usually been some years in one of our cities, working in a factory or
a sweatshop, let us say as a garment-worker. The religious and social
liberty which she has here learnt to consider her due has stimulated
her desire for further freedom, while the tremendous industrial
pressure under which she earns her daily bread stirs the keenest
resentment. One day patience, Jewish girlish patience, reaches its
limit. A cut in wages, exhausting overtime, or the insults of an
overbearing foreman, and an unpremeditated strike results. It may be
small, poorly managed, and unsuccessful. The next time things may go
better, and the girls come in touch with a union, and take their first
lessons in the meaning of collective bargaining. (What is passing in
the minds of the rank and file at this stage I am not certain. The
obscurities of their psychology are more difficult to fathom.) But I
am sure that to the leaders of the young protestants it is not so
much in the light of a tower of refuge that the trade union presents
itself, but rather as an instrument by means of which they believe
that they can control a situation which has become unbearable. As
happens to many endowed with the gift of leadership, they travel much
farther than they had any idea of when they set out. As time goes on,
if they are real leaders, they learn to understand human nature in
its varied aspects, the human nature of bosses, as well as the human
nature of their fellow-wage-earners. After a year or two as presidents
or secretaries of their local, you will hear these fiery-tongued
little orators preaching endurance, in order to gain an end not
obtainable today, aye, even advising compromise, they to whom the very
word compromise had erstwhile been impossible. This implies no loss of
principle, no paltering with loyalty, but merely putting in practice
the wisdom of the experienced statesman. Nearly all, sooner or later,
embrace the socialist philosophy, and many are party members. In that
philosophy they find a religious sanction in their most determined
struggles after victory, and unfailing support and consolation in the
hour of defeat.
As for the rank and file, with them, too, something of the same mental
processes probably goes on in a minor degree; but they are much longer
in learning their lesson, and meanwhile are often exceedingly hard to
direct. They are impulsive beyond belief. It used once to be remarked
that Jewish girls were the easiest of all to organize during a strike,
and the hardest of all to hold in the union afterwards. This is
fortunately not so true today, now that there are a few trained
leaders of their own race, whom they trust, and who understand their
moods, and know, better than most Americans, how to handle them.
The alien is forever being resented as an obstacle, even if an
unconscious one, in the way of organization. Yet as far as women are
concerned, it is to this group of aliens in particular that is due the
recent tremendous impulse towards organization among the most poorly
paid women. In the sewing trades, and in some other trades, such as
candy-making, it is the American girls who have accepted conditions,
and allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. It is the foreign
girl, and especially the Slavic Jewess who has been making the fight
for higher wages, shorter hours, better shop management, and above
all, for the right to organize; and she has kept it up, year after
year, and in city after city, in spite of all expectations to the
contrary.
One of the indirect benefits of the colossal strikes in the sewing
trades in which these Jewish girls have played so conspicuous a
part has been the increasing degree in which those of differing
nationalities have come to understand one another, as men and women
having common difficulties and common rights, as all alike members
of the great working people. Through sore trial many have learnt the
meaning of "class consciousness," who never heard of the word.
The new spirit is beginning to touch the Italian girl, and as time
goes on, she, too, will be brought into the fold of unionism. To meet
with large success, we need as leaders and organizers, Italians, both
men and women, of the type of Arthur Carotti, as capable and devoted.
The Italian girl is guarded in her home as is the girl of no other
race, and this works both for good and for evil. The freedom of the
streets, accorded so unquestioningly to their girls by the parents of
other nationalities, is conscientiously denied to the Italian girl. No
respectable family would permit their daughters to go to any sort of
an evening gathering, to attend church or dance or union meeting,
unless accompanied by father, mother or brother. While no one can
help deeply respecting the principles of family affection and
responsibility which dictate this code of manners, there is equally no
blinking the fact that it raises a most serious barrier in the way of
organizing girls of Italian parentage. Nor on the other hand is it
of the least avail to protect the girl against the evils of the
industrial system of which the whole family form a part. In especial
it does not serve to shield her from the injurious effects of cruel
overwork. In no class of our city population do we find more of this
atrocious evil, misnamed homework than among Italian families,
and whether it is sewing, artificial-flower-or feather-making or
nut-picking, neither grown daughters nor little children are spared
here. Along with the mother and under her eye, the whole group
work day after day, and often far into the night at occupations in
themselves harmless enough under proper conditions, but ruinous to
health and happiness when permitted to intrude under the family roof.
For the wrong of home-work is not to be measured even by the injury
suffered by the workers themselves. All parasitic trades, such as
these, lower wages in the open market. The manufacturer is continually
impelled to cut down wages in his shops to keep pace with the
competition of the ill-remunerated home-worker.
As I have said above, I believe that every race that has settled down
here in this America has some special contribution to bestow, which
will work for good to the whole labor movement. I have instanced the
case of the Slavic Jewess as one who has certainly arrived. From
others the gift has still to come. From the Italian girl it will come
in good time, for they are beginning to enter the unions now, and from
the lips of their own fellow-countrywomen even Italian mothers will
learn to accept for their daughters the gospel they will not listen to
from foreigners like ourselves. The most severely handicapped of all
the nationalities so far, to my thinking, is the Polish. They are what
is called pure Slavs, that is, with no Jewish blood. They are peasant
girls and cannot be better described than they are in a pamphlet
on "The Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants," published by the
Juvenile Protective League to Chicago.
In these places Polish girls are chosen for the following reasons:
1. Because they come of strong peasant stock, and accomplish a large
amount of work.
2. They are very thorough in what they do.
3. They are willing to take low wages.
4. They are very submissive, that is, they never protest.
5. They are ignorant of the laws of this country, and are easily
imposed upon.
6. They never betray their superiors, no matter what they see.
What a scathing indictment of the American people is set forth in this
brief summing up!
The trades that swallow up these strong, patient, long-enduring
creatures are work in the meat-canning plants, and dish-washing and
scrubbing in restaurants and hotels. These really valuable qualities
of physical strength and teachableness, unbalanced by any sense of
what is due to themselves, let alone their fellow-workers, prove their
industrial ruin.
It is only when they are fortunate enough to get into a better class
of work, and when they chance upon some well-organized establishment
and are drawn into the union as a matter of course that we find Polish
girls in unions at all. Intellectually they are not in the running
with the Russian Jewess and the peasant surroundings of their
childhood have offered them few advantages. One evening, for instance,
there were initiated into a glove-workers' local seventeen new Polish
members. Of these two only were able to read and write English, and of
the remainder not more than half were able to read and write Polish.
As to what is to be the later standing and the ultimate contribution
of the Polish girl, I cannot hazard a guess. I only know that she
possesses fine qualities which we are not utilizing and which we may
be obliterating by the cruel treatment so many thousands of Polish
girls are receiving at our hands.
I cannot see any prospect of organizing them in any reasonable numbers
at present. The one thing we can do to alleviate their hard lot is to
secure legislation--legislation for shorter hours and for the minimum
wage.
Their suspiciousness is perhaps the chief barrier in the way of social
elevation of the Poles. That Poles can be organized is shown by
the remarkable success of the Polish National Alliance and kindred
societies. Their capacity for coöperation is seen in their
establishment of their own coöperative stores.
VII
THE WOMAN ORGANIZER
The problems that face the woman organizer are many and complex. They
are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance
to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women
workers. The movement for organization among women is still so
inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men
leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world,
they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail,
so different from theirs that she has to work out her own solutions
for herself.
It is indeed a blind alley in which she has so often to move. The
workers are young and ignorant, therefore, by all odds, they require
the protection of both legislation and organization. Again, the
workers are young and ignorant, and therefore they have not learnt the
necessity for such protection. Their wages are in most cases low,
too low for decent self-support. But just because their wages are so
inadequate for bare needs it is in many cases all the more difficult
to induce them to deduct from such scanty pay the fifty cents a month
which is the smallest sum upon which any organization can pay its way
and produce tangible benefits for its members.
Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties
which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to
manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not
resisted. To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room,
to spend a few cents a day less for food--these are the near-hand
economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is
on the economizing side. When it comes to trying to earn more, to work
longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents
of the weekly pay envelope. The younger and inexperienced the worker,
the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she
turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn,
not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.
To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics,
the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign. To
some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work
your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are
urged to. To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not
to try and earn as big a wage as possible. But the organizer comes in
and she approaches the question from the other end. She does not talk
about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time. It is
her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first
step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more
wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing
about this result by herself, to show them that they must band
together with the determination to make their wage square with their
ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their
mode of living with their wage.
In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete
revolution.
It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls
to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer
has her special work cut out for her. And here she necessarily
contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to
deal with girls, because she understands the girl's work and the
girl's problems better, and the girl knows that she does.
I have taken wages as the prime subject of the organizer's activities
only because wages form the crux of the whole question. There, without
any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real
point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the
employé and the community, the standard of living that is possible,
as measured by the employé's share of the product of labor. But in
practice, money wages form only one element of the standard of living
problem, although the one around which least confusion gathers.
Whatever form the demands of labor organizations may take, the essence
of the demand is the same: better terms for the worker always, however
temporary circumstances or technical details may obscure the issue.
That this holds of reductions in hours of work has become a truism
among trade unionists, who recognize that any reduction of hours
of work eventually, though not perhaps immediately, results in a
readjustment of wages, whether week-workers or piece-workers or both
be involved, till the original money wage at any rate is reached,
supposing, of course, that no other influence enters in as an element
to lessen rates of pay.
The question of equal pay for equal work involves indeed much more
complicated issues, as regards both the individual worker and the
whole body of women workers in the trade or branch of the trade
affected. But even here, the underlying purpose is the same, the
assuring, to the total number of workers whose labor has gone into the
production, of a certain amount of finished marketable work, of an
increased, or at the least, not a lessened share of the product of
their toil. It is not to be questioned that if women are permitted
to work at the same operations as men for a lesser remuneration, the
man's wage must go down. In addition, he may, even at the lowered
rate, lose his job, as the employer may cherish the not altogether
groundless hope that he may cut down the women's wage yet further and
employ yet more women, and yet fewer men.
In the same way the provision of better sanitary conditions, the
fencing off of dangerous machinery, the prohibition usually of
dangerous processes or of the use of dangerous materials, such as lead
or white phosphorus, all involve an addition small or large, to the
cost of manufacture. If, however, there be in all these instances an
increase in the cost of manufacture there are also results to the
well-being of the workers, which, if they could be measured in money,
would be out of all proportion to the money cost to the employer or
to the purchasing community. But again, it is the maintenance of the
workers' ideal standard of living which causes the trade union to
demand that their share of the product of their toil shall not be
lessened by needless or avoidable risks to life or limb or health.
I have taken these demands in the order, in which, generally speaking,
the organizer can induce the young girl worker to consider them in her
own case. Better pay makes by far the easiest appeal, whether it be to
the very young girl with her eager desire for a good time or to her
older sister upon whom, quite surely, years have laid some of life's
increasing burdens.
Next in order of attractiveness came shorter hours, especially if the
wage-earners can be assured that wages will stay where they are.
But nothing short of both years and trade experience, apparently, will
impress upon the worker all that is implied in those words that we
write so easily and pronounce so glibly--sanitary conditions.
The young girls have all the blessed, happy-go-lucky care-free-ness
of children, the children they are in years. They start out on their
wage-earning career with the abounding high spirits and the stores of
vitality of extreme youth. They are proud of their new capacity to
earn, to begin to keep themselves and to help the mother and the
others, and at first it does not seem to them as if anything could
break them down or kill them. They do not at first associate bad air
with headaches or sore throats, nor long standing with backaches, nor
following the many needles of a power sewing-machine with eye trouble.
The dangerous knife-edge on the revolving wheel, or the belting
that may catch hair or clothing is to them only an item in the
shop-furnishings, that they hope may not catch them napping.
All along the progress of labor organization has been exceedingly slow
among women as compared with men, and has been far indeed from keeping
pace with the rate at which increasing numbers of women have
poured into the industrial field. So that it was not strange that
well-meaning labor men, judging from personal experiences or arguing
from analogy, came to the conclusion, paralyzing indeed to their own
strivings after an all-inclusive, nation-wide organization of the
workers, that women could not be organized. Or if such a labor man did
not like to put it quite so bluntly, even to himself, he would shake
his head, and regretfully remark that women did not make good trade
unionists. If someone less experienced or more hopeful came along with
plans for including or for helping women, the veteran trade unionist
had too often a number of facts to bring forward, the bald accuracy of
which was not to be disputed, of how in his own trade the women were
scabbing on the men by working for a lower wage, or that they were so
indifferent about the meetings, or worse still, how that women's local
did so fine during the strike, and then just went to pieces, and now
there wasn't any local at all.
"Facts are not to be explained away," he would conclude. No, they are
not to be explained away, but some facts may be explained, and not
unfrequently the explanation is based upon some other fact, which has
been overlooked. With the present question, the one important fact
which explains a good deal is the youth of so many women workers. This
by no means disposes of each particular situation with its special
difficulties, but it does help to explain the general tendency among
the women to be neglectful of meetings and to let their local go to
pieces, which so distracts our friend.
This new competitor with men, whom we think of and speak of as a
woman, is in many cases not a woman at all, but only a girl, very
often only a child. From this one fact arises a whole class, of
conditions, with resulting problems and difficulties totally different
from any the man trade unionist has to deal with among men.
The first and most palpable difficulty is that the majority of workers
are yet at the play age. They are still at the stage when play is
one of the rightful conditions under which they carry on their main
business of growing up. Many of them are not ready to be in the
factory at all. Certainly not for eight, ten or twelve hours a day.
And so those young things, after an unthankful and exhausting day's
toil, are not going to attend meetings unless these can be made
attractive to them. And the meeting that may appear entirely right and
even attractive to the man of thirty or forty will be tiresome and
boring past endurance to the girl of sixteen or eighteen.
Then there are other huge difficulties to encounter. The very first
principles of coöperative action and mutual responsibility are unknown
to the great majority of the young workers. Too rarely does it
happen, that in her own home the girl has learnt anything about trade
unionism, at least trade unionism for women. The greater number of
girls are not the daughters of factory mothers. The mother, whether
American or foreign-born, grew up herself in simpler conditions, and
does not begin to comprehend the utterly changed environment in which
her little daughter has to work when she enters a modern factory. If
American, she may; have married just out of her father's home, and if
foreign-born she may have been tending silkworms or picking grapes
in Italy, or at field-work in Poland or Hungary. Very different
occupations these from turning raw silk into ribbon or velvet in an
Eastern mill, or labelling fruit-jars in an Illinois cannery.
Again, neither in the public nor in the parochial school are the
workers-to-be taught anything concerning the labor movement or the
meaning of collective bargaining. Even if they should have attained
the eighth grade with its dizzy heights of learning, the little
teaching they have received in civics has not touched upon either of
the most vital problems of our day, the labor movement or the woman
movement.
The mere youth, however, of the girl workers is not in itself the
chief or the most, insuperable difficulty. If these girls were boys
we might look forward to their growing up in the trade, gaining
experience and becoming ever more valuable elements in the union
membership. But after a few years the larger percentage of the girls
marry and are lost to the union and to unionism for good. Nay, a girl
is often such a temporary hand that she does not even remain out
her term of working years in one trade, but drifts into and out of
half-a-dozen unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and works for
twenty different employers in the course of a few years. The head of a
public-school social center made it her business to inquire of fifty
girls, all over sixteen, and probably none over eighteen how long each
had held her present job. Two only had been over a year at the one
place. The rest accounted for such short periods as four months, six
weeks, two weeks, at paper-box-making, candy-packing or book-binding
with, of course, dull seasons and periods of unemployment between.
In the organized trades conditions are not quite so exasperating, but
even in these the short working term of the girl employé means an
utter lack of continuity in the membership of the trade and therefore
of the union. The element of permanence in men's organizations is in
great measure the result of the fact that men, whether they remain in
one particular trade or shift to another, are at least in industry for
life as wage-earners, unless indeed they pass on into the employing or
wage-paying class.
But instead of seeing in the temporary employment of so many girls
only another reason why they need the protection and the educational
advantages of organization, we have been too contented to let ill
alone, and all alike, the girl, the workingman, and the community are
suffering for this inertia.
In this connection the first and most important matter to take up is
that of women organizers, for women workers will never be enrolled in
the labor movement of America in adequate numbers except through women
organizers. And where are these today?
A most emphatic presentation of the practical reasons why the man
organizer can rarely handle effectively young women workers, and why
therefore women are absolutely necessary if the organization on any
large scale is to be successful, was made before the Convention of the
American Federation of Labor in Toronto in 1909.
The speaker was Mr. Thomas Rumsey of Toledo. He described his own
helplessness before the problem. He told, how, to begin with, it was
not possible for a man to have that readiness of access to the girl
workers when in their own homes and in their leisure hours which the
woman organizer readily obtained.