Where this large expense of laundry cannot be met financially by
saleswomen, it has to be met by sheer personal strength. One
department-store girl, who needed to be especially neat because her
position was in the shirt-waist department, told us that sometimes, after
a day's standing in the store, she worked over tubs and ironing-boards at
home till twelve at night.
It is worth noting, as one cause of the numerous helpless shifts of the
younger salesgirls, that, living, as most of them do, in a
semidependence, on either relatives or charitable homes, it is almost
impossible for them to learn any domestic economy, or the value of money
for living purposes. It seems significant that quite the most practical
spender encountered among the saleswomen was a widow, Mrs. Green, whose
accounts will be given below, who was for years the manager of her own
household and resources, and not a wage-earner until fairly late in life.
This helplessness of a semidependent and uneducated girl may be further
illustrated by the chronicle of Alice Anderson, a girl of seventeen, who
had been working in the department stores for three years and a half.
She was at first employed as a check girl in a Fourteenth Street store,
at a wage of $2.62-1/2 a week; that is to say, she was paid $5.25 twice a
month. Her working day was nine and a half hours long through most of the
year. But during two weeks before Christmas it was lengthened to from
twelve to thirteen and a half hours, without any extra payment in any
form. She was promoted to the position of saleswoman, but her wages still
remained $2.62-1/2 a week. She lived with her grandmother of eighty,
working occasionally as a seamstress, and to her Alice gave all her
earnings for three years.
It was then considered better that she should go to live with an aunt, to
whom she paid the nominal board of $1.15 a week. As her home was in West
Hoboken, she spent two and a half hours every day on the journey in the
cars and on the ferry. During the weeks of overtime Alice could not reach
home until nearly half past eleven o'clock; and she would be obliged to
rise while it was still dark, at six o'clock, after five hours and a half
of sleep, in order to be at her counter punctually at eight. By walking
from the store to the ferry she saved 30 cents a week. Still, fares cost
her $1.26 a week. This $1.26 a week carfare (which was still not enough
to convey her the whole distance from her aunt's to the store) and the
$1.15 a week for board (which still did not really pay the aunt for her
niece's food and lodging) consumed all her earnings except 20 cents a
week.
Alice was eager to become more genuinely self-dependent. She left the
establishment of her first employment and entered another store on
Fourteenth Street, as cash girl, at $4 a week. The hours in the second
store were very long, from eight to twelve in the morning and from a
quarter to one till a quarter past six in the afternoon on all days
except Saturday, when the closing hour was half past nine.
After she had $4 a week instead of $2.62-1/2, Alice abandoned her daily
trip to West Hoboken and came to live in New York.
Here she paid 6 cents a night in a dormitory of a charitably supported
home for girls. She ate no breakfast. Her luncheon consisted of coffee
and rolls for 10 cents. Her dinner at night was a repetition of coffee
and rolls for 10 cents. As she had no convenient place for doing her own
laundry, she paid 21 cents a week to have it done. Her regular weekly
expenditure was as follows: lodging, 42 cents; board, $1.40; washing, 21
cents; clothing and all other expenses, $1.97; total, $4.
Of course, living in this manner was quite beyond her strength. She was
pale, ill, and making the severest inroads upon her present and future
health. Her experience illustrates the narrow prospect of promotion in
some of the department stores.
III
It is significant in this point to compare the annals of this growing
girl with those of a saleswoman of thirty-five, Grace Carr, who had been
at work for twelve years. In her first employment in a knitting mill she
had remained for five years, and had been promoted rapidly to a weekly
wage of $12. The hours, however, were very long, from ten to thirteen
hours a day. The lint in the air she breathed so filled her lungs that
she was unable, in her short daily leisure, to counteract its effect. At
the end of five years, as she was coughing and raising particles of lint,
she was obliged to rest for a year.
Not strong enough to undertake factory work again, she obtained a
position in the shoe department in one of the large stores, where she was
not "speeded up," and her daily working time of nine hours was less
severe than that of the knitting mill. In summer she had a Saturday
half-holiday. There was a system of fines for lateness; but on the rare
occasions of her own tardiness it had not been enforced. The company was
also generous in grafting five-o'clock passes, which permitted a girl to
leave at five in the afternoon, with no deduction from her wage for the
free hour. She had been with this establishment for six years, earning $6
a week; and she had given up hope of advancing.
Miss Carr said that her work in the shoe department was exhausting,
because of the stooping, the frequent sitting down and rising, and the
effort of pulling shoes on and off. In the summer preceding the fall when
she told of her experience in the store, she had, in reaching for a box
of shoes, strained her heart in some way, so that she lost consciousness
immediately, and was ill for seven weeks. She failed to recuperate as
rapidly as she should have done, because she was so completely
devitalized by overwork.
The firm was very good to her at this time, sending a doctor daily until
she was in condition to go to the country. It then paid her expenses for
two weeks in a country home of the Young Women's Christian Association,
and during the three remaining weeks of her stay paid her full wage. Miss
Carr praised this company's general care of the employees. A doctor and
nurse were available without charge if a girl were ill in the store. A
social secretary was employed.
Miss Carr lived in a furnished room with two other women, each paying a
dollar a week rent. She cared nothing for her fellow-lodgers; her only
reason for spending her time with them in such close quarters was her
need of living cheaply. She cooked her breakfast and supper in the
crowded room, at an expense of $1.95 a week. She said that her "hearty"
meal was a noon dinner, for which she paid in a restaurant 15 cents a
day.
After her experience in the summer, she realized that she should assure
herself of income in case of illness. She joined a benefit society, to
which she paid 50 cents a month. This promised a weekly benefit of $4 a
week for thirteen weeks, and $200 at death. She paid also 10 cents a week
for insurance in another company.
The room was within walking distance of the store, so that she spent
nothing for carfare. The services and social life of a church were her
chief happiness. Besides her contributions to its support, she had spent
only $1 a year on "good times." She did her own washing.
Her outlay in health in these years had been extreme. She was very worn,
thin, and wrinkled with hard work, severe economies, and anxiety,
although she was still in what should have been the prime of life.
Her weekly budget was: lodging, $1; board, $1.95; luncheons, $1.05;
insurance, 21 cents; clothing, contributions to church, occasional
carfare, and other expenses, $1.79; total, $6.
Miss Carr said that her firm was generous in many of its policies, but
she felt it profoundly discouraging not to advance to a wage that would
permit decent living.
In connection with Miss Carr's budget the benefit system of New York
stores should be mentioned. In many of the large department stores,
monthly dues, varying with the wage of the employee, are deducted from
the pay of each, although in many cases she does not know what the return
for the dues is to be. These dues assure to her, while she remains in the
store's employ, a weekly benefit in case of illness, and a death benefit.
But if she leaves the store, or is discharged, the management retains the
amount she has been forced to pay to it, and gives no return whatever in
case of her subsequent sickness or death. While she is in the store's
employ, the sick benefit varies from one-half the girl's wage to a
regular payment of $5 a week for from five to thirteen weeks, according
to the particular rules in each store. The employee must be ill five days
or a week in order to draw it. Otherwise she is docked for absence.
The Mutual Benefit Fund of the New York Association of Working Girls'
Societies has in this respect a better policy than the stores. Members of
the clubs pay 55 cents a month for a benefit of $5 for six weeks in any
one year, and 20 cents a month for a benefit of $3. Cessation of
membership in a club does not terminate connection with the benefit fund,
unless the reason for leaving is unsatisfactory to the board. Women not
members of clubs may, under certain conditions, join the benefit fund as
associate members, and pay 50 cents a month for a benefit of $5 a week,
30 cents for a benefit of $3 a week, or 80 cents for a benefit of $8 a
week. These amounts are severally payable for six weeks in any one year.
A number of the stores have trained nurses and doctors in their employ,
to whom the girls may go if they are ill. Several of the stores have
recreation rooms; several have summer homes; several have employees'
restaurants, where a really nourishing meal can be obtained for 15 cents.
Miss Carr, struggling against overwhelming odds, lived within $6 without
charitable aid. With her experience may be compared those of two other
older saleswomen, who were wholly self-supporting.
Mrs. Green, a shrewd-appearing woman of thirty-five, had been
wage-earning only two years. She began work in Philadelphia in a
commission house as a saleswoman and corset fitter. Here she was able to
save from her salary. She also saved very carefully the wardrobe she had
before she entered business. With these reserves, she came to New York to
work in department stores for the purpose of gaining experience in
salesmanship and a more thorough knowledge of corsets. She expected to be
able to command a high salary as soon as she had thus increased her
competence. She went at first to a new and attractive Sixth Avenue
store, where, working eight hours and a quarter a day, she earned $10 a
week. Laid off at the end of five months, she was idle a month before
finding employment at another Sixth Avenue store.
In applying here she told the employer that she would not work for less
than $12 a week. He offered her $9, and a commission on all sales beyond
$400 a week. She refused, and the firm finally gave her what she asked.
It proved that her choice was wise, for she found that in her very
busiest week, when she was exhausted from the day's rush, her sales never
reached $400 a week, so that she would have received no income at all
from the proffered commission.
She had a small room alone in an attractive hotel for working girls. For
this and breakfasts and dinners she paid $5.10 a week. Luncheons cost, in
addition, about $1.50 a week. She paid 50 cents a week for washing,
besides doing some herself. Riding to and from work nearly every day
increased her weekly expense 50 cents. This left her $4.40 a week for
clothing and sundries.
Mrs. Green seemed extravagantly dressed; she said, however, that she
contrived to have effective waists and hats by making and trimming them
herself, and by purchasing materials with care at sales. In dressing
economically without sacrificing effect she was aided palpably by skill
and deftness.
She was in good health; and, though she did not save, she had not spent,
even in her idle month, any of the reserve fund she had accumulated
before she began to work.
Another self-supporting saleswoman aided by her experience in domestic
economy was Zetta Weyman, a young woman of twenty-eight, who had begun to
work for wages at the age of eleven; at this time she still attended
school, but did housework out of school hours. When she was older, she
was employed as a maid in the house of a very kind and responsive couple,
who gave her free access to their interesting library, where she read
eagerly. A trip to Europe had been especially stimulating. Her employer
was considerate, and tried to make it possible for her to benefit by the
experience.
Throughout this period she had been observant of dress and manner among
the cultured people she saw, and had applied what she learned to her own
dress and conduct. At twenty-six, wishing for larger opportunities than
those she could have in personal service, she obtained work in a
department store at $7 a week. Here she soon advanced to $10 in a
department requiring more than average intelligence. At the end of two
years she was very much interested in her work. It made demands upon her
judgment, and offered opportunity for increasing knowledge and
heightening her value to the company. She expected soon to receive a
larger wage, as she considered her work worth at least $15 a week. Aside
from underpay, she thought she was fairly treated. She greatly
appreciated two weeks' vacation with full wages.
Zetta gave $2.50 a week for a furnished hall bedroom and the use of a
bath-room. The warmth from the single gas-jet was the sole heat. She made
coffee in her room for breakfast; a light luncheon sufficed; and dinner
in a restaurant cost 25 to 35 cents a day. She was often entertained at
dinner, by friends.
She usually rode to work, and walked home, eight blocks, spending thus 30
cents a week carfare. All living expenses for the week came to about $6.
She paid for six years $24 a year on an insurance policy which promised
her $15 a week in case of illness, and was cumulative, making a return
during the life of the holder; $290 would be due from it in about a year.
Zetta said that she was extravagant in her expense for clothing, but she
considered that her social position depended upon her appearance. She was
very attractive looking. Her manner had quiet and grace, and there was
something touching, even moving, in the dignity of her pure, clear
English, acquired in the teeth of a fortune that forced her to be a
little scullion and cook at the age of eleven. She was dressed with taste
and care at the time of the interview. Through watching sales and through
information obtained from heads of departments, she contrived to buy
clothing of excellent quality, silk stockings, and well-cut suits
comparatively cheaply. By waiting until the end of the season, she had
paid $35, the winter before, for a suit originally costing $70; $35 was
more than she had intended to spend, but the suit was becoming and she
could not resist the purchase. She managed to have pretty and
well-designed hats for from $2 to $5, because a friend trimmed them.
She spent her vacation with relatives on a farm in the country. Railroad
fares and the occasional purchase of a magazine were her only
expenditures for pleasure. But she had many "good times" going to the
beaches in the summer with friends who paid her way.
She considered that with careful planning a girl could live in fair
comfort for $10 a week. But she saved nothing.
The drawback she mentioned in her own arrangements--the best she could
obtain for her present wage--was not the cold of her hall bedroom, warmed
only by the gas-jet, but that she had no suitable place for receiving men
friends. She was obliged to turn to trolley rides and walks and various
kinds of excursions,--literally to the streets,--for hospitality, when
she received a man's visit. She spoke frequently of one man with whom she
had many "good times." She could not take him to her room. Trolley
rides, and walks in winter, would pall. She hated park benches as a
resort for quiet conversation. Where, then, was she to see him? Although
she disapproved of it, she and another girl who had a larger and more
attractive room than her own had received men there.
Zetta's income for the year had been $520. She had spent $130 for rent;
$105 for dinners; $55 for breakfasts, luncheons, and washing; $195 for
clothing, summer railway fares, and incidentals; $15 for carfare; and $20
for insurance.
IV
Zetta's interest in her daily occupation is somewhat unusual in the trade
chronicles of the shop-girls. One frequently hears complaint of the
inefficiency and inattention of New York saleswomen and their rudeness to
plainly dressed customers. While this criticism contains a certain truth,
it is, of course, unreasonable to expect excellence from service
frequently ill paid, often unevenly and unfairly promoted, and, except
with respect to dress, quite unstandardized.
Further, it must be remembered that the world in which the shop-girl
follows her occupation is a world of externals. The fortunes, talents,
tastes, eager human effort spent in shop-window displays on Fifth Avenue,
the shimmer and sparkle of beautiful silks and jewels, the prestige of
"carriage trade," the distinction of presence of some of the customers
and their wealth and their freedom in buying--all the worldliness of the
most moneyed city of the United States here perpetually passes before the
eyes of Zettas in their $1.20 muslin waists so carefully scrubbed the
midnight before, and of Alices who have had breakfasts for 10 cents. Is
it surprising that they should adopt the New York shop-window-display
ideal of life manifested everywhere around them?
The saleswomen themselves are the worst victims of their unstandardized
employment; and the fact that they spend long years of youth in work
involving a serious outlay of their strength, without training them in
concentration or individual responsibility or resourcefulness, but
apparently dissipating these powers, seems one of the gravest aspects of
their occupation.
A proud and very pretty pink-cheeked little English shop-girl, with clear
hazel eyes, laid special stress upon unevenness of promotion, in telling
of her fortunes in this country.
She was sitting, as she spoke, in the parlor of a Christian "home,"
which, like that of many others where shop-girls live, was light and
clean, but had that unmistakably excellent and chilling air so subtly
imparted by the altruistic act of furnishing for others--the air that
characterizes spare rooms, hotel parlors, and great numbers of
settlement receiving rooms.
"I had always wanted to come to America," she said in her quick English
enunciation. "And I saved something and borrowed ten pounds of my
brother, and came. Oh, it was hard the first part of the time I was here.
I remember, when I first came in at the door of this house, and
registered, one of the other shop-girls here was standing at the desk. I
had on a heavy winter coat, just a plain, rough-looking coat, but it's
warm. That girl gave me such a look, a sort of sneering look--oh, it made
me hot! But that's the way American shop-girls are. I never have spoken
to that girl.
"I got down to 50 cents before I had a job. There was one store I didn't
want to go to. It was cheap, and had a mean name. One afternoon, when it
was cold and dark, I walked up to it at last; and it looked so horrid I
couldn't go in. There was another cheap store just beyond it, and
another. All the shoppers were hurrying along. Oh, it was a terrible time
that afternoon, terrible, standing there, looking at those big, cheap New
York stores all around me.
"But at last I went in, and they took me on. It wasn't so bad, after all.
In about two months I had a chance to go to a better store. I like it
pretty well. But I can't save anything. I had $8 a week. Now I have $9.
I pay $4.50 a week here for board and lodging, but I always live up to my
salary, spending it for clothes and washing. Oh, I worry and worry about
money. But I've paid back my $50. I have a nice silk dress now, and a new
hat. And now I've got them," she added, with a laugh, "I haven't got
anywhere to wear them to. I look forward to Sunday through the week days;
but when Sunday comes, I like Monday best.
"Though I think it doesn't make much difference how you do in the store
about being promoted. A girl next me who doesn't sell half as much as I
do gets $12 where I have $9; and the commission we have on sales in
Christmas week wasn't given to me fairly. The store is kind in many ways,
and lets the girls sit down every minute when customers aren't there, and
has evening classes and club-rooms. But yet the girls are discouraged
about not having promotions fairly and not having commissions straight.
Right is right."[4]
The charmlessness of existence noticeable in most of the working girls'
homes was emphasized by a saleswoman in the china department of a
Broadway department store, Kate McCray, a pretty young Irishwoman of
about twenty-three, who was visited in a hotel she said she didn't like
to mention to people, for fear they would think it was queer. "You see,
it's a boat, a liner that a gentleman that has a large plantation gave
for a hotel for working girls. It seems peculiar to some people for a
girl to be living on the river."
Miss McCray paid $3.50 a week board at the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel. Her
salary was $8 a week. She had been in the same department for four years,
and considered it wrong that she received no promotion. She could save
nothing, as she did none of her own washing on account of its inroads of
fatigue, and she was obliged to dress well. She was, however, in
excellent health and especially praised the store's policy of advising
the girls to sit down and to rest whenever no customers were present.
It was misty and raining on the occasion of my visit to the Maverick
Deep-Sea Hotel, a liner anchored in the East River; and Miss McCray
conducted me into the cabin to a large party of boys, elderly women, and
children, most of them visitors like myself, and all listening to a
powerful-wristed youth happily playing, "You'll Come Back and Hang
Around," with heavily accented rag-time, on an upright piano.
"About seventy girls board on this boat. That young lady going into the
pantry now is a stenographer--such a bright girl."
Absorbed in the spectacle of a hotel freedom which permitted a guest to
go to a pantry at will, whatever the force of her brightness, I followed
Miss McCray about the boat. It was as if the hotel belonged to the girls,
while in the Christian homes it had been as if everything belonged, not
to the girls, but to benevolent though carefully possessive Christians.
Miss McCray praised highly the manager and his wife.
"About twenty men and boys stay on a yacht anchored right out here. They
board on this boat, and go to their own boat when the whistle blows at
ten o'clock," she continued, leading me to the smoking-room, where she
introduced a number of very young gentlemen reading magazines and
knocking about gutturally together. They, too, seemed proud of their
position as boarders, proud of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel. They were
nice, boyish young fellows, who might have been young mechanicians.
She showed me the top deck with especial satisfaction as we came out into
the fresh, rainy air. The East River shipping and an empty recreation
pier rose black on one side, with the water sparkling in jetted
reflection between; and on the other quivered all the violet and silver
lights of the city. There were perhaps half a dozen tents pitched on
deck.
"Some of the girls sleep outdoors up here," said Miss McCray in her
gentle voice. "They like it so, they do it all winter long. Have plenty
of cover, and just sleep here in the tents. Oh, we all like it! Some of
the men that were here first have married; and they like it so well, they
keep coming back here with their wives to see us. It's so friendly," said
the girl, quietly; "and no matter how tired I am when I come here in the
evening, I sit out on the deck, and I look at the water and the lights,
and it seems as if all my cares float away."
The good humor of the Maverick Deep-Sea Hotel, its rag-time, its boarders
from the yacht, the charm of the row of tents with the girls in them
sleeping their healthful sleep out in the midst of the river wind, the
masts, the chimneys, stars, and city lights, all served to deepen the
impression of the lack of normal pleasure in most of the shop-girls'
lives.
This starvation in pleasure, as well as low wages and overwork, subjects
the women in the stores to a temptation readily conceivable.
The girls in the stores are importuned, not only by men from without
these establishments, but also, to the shame of the managements, by men
employed within the stores.
The constant close presence of this gulf has more than one painful
aspect. On account of it, not only the poor girls who fall suffer, but
also the girls who have the constant sense of being "on guard," and find
it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal
delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures. Many girls said, "I keep
myself to myself"; "I don't make friends in the stores very fast, because
you can't be sure what any one is like." This fear of friendship among
contemporaries sharing the same fortune, fear, indeed, of the whole
world, seemed the most cruel comment possible on the atmosphere of the
girls' lives in their occupation.
Another kind of meanness in human relations was abundantly witnessed by
Miss Johnson, the League's inquirer, who worked in one of the stores
during the week of Christmas good-will.
The "rush" had begun when Miss Johnson was transferred in this Christmas
week from the neckwear to the muffler department on the first floor of
one of the cheaper stores. All the girls stood all day long--from eight
to twelve and from one to eight at night on the first days; from one at
noon to ten and eleven at night, as the season progressed; and, on the
last dreadful nights, from noon to the following midnight. The girls had
35 cents supper money. Except for that, all this extra labor was unpaid
for.
The work was incessant. The girls were nervous, hateful, spiteful with
one another. The manager, a beautiful and extremely rough girl of
nineteen, swore constantly at all of them. The customers were grabbing,
insistent, unreasonable from morning to evening, from evening to
midnight. Behind the counter, with the advance of the day, the place
became an inferno of nervous exhaustion and exasperation. In the two
weeks of Miss Johnson's service one customer once thanked her; and one
tipped her 5 cents for the rapid return of a parcel. Both these acts of
consideration took place in the morning. Miss Johnson said that this was
fortunate for her, as, at one word of ordinary consideration toward the
end of her long day's work, she thought she must have burst into tears.
There was a little bundler in the department, Catriona Malatesta, a
white, hungry-looking little North Italian of fourteen with a thin chin
and a dark-shadowed, worried face. She had an adored sick sister of four,
besides six other younger brothers and sisters, and a worshipped mother,
to whom she gave every cent of her wages of three dollars and a half a
week. An older brother, a day laborer, paid the rent and provided food
for all of them. Every other family expense was met by Catriona's three
dollars and a half, so that she was in the habit of spending only five
cents for her own lunch, and, on the nights of overtime, five cents for
her own dinner, in order to take home the extra thirty cents; and every
day she looked whiter and older.
At the beginning of the week before Christmas, the store raised
Catriona's wage to four dollars. Her mother told her she might have the
extra half dollar for herself for Christmas. Though Catriona had worked
for some months, this was the first money of her own she had ever had.
With pride she told the department how it was to be spent. She was going
to surprise her mother with a new waist for Christmas, a waist Catriona
had seen in the store marked down to forty-nine cents. A ten per cent
discount was allowed to employees, so that the waist would cost
forty-five cents. With the remaining five cents Catriona would buy her
sick Rosa a doll. All her life Rosa had wanted a doll. Now, at last, she
could have one.
On the day when she received the money, Catriona kept it close at hand,
in a little worn black leather purse, in a shabby bag hanging from her
arm, and not out of sight for an instant.
Her purchases were to be made in the three-quarters of an hour allowed
for supper. The time Catriona consumed in eating her five-cent meal was
never long, so that, even allowing for prolonged purchasing, her absence
of an hour was strange.
"D---- your soul, where in hell have you been all this time, Catie?" the
manager screamed at her, angrily, without glancing at her, when she came
back at last.
Catriona looked more anxious and white than ever before. Her face was
stained with weeping. "I lost my purse," she said in a dazed, unsteady
voice. "It was gone when I opened my bag in the lunch-room. I've looked
for it everywhere."
There was a sudden breathless change in the air of the department. You
could have heard a pin drop.
"Better go down to the basement and wash your face," said the manager,
awkwardly, with unbelievable gentleness.
"Well," she continued suddenly, the minute Catriona was out of ear-shot,
"I'm not so poor but I can help to make _that_ up." She took a dollar
bill from her pocket-book. Every one contributed something, though
several girls went without their supper for this purpose, and one girl
walked home four miles after midnight. Altogether they could give nearly
ten dollars.
The manager sidled awkwardly toward Catriona, when she came back from
washing her face. "Here, kid," she muttered sheepishly, pushing the money
into the little girl's hand. Catriona, pale and dazed, looked up at
her--looked at the money, with a shy excitement and happiness dawning in
her eyes. Then she cried again with excitement and joy, and every one
laughed, and sent her off again to wash her face.
That night everything was different in the department. There had been a
real miracle of transfiguration. The whole air of intercourse was
changed. All the girls were gentle and dignified with each other.
Catriona's eyes sparkled with pleasure. Her careworn air was gone. She
was a child again. She had never had any physical loveliness before; but
on that night hundreds of passing shoppers looked with attention at the
delight and beauty of her face.
On the next day everything went on as before. The girls snapped at each
other and jostled each other. The beautiful manager swore. One girl came,
looking so ill that Miss Johnson was terrified.
"Can't you stop, Kitty? You look so sick. For heaven's sake, go home and
rest."
"I can't afford to go home."
Cross and snappish as the girls were, they managed to spare Kitty, and to
stand in front of her to conceal her idleness from the floor-walker, and
give her a few minutes' occasional rest sitting down. She went through
the first hours of the morning as best she might, though clearly under
pressure of sharp suffering. But at about ten the floor-walker, for whom
it must be said that he was responsible for the sales and general
presentability of the department, saw her sitting down. "Why aren't you
busy?" he called. "Get up."
At midnight on Christmas eve, as the still crowd of girls walked wanly
out of the great store into the brilliant New York street, some one said,
"How are you, Kitty?"
She made no reply for a minute. Then she said wretchedly, "Oh--I hope
I'll be dead before the next Christmas."
V
The sheer and causeless misery this girl endured was, of course,
attributable, not only to the long hours and to the standing demanded by
her occupation, but to the fact that this occupation was continued at a
period when the normal health of great numbers of women demands
reasonable quiet and rest.
With a few honorable exceptions[5] it may be said to be the immemorial
custom of department stores in this country to treat women employees, in
so far as ability to stand and to stand at all seasons goes, exactly as
if they were men.
The expert testimony collected by the publication secretary of the
National Consumers' League, Miss Josephine Goldmark, for the brief which
obtained the Illinois Ten-Hour Law, gives the clearest possible record of
the outlay of communal strength involved in these long hours of standing
for women.
_Report of "Lancet" Sanitary Commission on Sanitation in the
Shop_. 1892
Without entering upon the vexed question of women's rights, we
may nevertheless urge it as an indisputable physiological fact
that, when compelled to stand for long hours, women, especially
young women, are exposed to greater injury and greater
suffering than men.
_British Sessional Papers_. Vol. XII. 1886. Report from Select
Committee on Shop Hours Regulation Bill
Witness, W. Abbott, M.D.
"Does their employment injuriously affect them, as
child-bearing women in after years?"
"According to all scientific facts, it would do so."
"And you, as a medical man of a considerable number of years'
experience, would not look to girls who have been worked so
many hours in one position as the bearers of healthy, strong
children?"
"I should not."
"Then it naturally follows, does it not, that this is a very
serious matter in the interest of the nation as a whole, apart
from the immediate injury to the person concerned?"
"Yes. As regards the physical condition of the future race."
_British Sessional Papers_. Vol. XII, 1895. Report from the
Select Committee on Shops. Early Closing Bill
Witness, Dr. Percy Kidd, M.D., of the University of Oxford,
Fellow of the College of Physicians and Member of the College
of Surgeons, attached to London Hospital and Brompton,
Hospital.
"Would this be a fair way of putting it: It is not the actual
work of people in shops, but having to be there and standing
about in bad air; it is the long hours which is the injurious
part of it?"
"Quite so; the prolonged tension."
_Official Information from the Reports of the [German] Factory
Inspectors_. Berlin, Bruer, 1898
The inspector in Hesse regards a reduction of working hours to
ten for women in textile mills as "absolutely imperative," as
the continuous standing is very injurious to the female
organism.
_Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography_.
Berlin, September, 1907. Vol. II, Sec. IV. Fatigue Resulting
from Occupation. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1908
Doctor Emil Roth:
"My experience and observations do not permit me to feel any
uncertainty in believing that the injury to health inflicted
upon even fully capable workers by the special demands of a
periodically heightened rush of work is never compensated for.
Under this head we may consider the demands of all seasonal
work, ... as also the special rush season in shops before
Christmas."
_Night Work of Women in Industry. Reports on its Importance and
Legal Regulation_. Preface by Etienne Bauer. Night Work of Women
in Industry in Austria. Ilse Von Arlt. Jena, Fischer, 1903
The suitable limits of working time vary with individuals, but
it is acknowledged that not only is a regularly long day of
work injurious, but also that a single isolated instance of
overstrain may be harmful to a woman all the rest of her life.
_Proceedings of the French Senate_, July 7, 1891. Report on the
Industrial Employment of Children, Young Girls, and Women.
When I ask, when we ask, for a lessening of the daily toil of
women, it is not only of the women that we think, it is not
principally of the women, it is of the whole human race. It is
of the father, it is of the child, it is of society, which we
wish to reëstablish on its foundation, from which we believe it
has perhaps swerved a little.
In New York State, the hours of labor of adult women (women over
twenty-one) in mercantile establishments are not limited in any way by
law.
The law concerning seats in stores is as follows:--
Seats for Women in Mercantile Establishments
Chairs, stools, or other suitable seats shall be maintained in
mercantile establishments for the use of female employees
therein, to the number of at least one seat for every three
females employed, and the use thereof by such employees shall
be allowed at such times and to such extent as may be necessary
for the preservation of their health.
The enforcement of this law is very difficult. The mercantile inspectors
can compel the requisite number of seats. They have successfully issued
one hundred and fourteen orders on this point[6] to the stores within the
year 1909. But the use of these seats to such extent as may be necessary
for the preservation of the health of the women employees is another
matter. For fear of being blacklisted by the merchants, the saleswomen
will not testify in court in those cases where employers practically
forbid the use of seats, by requesting the employees to do something
requiring a standing position whenever they sit down. So that in these
cases the inspectors cannot bring prosecution successfully, on account of
lack of sufficient evidence.
Further, in one store the management especially advises the saleswomen to
be seated at every moment when the presence of a customer does not
require her to stand. But the saleswoman's inability to attract possible
customers while she is seated still keeps her standing, in order not to
diminish her sales.
Curiously enough, it would seem that the shopping public of a nation
professedly democratic will not buy so much as a spool of thread from a
seated woman. There is, of course, much work for women[7]--such as
ironing for instance--in which standing is generally considered
absolutely necessary. Salesmanship is not work of this character. It is
primarily custom that demands the constant standing seen in the stores;
and, until shoppers establish a habit of buying of shop-girls who are
seated, and the stores provide enough seats for all saleswomen and permit
them to sell when seated, the present system of undermining the normal
health of women clerks will continue unchecked.
The New York State law in regard to the work of the younger women
(minors)--in mercantile establishments is as follows:--
Hours of Labor of Minors[8]
No female employee between sixteen and twenty-one years of age
shall be required, permitted, or suffered to work in or in
connection with any mercantile establishment more than sixty
hours in any one week; or more than ten hours in any one day,
unless for the purpose of making a shorter work day of some one
day of the week; or before seven o'clock in the morning or
after ten o'clock in the evening of any day. _This section does
not apply to the employment of persons sixteen years of age or
upward, between the eighteenth day of December and the
following twenty-fourth day of December, both inclusive_.[9]
That is to say, that, for the holiday season, the time of all others when
it might seem wise and natural to protect the health of the younger women
working in the great metropolitan markets, for that season, of all
others, the State specifically provides that the strength of its youth is
to have no legal safeguard and may be subjected to labor without limit.
Substantially, all the present legal protection for workers in the
stores was obtained in 1896, after the investigation of mercantile
establishments conducted in 1895 by the Rinehart Commission.[10] Ever
since, an annual attempt has been made to perfect the present law and to
secure its enforcement, which had been left in the hands of the local
Boards of Health, and was practically inoperative until 1908. Enforcement
was then transferred to the Labor Commissioner, and has since that time
been actively maintained.
The hearings on the law relative to mercantile establishments are held in
Albany in a small room in the Capitol before the Judiciary Committee of
the Senate and the Assembly Commission on Labor. These hearings are very
fiery. The Support is represented by Attorney Mornay Williams, and Mrs.
Nathan, Mrs. Kelley, Miss Stokes, Miss Sanford, and Miss Goldmark of the
New York and National Consumers' Leagues, and delegates from the Child
Labor Committee, the Working-Girls' Clubs, and the Woman's Trade-Union
League. Both men and women speak fox the amendment.[11] The Support's
effort for legislation limiting hours has regularly been opposed by the
Retail Dry-Goods Merchants' Association, which yearly sends an
influential delegation to Albany.
"These ladies have been coming here for sixteen years," said one of the
merchants, resentfully, last spring. Looking around, and observing
changes in the faces watching him among adherents of the Support, he
added: "Well, perhaps not the _same_ ladies. But they have come."
"These ladies are professional agitators," said another merchant at
another hearing. "Why, they even misled Mr. Roosevelt, when he was
Governor, into recommending the passage of their bill."
Such are some of the reasons offered by the opposition for not limiting
women's hours of labor in mercantile establishments.
Among the several common features of the experiences of these New York
saleswomen, low wages, casual employment, heavy required expense in
laundry and dress, semidependence, uneven promotion, lack of training,
absence of normal pleasure, long hours of standing, and an excess of
seasonal work, the consideration of this last common condition is placed
last because its consequences seem the most far-reaching.
Looking back at these common features in the lives of these average
American working girls, one has a sudden sense that the phenomenon of the
New York department stores represents a painful failure in democracy.
What will the aspect of the New York department stores be in the future?
For New York doubtless will long remain a port of merchandise, one of the
most picturesque and most frequented harbors of the Seven Seas. Doubtless
many women still will work in its markets. What will their chances in
life be?
First, it may be trusted that the State law will not forever refuse to
protect these women and their future, which is also the future of the
community, from the danger of unlimited hours of labor. Then, the fact
that in a store in Cincinnati the efficiency of the saleswomen has been
standardized and their wages raised, the fact that in a store in Boston
the employees have become responsible factors in the business, and the
fact that a school of salesmanship has been opened in New York seem to
indicate the possibility of a day when salesmanship will become
standardized and professional, as nursing has within the last century.
Further, it may be believed that saleswomen will not forever acquiesce in
pursuing their trade in utterly machinal activity, without any common
expression of their common position.
Very arresting is the fact that, year after year, the Union women go to
Albany to struggle for better chances in life for the shop-women who
cannot at present wisely make this struggle for themselves. The fact
that the Union women fail is of less moment than that they continue to
go.
But what have the organized women workers, the factory girls who so
steadfastly make this stand for justice for the shop-girls, attained for
themselves in their fortunes by their Union? It was for an answer to this
question that we turned to the New York shirt-waist makers, whose income
and outlay will be next considered in this little chronicle of women's
wages.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: In the last six months further accounts from working women
in the trades mentioned in New York have been received by Miss Edith
Wyatt, Vice-President of the Consumers' League of Illinois. Aside from
the facts ascertained through the schedules filled by the workers, and
through Mrs. Clark's and Miss Wyatt's visits to them, information has
been obtained through Miss Helen Marot, Secretary of the New York Woman's
Trade-Union League, Miss Marion MacLean, Director of the Sociological
Investigation Committee of the Young Women's Christian Association of the
United States, Miss May Matthews, Head Worker of Hartley House, Miss
Hall, Head Worker of the Riverside Association, Miss Rosenfeld, Head
Worker of the Clara de Hirsch Home, the Clinton Street Headquarters of
the Union, the St. George Working Girls' Clubs, the Consumers' League of
the City of New York, and the offices or files of the _Survey_, the
_Independent_, the _Call_, and the _International Socialist Review_.]
[Footnote 2: It remains to be said that there are both among saleswomen
and among women in business for the department stores, buyers, assistant
buyers, receivers of special orders, advertisers, and heads of
departments, earning salaries of from twenty dollars to two hundred
dollars a week. But this experience does not represent the average
fortune the League was interested in learning.]
[Footnote 3: Here are the estimates made by the St. George's Working
Girls' Club of the smallest practicable expenditure for self-supporting
girls in New York: General expense per week: room, $2; meals, $3;
clothes, $1.25; washing, 75 cents; carfare, 60 cents; pleasures, 25
cents; church, 10 cents; club, 5 cents: total $8. Itemized account of
clothing for the year at $1.25 a week, or $65 a year: 2 pair of shoes at
$2, and mending at $1.50, $5.50; 2 hats at $2.50, $5; 8 pair of stockings
at 12-1/2 cents, $1; 2 combination suits at 50 cents, $1; 4 shirts at
12-1/2 cents, 50 cents; 4 pairs of drawers at 25 cents, $1; 4 corset
covers at 25 cents, $1; 1 flannel petticoat, 25 cents; 2 white petticoats
at 75 cents, $1.50; 5 shirt-waists at $1.20, $6; 1 net waist, $2.50; 2
corsets at $1, $2; gloves, $2; 2 pairs rubbers at 65 cents, $1.30; 1
dozen handkerchiefs at 5 cents, 60 cents; 3 nightgowns at 50 cents,
$1.50; 1 sweater, $2; 2 suits at $15, $30: total, $65.65.]
[Footnote 4: This worker later, however, in the winter of 1911,
considered she had been paid and promoted fairly.]
[Footnote 5: Macy and Company of New York give to those of their
permanent women employees who desire it a monthly day of rest with pay.
The Daniels and Fisher Company of Denver refund to any woman employee who
requests it the amount deducted for a monthly day of absence for illness.
This excellent rule is, however, said to represent here rather a
privilege than a practice, and not to be generally taken advantage of,
because not generally understood. The present writer has not been able to
learn of other exceptions.]
[Footnote 6: Ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, p. 127.]
[Footnote 7: See page 16 (foot-note), "Scientific Management as applied
to Women's Work."]
[Footnote 8: This statement does not include the excellent New York Child
Labor Law for children under sixteen, which allows of no exception at
Christmas time.]
[Footnote 9: Italics ours.]
[Footnote 10: A New York State Commission, appointed for this purpose in
the year 1895, through the efforts of the Consumers' League of the city
of New York.]
[Footnote 11: For fear of a permanent loss of position the saleswomen
themselves have never been urged to appear in support of this
legislation, nor, except in a few instances where this difficulty has
been nullified, have they been present at these hearings.]
CHAPTER II
THE SHIRT-WAIST MAKERS' STRIKE
I
Among the active members of the Ladies Waist Makers' Union in New York,
there is a young Russian Jewess of sixteen, who may be called Natalya
Urusova. She is little, looking hardly more than twelve years old, with a
pale, sensitive face, clear dark eyes, very soft, smooth black hair,
parted and twisted in braids at the nape of her neck, and the gentlest
voice in the world, a voice still thrilled with the light inflections of
a child.
She is the daughter of a Russian teacher of Hebrew, who lived about three
years ago in a beech-wooded village on the steppes of Central Russia.
Here a neighbor of Natalya's family, a Jewish farmer, misunderstanding
that manifesto of the Czar which proclaimed free speech, and
misunderstanding socialism, had printed and scattered through the
neighborhood an edition of hand-bills stating that the Czar had
proclaimed socialism, and that the populace must rise and divide among
themselves a rich farm two miles away.
Almost instantly on the appearance of these bills, this unhappy man and a
young Jewish friend who chanced to be with him at the time of his arrest
were seized and murdered by the government officers--the friend drowned,
the farmer struck dead with the blow of a cudgel. A Christian mob formed,
and the officers and the mob ravaged every Jewish house in the little
town. Thirty innocent Jews were clubbed to death, and then literally cut
to pieces. Natalya and her family, who occupied the last house on the
street, crept unnoticed to the shack of a Roman Catholic friend, a woman
who hid sixteen Jewish people under the straw of the hut in the fields
where she lived, in one room, with eight children and some pigs and
chickens. Hastily taking from a drawer a little bright-painted plaster
image of a wounded saint, this woman placed it over the door as a means
of averting suspicion. Her ruse was successful. "Are there Jews here?"
the officer called to her, half an hour afterward, as the mob came over
the fields to her house.
"No," said the woman.
"Open the door and let me see."
The woman flung open the door. But, as he was quite unsuspecting, the
officer glanced in only very casually; and it was in utter ignorance that
the rage of the mob went on over the fields, past the jammed little room
of breathless Jews.
As soon as the army withdrew from the town, Natalya and her family made
their way to America, where, they had been told, one had the right of
free belief and of free speech. Here they settled on the sixth floor of a
tenement on Monroe Street, on the East Side of New York. Nothing more
different from the open, silent country of the steppes could be conceived
than the place around them.
The vista of the New York street is flanked by high rows of dingy brick
tenements, fringed with jutting white iron fire-escapes, and hung with
bulging feather-beds and pillows, puffing from the windows. By day and by
night the sidewalks and roads are crowded with people,--bearded old men
with caps, bare-headed wigged women, beautiful young girls, half-dressed
babies swarming in the gutters, playing jacks. Push carts, lit at night
with flaring torches, line the pavements and make the whole thronged,
talking place an open market, stuck with signs and filled with
merchandise and barter. Everybody stays out of doors as much as possible.
In summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken
coops along the sidewalk; for, inside, the rooms are too often small and
stifling, some on inner courts close-hung with washing, some of them
practically closets, without any opening whatever to the outer air.
Many, many of Natalya's neighbors here are occupied in the garment
trade. According to the United States census of 1900, the men's clothing
made in factories in New York City amounted to nearly three times as much
as that manufactured in any other city in the United States. The women's
clothing made in factories in New York City amounted to more than ten
times that made in any other city; the manufacture of women's ready-made
clothing in this country is, indeed, almost completely in the hands of
New York's immense Jewish population.[12]
As soon after her arrival as her age permitted, Natalya entered the
employment of a shirt-waist factory as an unskilled worker, at a salary
of $6 a week. Mounting the stairs of the waist factory, one is aware of
heavy vibrations. The roar and whir of the machines increase as the door
opens, and one sees in a long loft, which is usually fairly light and
clean, though sometimes neither, rows and rows of girls with heads bent
and eyes intent upon the flashing needles. They are all intensely
absorbed; for if they be paid by the piece, they hurry from ambition, and
if they be paid by the week, they are "speeded up" by the foreman to a
pace set by the swiftest workers.
In the Broadway establishment, which may be called the Bruch Shirt-waist
Factory, where Natalya worked, there were four hundred girls--six hundred
in the busy season. The hours were long--from eight till half past
twelve, a half hour for lunch, and then from one till half past six.
Sometimes the girls worked until half past eight, until nine. There were
only two elevators in the building, which contained other factories.
There were two thousand working people to be accommodated by these
elevators, all of whom began work at eight o'clock in the morning; so
that, even if Natalya reached the foot of the shaft at half past seven,
it was sometimes half past eight before she reached the shirt-waist
factory on the twelfth floor. She was docked for this inevitable
tardiness so often that frequently she had only five dollars a week
instead of six. This injustice, and the fact that sometimes the foreman
kept them waiting needlessly for several hours before telling them that
he had no work for them, was particularly wearing to the girls.
Natalya was a "trimmer" in the factory. She cut the threads of the waists
after they were finished--a task requiring very little skill. But the
work of shirt-waist workers is of many grades. The earnings of makers of
"imported" lingerie waists sometimes rise as high as $25 a week. Such a
wage, however, is very exceptional, and, even so, is less high than might
appear, on account of the seasonal character of the work.
The average skilled waist worker, when very busy, sometimes earns from
$12 to $15 a week. Here are the yearly budgets of some of the better paid
workers, more skilled than Natalya--operatives receiving from $10 to $15
a week.
Rachael, a shirt-waist operative of eighteen, had been at work three
years. She had begun at $5 a week and her skill had increased until in a
very busy week she could earn from $14 to $15 by piece-work. "But," she
said, "I was earning too much, so I was put back at week's work, at $11 a
week. The foreman is a bad, driving man. Ugh! he makes us work
fast--especially the young beginners."
Rachael, too, had been driven out of Russia by Christian persecution. Her
little sister had been killed in a massacre. Her parents had gone in one
direction, and she and her two other sisters had fled in another to
America.
Here in New York she lived in a tenement, sharing a room with two other
girls, and, besides working in the shirt-waist factory, did her own
washing, made her own waists, and went to night school.
Her income was seriously depleted by the seasonal character of her work.
Out of the twelve months of the year, for one month she was idle, for
four months she had only three or four days' work a week, for three
months she had five days' work a week, and for four months only did she
have work for all six days. Unhappily, during these months she developed
a severe cough, which lost her seven weeks of work, and gave her during
these weeks the expense of medicine, a doctor, and another boarding
place, as she could not in her illness sleep with her two friends.
Her income for the year had been $348.25. Her expenses had been as
follows: rent for one-third of room at $3.50 a month, $42; suppers with
landlady at 20 cents each, $63; other meals, approximately, $90; board
while ill, seven weeks at $7, $49; doctor and medicine (about) $15;
clothing, $51.85; club, 5 cents a week, $2.60; total, $313.45, thus
leaving a balance of $34.80.
Shoes alone consumed over one-half of the money used for clothing. They
wore out with such amazing rapidity that she had needed a new pair once a
month. At $2 each, except a best pair, costing $2.60, their price in a
year amounted to $24.60.[13]
In regard to Rachael's expenditure and conservation in strength, she had
drawn heavily upon her health and energy. Her cough continued to exhaust
her. She was worn and frail, and at eighteen her health was breaking.
Anna Klotin, another older skilled worker, an able and clever Russian
girl of twenty-one, an operative and trimmer, earned $12 a week. She had
been idle twelve weeks on account of slack work. For four weeks she had
night work for three nights a week, and payment for this extra time had
brought her income up to $480 for the year. Of this sum she paid $312 ($6
a week) for board and lodging alone in a large, pleasant room with a
friendly family on the East Side. To her family in Russia she had sent
$120, and she had somehow contrived, by doing her own washing, making her
own waists and skirts, and repairing garments left from the previous
year, to buy shoes and to pay carfare and all her other expenses from the
remaining $48. She had bought five pairs of shoes at $2 each, and a suit
for $15.
Fanny Wardoff, a shirt-waist worker of twenty, who had been in the United
States only a year, helped her family by supporting her younger brother.
For some time after her arrival in this country the ill effects of her
steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained
employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7.
But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was
uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks.
At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become
a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week,
working nine and a half hours a day.
Her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $2.50 a
week. She paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended
school. The weekly expense was palpably increased by 60 cents a week for
luncheon and 30 cents for carfare to ride to work. She walked home,
fifteen blocks.
Her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $40. Of
this, $8 had been spent for four pairs of shoes. Two ready-made skirts
had cost $9, and a jacket $10. Her expense for waists was only the cost
of material, as she had made them herself.
She spent 35 cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her
own washing.
Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to
$10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more
skilled than Natalya.
Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other
people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage
of $9 a week. She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built,
with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and
responsible than that of many women of forty. Irena Kovalova had not been
out of work for one whole week in the year she described. She had never
done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on
Sunday--except in slack weeks. She was not certain how many of these
there had been; but there had been enough slack time to reduce her income
for her family for the year to $450. They had paid $207 rent for four
rooms on the East Side, and had lived on the remaining $243, all of which
Irena had given to her mother.
Her mother helped her with her washing, and she had worn the clothes she
had the year before, with the exception of shoes. She had been forced to
buy four pairs of these at $2 a pair. They all realized that if Irena
could spend a little more for her shoes they would wear longer. "But for
shoes," she said, with a little laugh, "two dollars--it is the most I
ever could pay."
She was a girl of unusual health and strength, and though sometimes very
weary at night and troubled with eye strain from watching the needle, it
was a different drain of her vitality that she mentioned as alarming. She
was obliged to work at a time of the month when she normally needed rest,
and endured anguish at her machine at this season. She had thought, she
said gravely, that if she ever had any money ahead, she would try to use
it to have a little rest then.
Molly Zaplasky, a little Russian shirt-waist worker of fifteen, operated
a machine for fifty-six hours a week, did her own washing, and even went
to evening school. She had worked for five months, earning $9 a week for
five weeks of this time, and sometimes $6, sometimes $7, for the
remainder. She and her sister Dora, of seventeen, also a shirt-waist
maker, had a room with a cousin's family on the East Side.
Dora had worked a year and a half. She, too, earned $9 a week in full
weeks. But there had been only twenty-two such weeks in that period. For
seventeen weeks she had earned $6 a week. For four weeks she had been
idle because of slackness of work, and for nine weeks recently she had
been too ill to work, having developed tuberculosis. Dora, too, did her
own washing. She made her own waists, and went to evening school. She had
paid $2.75 a week for partial board and for lodging. The food, not
included in her board, cost about $1 a week. The little Molly had paid
for Dora's board and lodging in her nine weeks' illness. Dora, who had
worked so valiantly, was quietly expecting just as valiantly her turn in
the long waiting list of applicants for the Montefiore Home for
consumptives. She knew that the chance of her return to Molly was very
slight.
Her expenditure for food, shelter, and clothing for the year had been as
follows: room and board (exclusive of nine weeks' illness), $161.25;
clothing, $41.85; total, $203.10. As her income for the year had been
$297.50, this left a balance of $94.40 for all other expenses. Items for
clothing had been: suit, $12; jacket, $4.50; a hat, $2.50; shoes (two
pairs), $4.25; stockings (two pairs a week at 15 cents), $15.60;
underwear, $3; total, $41.85.
One point should be accentuated in this budget--the striking cost of
stockings, due to the daily walk to and from work and the ill little
worker's lack of strength and time for darning. The outlay for footwear
in all the budgets of the operators is heavy, in spite of the fact that
much of their work is done sitting.
Here are the budgets of some of the shirt-waist makers who were earning
Natalya's wage of $6 a week, or less than this wage.
Rea Lupatkin, a shirt-waist maker of nineteen, had been in New York only
ten months, and was at first a finisher in a cloak factory. Afterward,
obtaining work as operator in a waist factory, she could get $4 in
fifty-six hours on a time basis. She had been in this factory six weeks.
Rea was paying $4 a month for lodging in two rooms of a tenement-house
with a man and his wife and baby and little boy. She saved carfare by a
walk of three-quarters of an hour, adding daily one and a half hours to
the nine and a half already spent in operating. Her food cost $2.25 a
week so that, with 93 cents a week for lodging, her regular weekly cost
of living was $3.18, leaving her 82 cents for every other expense. In
spite of this, and although she had been forced to spend $3 for
examination of her eyes and for eyeglasses, Rea contrived to send an
occasional $2 back to her family in Europe.
Ida Bergeson, a little girl of fifteen, was visited at half past eight
o'clock one evening, in a tenement on the lower East Side. The gas was
burning brightly in the room; several people were talking; and this
frail-looking little Ida lay on a couch in their midst, sleeping, in all
the noise and light, in complete exhaustion. Her sister said that every
night the child returned from the factory utterly worn out, she was
obliged to work so hard and so fast.
Ida received the same wage as Natalya--$6 a week. She worked fifty-six
hours a week--eight more than the law allows for minors. She paid $4 a
week for board and a room shared with the anxious older sister, who told
about her experience. Ida needed all the rest of her $2 for her clothing.
She did her own washing. As the inquirer came away, leaving the worn
little girl sleeping in her utter fatigue, she wondered with what
strength Ida could enter upon her possible marriage and
motherhood--whether, indeed, she would struggle through to maturity.
Katia Halperian, a shirt-waist worker of fifteen, had been in New York
only six months. During twenty-one weeks of this time she was employed in
a Wooster Street factory, earning for a week of nine-and-a-half-hour days
only $3.50. Katia, like Natalya, was a "trimmer."
After paying $3 a week board to an aunt, she had a surplus of 50 cents
for all clothing, recreation, doctor's bills, and incidentals.
To save carfare she walked to her work--about forty minutes' distance.
Her aunt lived on the fourth floor of a tenement. After working nine and
a half hours and walking an hour and twenty minutes daily, Katia climbed
four flights of stairs and then helped with the housework.
Sonia Lavretsky, a girl of twenty, had been self-supporting for four
years. She lived in a most wretched, ill-kept tenement, with a family who
made artificial flowers. She had been totally unable to find work for the
last five months, but this family, though very poor, had kept her with
them without payment through all this time.
She had been three months an operative, putting cuffs on waists. Working
on a time basis, she earned $3 the first week and $4 the second. She was
then put on piece-work, and in fifty-four hours and a half could earn
only $3. Laid off, she found employment at felling cloaks, earning from
$3 to $6 a week. But after twelve weeks, trade in this place also had
grown dull.
During her idle time she became "run down" and was ill three weeks.
Fortunately, a brother was able to pay her doctor's bills, until he also
was laid off during part of her idle time.
When Sonia had any money she gave her landlady, for part of a room in the
poor tenement with the flower-makers, $3.50 a month, and about $2.50 a
week for food. Before her dull season and slack work began, she had paid
20 cents a week dues to a self-education society and social club.
Her brother had given her all the clothing she had. The burden of her
support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken
family of her hostess. And Sonia was in deep discouragement. She was
about to go away from New York in hopes of finding work in Syracuse.
Getta Bursova, an attractive Russian girl of twenty, had worked for eight
years--ever since she was twelve. She had been employed as a waist
operative for six years in London and for two in New York.
Here she worked nine and a half hours daily in a factory on Nineteenth
Street, earning $5 to $6 a week. Of this wage she paid her sister $4 a
week for food and lodging in an inside tenement room in very poor East
Side quarters, so far from her work that she was obliged to spend 60
cents a week for carfare. In her busy weeks she had never more than $1.40
a week left, and often only 60 cents, for her clothing and every other
expense.
Getta had been idle, moreover, for nearly six months. During this time
she had been supported by her sister's family.
In spite of this defeat in her fortunes, her presence had a lovely
brightness and initiative, and her inexpensive dress had a certain
daintiness. She was eager for knowledge, and through all her busy weeks
had paid 10 cents dues to a self-education society.
Nevertheless, her long dull season was a harassing burden and
disappointment both for herself and her sister's struggling family.
Betty Lukin, a shirt-waist maker of twenty, had been making sleeves for
two years. For nine months of the year she earned from $6 to $10 a week;
for the remaining three months only $2 a week. Her average weekly wage
for the year would be about $6. Of this she spent $3 a week for suppers
and a place in a tenement to sleep, and about 50 cents a week for
breakfast and luncheon--a roll and a bit of fruit or candy from a push
cart. Her father was in New York, doing little to support himself, so
that many weeks she deprived herself to give him $3 or $4.
She spent 50 cents a week to go to the theatre and 10 cents for club
dues. She had, of course, very little left for dress. She looked ill
clad, and she was, naturally, improperly nourished and very delicate.
Two points in Betty's little account are suggestive: one is that she
could always help her father. In listening to the account of an organizer
of the Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a man who had known some 40,000 garment
workers, I exclaimed on the hardships of the trade for the number of
married men it contained, and was about to make a note of this item when
he eagerly stopped me. "Wait, wait, please," he cried generously. "When
you put it down, then put this down, too. It is just the same for the
girls. The most of them are married to a family. They, too, take care of
others."
To this truth, Betty's expense of $3 to $4 for her father from her
average wage of $6, and little Molly's item of nine weeks' board and
lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. On the girls' part they
were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit
simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic.
The other fact to be remarked in Betty's account is that she spent 60
cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only 50 cents for all her
casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. Such an
eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for
beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in
themselves a true romance. Nearly all the Russian shirt-waist makers
visit the theatre and attend clubs and night classes, whatever their wage
or their hours of labor. Most of them contribute to the support of a
family.
These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay
are described above, were all--with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who
supported a family of four--living away from home. Natalya lived with her
mother and father.
She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those
of her sister and mother. But her story is given because in other
ways--in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment
from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to
obtain juster and better terms of living--her experience has seemed
characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand
shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.
In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist
makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a
piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the
foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it,"
said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters'
out on the street, then?"
Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making
inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had
struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their
trade.
The factories had continued work with strike breakers. Some of the
companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of
the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to
speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling
their work on unfair terms. Some had employed special police protection
and thugs against the pickets.
There is, of course, no law against picketing. Every one in the United
States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on
the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his
belief in the tariff. But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to
the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of
the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly
along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the
Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each. The chairman of the strikers
from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting
funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for
weeks.
A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one
afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in
the side and broke one of her ribs. She was in bed for four weeks, and
will always be somewhat disabled by her injury. These and other illegal
oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the
Woman's Trade-Union League to assist the girls in peaceful picketing.
Early in November, a policeman arrested Miss Mary E. Dreier, the
President of the Woman's Trade-Union League, because she entered into a
quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers. Miss Dreier is a
woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout New York
and Brooklyn. When the sergeant recognized her as she came into the
station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and
assured Miss Dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had
known who she was.
This flat instance of discrimination inspired the officers of the Woman's
Trade-Union League to protest to Police Commissioner Baker against the
arbitrary oppression of the strikers by the policemen. He was asked to
investigate the action of the police. He replied that the pickets would
in future receive as much consideration as other people. The attitude of
the police did not, however, change.
It was to these events, as Natalya Urusova found, that the foreman of the
Bruch factory had referred when he asked the girls, with a sneer, why
they didn't join their "sisters." Going to the Union headquarters on
Clinton Street, she learned all she could about the Union. Afterward, in
the Bruch factory, whenever any complaints arose, she would say casually,
in pretended helplessness, "But what can we do? Is there any way to
change this?" Vague suggestions of the Union headquarters would arise,
and she would inquire into this eagerly and would pretend to allow
herself to be led to Clinton Street. So, little by little, as the long
hours and low wages and impudence from the foreman continued, she induced
about sixty girls to understand about organization and to consider it
favorably.
On the evening of the 22d of November, Natalya, and how many others from
the factory she could not tell, attended a mass meeting at Cooper Union,
of which they had been informed by hand-bills. It was called for the
purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in New York
City. The hall was packed. Overflow meetings were held at Beethoven Hall,
Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall. In the Cooper Union addresses were
delivered by Samuel Gompers, by Miss Dreier, and by many others.
Finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the
floor. She said: "I have listened to all the speeches. I am one who
thinks and feels from the things they describe. I, too, have worked and
suffered. I am tired of the talking. I move that we go on a general
strike."
The meeting broke into wild applause. The motion was unanimously
indorsed. The chairman, Mr. Feigenbaum, a Union officer, rapped on the
table. "Do you mean faith?" he called to the workers. "Will you take the
old Jewish oath?" Thousands of right hands were held up and the whole
audience repeated in Yiddish:[14] "If I turn traitor to the cause I now
pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."
This was the beginning of the general shirt-waist strike. A committee of
fifteen girls and one boy was appointed at the Cooper Union meeting, and
went from one to the other of the overflow meetings, where the same
motion was offered and unanimously indorsed.
II
"But I did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at
that meeting. I could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory
the next day," said Natalya, afterward. "When we came back the next
morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. We all
sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave.
The foreman had no work for us when we got there. But, just as always, he
did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all
that day. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room
among the machines: 'Shall we wait like this?' 'There is a general
strike,' 'Who will get up first?' 'It would be better to be the last to
get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do
well for you,' But I told them," observed Natalya, with a little shrug,
"'What difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?'
Well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would
do, not making up our minds, for two hours. Then I started to get up."
Her lips trembled. "And at just the same minute all--we all got up
together, in one second. No one after the other; no one before. And when
I saw it--that time--oh, it excites me so yet, I can hardly talk about
it. So we all stood up, and all walked out together. And already out on
the sidewalk in front the policemen stood with the clubs. One of them
said, 'If you don't behave, you'll get this on your head.' And he shook
his club at me.
"We hardly knew where to go--what to do next. But one of the American
girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the Woman's Trade-Union
League, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away.
After we were there, we wrote out on paper what terms we wanted: not any
night work, except as it would be arranged for in some special need for
it for the trade; and shorter hours; and to have wages arranged by a
committee to arbitrate the price for every one fairly; and to have better
treatment from the bosses.
"Then a leader spoke to us and told us about picketing quietly, and the
law.[15]
"Our factory had begun to work with a few Italian strike breakers.[16]
The next day we went back to the factory, and saw five Italian girls
taken in to work, and then taken away afterward in an automobile. I was
with an older girl from our shop, Anna Lunska. The next morning in front
of the factory, Anna Lunska and I met a tall Italian man going into the
factory with some girls. So I said to her: 'These girls fear us in some
way. They do not understand, and I will speak to them, and ask them why
they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all--only to
speak about our work.'
"I moved toward them to say this to them. Then the tall man struck Anna
Lunska in the breast so hard, he nearly knocked her down. She couldn't
get her breath. And I went to a policeman standing right there and said,
'Why do you not arrest this man for striking my friend? Why do you let
him do it? Look at her. She cannot speak; she is crying. She did nothing
at all,' Then he arrested the man; and he said, 'But you must come, too,
to make a charge against him.' The tall Italian called a man out of the
factory, and went with me and Anna Lunska and the three girls to the
court."
But when Natalya and Anna reached the court, and had made their charge
against the tall Italian, to their bewilderment not only he, but they,
too, were conducted downstairs to the cells. He had charged them with
attacking the girls he was escorting into the factory.
"They made me go into a cell," said Natalya, "and suddenly they locked us
in. Then I was frightened, and I said to the policeman there, 'Why do you
do this? I have done nothing at all. The man struck my friend. I must
send for somebody.'
"He said, 'You cannot send for any one at all. You are a prisoner.'
"We cried then. We were frightened. We did not know what to do.
"After about an hour and a half he came and said some one was asking for
us. We looked out. It was Miss Violet Pike. A boy I knew had seen us go
into the prison with the Italian, and not come out, and so he thought
something was wrong and he had gone to the League and told them.
"So Miss Pike had come from the League; and she bailed us out; and she
came back with us on the next day for our trial."
On the next morning the case against the tall Italian was rapidly
examined, and the Italian discharged. He was then summoned back in
rebuttal, and Natalya and Anna's case was called. Four witnesses, one of
them being the proprietor of the factory, were produced against them, and
stated that Natalya and Anna had struck one of the girls the Italian was
escorting. At the close of the case against Natalya and Anna, Judge
Cornell said:[17] "I find the girls guilty. It would be perfectly futile
for me to fine them. Some charitable women would pay their fines or they
could get a bond. I am going to commit them to the workhouse under the
Cumulative Sentence Act, and there they will have an opportunity of
thinking over what they have done."
"Miss Violet Pike came forward then," said Natalya, "and said, 'Cannot
this sentence be mollified?'
"And he said it could not be mollified.
"They took us away in a patrol to the Tombs.
"We waited in the waiting-room there. The matron looked at us and said,
'You are not bad girls. I will not send you down to the cells. You can do
some sewing for me here.' But I could not sew. I felt so bad, because I
could not eat the food they gave us at noon for dinner in the long hall
with all the other prisoners. It was coffee with molasses in it, and
oatmeal and bread so bad that after one taste we could not swallow it
down. Then, for supper, we had the same, but soup, too, with some meat
bones in it. And even before you sat down at the table these bones
smelled so it made you very sick. But they forced you to sit down at the
table before it, whether you ate or drank anything or not. And the
prisoners walked by in a long line afterward and put their spoons in a
pail of hot water, just the same whether they had eaten anything with the
spoons or not.
"Then we walked to our cells. It was night, and it was dark--oh, so dark
in there it was dreadful! There were three other women in the cell--some
of them were horrid women that came off the street. The beds were one
over the other, like on the boats--iron beds, with a quilt and a blanket.
But it was so cold you had to put both over you; and the iron springs
underneath were bare, and they were dreadful to lie on. There was no air;
you could hardly breathe. The horrid women laughed and screamed and said
terrible words.
"Anna Lunska felt so sick and was so very faint, I thought what should we
do if she was so much worse in the night in this terrible darkness, where
you could see nothing at all. Then I called through the little grating to
a woman who was a sentinel that went by in the hall all through the
night, 'My friend is sick. Can you get me something if I call you in the
night?'
"The woman just laughed and said, 'Where do you think you are? But if you
pay me, I will come and see what I can do.'
"In a few minutes she came back with a candle, and shuffled some cards
under the candlelight, and called to us, 'Here, put your hand through the
grate and give me a quarter and I'll tell you who your fellows are by the
cards.' Then Anna Lunska said, 'We do not care to hear talk like that,'
and the woman went away.
"All that night it was dreadful. In the morning we could not eat any of
the breakfast. They took us in a wagon like a prison with a little
grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating. As we
got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women
prisoners. She cried and cried. And I saw she was a working girl. I
managed to speak to her and say, 'Who are you?' She said, 'I am a
striker. I cannot speak any English.' That was all. They did not wish me
to speak to her, and I had to go on.
"From the boat they made us go into the prison they call Blackwell's
Island. Here they made us put on other clothes. All the clothes they had
were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty. They had dresses
in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and
the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women. They almost drag you
down to the ground. Everything was so very much too big for me, the
sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far,
they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins.
"Then we had the same kind of food I could not eat; and they put us to
work sewing gloves. But I could not sew, I was so faint and sick. At
night there was the same kind of food I could not eat, and all the time I
wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of
English, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways.
When we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she
started to send Anna Lunska and me to different cells. She would have
made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street. But I
was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let Anna
Lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could.
"Just after that I saw that other girl, away down the line, so white, she
must have cried and cried, and looking so frightened. I thought, 'Oh, I
ought to ask for her to come with us, too' But I did not dare. I thought,
'I will make that matron so mad that she will not even let Anna Lunska
and me stay together,' So I got almost to our cell before I went out of
the line and across the hall and went back to the matron and said: 'Oh,
there is another Russian girl here. She is all alone. She cannot speak
one word of English. Please, please couldn't that girl come with my
friend and me?'
"She said, 'Well, for goodness' sake! So you want to band all the
strikers together here, do you? How long have you known her?'
"I said, 'I never saw her until to-day.'
"The matron said, 'For the land's sake, what do you expect here?' but she
did not say anything else. So I went off, just as though she wasn't going
to let that girl come with us; for I knew she would not want to seem as
though she would do it, at any rate.
"But, after we were in the cell with an Irish woman and another woman,
the door opened, and that Russian girl came in with us. Oh, she was so
glad!
"After that it was the same as the night before, except that we could see
the light of the boats passing. But it was dark and cold, and we had to
put both the quilt and the blanket over us and lie on the springs, and
you must keep all of your clothes on to try to be warm. But the air and
the smells are so bad. I think if it were any warmer, you would almost
faint there. I could not sleep.
"The next day they made me scrub. But I did not know how to scrub. And,
for Anna Lunska, she wet herself all over from head to foot. So they
said, very cross, 'It seems to us you do not know how to scrub a bit. You
can go back to the sewing department.' On the way I went through a room
filled with negresses, and they called out, 'Look, look at the little
kid,' And they took hold of me, and turned me around, and all laughed and
sang and danced all around me. These women, they do not seem to mind at
all that they are in prison.
"In the sewing room the next two days I was so sick I could hardly sew.
The women often said horrid things to each other, and I sat on the bench
with them. There was one woman over us at sewing that argued with me so
much, and told me how much better it was for me here than in Russian
prisons, and how grateful I should be.
"I said, 'How is that, then? Isn't there the same kind of food in those
prisons and in these prisons? And I think there is just as much
liberty.'"
On the last day of Natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own
little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most
repellent women of the street said to her, "I am staying in here and
you're going out. Give me a kiss for good-by." Natalya said that this
woman was a horror to her. "But I thought it was not very nice to refuse
this; so I kissed her a good-by kiss and came away."
The officers guarded the girls to the prison boat for their return to New
York. There, at the ferry, stood a delegation of the members of the
Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union waiting to receive them.
Such is the account of one of the seven hundred arrests made during the
shirt-waist strike, the chronicle of a peaceful striker.
As the weeks went on, however, in spite of the advice of the Union
officers, there were a few instances of violence on the part of the Union
members. Among thirty thousand girls it could not be expected that every
single person should maintain the struggle in justice and temperance with
perfect self-control. In two or three cases the Union members struck back
when they were attacked. In a few cases they became excited and attacked
strike breakers. In one factory, although there was no violence, the
workers conducted their negotiations in an unfair and unfortunate manner.
They had felt that all their conditions except the amount of wages were
just, and they admired and were even remarkably proud of the management,
a firm of young and well-intentioned manufacturers. Early in the general
strike, however, they went out without a word to the management, without
even signifying to it in any way the point they considered unjust. The
management did not send to inquire. After a few days it resumed work with
strike breakers. The former employees began picketing. The management
sent word to them that it would not employ against them, so long as they
were peaceful and within the law, any of the means of intimidation that
numbers of the other firms were using--special police and thugs. The
girls sent word back that they would picket peacefully and quietly. But
afterward, on their own admission, which was most disarming in its
candor, they became careless and "too gay." They went picketing in too
large numbers and were too noisy. Instantly the firm employed police.
Before this, however, the girls had begun to discuss and to realize the
unintelligence of their behavior in failing to send a committee to the
management to describe their position clearly and to obtain terms. They
now appointed and instructed such a committee, came rapidly to terms with
the management, and have been working for them in friendly relations ever
since.
While in general the strike was both peaceful in conduct and just in
demand and methods of demand on the part of the strikers, these
exceptions must, of course, be mentioned in the interests of truth.
Further, it would convey a false impression to imply that every striker
arrested had as much sense and force of character as Natalya Urusova.
Natalya was especially protected in her ordeal by a vital love of
observation and a sense of humor, charmingly frequent in the present
writer's experience of young Russian girls and women. With these
qualities she could spend night after night locked up with the women of
the street, in her funny, enormous prison clothes, and remain as
uninfluenced by her companions as if she had been some blossoming
geranium or mignonette set inside a filthy cellar as a convenience for a
few minutes, and then carried out again to her native fresh air. But such
qualities as hers cannot be demanded of all very young and unprotected
girls, and to place them wantonly with women of the streets has in
general an outrageous irresponsibility and folly quite insufficiently
implied by the experience of a girl of Natalya's individual penetration
and self-reliance.
III
In the period since the strike began many factories had been settling
upon Union terms. But many factories were still on strike, and picketing
on the part of the Union was continuing, as well as unwarranted arrests,
like Natalya's, on the part of the employers and the police. The few
exceptions to the general rule of peaceful picketing have been stated.
Over two hundred arrests were made within three days early in December.
On the 3d of December a procession of ten thousand women marched to the
City Hall, accompanying delegates from the Union and the Woman's
Trade-Union League, and visited Mayor McClellan in his office and gave
him this letter:--
HONORABLE GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN,
Mayor of the City of New York.
We, the members of the Ladies' Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a
body of thirty thousand women, appeal to you to put an
immediate stop to the insults and intimidations and to the
abuses to which the police have subjected us while we have been
picketing. This is our lawful right.
We protest to you against the flagrant discrimination of the
Police Department in favor of the employers, who are using
every method to incite us to violence.
We appeal to you directly in this instance, instead of to your
Police Commissioner.
We do this because our requests during the past six months have
had no effect in decreasing the outrages perpetrated upon our
members, nor have our requests been granted a fair hearing.
Yours respectfully,
S. SHINDLER, Secretary.
The Mayor thanked the committee for bringing the matter to his attention,
and promised to take up the complaint with the Police Commissioner.
But the arrests and violence of the police continued unchecked.
On the 5th of December the Political Equality League, at the instigation
of Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, held a packed meeting for the benefit of the
Shirt-waist Makers' Union. Many imprisoned girls were present, and gave
to the public clear, straightforward stories of the treatment they had
received at the hands of the city. The committee of the meeting had
offered the Mayor and other city officials a box, but they refused to be
present.
Again the arrests and violence continued without protection for the
workers. Nevertheless their cause was constantly gaining, and although
all attempts at general arbitration were unsuccessful, more and more
employers settled with the operatives. They continued to settle during
December and January until the middle of February. All but thirteen of
the shops in New York had then made satisfactory terms with the Union
workers. It was officially declared that the strike was over.
Natalya's shop had settled with the operatives on the 23d of January, and
she went back to work on the next day.
She had an increase of $2 a week in wages--$8 a week instead of $6. Her
hours were now fifty-two a week instead of sixty--that is to say, nine
and one-half hours a day, with a Saturday half-holiday. But she has
since then been obliged to enter another factory on account of slack
work.
Among the more skilled workers than Natalya in New York to-day, Irena
Kovalova, who supports her mother and her younger brother and sister, has
$11 a week instead of $9. She is not obliged to work on Sunday, and her
factory closes at five o'clock instead of six on Saturday. "I have four
hours less a week," she said with satisfaction. The family have felt able
to afford for her a new dress costing $11, and material for a suit,
costing $6. A friend, a neighbor, made this for Irena as a present.
Among the older workers of more skill than Irena, Anna Klotin, who sent
$120 home to her family last year, has now, however, only $6, $7, and $8
a week, and very poor and uncertain work, instead of her former $12 a
week. Hers was one of the thirteen factories that did not settle. Of
their one hundred and fifty girls, they wished about twenty of their more
skilled operators to return to them under Union conditions, leaving the
rest under the old long hours of overtime and indeterminate, unregulated
wages. Anna was one of the workers the firm wished to retain on Union
terms, but she felt she could not separate her chances in her trade from
the fortunes of her one hundred and thirty companions. She refused to
return under conditions so unjust for them. She has stayed on in her
boarding place, as her landlady, realizing Anna's responsible character,
is always willing to wait for money when work is slack. She has bought
this year only two pairs of shoes, a hat for 50 cents, and one or two
muslin waists, which she made herself. She has lived on such work as she
could find from time to time in different factories. Anna did not grudge
in any way her sacrifice for the less skilled workers. "In time," she
said, "we will have things better for all of us." And the chief regret
she mentioned was that she had been unable to send any money home since
the strike.
The staunchest allies of the shirt-waist makers in their attempt to
obtain wiser trade conditions were the members and officers of the
Woman's Trade-Union League, whose response and generosity were constant
from the beginning to the end of the strike. The chronicle of the largest
woman's strike in this country is not yet complete. A suit is now pending
against the Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union for conspiracy in
restraint of trade, brought by the Sittomer Shirt-waist Co. A test suit
is pending against Judge Cornell for false imprisonment, brought by one
of the shirt-waist strikers.
The whole outcome of the strike in its effect on women's wages in the
shirt-waist trade, their income and outlay in their work, both
financially and in vitality, cannot, of course, yet be fully known. The
statement that there has been a general rise of wages must be modified in
other ways than that suggested by the depletion of Anna Klotin's income
in the year since the strike. In factories where price on piece-work is
subject to arbitration between a Union committee of the workers and the
firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor.
One of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe Union
conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its
word. It discriminates against Union members, and it insists on Sunday
work and on night work for more than two nights a week. Further, during
the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily
filled in New York were placed with New Jersey and Pennsylvania firms.
The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this
writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the
slight amounts they earn through slack work.
"But that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers.
"You must be reasonable for them. You cannot ask them for work they are
not able to obtain to give you." Her remark is quoted both from its
wisdom and for another purpose. She was the girl who will always be
disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. Her quiet and instinctive
mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers
had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious
generosity and nobility.
Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its
profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be
its spirit. Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a
mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit,
manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of
life.
"The most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the
_Call_,[18] "is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued
with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial
uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship,
secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison."
There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers'
strike. Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. When
every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have
all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, "All
for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the
voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country--perhaps new
in the voice of the world. Wonderful it is to know that in that world
to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who,
in the meanest quarter of New York, on stinted food, in scanty clothes,
drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life,
giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the
theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight
strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. Wonderful it
is to know that when Natalya Urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and
cold on Blackwell's Island, she still could be responsibly concerned for
the fortunes of a stranger and had something she could offer to her
nobly. Wonderful to know that, after her very bones had been broken by
the violence of a thug of an employer, one of these girls could still
speak for perfect fairness for him with an instinct for justice truly
large and thrilling. Such women as that ennoble life and give to the
world a richer and altered conception of justice--a justice of
imagination and the heart, concerned not at all with vengeance, but
simply with the beauty of the perfect truth for the fortunes of all
mortal creatures.
Besides the value to the workers of the spirit of the shirt-waist strike,
they gained another advantage. This was of graver moment even than an
advance in wages and of deeper consequences for their future. They
gained shorter hours.
What, then, are the trade fortunes of some of those thousands of other
women, other machine operatives whose hours and wages are now as the
shirt-waist makers' were before the shirt-waist strike? What do some of
these other women factory workers, unorganized and entirely dependent
upon legislation for conserving their strength by shorter working hours,
give in their industry? What do they get from it? For an answer to these
questions, we turn to some of the white goods sewers, belt makers, and
stitchers on children's dresses, for the annals of their income and
outlay in their work away from home in New York.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: _Union Label Bulletin_, Vol. 2, No. I, p. 1.]
[Footnote 13: This expense would at this date probably be heavier, as the
working girls at one of the St. George's Working Girls' Clubs estimated
early this summer that shoes of a quality purchasable two years ago at $2
would now cost $2.50.]
[Footnote 14: Constance Leupp, in the _Survey_.]
[Footnote 15: The circular of advice issued a little later by the Union
reads as follows:--
RULES FOR PICKETS
Don't walk in groups of more than two or three.
Don't stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block.
Don't stop the person you wish to talk to; walk along side of him.
Don't get excited and shout when you are talking.
Don't put your hand on the person you are speaking to. Don't touch
his sleeve or button. This may be construed as a "technical
assault."
Don't call any one "scab" or use abusive language of any kind.
Plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten.
If a policeman arrest you and you are sure that you have committed
no offense, take down his number and give it to your Union
officers.]
[Footnote 16: In the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked
side by side, their feeling for each other seems generally to have been
friendly. After the beginning of the strike an attempt was made to
antagonize them against each other by religious and nationalistic
appeals. It met with little success. Italian headquarters for Italian
workers wishing organizations were soon established. Little by little the
Italian garment workers are entering the Union.]
[Footnote 17: Extract from the court stenographer's minutes of the
proceedings in the Per trial.]
[Footnote 18: Therese Malkiel, December 22.]
CHAPTER III
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS
[Unskilled and Seasonal Factory Work]
I
Besides the accounts of the waist makers, the National Consumers' League
received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from
unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine
operatives--among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives,
cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers,
fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers
on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses.
As will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual
girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some
other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not
as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade,
but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance
passing factory workers.
For the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those
of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives
expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their
tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression.
For the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an
unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries.
Discouragement at the lack of opportunity to advance was expressed by
almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled
factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, an American girl, was one of the
first workers who gave the League an account of her experience.
Emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was
about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine
she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then
for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house
for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.
She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3
a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the
rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her
own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the
material, the pretty spring suit she wore--a coat, skirt, and jumper, of
cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but
stylishly cut and becoming.
In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income
had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in
the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6;
half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack
work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.
She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness
of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted
it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.
Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to
escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a
private evening school.
For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week.
Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with
three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant
girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat,
with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a
plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina
scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress,
money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the
original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she
might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in
Russia.
In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a
world of her own--a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she
studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments
of the Russian revolution.
She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an
artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a
cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5,
for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was
very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts.
She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to
twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe
exhaustion.[19]
From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and
$4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did
not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had
her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10
cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1-1/2 cents' worth of rolls.
All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable
for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating
herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I
ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."
Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a
position to pity her.
Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of
nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by
educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.
Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,--four years
in New York,--in factory work, without the slightest prospect of
advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind--cutting off the ends
of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes.
She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent
rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her
mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this
last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had
kept her health, she was not at all strong.
She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the
factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the
year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit;
$2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her
board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less
in one way than with strangers. But she slept with part of her sister's
family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and
rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her
luncheon before starting for the factory at seven.
Marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to
make her deeply desired journey back to Austria to see her mother and
father. Although both their children were in the new country, her mother
and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her
father was blind.
The lack of opportunity to rise, among older unskilled factory workers,
may be illustrated by the experience of Mrs. Hallett, an American woman
of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing
candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years. In this time she
had advanced from a wage of $4 a week to a wage of $6, earned by a week
of nine-hour days, with a Saturday half-holiday.
However, as with Marta, this had represented payment from the company for
length of service, and not an advance to more skilled or responsible
labor with more outlook. In Mrs. Hallett's case this was partly because
the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's
retail stores, and she was not strong enough to endure the all-day
standing which this would require. Mrs. Hallett liked this company. The
foreman was considerate, and a week's vacation with pay was given to the
employees.
Mrs. Hallett lived in an excessively small, unheated hall bedroom, on the
fourth floor of an enormous old house filled with the clatter of the
elevated railroad. On the night of the inquirer's call, she was
pathetically concerned lest her visitor should catch cold because "she
wasn't used to it." She lighted a small candle to show her the room,
furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a
broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for Mrs. Clark and her
kind, public-spirited little hostess. They sat, drowned at times in the
noise of the elevated, in almost complete darkness, as Mrs. Hallett
insisted on making a vain effort to extract some heat for her guest from
the single gas-jet, by attaching to it an extremely small gas-stove.
For this room, which was within walking distance of the candy factory,
Mrs. Hallett paid $1.75 a week. Her breakfast of coffee and rolls in a
bakery near by cost her 10 cents daily. She apportioned 15 or 25 cents
each for her luncheon or dinner at restaurants. In her hungriest and most
extravagant moments she lunched for 30 cents. Her allowance for food had
to be meagre, because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged
to have her washing done outside. Sometimes she contrived to save a
dollar a week toward buying clothing. But this meant living less tidily
by having less washing done, or going hungrier. During the last year her
expense for clothing had been a little more than $23: summer hat, $1;
winter hat, $1.98; best hat, $2; shoes (2 pairs at $2.98, 2 pairs
rubbers), $7.16; wrap (long coat), $2.98; skirt (a best black
brilliantine, worn two years), at $5.50, $2.75; underskirt (black
sateen), 98 cents; shirtwaist (black cotton, worn every day in the year),
98 cents; black tights, 98 cents; 2 union suits at $1.25 (one every other
year), $1.25; 6 pairs stockings at 25 cents, $1.50; total, $23.56.
She said with deprecation that she sometimes went to the theatre with
some young girl friends, paying 25 cents for a seat, "because I like a
good time now and then."
These trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual
industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who
gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in
New York.
II
The chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different
kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features
most common to the trade fortunes the workers described--uncertain and
seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and
fatigue from speeding.
Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the
New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another.
This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian
white-goods worker living in the Bronx.
The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the
longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem,
Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many
self-supporting factory workers live. These newer-built lodgings, too,
have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing.
Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair
workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and
German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs
of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess
dresses. These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their
fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like
great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff
ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and
several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots--small,
strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide
tide of Slav and Austrian immigration.
In this curious and bizarre neighborhood, Yeddie Bruker and her sister
lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean
little flat owned by a family of their own nationality.
Yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn
looking and white. At work for six years in New York, she had at first
been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to
the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers
are attached. Then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's
collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker.
In the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger
of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman
was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of
the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from
breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust
flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4
a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting
herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near
her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the
machinery.
In the collar factory she again earned $4 a week, stitching between five
and six dozen collars a day. The stitch on men's collars is extremely
small, almost invisible. It strained her eyes so painfully that she was
obliged to change her occupation again.
As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out
of work by the trade seasons. These still leave her idle, in her present
occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every
year.
In the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on
petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower East Side,
she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months,
employment for all the working days in the week for another three months,
and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional
half day on Sunday, for between two and three months. Legal holidays and
a few days of illness made up the year.
In full weeks her wage is $8. Her income for the year had been $366, and
she had been able to save nothing. She had paid $208 for her board and
lodging, at the rate of $4 a week; a little more than $100 for clothing;
$38 for carfare, necessitated by living in the Bronx; $3 for a doctor;
$2.60 to a benefit association, which assures her $3 a week in case of
illness; $5 for the theatre; and $6 for Union dues.
Her work was very exhausting. Evenly spaced machine ruffling on
petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do. She
sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and
was hard to thread. It may be said here that the number of needles does
not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines;
two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even
twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily
constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under
the needle-point. It was not her eyes, Yeddie said, that were tired by
the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the
machines. Every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed
every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was
open.
One of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades,
is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen,
frequently mentioned by other workers besides Yeddie. Two years ago, in a
waist and dress factory where 400 operatives--more than 300 girls and
about 20 men--were employed for the company by a well-known
subcontractor, Jake Klein, a foreman asked Mr. Klein to beset some of the
girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand. The
manager discharged him. He asked to speak to the girls before he went
away. The manager refused his request. As Mr. Klein turned to the girls,
his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized Klein's collar,
overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the
stairs. "Brothers and sisters," Klein called to the operatives, "will you
sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?" In one impulse of clear
justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with Jake Klein, and
stayed out till the company made overtures of peace. This adventure,
widely related on the East Side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled
by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in
many sewing shops.
The uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell
heavily on Sarah Silberman, a delicate little Austrian Jewish girl of
seventeen, who finished and felled women's cloaks.
She had always lived in poverty. She had worked in a stocking factory in
Austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting
ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in Vienna and London and New
York.
She had been in New York for about a year, lodging, or rather sleeping at
night, in the tenement kitchen of some distant cousins of hers,
practically strangers. The kitchen opened on an air-shaft, and it was
used, not only as a kitchen, but as a dining room and living-room. For
the first four months after her arrival Sarah earned about $5 a week,
working from nine and one-half to ten hours a day as a finisher of boys'
trousers. From this wage she paid $3 a week for her kitchen sleeping
space and breakfast and supper. Luncheon cost her 7 cents a day. She had
been able to buy so very little clothing that she had kept no account of
it. She did her own washing, and walked to work.
She had never had any education until she came to America, and she now
attended a night school, in which she was keenly interested. She was
living in this way when her factory closed.
She then searched desperately for employment for two weeks, finding it
at last in a cloak factory[20] where she was employed from half past
seven in the morning until half past six or seven in the evening, with a
respite of only a few minutes at noon for a hasty luncheon. Her wage was
$3 a week. Working her hardest, she could not keep the wolf from the
door, and was obliged to go hungry at luncheon time or fail to pay the
full rent for her place to sleep in the kitchen.
Sarah was very naturally unstrung and nervous in this hardness of
circumstance and her terror of destitution. As she told her story, she
sobbed and wrung her hands. In the next six months she had better
occupation, however, in spasmodically busy shops, where the hours were
shorter than in the cloak factory, and she managed to earn an average
wage of $6 a week. She was then more serene; she said she had "made out
good."
During her six weeks of better pay at $6 a week, however, which so few
people would consider "making out good," she had suffered an especially
mean exploitation.
She applied at an underwear factory which constantly advertises, in an
East Side Jewish paper, for operatives. The management told her they
would teach her to operate if she would work for them two weeks for
nothing and would give them a dollar. She gave them the dollar; but on
the first day in the place, as she received no instructions, and learned
through another worker that after her two weeks of work for nothing were
over she would not be employed, she came away, losing the dollar she had
given to the firm.
Another worker who was distressed by the dull season, and had witnessed
unjust impositions, was Katia Markelov, a young operative on corsets. She
was a tiny, grave-looking girl of nineteen, very frail, with smooth black
hair, a lovely refinement of manner, and a very sweet smile. Like many
other operatives, she wore glasses. Katia was a good manager, and an
industrious and clever student, a constant attendant at night school.
In the factory where she was employed she earned about $10 a week as a
week worker, a skilled worker making an entire corset, after it was cut
and before it was trimmed. But she had only twelve full weeks' work in
the year; for two and a half months she was entirely idle, and for the
remaining six and a half months she worked from two to five days a week.
Her income for the year had been about $346.
Katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower
Broadway. Before that she had been employed as a week worker in a Fifth
Avenue corset factory, which may be called Madame Cora's. Shortly before
Katia left this establishment, Madame Cora changed her basis of payment
from week work to piece-work. The girls' speed increased. Some of the
more rapid workers who had before made $10 were able to make $12. On
discovering this, Madame Cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning
to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for
thread and needles. She made them pay her 2 cents for every needle.
Thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the
needles, stitches up very rapidly. The girls were frequently obliged to
pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed
into Madame Cora's corsets, and for needles. They rebelled when Madame
Cora refused to pay for these materials herself. From among the three
hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to Union headquarters, and asked
to be organized. But Madame Cora simply filled their places with other
girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and
refused to take them back. Katia did not respect Madame Cora's methods,
and had left before the strike.
Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a
room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem. The room
was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant.
She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred
dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and
making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books
and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an
outing. On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of
unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.
Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was
struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had
swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.
When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger
children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable
intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in
some other country.
Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek,
not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. After she had
been in London for four years, her father died. She and her next younger
sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family;
and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like
Whittington, turned again and came to New York.
Here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a
week. She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month. For
supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week. Other food she bought
from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week. As she did
her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses,
except for shoes. Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she
was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for
them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.
In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she
managed to send $90 home, for the others.
Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York,
and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between
them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage
ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with
the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the
instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the
rest of the family into New York harbor--the girls' mother, their three
younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of
seven.
Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for
these extortionate tickets.
In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons
into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The
fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of
seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost
$9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most
of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month
for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's
Hebrew schooling.
Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because
the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she
suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's
work through illness.
She was only nineteen years old. By working every hour she could make a
fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work,
she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair
standard of living.
A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the
price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more
suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old
hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a
dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes
she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must
begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another
pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly
spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves
these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the
congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The
stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out
even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible to mend
stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's
washing.
All Molly Davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding
concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family
responsibility.
In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family
responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna. She was a girl of nineteen, who
had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai.
Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to
bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or
two younger than Rita.
Soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men's vests,
at $6 or $7 a week, for ten hours' work a day. Living and saving with her
brother, she contrived to send home $4 a month. Between them, Nikolai and
Rita brought over their mother and the little brother. But, very soon
after they were all settled together, their mother died. They were
obliged to put the little brother into an institution. Then Nikolai fell
from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial
recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his
work.
Rita now lived alone, spending $3.50 a month for a sleeping place in a
tenement, and for suppers $1.25 a week. Her luncheons and breakfasts,
picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was
working, to about 12 cents a day. At other times she often went without
both meals. For in the last year her average wage had been reduced to
$4.33 a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness.
Through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and
for nine weeks none at all.
When she was working, she paid 60 cents a week carfare, 25 cents a month
to the Union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and 10 cents a
month to a "Woman's Self-Education Society." The Union and this club
meant more to Rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with,
and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $20 in a
year and a half.
Some months afterward, Mrs. Clark received word that Rita had solved many
of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her
domestic anxieties were relieved.
The chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still
in Russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a
friend, another girl, working in the same shop--a tragedy told here
because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work.
Rita's younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl,
alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate
that it was doubtful whether her admission to the United States could be
secured, even if Rita could possibly save enough for her passage money.
The friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last
become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the
birth of their child, when he left her resourceless. Slack and dull
seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on
their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great
beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations.[21] Especially at the
mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers,
and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops.
Helena Hardman, an Austrian girl, a fur sewer, had been employed for only
twenty weeks in the year. She sewed by hand on fur garments in a Twelfth
Street shop, for $7 a week, working nine hours a day, with a Saturday
half-holiday. The air and odors in the fur shop were very disagreeable,
but had not affected her health.
At the end of the twenty weeks she had been laid off, and had looked
unsuccessfully for work for seventeen weeks, before she found employment
as an operative in an apron factory. Here, however, in this unaccustomed
industry, by working as an operative nine hours a day for five days a
week, and six hours on Saturday, she could earn only $3 or $4.
She paid $4 a week for board and a tenement room shared with another
girl. She had been obliged to go in debt to her landlady for part of her
long idle time, after her savings had been exhausted.
During this time she had been unable to buy any clothing, though her
expense for this before had been slender: a suit, $18; a hat, $3; shoes,
$3; waists, $3; and underwear, $2.50. She looked very well, however, in
spite of the struggle and low wages necessitated by learning a secondary
trade.
The dull season is tided over in various ways. A few fortunate girls go
home and live without expense. Many live partly at the expense of
philanthropic persons, in subsidized homes. In these ways they save a
little money for the dull time, and also store more energy from their
more comfortable living.
On the horizon of the milliner the dull season looms black. All the world
wants a new hat, gets it, and thinks no more of hats or the makers of
hats. On this account a fast and feverish making and trimming of hats, an
exhausting drain of the energy of milliners for a few weeks, is followed
by weeks of no demand upon their skill.
Girl after girl told the investigator that the busy season more than wore
her out, but that the worry and lower standard of living of the dull
season were worse. The hardship is the greater because the skilled
milliner has had to spend time and money for her training.
Many of these girls try to find supplementary work, as waitresses in
summer hotels, or in some other trade. A great difficulty here is the
overlapping of seasons. The summer hotel waitress is needed until
September, at least, but the milliner must begin work in August. To
obtain employment in a non-seasonal industry, it is often necessary to
lie. In each new occupation it is necessary to accept a beginner's wage.
Regina Siegerson had come alone, at the age of fifteen, from Russia to
New York, where she had been for seven years. The first winter was cruel.
She supported herself on $3 a week. She had been forced to live in the
most miserable of tenements with "ignorant" people. She had subsisted
mainly by eating bananas, and had worn a spring jacket through the cold
winter. It seemed, however, that no hardship had ever prevented her from
attending evening school, where her persistence had taken her to the
fourth year of high school. She was thinking of college at the time of
the interview. Regina was a Russian revolutionist, and keenly thirsting
for knowledge. She talked eagerly to the inquirer about Victor Hugo,
Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw. With no less interest she spoke of the
trade fortunes of milliners in New York, and her own last year's
experience. She had worked through May, June, and July as a trimmer,
making $11 in a week of nine hours a day, with Saturday closing at five.
During August and September and the first weeks in October she had only
six weeks' work, as a maker in a ready-to-wear hat factory, situated on
the lower West Side over a stable, where she made $10 in a week of nine
hours a day.
Regina and a girl friend had managed to furnish a two-room tenement
apartment with very simple conveniences, and there they kept house. Rent
was $10.50 a month; gas for heating and cooking, $1.80; and food for the
two, about $5 a week. As Regina did her own washing, the weekly expense
for each was but $3.67, less than many lodgers pay for very much less
comfort.
The greatest pleasure the girls had in their little establishment was the
opportunity it gave them for entertaining friends. Before, it had been
impossible for them to see any one, except in other people's crowded
living-rooms, or on the street.
Regina was engaged to a young apothecary student, whom she expected to
marry in the spring. Like her, he was in New York without his family, and
he took his meals at the two girls' little flat with them.
Regina's father, who was living in Russia with a second wife, had sent
her $100 when she wrote him of her intended marriage. This, and about $40
saved in the six weeks of earning $10, were her reserve fund in the long
dull season.
The inquirer saw Regina again a few days before Thanksgiving. She was
still out of work, but was learning at home to do some mechanical china
decorating for the Christmas trade.
Among the milliners, several girls were studying to acquire, not only a
training in a secondary trade, but the better general education which
Frances Ashton, a young American girl of twenty, had obtained through
better fortunes.
Her father, a professional man, had been comfortably situated. Without
anticipating the necessity of supporting herself, she had studied
millinery at Pratt Institute for half a year. Then, because it was rather
a lark, she had gone to work in New York. Most of her wage was spent for
board and recreation, her father sending her an allowance for clothes.
After a year, his sudden death made it necessary for her to live more
economically, as her inheritance was not large. The expenses of an attack
of typhoid one summer, and of an operation the next year, entirely
consumed it.
In the year she described, she had been a copyist in one of the most
exclusive shops on Fifth Avenue. The woman in charge was exceptionally
considerate, keeping the girls as long as possible. She used to weep
when she was obliged to dismiss them, for she realized the suffering and
the temptation of the long idle period.
However, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a
time, from February 1 to May 15, and from August 18 to December 4. During
the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were
piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. The working day
lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon.
Many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $1, besides
30 cents supper money, for overtime. But by six o'clock Frances was so
exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that
hour.
In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment,
Frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began
earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year,
and idle for twenty. She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to
$14 a week.
The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to
find anything to do. Application at department stores had been
ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. She said she had lost all
scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a
place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.
Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized
homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room
shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week. Although she walked sometimes
from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week. Laundering two
sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents. Thus, for a
reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by
philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of
clothing.
She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. She
said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant
foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her
apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. She was, at the time she gave
her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to
pay another week's board.
Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living
comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate
employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the
circumstances.
Something, then, must be said about these circumstances--this widespread
precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or
industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. Where industry acts
the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless
for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant. Among the
factory workers, the waist makers' admirable efforts for juster wages
were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on
account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence
employers are as powerless as employees to forestall.
These chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work on the fortunes of
some self-supporting operatives and hand workers in New York factories
and workshops, concern only one corner of American industry, in which, as
every observer must realize, there are many other enormous fields of
seasonal work. These histories are nevertheless clear and authentic
instances of a strange and widespread social waste. Neither trade
organization nor State legislation for shorter hours is primarily
directed toward a more general regular and foresighted distribution of
work among all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers. Until some
focussed, specific attempt is made to secure such a distribution, it
seems impossible but that extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness,
will be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime or
exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner apparently arranged by
fortune to devastate human energy in the least intelligent manner
possible.
Further effects of speeding and of monotony in this labor were described
by other self-supporting factory workers whose chronicles, being also
concerned with industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed
next.
[Illustration: Photograph by Lewis Hine
"Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound;--
But where is what I started for so long ago,
And why is it still unfound?"
--WALT WHITMAN.]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: See Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in
the United States. Volume II, Men's Ready-made Clothing, pages 141-157;
160-165; 384-395.]
[Footnote 20: The income and outlay of other cloak makers will be
separately presented.]
[Footnote 21: In the first report of the New York Probation Association
the statement is made that out of 300 girls committed by the courts
during the year to the charge of Waverley House, 72 had been engaged in
factory work. Of these many had been at one time or other employed as
operatives. On questioning the probation worker, Miss Stella Miner, who
had lived with them and knew their stories most fully, it was learned,
however, that almost every one of these girls had gone astray while they
were little children, had been remanded by courts to the House of the
Good Shepherd, where they had learned machine operating, and on going out
of its protection to factories had drifted back again to their old ways
of life. How far their early habit and experience had dragged these young
girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known. The truth remains that
factory work, when it is seasonal, must increase temptation by its
economic pressure.]
CHAPTER IV
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY-WORKERS
[Monotony and Fatigue in Speeding]
One of the strangest effects of the introduction of machinery into
industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of
workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and
warp these forces to the functions of machines.[22]
This stupefying and wearying effect of machine-work from concentration
and intensity of application and attention was frequently mentioned by
the factory workers in their accounts.
Tina Levin, a young girl eighteen years old, had worked two years in an
underwear factory in New York; and before her arrival in America, six
years in an underwear factory in Russia. She had come from abroad to her
fiancé, Ivan Levin, whom she had recently married. She still worked in
the underwear factory, although she was not entirely self-supporting. She
and her young husband met the League's Inquirer at a Jewish Girls'
Self-Education Club, where they gave between them the account of Tina's
self-supporting years.
Before her marriage, Tina had worked at a machine ten hours a day for an
underwear manufacturer on Canal Street. In the height of the season the
shop often worked overtime until 8 o'clock, two or three nights a week.
Besides this, many of the girls took hand work home, where they sewed
till eleven or twelve o'clock. But Tina was so exhausted by her long day
that she never did this. Working as hard as possible, she earned $7, and
sometimes $8 a week, during the six busy months.
For part of this time she lived a full hour-and-a-half's car ride from
the factory. So that with dressing, and eating two meals at her lodging,
when she was at the machine twelve hours a day, she had only about six
hours sleep.
At least half the year was so dull that she could earn only $3 or $3.50 a
week; and she was so worn out that every month she was utterly unable to
work for three or four days. This loss had reduced her income by $32. She
had been obliged to pay $9 for medicine. Her income for the year had been
about $262. For board and lodging in a tenement she had paid $3.50 a
week; for carfare 60 cents a week; and she had sent $5 home in the year;
and given $9 for medicine; $36 for the dentist; and $1 a month to the
Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society. She had less than $10 left for
dress for the year. But her lover had helped her with many presents; and
had given her many good times and pleasures, besides those obtainable at
the Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society.
Tina had the advantage of a knowledge of English. This lack of
opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was
poignantly regretted by another machine operative, Fanny Leysher, a
white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in America four years.
She lived in one room of a tenement off the Bowery, where she boarded and
lodged for $4 a week. She worked in a factory within walking distance,
earning $7 a week in the busy season.
Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile,
and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked,
however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for
four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a
week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of
108 corset covers--9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly
complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of
stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to
attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from
headache and from backache.
Fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks
she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For
three weeks she had been ill.
She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a
nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night
school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes.
Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of
Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses.
Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress
showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of
line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every
advantage." It was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white
piqué collar and a loose blue tie. She had tan stockings and low russet
shoes. Fanny belonged to the Working-man's Circle. She said she went as
often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. And when she was
asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness
and eagerness, "Oh, I want nothing but the best. Only what will tell me
about real life."
She said she had spent too much money for dress last year; but she had
been able to buy clothing of a quality which she thought would last her
for a long time. The little plain gold watch in her list she had partly
needed and partly had been unable to resist. One of the three summer
dresses costing $14 was her blue linen dress, for which she had given $7.
She expected to wear it for two summers with alterations.
Last year's suit cleaned $ 3
Shoes 11
Hat 10
Dresses (1 winter, $10; 3 summer, $14) 24
Coat 9
Every-day hat 4.50
Muslin (for white waists and corset covers made by herself) 5
Umbrella 2
Gloves 2
Pocket-book 1
Watch 11
______
$82.50
Painful as it was in some ways to see Fanny Leysher, who liked "nothing
but the best," pouring her life force into stitching 108 corset covers a
day, she yet seemed less helpless than some still younger workers.
Minna Waldemar, a girl of sixteen, an operative in an umbrella factory,
had been in the United States for six months. For five months of this
time she had been stitching the seams and hems of umbrella covers for 35
cents a hundred. Her usual output was about 200 a day. By working very
fast, she could in a full day make 300, but when she did, it left her
thumb very sore.
Minna paid $3 a month for sleeping space in a tenement; $1.75 a week for
suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.
She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1. A suit had cost $8; a
hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2. Working her hardest and fastest, she
had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings,
and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in
New York.
Every line of Minna's little figure looked overworked. This was true,
too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who
had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.
In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she
had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she
earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy
weeks she had earned $9 a week.
After the slack season, the factory closed. Hunting desperately for a way
to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children's
dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a
week. In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at
this for the next three or four months.
After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. She had returned
to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week. Her busiest days were
eleven hours long, and her others nine.
She spent nothing for pleasure. She could send nothing to her family. In
the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a
suit for $12. She went to night school, but was generally so weary that
she could learn really nothing. She did her own washing, and for $3 a
month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded
East Side tenement. It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken
landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes
late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and
flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. Supper with the
landlady cost her 20 cents a night. Sadie's breakfasts and dinners
depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. As in the
weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a
week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40
cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is
easily understood.
Sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner
and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant,
is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for
lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any
definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her
own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could.
If she had attempted to find a better and less expensive place for
sleeping, in a less congested quarter of the city, she would have been
obliged to pay, besides her rent, a sum at least half as large, for
transportation. In the same way, for this really very large sum of $15 or
$20 paid yearly to the city railroads, she would not have received in
their cars any definite place at all, honestly provided for her as her
own, but simply a chance of getting a foothold when she could on a
cross-town car or the Bronx elevated during the rush hours. The yearly
sums paid to the car companies by factory workers too exhausted to walk
home are very striking in these budgets. Tina Levin had paid nearly
$30--more than she had spent for her clothing during the year. This
expense of carfare and the wretched conditions in transportation which
most of the car companies supply to the workers compelled to use their
lines in rush hours is a difficulty scarcely less than that of New York
rents and congestion, and inseparably connected with them.
Anna Flodin, a girl of eighteen, forced by illness to leave the congested
quarters of New York for the Bronx, did not attempt to return to work
until she was able to live again within walking distance of the factory.
Anna Flodin was a pale, quiet girl with smooth black hair and a serious,
almost poignant expression. All her life had been one of poverty, a sheer
struggle to keep the wolf from the door. She spoke no English, though she
could understand a little.
She stitched regularly in the busy season 1568 yards of machine sewing
daily in fastening belts to cheap corset covers. The forewoman gave her
in the course of the day 28 bundles, each containing 28 corset covers
with the belts basted to the waist lines and the loose ends of the belts
basted ready to finish.
The instant Anna failed to complete this amount, or seemed to drop behind
in the course of the day, the forewoman blamed her, and threatened to
reduce her wage.
Anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $6 a week. If she were
five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. She was docked for
every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in
the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then
been only $5 a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she
stitched into the white-goods company's output.
In order to complete 784 yards of belting a day--over 1600 yards of
stitching, for she fastened both edges of the belt--she was forced, of
course, to work as fast as she could feed and guide belts under the
needle. She had strong eyes. But her back ached from the stooping to
guide the material, and she suffered cruelly from pain in her shoulders.
There had been seventeen weeks of this work. Then there had been ten
weeks of two or three days' work a week, when it seemed impossible to
earn enough to live on. Then, ten weeks when the factory closed. Then she
had an illness lasting over two months, which began a few weeks after the
factory closed.
She said the doctor had told her that her illness was consumption and
that he had cured it. It must have been, of course, not consumption or
not arrested in that space of time. But, during it, she had paid him
$28.50 and given $22.50 for her board and lodging, with an uncle in the
Bronx, and for milk and eggs.
Almost as soon as she was declared able to return to stitching seven
hundred belts a day, she hurried back to work. But within a few days the
girls struck against the company's practice of making them buy thread,
and were out for five weeks. At the end of this time they won their
point.
Altogether her income for the year had been about $150; and the severity
and amount of labor she had given in earning it had left her cruelly
spent.
She could not possibly live on this amount, as board and lodging alone
had cost her $3 a week--$126 for the year. She had been obliged to borrow
$50 for her treatment in her illness; and she had not yet paid back this
sum. Besides, her landlady had trusted her for some board bills she had
not yet paid. For clothing she had spent $26.59,--one dress for $7; one
hat for $2; one jacket for $6; two pairs of shoes at $2; a pair for $4;
36 pairs of stockings at 10 cents a pair for $3.60; three waists at 98
cents each for $2.94; and three suits of winter underwear for $1.05. But
she said winter underwear of this quality failed to keep her really warm.
In the evening she was too tired to leave the tenement for night school
or for anything else. She did her own washing. In the course of a year
her only pleasure had been a trip to the theatre for 35 cents.
Anna Flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the Bowery; and she told
her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to
express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost
ambassadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching.
That spirit--a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear
interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and
expenditure of strength--was evinced by countless girls. None, indeed,
were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless
they wished to help in the inquiry. But perhaps because it arose from
such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of
Anna Flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling.
She told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a
little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy,
ill-smelling inner court. The only brightening of her grave, young face
throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of
her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she
spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about
thread. She was a member of the Union. In the shop there were girls not
members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread
indefinitely. Anna Flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that
she would never have anything to do with such girls.
Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with
every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.
She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the
sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing
eyes imparted. There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness
of dissipation in youth. Too little is said of the fact that such an
enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin's is in
youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the
painful sense of wreck. All tragedies are not those of violence, but of
depletion, too, and of starvation.
The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine
was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind,
who afterwards found more attractive employment. She said that in her
factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine
o'clock, after her work was done, with a cousin. The cousin was another
clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age. They had a hundred
things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost
always say to the other: "Please do not speak to me on my way home. I am
so tired I can scarcely answer." Instantly after supper they went to bed.
In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at
eight, to go through the round of the day before.
"We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the
girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were
so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they
were talking about. And still, although there was nothing for us but bed
and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through
the slack season."
It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid
operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in
a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.
She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York.
After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder
the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable
and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther
was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful
direct glance.
Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the
most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had
dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather
belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost
immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon
she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a
forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that
she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her
at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years,
though not in the same factory.
Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of
stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation
from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work.
Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so
much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather,
necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men.
Theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day. She and other
Americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some Russian girls, who
could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous
stitches and loose threads. When the forewoman blamed Theresa for
finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt
for their slovenly belts. She had a strong handicraft pride, and it was
pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman's reply
that "None of them (the badly made belts) ever came back"--as though
their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship.
She had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours
of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours
a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long
prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in
which she was unable to do anything for months.
On her recovery she entered another factory, where the hours are not so
excessive, the treatment is fair, and she has now an excellent position
as forewoman at $18 a week.
Theresa was a very earnest, clear-minded girl, with strong convictions
concerning the bad effect of excessive hours for working women. At the
time when the hearing on the New York State Labor Law was held at Albany
last spring, she had been active in obtaining a petition, signed by a
body of New York working girls and placed in the hands of Labor
Commissioner Williams, to aid in securing a shortening of their present
legal hours. Theresa had advanced beyond the drudgery of her trade to one
of its better positions by extraordinary ability. Some of the skilled
machine operatives, like some of the unskilled factory workers, were
buoyed through the monotony of their present calling by the hope of
leaving it for another occupation.
Alta Semenova, a Polish glove maker, twenty years old, worked nine hours
a day at a machine for $7 a week, and studied five evenings a week in a
private evening school, for which she paid $4 a month tuition.
She lived in a small hall bedroom with an admired girl friend. Each paid
$4.25 a month rent. Her food amounted to $2.90 a week. Saturday evening
she spent in doing her washing. She lived near enough to the factory to
walk to work in five or ten minutes. She paid 25 cents a month for Union
dues.
Alta was working for "counts" toward entering college or Cooper Union. In
spare moments she read the modern Russians. During her year in New York
she has mastered sufficient English to read Shakespeare in the original.
In a few years she will be a teacher. Alta was an eager Russian
revolutionist. She had the student's passion, and her head was full of
plans for a life of intellectual work.
These chronicles of the income and outlay of some New York factory
workers have described monotony and speeding in machine-work. The annals
of the New York factory workers presented below describe monotony and
speeding in hand-work.
Yetta Sigurdin, an Austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in New York
three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a
tobacco factory, a Union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work.
Her hours were eight a day. In a full day, Yetta could roll 2200
cigarettes. So her best wage was about $12 a week. The average was,
however, not more than $8, as the factory had been idle four weeks, and
very dull for five months, though busy for the remaining six.
Yetta looked very robust and happy. She seemed comfortable in her work
and with her income, in spite of the extra labor of washing some of her
own clothes and making her own waists. This, no doubt, was due largely to
her sane and reasonable working hours, and partly to the fact that her
work did not require the intensity of watching and application demanded
by rapid machine-work. Indeed in some Union tobacco factories the rollers
sometimes make up a sum among themselves to pay a reader by the hour to
read aloud to them while they are at work.
Yetta paid $3 a week for room, breakfast, and supper in a tenement. It
was in an extremely poor neighborhood, but was fresh, pleasant, and well
aired. Her dinners cost about $1.50 a week. She did part of her washing
and part was included in the charge for board. Her Union fee was 15 cents
a week. The members of the Cigarette Makers' Union pay a weekly due of 5
cents for the support of a sanatorium in Colorado for tubercular tobacco
workers. Yetta contributed to this sanatorium and gave a 10-cent monthly
fee for Union agitation.
She estimated the cost of her clothing at about $82 for the year. A
winter suit cost $14; a spring suit, $15; a summer dress, $5; and a
winter dress, $18. Six pairs of shoes cost $15. She could not remember
the items of the rest of her expenditure for dress. Part of it was for
underwear and part of it for material for waists she had made herself.
In spite of the monotony and speed of Yetta's work, it did not exhaust
her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor
was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours.
Barbara Cotton, an American woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in
an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than
eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment.
In the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was
split into the thinnest possible sheets. She was paid by the number she
succeeded in splitting. The constant repetition of an act of such
accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made
her extremely nervous.
For six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $8 or $8.50 a week.
During the other six months there was no work on Saturdays, and she
earned about $7 a week. She had a week's vacation with pay. She had lost
during the year she described two months' work from illness, due to her
run-down condition. This she said, however, was not caused by her work,
but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a
sister, who had been sick.
Miss Cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she
had received an allowance of $5 a week.
Her income for the year had been about $367, an average of $7.06 a week.
Miss Cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and
although the expense was about the same, the places were much less
attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was
staying at the time of the interview.
For half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for
breakfasts and dinners, she paid $4.50 a week. Luncheons in addition cost
her $1 a week. As she was within walking distance of work, she had no
other expense but 35 cents for part of her washing. The rest she did
herself.
She bought very little clothing, as out of the $1.15 a week she had left
after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a
sick sister and niece. After eighteen years of hard, steady work--nine
years of it skilled work--she had saved nothing except in the form of
benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving.
Although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was
less exhausted by her industrial experience than Katherine Ryan, an Irish
worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing trimmings for six
years in an appliqué factory.
Eight and a quarter hours of this work a day exhausted her. She received
$7 a week. Her eyes were fast failing her from the close watch she had
to keep on her scissors to guard against cutting too far.
She often went to bed at eight or half past eight o'clock, worn out by
one day's task and eager to be fresh for the next, for she was hard
pressed by the competition of young eyes and quick fingers.
Newer workers were given finer and more profitable work to do. In spite
of her faithfulness, and straining for speed, she was laid off two months
earlier in the last season than in any previous year, and newer helpers
were retained. She thought the forewoman was prejudiced against her, and
naturally could not understand the truth that from the standpoint of
modern industry she was aged at forty-five.
She had been paying $3 a week for board in a philanthropic home, and
there she was permitted to stay and to pay for her board and lodging when
she had no money by helping with the housework. Miss Ryan, however, had
exhausted herself less rapidly than Elena and Gerda Nakov, two young
Polish women of thirty-three and twenty-nine, skilled hand-workers on
children's dresses.
Elena had come from South Russia to seek her fortunes when she was
sixteen years old. Her mother and father were dead. She had been educated
by an uncle, with whom her younger sister, Gerda, remained.
According to the testimony of Elena's brother-in-law, the kind-hearted
husband of a married sister living in New York, and also according to the
testimony of Gerda, Elena at sixteen was a very beautiful girl. She was
small, but very strong and well knit, with a fresh, glowing color, deep
gray eyes, and heavy reddish gold hair, growing low upon her forehead in
a widow's peak.
Elena first found work as a cigarette roller, earning $4 a week. Here she
was subjected to constant insolence and scurrilous language from the
foreman and the men working with her. Her eyes turned black with contempt
when she spoke of this offence--"Oh" she exclaimed, "I thought, 'I am
poor, but I will never in my life be so poor as to stand things like
that.'"
She left the tobacco factory and found employment as a neckwear worker.
Here, too, she earned $4, but the season grew dull, and she entered a
small factory, where she worked on children's dresses, embroidering,
buttonholing, faggoting, and feather-stitching. In this craft she proved
to have such deftness, nicety of touch, and speed that she could do in an
hour twice as much as most of the other girls and women in the factory.
She sewed from eight to six, with half an hour for lunch. She always took
work home and sometimes she sewed for half of Sunday, for living expenses
consumed all of her $4 a week. Her stomach had failed her in the
intensity of her occupation and from the insufficient food she was able
to purchase, and she needed all the extra money she could earn for
doctor's bills and medicine.
She was thin, spent, worn, and pale, when Gerda came over from Russia,
four years after Elena had arrived. Gerda was a strong, attractive girl,
with good health, dark curling hair, and a lovely color.
Entering the same factory with Elena, she soon became almost as able as
her sister in fine sewing, and almost as ill. She earned $3 a week.
The factory was owned by a young German widow, Mrs. Mendell, an extremely
attractive, pretty, and skilful person, appearing in her office an
agreeable and well-educated young woman, and able to produce the most
engaging little dresses, caps, and undermuslins for children, at a high
profit, by paying extremely small wages to skilled immigrant
seamstresses. In her workroom, Mrs. Mendell alternately terrorized and
flattered the girls. She speeded them constantly. Unless they had done as
much work as she wished to accomplish through the day, she refused to
speak to them. She made the younger girls put on her boots, and dress her
when she changed her office frock for the clothes in which she motored
home at night. And in the morning she punished girls who had not
finished as much work as she wished over night by giving them the worst
paid and hardest sewing in the factory.
One night she sent Elena and Gerda home with two great bundles of
infants' bands--shoulder-straps and waistbands--to be made ready to be
fastened to long skirts the next morning. They were all to be
feather-stitched around the shoulder-bands and upper edges of the
waist-bands, three buttons sewed on, and three buttonholes made in each.
This was to be done for 2-1/2 cents a piece--a quarter a dozen.
In the morning after she had completed this work, Elena felt so nervous
and ill when she went to the factory, that as she handed Mrs. Mendell
back the bundle and received the quarter, she burst into tears. She told
Mrs. Mendell she was sick. She could not live and work as she was
working. Gerda's eyes were always strained. Their wages must be raised.
Mrs. Mendell replied with calm and self-approbation, that she herself
stayed in the factory all day, but she never complained in any such way.
However, she raised Elena's wages 50 cents.
At this time the two girls lived in a tiny, inner room with one window,
on an air-shaft in an East Side tenement. For this they paid $8 a month.
It was scarcely more than a closet, holding one chair, one table, and a
bed; and so small that Elena and Gerda could scarcely squeeze in between
their meagre furnishings. They did their own washing, cooked their own
breakfasts on the landlady's stove, prepared a lunch they took with them
to the factory, and paid 20 cents a night apiece for dinner. Almost all
the money they had left, after their lodging and board and the barest
necessities for clothing were paid for, went for medicines and doctors.
Their clothing was so poor that they were ashamed to go out on
Sunday--when everybody else put on "best dresses"--and would sit in their
room all day. However, in the evenings they sometimes went to see
relatives in the Bronx, and on one of these occasions they had a piece of
good fortune of the oddest character. On the elevated road on which they
happened to be riding there was an accident--a collision. They were
neither of them injured; but they saw the collision, and were summoned as
witnesses for the road. They were obliged to spend several mornings away
from making children's dresses, waiting to give their testimony in the
criminal court, which they found highly pleasant and recreative. However,
after all, the road settled with the prosecutors before the girls were
ever called on for their testimony, and the case never came to trial. But
the railroad gave Elena and Gerda for the time they had spent on its
behalf a check for $20.
At this they determined to move to better quarters. The factory, besides,
had grown and moved into larger rooms farther up-town (though its
workrooms had always been well lighted and ventilated), so that the girls
were obliged to spend more than they could afford for carfare. With the
$20 they furnished their room in Harlem. They were in a wild,
disreputable neighborhood, of which the girls remained quite independent.
But the rooms were airy and attractive. Having now their own furnishings,
they paid only $8 a month for all this added space and comfort, so that
they could continue to live in these accommodations, but only with severe
effort and industry on Elena's part. For Gerda's optic nerve was now so
affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and
illness, that she was unable to go to the factory. She kept the house,
doing some sewing at home.
Elena's wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with
Mrs. Mendell, were raised to $7 a week after her thirteen years of
service. But she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health.
She was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis.
At last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she
would die. Her stomach was almost completely worn out. This doctor sent
her to a hospital, and visited Gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital.
This was four years ago. But both the young women are so broken down that
no efforts of public or private phi
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