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 applique 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 philanthropic medical care in the state and the city have been able to restore their health. The doctors in whose charge they have been say that these young women's strength is simply worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty food, and that they can never again be really well.

They leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning, six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all. Their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various forms of charitable cure and the great charitable institutions of the community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they have lost in its industries.

It may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory management, which has been obliged to employ in Elena's place two other less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists of New York who support charity hospitals and vacation homes.

These chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed, monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women, operatives and hand-workers.

While one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange that it cannot seem inevitable. Speeding for long hours at machines, rather than machine labor itself, appears most widely responsible for the fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been narrated. Further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers encountered—the experience of Elena and Gerda Nikov, who were employed not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy be called a handicraft.

The exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable to their custom of pursuing their trade not only in factory hours, but outside the factory, at home. Within the last year, the most widely constructive effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle trades ever undertaken in this country has been initiated by the New York cloak makers, to whom we next turned for an account of their industrial fortunes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: These testimonies are cited from the brief for the Illinois Ten-Hour Law, prepared by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark.

Investigations into the Conditions of Health of the Swiss Factory Workers. Dr. Fridlion Schuler, Swiss Factory Inspector, and Dr. A. E. Burckhardt, Professor of Hygiene.

"Instead of becoming wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the worker."

Dangerous Trades. Thomas Oliver, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P. London. 1902.

"The introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... While machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has not diminished fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its relentless course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious, especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal, for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. Present-day factory labor is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive iron."

Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, Berlin, September, 1907. Fatigue Resulting from Occupation. Dr. Emil Roth, Regierungsrat, Potsdam.

"With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony—to the absence of spontaneity or joy in work."

Proceedings of the First International Convention on Industrial Diseases, Milan, 1906. Imbecility and Criminality in Relation to Certain Forms of Labor. Professor Crisafuli.

"When only one brain-centre works, it becomes overfatigued much more easily than if the functions were alternately performed by the various centres.

"Here, then, is another factor in overfatigue due to the monotony of work, interrupted only at long intervals.

"This monotony is the determining cause of local disturbances and endangers the entire organism."]



CHAPTER V

THE CLOAK MAKERS' STRIKE AND THE PREFERENTIAL UNION SHOP

Forty million dollars are invested in New York in the making of women's cloaks, skirts, and suits. One hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of these garments are produced in New York in a year.[23]

Between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city are employed in these industries. The Union members constitute ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten thousand of these members are women.[24]

It seems at first strange to find that the multitudinous fields of the metropolitan needle trades,—industries traditionally occupied by sewing women,—are, in fact, far more heavily crowded with sewing men. There is, however, a division of labor, the men doing practically all the cutting, machine sewing, and pressing, and in many cases working at hand-finishing; the women practically never cutting, machine sewing, or pressing, and in all cases working at hand-finishing.

A general strike involving all these men and women in the cloak making trade was declared on the 8th of July, 1910. The industry had for years burdened both its men and women workers with certain grave difficulties—an unstandardized wage, the subcontracting system, competition with home work, and long seasonal hours.

The subcontracting system bore most severely on the women in the trade, as the greater proportion of the finishers were women, and before the strike nearly every finisher was employed by a subcontractor.

The wages paid to finishers in the same shop, whether they were girls or men, were the same. But as compared with cutters, basters, and operators the finishers both before and since the strike had always been paid relatively below their deserts.

Wages were lowered, not only by the unstandardized rates prevalent through the sub-subcontracting system, but also by the practice of sending hand-finishing out of the factories and shops to be done at home. When inquiry was made of numerous self-supporting girls employed as cloak finishers, most of them said that at the end of the working day they were too exhausted to carry any sewing home. But work had been carried away by various strong girls in the trade, and by old men, and by young men to their families.

Among the women cloak finishers, Rose Halowitch, a delicate little Russian girl of seventeen, a helper in a cloak factory, who gave her account to the Consumers' League, about two years and a half ago received a wage of from $3.50 to $6 a week. In busy weeks she would work from eight in the morning till eight at night, with only one stop of an hour for her insufficient noon lunch, for which she could afford to spend only 6 or 7 cents.

Among the home workers Rhetta Salmonsen, a Russian woman of forty, the mother of four children, used to finish at night the cloaks brought to her by her husband, who worked through the day as an operator in a cloak factory. Between them they would earn $12 and $15 in busy weeks. In these weeks there were some occasions when Mrs. Salmonsen would do the housework till her husband came home late at night. After clearing away his supper and putting the children to bed, she would start felling seams at midnight; and in order to complete the cloaks he had brought before he returned to the shop in the morning, she would sew until she saw the white daylight coming in at the tenement window, and it was time for her to prepare breakfast again. With all this industry, as her husband had been ill and there had been three months of either slack work or idleness, the family had fallen in debt. Rent, food, and shoes alone had cost them $400. This left less than $100 a year for all the other clothing and expenses of six people in New York. Against such a standard of living as this, then, cloak finishers were obliged to compete as long as they attempted to underbid the hours and prices of home work.

Among the stronger girls who had taken work home, Ermengard Freiburg, a powerful young Galician woman of twenty-eight, who had been finishing cloaks ever since she was eleven, had earned $1 in the first week and had advanced rapidly to $3 a week. In the last years, however, she had not carried any work home. She had sewed on piece-work from eight in the morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or overtime. She had earned from $20 to $25 a week in the busy weeks when the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $6 and $7. Ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade fortunes. All her concern and conversation were for the numbers of women cloak makers who lacked her own wonderful strength. Successful without education, she was astonishingly destitute of the wearisome fallacy of complacent self-reference characteristic of many people of uncommon ability. During the past year she had twice been discharged for organizing the workers in cloak factories where she was employed. In the first establishment subcontracting had made conditions too hard for most of the women; and in the second, wages were too low for a decent livelihood for most of the workers.

These instances serve to express in the industry and lives of women cloak workers the subcontracting system, long seasonal hours, home work, and an unstandardized wage—the features under discussion in the cloak making trade in the spring of 1910.

The whole cloak making trade of New York presents, for an outside observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static. The cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade. In the general strike of the cloakmakers in 1896 nearly all the manufacturers were German. In the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were Galician and Russian.

This aspect of the New York needle trades must be borne in mind in realizing those occurrences in the last strike which led to the present joint effort of both manufacturers and workers to standardize the wage scale, to regulate seasonal hours, to abolish the subcontracting system and home work, and to establish the preferential Union shop throughout the metropolitan industry.

Dr. Henry Moskowitz, an effective non-partisan leader in achieving the settlement of the strike, was an eye-witness and student of all its crises, and the outline of its history below is mainly drawn from his chronicle and observation.

Between the cloak makers and the manufacturers of New York a contest waged in numerous strikes had continued for twenty-five years. The agreements reached at the close of these strikes had been only temporary, because the cloak makers were never able to maintain a Union strong enough to hold the points won at the close of the struggle. The cloak makers had always proved themselves heroic strikers, but feeble Unionists, lacking sustained power. Again and again, men and women who had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend Union meetings, fail to pay Union dues; and the organization, strong in the time of defeat through the members' zeal, would weaken through their negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success.

The main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the Cloak and Suit Manufacturers' Protective Association. The majority of the manufacturers in the association are men of standing in the trade, controlling large West Side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the New York output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses of New York. These cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and fourteen hundred, most of them on the East Side and the lower West Side, manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing. Such smaller houses had frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers. Many small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests.

On this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers' agreements. On the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms which enabled them to undersell their competitors. For this reason the manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers' agreements. With this mutual suspicion, the strike of 1910 began in June in two houses, an East Side and a West Side house. From the first house the workers went out because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on account of lockout.

On the 3d of July, a mass meeting of 10,000 cloakmakers gathered in Madison Square Garden. It was decided that the question of a general strike should be put to the vote of the 10,000 Union members. Balloting continued at the three polls of the three Union offices for two succeeding days. Of these 10,000, all but about 600 voted in favor of the strike, and of these 600 the majority afterward declared that they, too, were in sympathy with the action.

The wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the 10,000 workers assembled at Madison Square Garden was evinced by the fact that within the next week an army of over 40,000 men and women in the New York garment trade joined the Cloak and Suit Makers' Union.

These crowds poured into the three Union offices, filled the building entries, the streets before them, reached sometimes around the block—great processions of Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Italians, Galicians, and Russians, the last two nationalities in the greatest numbers, men and women who had been driven out of Europe by military conscription, by persecution and pillage, literally by fire and sword, bearded patriarchs, nicely dressed young girls with copies of Sudermann and Gorky under their arms, shawled, wigged women with children clinging to their skirts, handsome young Jews who might have stood as models for clothiers' advertisements—cutters, pressers, operators, finishers, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors; for these, too, struck with all the rest. In watching these sewing men and sewing women streaming through the Union office on Tenth Street—an office hastily improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds—it seemed to an onlooker that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised elements so very catholic and various. Who could lead such a body? How could the position of their great opponents, from day to day, be made known to them? As a matter of fact, no one man can be said to have led the 60,000 New York cloak makers. In the absence of such control, the corps of more prominent Union officers and their attorney, Meyer London, and through these men the multitudes of the Union members, were virtually guided by an East Side Yiddish paper, the Vorwaerts.

In the meantime, while these multitudes were flocking into the Union early in July, the Cloak Manufacturers' Association, representing beforehand about seventy-five houses, had by the inclusion of many smaller firms extended its membership to twelve hundred establishments.[25]

Soon after the formation of the alliance, it became apparent to the smaller firms that the larger ones were not in any haste for settlement. The latter felt that they could beat their opponents by a waiting game; while the smaller firms, with their lesser capital, scarcely more able than their workers to exist through a prolonged beleaguering of the cloak makers, felt that the present stand of the larger manufacturers involved, not only beating the Unionists, but driving themselves, the weaker manufacturers, out of the industry.

One by one, they left the association, sought the Union headquarters, and settled with the cloak makers. The profit reaped by these firms starting to work induced others to meet the workers' demands. By the end of July and the first week in August, six hundred smaller firms, employing altogether 20,000 cloakmakers, had settled.[26] In many instances the men and women marched back to their work with bands of music playing and with flying flags and banners.

In July two attempts were made, on behalf of the cloak makers, by the State Board of Arbitration to induce the manufacturers to meet the Union members and to arbitrate with them. These attempts failed because the Union insisted on the question of the closed shop as essential. The manufacturers refused to arbitrate the question of the closed shop.

At this juncture a public-spirited retailer of Boston, Mr. Lincoln Filene, entered the controversy. Mr. Filene resolved that, as a large consumer, he and his class had no right to shirk their responsibility by passively acquiescing in sweat-shop conditions. As an intermediary between the wholesaler and the public, the retailer had an important part in the conflict, not only because he suffered directly from the temporary paralysis of the industry, but also because his indifference to the claims of the worker for a just wage, sanitary factory conditions, abolition of home work, and for a decent working-day was equivalent to an active complicity in the guilt of the manufacturer. Through Mr. Filene's intervention, the manufacturers and the Union officials agreed to confer, and to request Mr. Louis Brandeis of Boston to act as chairman.

Mr. Brandeis had, at the outset, the confidence of both parties. Each side recognized in him that combination of wide legal learning and a social economic sense which had made him an effective participant in the development of the progressive political and industrial policies of the nation. The employers welcomed Mr. Brandeis because they had faith in his sense of fairness. The cloak makers welcomed him because of his brilliant and signal service to the entire trade-union movement and to American working women in securing from the United States Supreme Court the decision which declared constitutional the ten-hour law for the women laundry workers of Oregon.

The conference that was to have determined the industrial fortunes of more than 40,000 New York workers for the following year opened on Thursday morning, July 28, in a small room in the Metropolitan Life Building. Mr. Brandeis was in the chair. On one side of a long table sat the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a member of the Vorwaerts staff, and the Secretary of the International Garment Workers' Union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly Americanized; and three older men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to "scabs," a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop—a subject which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed in the conference. All these men, with the exception of their attorney, Mr. London, had cut and sewed on the benches of the garment trade. On the other side of the table sat the ten representatives of the manufacturers, some of them men of wide culture and learning, versed in philosophies, and prominent members of the Ethical Society, some of them New York financiers who had come from East Side sweat shops. Perhaps the most eager opponent of the closed shop in their body was a cosmopolitan young manufacturer, a linguist and "literary" man, interested in "style" from every point of view, who had introduced into the New York trade from abroad a considerable number of the cloak designs now widely worn throughout America. This man felt the keenest personal pride in his output. He is said at one time to have remarked, "Le cloak c'est moi" And, bizarre as it may seem to an outsider, a really sincere reason of his against accepting workmen on the recommendation of the Union was that the cloak manufacturer as an artist should adopt toward his workers "the attitude of Hammerstein to his orchestra." One of the manufacturers had been a strike leader in 1896. "Your bitterest opponent of fourteen years ago sits on the same side of the table with you now," said one of the older cloak makers, in a deep, intense voice, as the men took their places.

Mr. Brandeis opened the conference with these words: "Gentlemen, we have come together in a matter which we must all recognize is a very serious and an important business—not only to settle this strike, but to create a relation which will prevent similar strikes in the future. That work is one which, it seems to me, is approached in a spirit that makes the situation a very hopeful one, and I am sure, from my conferences with counsel of both parties[27] and with individual members whom they represent, that those who are here are all here with that desire."

Up to a certain point in the conference, which lasted for three days, this seemed to be true. The manufacturers agreed to abolish home work, to abolish subcontracting, to give a weekly half-holiday, besides the Jewish Sabbath, during June, July, and August, and to limit overtime work to two hours and a half a day during the busy season, with no work permitted after half past eight at night, or before eight in the morning. Beyond this, the question of hours was left to arbitration. Also, the question of wages was left to arbitration.

The last subject to be dealt with at the Brandeis conference was the general method of enforcing agreements between the Manufacturers' Association and the Union. It was in this discussion that the question of the closed shop and the open shop came before the conference.

Though the Union leaders had agreed to eliminate the discussion of the closed shop before they entered into negotiations, it was almost impossible for them to refrain from suggesting it as a means of enforcing agreements. As one of the cloak makers, one of the old leaders of the labor movement in America, said: "This organization of cloak makers in the city of New York can only control the situation where Union people are employed. They have absolutely no control of the situation where non-union people are employed. They cannot enforce any rules, nor any discipline of any kind, shape, or description, and if we are to cooeperate in any way that will be absolutely effective, then the ... Manufacturers' Association, ... it seems to me, should see that the necessary first step is that they shall run Union shops."[28]

The Union shop the speaker had in mind, the Union shop advocated by the Vorwaerts and desired, as it proved, by a majority of the workers, was a different matter from the closed shop, which constitutes a trade monopoly by limiting the membership of a trade to a certain comparatively small number of workers.

The institution of the closed shop is by intention autocratic and exclusive. The institution of the Union shop is by intention democratic and inclusive. With the cloak makers' organization, entrance into the Union was almost a matter of form. There were no prohibitive initiation fees, or dues, as in other unions. They offered every non-union man and woman an opportunity to join their ranks.

The manufacturers contended that they had no objection to the voluntary enlistment of non-union men in Union ranks; but they would not insist that all their workers belong to the Union.

This deadlock was reached on the third day of the conference. At this point Mr. Brandeis brought before the meeting the opinion that "an effective cooeperation between the manufacturers and the Union ... would involve, ... of necessity, a strong Union." "I realize," he said, ... "from a consideration of ... general Union questions, that in the ordinary open shop, where that prevails, there is great difficulty in building up the Union. I felt, therefore, particularly in view of the fact that so many of the members of the Garment Workers' Union are recent members, that to make an effective Union it was necessary that you should be aided ... by the manufacturers, ... and that aid could be effectively ... given by providing that the manufacturers should, in the employment of labor hereafter, give preference to Union men, where the Union men were equal in efficiency to any non-union applicants.... That presented in the rough what seemed to me a proper basis for coming together.... I think, if such an arrangement as we have discussed can be accomplished, it will be the greatest advance, not only that unionism has made in this country, but it would be one of the greatest advances that has generally been made in improving the condition of the working-man, for which unionism is merely an instrument."

This, then, was the first public presentation of the idea of the preferential shop. Mr. Brandeis, as a result of close study of labor disputes and a rich experience in settling strikes, had reached the conclusion that the position of the adherents of the closed as well as those of the open shop was economically and socially untenable. The inherent objection to the closed shop, he contends, is that it creates an uncontrolled and irresponsible monopoly of labor.

On the other hand, the so-called open shop, even if conducted with fairness and honesty on the part of the employer, is apt to result in a disintegration of the Union. It has been a frequent experience of organized labor that, even after a strike has been won, men drop out of the Union and leave the burden of Union obligation to the loyal minority, who, weakened in numbers, face not only a loss of what the strike has gained, but a retrogression of those Union standards that have been the result of past struggles and sacrifices.

By the preferential Union plan, when an employer obliges himself to prefer Union to non-union men, a Union man in good standing, that is, a Union man who has paid his dues and met his Union obligations, is insured employment to a limited extent, and the dues represent a premium paid by him for such employment.

It was not an easy task to secure assent to this idea from the manufacturers, for Mr. Brandeis made it clear that, while the plan did not oblige the manufacturers to coerce men into joining the Union, it clearly placed them on record in favor of a trade-union, and obliged them to do nothing, directly or indirectly, to injure the Union, and positively to do everything in their power, outside of coercion, to strengthen the Union.

In Mr. Brandeis' appeal to the Union representatives he referred to the history of the Cloak Makers' Union as a telling illustration of the futility of their past policy. He pointed out that the membership of the Union during a strike was no test of its strength—a Union's solidity rested upon its membership in time of peace. Were they not justified in assuming that what had occurred in the past of the Cloak Makers' Union would occur in the future, and that its membership would dwindle to a small number of the faithful? How could their organization be permanently strengthened?

Cloak making, as a seasonal trade, offered a fair field for proving the efficiency of the preferential plan, for in the slack season the manufacturers must, by its terms, prefer Union men. The industrial situation provided a test of this good faith. The Union leaders could then effectively show the non-union worker the advantage of the union membership.

The final formation of the preferential union shop as presented to both sides by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. London, and Mr. Cohen, in the Brandeis conference, was this: "The manufacturers can and will declare in appropriate terms their sympathy with the Union, their desire to aid and strengthen the Union, and their agreement that, as between Union and non-union men of equal ability to do the job, the Union men shall be given the preference."

The manufacturers were willing to make this agreement. But the representatives of the Union received it with a natural suspicion bred by years of oppression. "Can the man who has ground us down year after year suddenly be held by a sentiment for the organization he has fought for a quarter of a century?" they asked. "Between Union and non-union men, will he candidly give the preference to Union men of equal ability? Will he not rather, since the question of ability is a matter of personal judgment and is left to his judgment, prefer the non-union man, and justify his preference by a pretence, in each case, that he considers the skill of the non-union man superior?"

Nevertheless, a majority of the leaders of the cloak makers were willing to try the plan.... A minority refused. This minority was influenced partly by its certain knowledge that the 40,000 cloak makers would never accept an agreement based on the idea of the preferential Union shop, and partly by its complete distrust of the good will of the manufacturers. The minority was trusted and powerful. It won. The conference broke.

The Vorwaerts printed a statement that the preferential shop was the "open shop with honey." The news of the Brandeis conference reached the cloak makers through the bulletins of this paper; and during its progress and after its close, frantic crowds stood before the office on the lower East Side, waiting for these bulletins, eager for the victory of the closed shop, the panacea for all industrial evils.

After the decision of the leaders, after the breaking of the conference, the cloak makers who had settled gave fifteen per cent of their wages to support those standing out for the closed shop, and volunteered to give fifty per cent. The Vorwaerts headed a subscription list with $2000 for the strikers, and collected $50,000. A furore for the closed shop arose. Young boys and bearded old men and young women came to the office and offered half their wages, three-quarters of their wages. One boy offered to give all his wages and sell papers for his living. Every day the office was besieged by committees, appointed by the men and women in the settled shops, asking to contribute to the cause more than the percentage determined by the Union. These were men and women accustomed to enduring hardships for a principle, men and women who had fought in Russia, who were revolutionists, willing to make sacrifices, eager to make sacrifices. Their blind faith was the backbone of the strike.

This furore was continuing when, in the third week in August, the loss of contracts by the manufacturers and the general stagnation of business due to the idleness of 40,000 men and women, normally wage-earners, induced a number of bankers and merchants of the East Side to bring pressure for a settlement of the strike. Louis Marshall, an attorney well known in New York in Jewish charities, assembled the lawyers of both sides. They drew up an agreement in which the preferential union shop again appeared as the basis of future operations, formulated as in the Brandeis conference.

The Vorwaerts printed the result of the Marshall conference with deep concern. It maintained a neutral attitude. The editorials urged that the readers consider the whole document soberly, discuss it freely in local meetings, and vote for themselves, on their own full understanding, after mature conviction on each point.

Tremendous crowds surged around the Vorwaerts office. They almost mobbed the East Side leaders, with their voluble questioning about the preferential Union shop. Thousands of men and women and children called out pleas and reproaches and recriminations in an avid personal demonstration possible only to their race. "Oh, you wouldn't sell us out?" they cried desperately. "You wouldn't sell us out? You are our hope."

Imagine what these days of doubt, of an attempt to understand, meant to these multitudes, knowing no industrial faith but that of the closed shop which had failed them absolutely, wanderers from a strange country, turning wildly to their leaders, who could only tell them that they must determine their own fates, they must decide for themselves. These leaders have been blamed at once for their autocracy and for not mobilizing and informing and directing these multitudes more clearly and firmly. Their critics failed to conceive the remarkably various economic and political histories of the enormous concourse of human beings engaged in the needle trades of New York.

However that may be, when the workers and their families surged around the Vorwaerts office and asked the leaders if they had betrayed them, Schlesinger, the business manager, and the old strike leaders addressed them from the windows, and said to the people, with painful emotion: "You are our masters. What you decide we will report back to the association lawyers. What you decide shall be done."

Terrible was the position of these men. Well they knew that the winter was approaching; that the closed shop could not win; that the workers could not hear the truth about the preferential Union shop, and that the man who stood avowedly for the preferential shop, now the best hope of victory for the Union, would be called a traitor to the Union.

In great anxiety, the meetings assembled. The workers had all come to the same conclusion. They all rejected the Marshall agreement.

Soon after this, the tide of loyalty to the closed shop was incited to its high-water mark by the action of Judge Goff, who, as a result of a suit of one of the firms of the Manufacturers' Association, issued an injunction against peaceful picketing, on the part of the strikers, on the ground that picketing for the closed shop was an action of conspiracy in constraint of trade, and therefore unlawful.

The manufacturers were now, naturally, more deeply distrusted than ever on the East Side.[29] The doctrine of the closed shop became almost ritualistic. Early in September, one of the Labor Day parades was headed by an aged Jew, white-bearded and fierce-eyed,—a cloak maker who knew no other words of English than those he uttered,—who waved a purple banner and shouted at regular intervals: "Closed shop! Closed shop!" That man represented the spirit of thousands of immigrants who have recently become trade-unionists in America. Impossible to say to such a man that the idea of the closed shop had been an enemy to the spread of trade-unionism in this country by its implication of monopolistic tyranny.

Impossible, indeed, to say anything to Unionists whose reply to every just representation is, "Closed shop"; or to employers whose reply to every just representation is, "We do not wish other people to run our business." This reply the Marshall conference still had to hear for some days. It was now the first week in September. There was great suffering among the cloak makers. On the manufacturers' side, contracts heretofore always filled by certain New York houses, in this prolonged stoppage of their factories were finally lost to them and placed with establishments in other important cloak making centres—Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and even abroad. Two or three large Union houses settled for terms, in hours and wages, which were satisfactory to every one concerned, though lower than the demands on these points listed in the cloak makers' first letter.

Curiously enough, wages and hours had been left to arbitration, had never been thoroughly considered in the whole situation before. Neither the workers nor the employers had clearly stated what they really would stand for on these vital points. No one, not even the most wildly partisan figures on either side, supposed that the first demands as to wages and hours represented an ultimatum. The debaters in the Marshall conference now agreed on feasible terms on these points,[30] though, curiously enough, the rates for piece-work were left to the arbitration of individual shops. In spite of this fact, the majority of the workers are paid by piece-work. The former clauses of the agreement relating to the abolition of home work and of subcontracting remained practically as they had stood before.[31] As for the idea of the preferential Union shop, it had undoubtedly been gaining ground. Naturally, at first, appearing to the Vorwaerts' staff and to many ardent unionists as opposed to unionism, it had now assumed a different aspect. This was the final formulation of the preferential Union shop in the Marshall agreement: "Each member of the Manufacturers' Association is to maintain a Union shop, a 'Union shop' being understood to refer to a shop where Union standards as to working conditions prevail, and where, when hiring help, Union men are preferred, it being recognized that, since there are differences of skill among those employed in the trade, employers shall have freedom of selection between one Union man and another, and shall not be confined to any list nor bound to follow any prescribed order whatsoever.

"It is further understood that all existing agreements and obligations of the employer, including those to present employees, shall be respected. The manufacturers, however, declare their belief in the Union, and that all who desire its benefits should share in its burdens."

As will be seen, this formulation signified that the Union men available for a special kind of work in a factory must be sought before any other men. The words "non-union man," the words arousing the antagonism of the East Side, are not mentioned. But whether the preference of Union men is or is not insisted on as strongly as in the Brandeis agreement must remain a matter of open opinion.

This formulation was referred to the strike committee. It was accepted by the strike committee, and went into force on September 8.

The Vorwaerts posted the news as a great Union victory. At the first bulletin, the news ran like wildfire over the East Side. Multitudes assembled; men, women, and children ran around Rutgers Square, in tumult and rejoicing. The workers seized London, the unionists' lawyer, and carried him around the square on their shoulders, and they even made him stand on their shoulders and address the crowd from them. People sobbed and wept and laughed and cheered; and Roman Catholic Italians and Russian Jews, who had before sneered at each other as "dagoes" and "sheenies," seized each other in their arms and called each other brother.

Now that the men and women have returned to their shops, it remains for all the people involved—the manufacturers, the workers, the retailers, and the interested public—to make a dispassionate estimate of this new arrangement. Is the preferential shop so delicate a fabric as to prove futile? Has it sustaining power? Will the final agreement prove, at last, to be a Union victory? Will both sides act in good faith—the manufacturers always honestly preferring Union men, the Union leaders always maintaining a democratic and an inclusive Union, without autocracy or bureaucratic exclusion? Undoubtedly there will be failures on both sides. But the New York cloak makers' strike may be historical, not only for its results in the cloak industry, but for its contribution to the industrial problems of the country.

No outsider can read the statement of the terms of the manufacturers' preference without feeling that a joint agreement committee should have been established to consider cases of alleged unfair discrimination against Union workers. On the other hand, no outsider can hear without a feeling of uneasiness such an assertion as was made to one of the writers—that strike breakers had been obliged to pay an initiation fee of one hundred dollars to enter the Cloak Makers' Union.

There is undoubtedly, on both sides, need of patience and a long educational process to change the attitude of hostility and bitterness engendered by over twenty years of a false policy of antagonism. But never before, in the cloak makers' history, have the men and women gone back to work after a strike holding their heads as high as they do to-day.[32] It can be reasonably believed that their last summer's struggle will achieve a permanent gain for the workers' industrial future. This narrative of the industrial fortunes of the women cloak makers in New York in the last year is given for its statement of the effects of the struggle for the Preferential Union Shop on their trade histories, and for its account of their gains as workers in the same trade with men.

These cloak makers' gains were local. What national gains have American working women been able to obtain? For an answer to this question we turned to the results of the National Consumers' League inquiry concerning the fortunes of women workers in laundries and its chronicle of the decision of the Federal Supreme Court on the point of their hours of labor.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: Printed statement of the Cloak, Skirt, and Suit Manufacturers' Protective Association, July 11, 1910.]

[Footnote 24: Estimate of the Waverly Place Office of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, November 26 to 30.]

[Footnote 25: For this account of the position of different cloak manufacturers the writers wish to acknowledge the kindness of Miss Mary Brown Sumner of the Survey.]

[Footnote 26: These were the most important clauses of these early settlements as regards women workers:—

I. The said firm hereby engages the Union to perform all the tailoring, operating, pressing, finishing, cutting, and buttonhole-making work to be done by the firm in the cloak and suit business during one year ... from date; and the Union agrees to perform said work in a good and workmanlike manner.

II. During the continuance of this agreement, operators shall be paid in accordance with the annexed price list. The following is the scale of wages for week hands: ... skirt makers, not less than $24 per week; skirt basters, not less than $15 per week; skirt finishers, not less than $12 per week; buttonhole makers, not less than $1.10 per hundred buttonholes.

III. A working week shall consist of forty-eight hours in six working-days.

IV. No overtime work shall be permitted between the fifteenth day of November and the fifteenth day of January and during the months of June and July. During the rest of the year employees may be required to work overtime, provided all the employees of the firm, as well as all the employees of the outside contractors of the firm, are engaged to the full capacity of the factories. No overtime shall be permitted on Saturday nor on any day for more than two and a half hours, nor before 8 A.M. or after 8 P.M. For overtime work the employees shall receive double the usual pay. No contracting or subcontracting shall be permitted by the firm inside its factory, and no operator or finisher shall be permitted more than one helper.

XIII. No work shall be given employees to be done at their homes.

XV. Only members of respective locals above named shall be employed by the firm to do the said work.]

[Footnote 27: Mr. London for the cloak makers, and Mr. Cohen for the manufacturers.]

[Footnote 28: Stenographic minutes of the Brandeis conference.]

[Footnote 29: This decision met with disapproval, not only on the East Side. The New York Evening Post said: "Justice Goff's decision embodies rather strange law and certainly very poor policy. One need not be a sympathizer with trade-union policy, as it reveals itself to-day, in order to see that the latest injunction, if generally upheld, would seriously cripple such defensive powers as legitimately belong to organized labor."

And the Times: "This is the strongest decision ever handed down against labor."]

[Footnote 30: These are the clauses of the Marshall agreement on wage scale and hours of labor which affect women workers. The term "sample makers" includes, of course, sample makers of cloaks. The week workers among the cloak makers are principally the sample makers. But the greater proportion of the workers in the cloak factories are piece-workers. This explains why there is no definite weekly wage schedule listed for cloak workers as such. Sample makers, $22; sample skirt makers, $22; skirt basters, $14; skirt finishers, $10; buttonhole makers, Class A, a minimum of $1.20 per 100 buttonholes; Class B a minimum of 80 cents per 100 buttonholes.

As to piece-work, the price to be paid is to be agreed upon by a committee of the employees in each shop and their employer. The chairman of said price committee of the employees shall act as the representative of the employees in their dealings with the employer.

The weekly hours of labor shall consist of 50 hours in 6 working days, to wit, nine hours on all days except the sixth day, which shall consist of five hours only.

No overtime work shall be permitted between the fifteenth day of November and the fifteenth day of January, or during the months of June and July, except upon samples.

No overtime work shall be permitted on Saturdays, except to workers not working on Saturdays, nor on any day or more than two and one-half hours, nor before 8 A.M., nor after 8.30 P.M.

For overtime work all week workers shall receive double the usual pay.]

[Footnote 31: There has been practically no complaint on the part of the workers or the public concerning the sanitary conditions of the larger houses. At present the strike settlement has established a joint board of sanitary control, composed of three representatives of the public, Dr. W.J. Scheffelin, chairman, Miss Wald of the Nurses' Settlement, and Dr. Henry Moskowitz of the Down-town Ethical Society; two representatives of the workers, Dr. George Price, Medical Sanitary Inspector of the New York Department of Health, 1895-1904, and Mr. Schlesinger, Business Manager of the Vorwaerts; and two representatives of the manufacturers, Mr. Max Meier and Mr. Silver. The work of this committee will be the enforcement of uniform sanitary conditions in all shops, including the more obscure and smaller establishments.]

[Footnote 32: This statement is written in the last week of September, 1910.]



CHAPTER VI

WOMEN LAUNDRY WORKERS IN NEW YORK

(This article is composed of the reports of Miss Carola Woerishofer, Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood, and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins, supplemented with an account of the Federal Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of the Oregon Ten-Hour Law for laundry workers.)

What do self-supporting women away from home in New York give in their work, and what do they get from it, when their industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength? For a reply to this question the National Consumers' League turned to the reports of women's work as machine ironers and hand ironers, workers at mangles, folders, and shakers of sheets and napkins from wringers in the steam laundries of New York.

For, although the labor at the machines in the laundry wash-rooms is done by men, and all work in laundries consists largely of machine tending, still women's part in the industry can be performed only by unusually strong women.[33]

In the winter of 1907-1908 the National Consumers' League had received from different parts of New York a series of letters filled with various complaints against specified laundries in this city—complaints stating that hours were long and irregular, wages unfair, the laundries dirty, and the girls seldom allowed to sit down, and containing urgent pleas to the women of the Consumers' League to help the women laundry workers.

After consulting some of the laundry women, the League determined to secure through a special inquiry a well-ascertained statement of conditions as a basis for State factory legislation for uniform improvements. A few months before, the constitutionality of the present New York legislation, as well as of almost all of the State legislation concerning the hours of work of adult women in this country, had been virtually determined by the decision of the Federal Supreme Court in regard to the ten-hour law for women laundry workers in Oregon. The opinion of the National Supreme Court, which practically confirmed the passed New York laundry laws and made future laws for fair regulation for the women workers seem practicable, will be given after the account of women's work in laundries in New York.

Miss Carola Woerishofer conducted the inquiry, which was confined to steam laundries, as hand laundries were more favorably described by many reliable authorities. Among these, the large laundries were commercial laundries, such as we all patronize, and hotel and hospital laundries. The features chiefly observed in all these establishments were sanitation, the danger of injury, and wages and hours of labor. For the account of the hospital and hotel laundries the Consumers' League of the city of New York obtained the services of Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood of Smith College and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins of Wellesley College. As a means of investigating commercial laundries, Miss Woerishofer, answering advertisements as they came, worked in laundries in trade employed in nearly every branch of the industry in which women are engaged throughout the borough of Manhattan. Her report follows.

I

"Naturally, the first question which faced me was that of finding a job. For this I turned to the laundry want 'ads' in the newspapers. To my surprise, as my investigation was made in the summer, which is, curiously enough, by far the slackest season in New York commercial laundries, I was never without work for more than a day at a time, although I changed continually, for the sake of experience, averaging about a week in a place.

"The first establishment to which I went was known as a model laundry. It was large and well ventilated and had a dry floor. These sanitary conditions may be said to be fairly typical. In only one laundry did I find a girl who was compelled to stand in a wet place, though water overflowed sometimes into the girls' quarters from the wash-rooms, where the men worked. In some of these wash-rooms the water is at times ankle-deep, a condition due only to bad drainage, as other wash-rooms are absolutely dry. Whatever the condition of the work-rooms, the women's dressing-rooms frequently had insanitary plumbing, and were verminous and unhealthful. In one laundry the water supply was contaminated, smelling and tasting offensively when it came from the faucet, and worse after it had passed through the cooler. The women here at first kept bottles of soda-water. Some old women had beer. But on a series of hot days, with hours from half past seven to twelve, and from one till any time up to ten at night, 10 cents' worth of beer or soda-water a day did not go far to alleviate thirst, and soon drank a big hole in a wage of $5 a week. A complaint was sent to the Board of Health. After nearly three weeks, the Board of Health replied that the complaint must be sent to the Water Department. From the Water Department no reply could possibly come for several weeks more. And in the meantime, all the women workers in the laundry, impelled by intolerable thirst, drank the contaminated water.

"The work-room where I was employed had, on the whole, plenty of windows. These were left open. But when a room is large and full of machinery, artificial light is needed all day, and the outside air does not come in very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. On going out at noon from a laundry where I had dipped shirts in hot starch all the morning at a breakneck pace, I was struck by the coolness of the day. That night I discovered that the thermometer had been registering 96 deg. in the shade. A few fans should be put in each laundry. They could be run by the power that runs the machines.

"In the 'model laundry,' I worked at first at a mangle, running spreads and sheets and towels between two revolving cylinders. Here I found there was danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders in the process of feeding. The mangle had a guard, to be sure,—a flexible metal bar about three-quarters of an inch above the feeding-apron in front of the cylinder. But I learned that this acted as a warning rather than a protection. 'Once you get your fingers in, you never get them out,' Jenny, the Italian girl beside me, said repeatedly. The Italian girls Anglicized their names, and Jenny had probably been Giovanna at home.

"At the collar machine, at which I was stationed after lunch, there was an adequate guard where the collars were slipped in. Where they came out, however, they had to be pushed in rapid succession under the farther side of a burning hot cylinder with no guard at all. To avoid touching the cylinder with my arm in this process, I was obliged either to raise it unnaturally high, or to stand on tiptoe. 'You didn't get burned to-day or yesterday,' said Jenny, 'but you sure will sometime. Everybody does on that machine.'

"In the ironing of collars and cuffs by machinery, there is continual risk of burns on hands and arms. At a sleeve-ironing machine, in another place I received some slight burn every day. And when I asked the girls if this were because I was 'green,' they replied that every one got burned at that machine all the time. Each burn is due to 'carelessness,' but if the girls were to be careful, they would have to focus their minds on self-protection instead of the proper accomplishment of their task, and would also have to work at a lower rate of speed than the usual output of the laundries demands. A graver danger than that from hot surfaces and from slightly protected gas flames is from unguarded belts and gears.

"At mangles, too, the danger is grave. What the girls call 'millionaire work'—work that has to come out straight—in contrast with 'boarding-house work," must be shoved up to within a quarter of an inch of the cylinder. Fingers once caught in such mangles are crushed. Consider, in connection with these two facts, the high rate of speed at which the girls feed the work into the machine, and the precarious character of their task will be realized. However, in many laundries, good mangles for table and bed linen are in use, which either have a stationary bar in front of the first cylinder, or else have the first roll, whether connected or not with the power, attached to a lever, and so constructed as to lift the pressure immediately from the finger, should it be slipped underneath.[34]

"For the purpose of inspecting the machinery I visited with different factory inspectors, through the courtesy extended by the Department of Labor, all, so far as I was able to determine, of the commercial steam laundries in the borough of Manhattan. Out of sixty laundries inspected, I found that twenty-six had either unguarded or inadequately guarded mangles, collar presses, and collar dampeners, or else unguarded or inadequately guarded gears and belts. In a laundry visited when the boss was out, we conferred with the engineer about one particularly bad mangle.

"'What's this machine for? To cut girls' hands off?' asked the inspector.

"'Well,', said the engineer, 'it came pretty near finishing up the last girl we had here—caught her arm in an apron-string and got both hands under the roll—happened over two months ago. Fingers cut off one hand, and all twisted and useless on the other.'

"Instead of having the machine guarded, after this mutilation, the owner had employed a man to take chances here, instead of a girl.

"This and all the illegal defects discovered were ordered remedied by the factory inspectors. But New York labor legislation, no matter how excellent, cannot be enforced, with the present number of inspectors. An inspector will arrive on one day; will discover that rules are violated; will impose a fine; will return in the next week and discover that rules are not violated; will, perforce, return to another part of the field; and after that the violation will continue as if he had never observed it.

"Further, it is difficult for the inspector to discover, through employees, violations of the State laws enacted in their interest, as they risk being discharged for complaints. In addition, moreover, to this danger, bringing a charge means that the complainant must go to court, thus losing both time and money. A union organization would be the only possible means of settling the matter. Made up of the workers themselves, it is always present to observe violations; and it offers to the workers the advantage of reporting to the State, not as individuals, but as a body. The cooeperative spirit present among almost all of the laundry workers should make organization entirely feasible.[35]

"On entering a new situation I found, as a rule, cordiality and friendly interest. On several occasions it was expressed by this social form:—

"'Say, you got a feller?'

"'Sure. Ain't you got one?'

"'Sure.'

"The girls are really very kind to one another, helping one another in their work, and by loans of lunch and money.

"In one place a woman with a baby to support—a shaker earning $4.50 a week, and heavily in debt—used to borrow weekly a few pennies apiece from all the girls around her to pay her rent. And the pennies were always forthcoming, although the girls had hardly more than she had, and knew quite well that they were seldom returned. There was a great deal of swearing among the women in almost all of the laundries, but it was of an entirely good-natured character.

"While there was a natural division of labor, there was also an artificial one, created during lunch hours. A deep-rooted feeling of antagonism and suspicion exists between the Irish and the Italians, each race clubbing together from the different departments in separate bands.

"Aside from this distinction, there is another social cleavage—the high-wage earners sitting apart from the low-wage earners, through natural snobbishness. In one laundry, the high-wage earners, though they often treated the $5 girls to stray sardines, cake, etc., were in the habit of sending young girls to the delicatessen shop to get their lunches, and also to the saloon for beer. Then the girl had to hurry out on the street in her petticoat and little light dressing-sack that she wore for work, for they gave her no time to change. For this service the girl would get 10 cents a week from each of the women she did errands for. They did not—the boss starcher explained to me with quiet elegance—think of such a thing as drinking beer behind the boss's back, but they 'just didn't want him to know.'

"The same difficulties in enforcing the law about protected machinery in laundries exist in the enforcing of the law requiring that adult women in laundries shall not work more than sixty hours in a week. Just as in the case of protected machinery, these difficulties might be partly removed through trade organization.

"Nearly all laundry work is performed standing, and on heavy days, when the work is steady, except at lunch time, very few women get a chance to sit down during any part of the day. The chief difference between laundry work and that of other factories is in the irregularity of the hours. A manufacturer knows more or less at the beginning of the week how much work his factory will have to do, and can usually distribute overtime, or engage or lay off extra girls, according to his knowledge. The laundryman can never estimate the amount of work to be done until the laundry bundles are actually on the premises. He can never tell when the hotels, restaurants, steamboats, and all the small 'hand' laundries, whose family laundries he rough-dries, and whose collars and table and bed linen he finishes, will want their washing back. Hard as this is for the employer, it is still harder for the workers. The small hand laundry can seldom keep customers waiting longer than from Monday till Saturday. On this account, the steam laundry will be obliged to rush all of its work for the 'hand' laundry through in one or two days. I found some steam laundries in which no work at all is done on Monday or Saturday, but in the busy season the place keeps running regularly on the other four days from seven in the morning till half past eleven and twelve at night. Very seldom is there any compensation for these long hours. Few of the laundries pay overtime. Of these, some dock the girls proportionately for every hour less than sixty a week they work. No laundries in which I worked, except one, give supper money. A piece-worker at least gets some advantage to counterbalance long hours. But the week worker not only lacks recompense for actual labor, but is often put to greater expense.

"She does not know when her long day is coming, so she must buy her supper, when supper is waiting for her at home. She is often so tired that she must spend 5 cents for carfare, instead of walking. Seven cents is a fair average spent upon supper—2 cents for bread and 5 cents for sausage, cheese, or meat. If overtime is worked three nights a week, the girl is out of pocket 36 cents—not a small item in wages of $4.50 and $5 a week, where every penny counts. Often, also, she either has not extra money or she forgets to bring it. Then she has to share some one else's lunch. The girls are always willing to divide, however slight their own provisions. I once saw a 1-cent piece of cake shared by four girls.

"There are two kinds of long hours: those due to bad systematizing of laundry work, creating long waits between lots; and those due to very heavy work. In regard to the first kind, it must be said that the shirt starchers, who are the main sufferers from waiting for work, are the best paid, and hence are not as indignant at frequent overtime as the week workers are. Besides, though obliged to stay in the work-room, they are frequently seated throughout their waiting time, which sometimes lasts for four or five hours. I saw one woman about to be confined, who sometimes starched shirts until two in the morning, after arriving at the laundry at half past seven on the morning before.

"The other kind of long hours involves constant standing, and is most apt to occur in laundries where only mangle work is done. These laundries do not tend to work late at night, but they more frequently violate the sixty-hour law than the others do. Work is almost absolutely steady. The women stand on their feet ten and twelve hours, with just half an hour or an hour for lunch, and work with extreme speed.

"If your job is shaking the wrinkles out of towels and sheets, this in itself is violent exercise. The air is hot and damp because you stand near the washers. You are hurried at a furious rate. When you finish one lot, you have to roll heavy baskets, and dump them upon your table, and then go on shaking and shaking again, only to do more heavy loading and dumping. One girl always had a headache late in the afternoon. After standing ten or twelve hours, there are few whose feet or backs do not ache. The effect on the feet is perhaps the chief ground of complaint. Some merely wear rags about their feet, others put on old shoes or slippers, which they slit up in front and at the sides. The girls who press skirts by machine and those who do the body ironing have to press down on pedals in order to accomplish their tasks, and find this, as a rule, harder than standing still. An occasional worker, however, pronounces it a relief. But several I met had serious internal trouble which they claimed began after they had started laundry work. Few laundries give holidays with pay. Some give half a day on the legal holidays. In the others, 'shaking' and 'body ironing' and all the hard, heavy processes of laundry work continue straight through Christmas day, straight through New Year's day, straight through the Fourth of July, just as at other times.

"In recompense for these long hours of standing, the piece-worker often has fairly high payment financially. But the opposite is true of the week worker. In the down-town laundries, where the wage scale runs lower, the amount is usually inadequate for the barest need.

"The payment in laundries is extremely varied. The wages of the majority of women I talked to in laundries amounted to between $8 and $4.50 a week. But wages ranged from the highest exceptional instances in piece-work, in hand starching and in hand ironing, at $25 a week, for a few weeks in the year, down to $3 a week.

"High wages generally involved long hours. For instance, in one laundry, young American women between twenty and thirty were employed as hand starchers at piece-work. They made $10 a week, when times were slack, by working once or twice a week, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. In busy times they sometimes made $22 a week by working occasionally from seven o'clock one morn till two o'clock the following morning.[36]

"Although Italians, Russians, Irish, Polish, Germans, Americans, and Swedes are employed in New York laundries, the greater part of the work is done by Irish and Italians. The Irish receive the higher prices, the Italians the lower prices. The best-paid work, the hand starching of shirts and collars and the hand ironing, is done by Irish women, by colored women, and by Italian and Jewish men. The actual process of hand starching may be learned in less than one hour. Speed in the work may be acquired in about ten days. On the other hand, to learn the nicer processes of the ill-paid work of feeding and folding at the mangle—the passing of towels and napkins through the machine without turning in or wrinkling the edges, the passing of table-covers between cylinders in such a way that the work will never come out in a shape other than square—to learn these nicer processes requires from thirteen to fifteen days. The reason for the low wages listed for mangle work seems to lie only in nationality. Mangle work, as a rule, is done by Italians. In two laundries I found, working side by side with American and Irish girls, Italians, who were doing exactly the same work, and were paid less, solely because they were Italians. The employer said he never paid the Italians more than $4 a week.

"In the next best-paid work after hand starching, the work of hand ironing, paying roughly from $8 to $18 a week, Italian women are practically never employed.

"The worst part of mangle work, the shaking, is done by young girls and by incapable older women of many nationalities. One of the ill-paid girls, who had $4.50 a week, gave $3.50 a week board to an aunt, who never let her delay payment a day. She had only $1 a week left for every other expense. This girl was 'keeping company' with a longshoreman, who had as much as $25 in good weeks. She had been engaged to him, and had broken her engagement because he drank—'he got so terribly drunk.' But when I saw her she was in such despair with her low wage, her hard hours of standing, and only $5 a week ahead of her, that she was considering whether she should not swallow her well-founded terror of the misery his dissipation might bring upon them, and marry him, after all.

"The shakers are the worst paid and the hardest worked employees. The young girls expect to become folders and feeders. The older women are widows with children, or women with husbands sick or out of work or in some way incapacitated. Indeed, many of all these laundry workers, probably a larger proportion than in any other trade, are widows with children to support. 'The laundry is the place,' said one of the women, 'for women with bum husbands, sick, drunk, or lazy.' The lower the pay and the damper and darker the laundry, the older and worse off these women seem to be.

"The low wages and long hours of the great majority of the women workers, the gradual breaking and loss of the normal health of many lives through undernourishment and physical strain, are, in my judgment, the most serious danger in the laundries. The loss of a finger, the maiming of a hand, even the mutilation of the poor girl who lost the use of both of her hands—the occasional casualties for a few girls in the laundries—are, though so much more salient, far less grave than the exhaustion and underpayment of the many.

"This, then, is the situation in general for women workers in the commercial laundries. With respect to sanitation, the heat is excessive wherever ironing is done by machinery. Many of the rooms are full of steam. Some of the laundries have insanitary toilet and cloak rooms. With respect to danger of injury, in a large proportion of places there is unguarded or inadequately guarded machinery. In respect to hours of labor, these often extend over the sixty-hour limit in rush seasons. The hours are not only long, but irregular. A twelve to fourteen-hour working-day is not infrequent. In a few places closing on Mondays and Saturdays, or open for short hours on Mondays, the working-day runs up on occasions to seventeen hours. Almost all the laundry work is done standing. Wages for the majority of the workers are low."