theatrical employés. The labor movement needs them all, and, although
few of them realize it, they need the labor movement. These are
professions with great prizes, but the average worker makes no big
wage, has no assurance of steadiness of employment, of sick pay when
out of work, or of such freedom while working as shall bring out the
very best that is in her.
In almost all of these occupations are to be found the beginnings
of organization on trade-union lines. The American Federation of
Musicians is a large and powerful body, of such standing in the
profession that the entire membership of the Symphony Orchestras in
all the large cities of the United States and Canada (with the single
exception of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) belongs to it. Women, so
far, although admitted to the Federation, have had no prominent part
in its activities.
Nurses and attendants in several of the state institutions of Illinois
have during the last two years formed unions. Already they have had
hours shortened from the old irregular schedule of twelve, fourteen
and even sixteen hours a day to an eight-hour workday for all, as far
as practicable. The State Board is also entirely favorable to concede
higher wages, one day off in seven, and an annual vacation of two
weeks on pay, but cannot carry these recommendations out without an
increased appropriation from the legislature.
There are now eight small associations of stenographers and
bookkeepers and other office employés, one as far west as San
Francisco, while there is at least one court reporters' union.
The various federations of school-teachers have worked to raise school
and teaching standards as well as their own financial position. They
have besides, owing to the preponderance of women in the teaching
profession, made a strong point of the justice of equal pay for equal
work. Women teachers are perhaps in a better position to make this
fight for all their sex than any other women.
The fact that so many bodies of teachers have one after another
affiliated with the labor movement has had a secondary result in
bringing home to teachers the needs of the children, the disadvantages
under which so many of them grow up, and still more the handicap under
which most children enter industry. So it has come about that the
teaching body in several cities has been roused to plead the cause of
the workers' children, and therefore of the workers, and has brought
much practical knowledge and first-hand information before health
departments, educational authorities, and legislators.
Yet another angle from which the organization of teachers has to be
considered is that they are actually, if not always technically,
public employés. Every objection that can be raised against the
organization of public employés, if valid at all, is valid here. Every
reason that can be urged why public employés should be able to give
collective expression to their ideas and their wishes has force here.
The domestic servant, as we know her, is but a survival in culture
from an earlier time, and more primitive environment. As a personal
attendant, with no limitation of hours, without defined and
standardized duties, and taking out part of her wages in the form of
board and lodging, also at no standardized valuation, she will have to
be improved out of existence altogether.
On the other hand as a skilled worker, she fills an important function
in the community, satisfying permanent human needs, preparing food to
support our bodies, and making clean and beautiful the homes wherein
we dwell. Surely humanity is not so stupid that arrangements cannot be
planned by which domestic workers can have their own homes, like
other people, hours of leisure, like other workers, and organizations
through which they may express themselves. The main difficulty in
the immediate future is that the very reason why organization is
so urgently needed by domestic workers is the reason why it is so
difficult to form organizations, the individual isolation in which the
girls live and work. The desire for common action assuredly is there;
one little group after another are meeting and talking over their
difficulties, and planning how they can overcome them. The obstacles
in the way of forming unions of domestic workers are tremendous. What
such groups need, above all, is a union headquarters, with comfortable
and convenient rooms, in which girls could meet their friends during
their times off, or in which they could just rest, if they wanted to,
for many have no friend's house to go to during their precious free
days. Such a headquarters should conduct an employment agency. Other
activities would probably grow out of such a center, and the workers
coöperating would help towards the solving of that domestic problem
which is their concern even more intimately than it is that of those
whom, as things are, they so unwillingly serve. That the finest type
of women are already awake, and nearing the stage when they themselves
recognize the need of organization, is evident from the fact that
in Chicago, Buffalo and Seattle, there lately sprang up almost
simultaneously, small associations of household workers formed to
secure regular hours and better living conditions.
There is no class of women or girls more urgently in need of a radical
change in their economic condition than department-store clerks. To
this need even the public has of late become somewhat awakened,
thanks mainly to a troop of investigators and to the writers in the
magazines, who on the one hand have roused nation-wide horror by means
of revelations regarding the white-slave traffic, and on the other
have brought to that same national audience painful enlightenment as
to the chronic starvation of both soul and body endured by so many
brave and patient young creatures, who on four, five or six dollars
a week just manage to exist, but who in so doing, are cheated of all
that makes life worth living in the present, and are disinherited of
any prospect of home, health and happiness in the future.
This story has been told again and again. Yet the public has not yet
learned to relate it to any effectual remedy. Undoubtedly organization
has done a great deal for this class in other countries, notably in
England and in Germany, and in this country also, in the few cities
where it has been brought about. But meanwhile their numbers are
increasing, and it hardly seems human for us to wait while all these
young lives are being ruined in the hope that a few years hence the
department-store clerks succeeding them may be able to save themselves
through organization, when there is another remedy at hand. That
remedy is legislation to cover thoroughly hours, wages and conditions
of work. No one suggests depending exclusively on laws. One reason,
probably, why the freeing of the negro slave has been so often merely
a nominal freeing is because he was able to play so small a part
himself in the gaining of his freedom. It was a gift, truly, from the
master race. But no one, surely, would use that argument in reference
to children, and an immense proportion of the department-store
employés are but children, children between fourteen and eighteen,
and in some states much younger. One hears of occasional instances
in which even children have banded together and gone on strike.
School-children have done it. The little button-sewers of Muscatine,
Iowa, formed a juvenile union during the long strike of 1911. But
these are such exceptional instances that they can hardly count in
normal times. And that such a large body of children and very young
girls are included among department-store employés adds immensely to
the difficulty of gaining over the grown-up women to organization.
[Illustration: A BINDERY
Hand folders on platform. Machine folder and hand gatherers below.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EQUIPPED WAIST
AND CLOAK FACTORIES IN NEW YORK CITY]
Perhaps at some future time children may mature mentally earlier. If
along with this, education is more efficient, and the civic duty of a
common responsibility for the good of all is taught universally in our
schools, even the child at fourteen may become class-conscious, and
willing to fight and struggle for a common aim. But if that day
ever comes, it will be in the far future, and let us hope that then
childish energies may be free to find other channels of expression and
childish coöperation be exerted for happier aims. The child of today
is often temporarily willful and disobedient, but on the whole he (and
more often she) is pathetically patient and long-suffering under all
sorts of hardships and injustices, and has no idea of anything like an
industrial rebellion. Indeed overwork and ill-usage have upon children
the markedly demoralizing effect of cowing them permanently, so that
in oppressing a child you do more than deprive him of his childhood,
you weaken what ought to be the backbone of his maturity. But improve
conditions, whether by law or otherwise, and you will have a more
independent "spunky" child, a better prospect of having him, when
grown up, a more wholesomely natural rebel. Indeed more or less, this
applies to human beings of any age.
As regards the minimum wage, the objection raised by certain among the
conservative labor leaders has been that it will retard organization
and check independence of spirit. This reasoning seems quite academic,
in view of the fact that it is the most oppressed workers who are
usually the least able and willing to assert themselves. Give them
shorter hours or better wages, and they will soon be pleading for
still shorter hours and yet higher wages. Wherever the regulation
of wages, through that most democratic method, that of wages boards
composed of representatives of workers and employers, has been
attempted, organization has been encouraged, and this plan of
legalized collective bargaining has been applied to trade after trade.
In Victoria, Australia, the birthplace of the system, and the state
where it has been longest in force, and more fully developed than
anywhere else, the number of trades covered has grown in less than
twenty years from the four experimental trades of shoemaking, baking,
various departments of the clothing trades and furniture-making to 141
occupations, including such varied employments as engravers, plumbers,
miners and clerical workers.
It is hardly necessary to say that minimum wages boards in Australia
control the wages of men as well as of women. This question, however,
does not enter into practical labor statesmanship in the United States
today, but the minimum wage for women is a very live issue, and its
introduction in state after state is supported by the working-women,
both speaking as individuals and through their organizations.
The objections of employers to any regulation of wages is partly
economic, as they fear injury to trade, a fear not sustained by
Australian experience, or by the experience of employers in trades
in this country, in which wages have been raised and are largely
controlled by strong labor organizations. In especial, employers
object to an unequal burden imposed upon the state or states first
experimenting with wages boards. This has no more validity than a
similar objection raised against any and all interference between
employer and employé, whether it be limitation of hours, workmen's
compensation acts or any other industrial legislation. It is only that
another adjustment has to be made, one of the many that any trade
and any employer has always to be making to suit slightly changing
circumstances. And often the adjustment is much less, and the
advantage to the employer arising from having more efficient and
contented employés greater than anticipated. Competition is then not
for the cheapest worker, but for the most efficient.
Public responsibility for social and economic justice is likely to
be quickened and maintained by the very existence of these permanent
boards created not so much to remedy acute evils as to establish in
the industry conditions more nearly equitable.
It has ever been found that in regard to ordinary factory legislation,
organized employés were the best inspectors to see that the law was
enforced. This principle holds good in even a more marked degree,
where the representatives of the workers have themselves a say in the
decision, as is the case during the long sessions of a wages board,
where all who take part in the discussions and in the final agreement
are experts in the trade, and intimately acquainted with the practical
details of the industry.
The very same misgivings as are felt and expressed by employers and by
the public regarding the effect of legislation for the regulation of
wages have been heard on every occasion when any legal check has been
proposed upon the downward pressure upon the worker, inevitable under
our system of competition for trade and markets. What a cry went up
from the manufacturers of Great Britain when a bill to check the
ruthless exploitation of babies in the cotton mills was introduced
into the House of Commons. The very same arguments of interference
with trade, despotic control over the right of the employé to bargain
as an individual, are urged today, no matter how often their futility
and irrelevance have been exposed.
The question of organization and the white alien has been dealt with
in another chapter, but organization cannot afford to stop even here.
It will never accomplish all that trade unionists desire and what the
workers need until those of every color, the Negro, the Indian, the
Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindoo are included. The southern states
are very imperfectly organized, and trade unionism on any broad scale
will never be achieved there until the colored workers are included.
In this the white workers, neither in the North nor in the South, have
yet recognized their plain duty. It is not the American Federation
itself which is directly responsible, but the national and local
unions in the various trades, who place difficulties in the way of
admitting colored members. "Ordinarily," writes Dr. F.E. Wolfe in his
"Admission to Labor Unions," published by the Johns Hopkins University
Press, "the unimpeded admission of Negroes can be had only where the
local white unionists are favorable. Consequently, racial antipathy
and economic motive may, in any particular trade, nullify the policies
of the national union." This applies even in those cases where the
national union itself would raise no barrier. I think it may be safely
added that there are practically no colored women trade unionists, the
occasional exception but serving to emphasize our utter neglect, as
regards organization, of the colored woman.
Yet another world waiting to be conquered is the Dominion of Canada,
Canada with its vast area and its still small population, yet with its
cities, from Montreal to Vancouver, facing the very same industrial
problems as American cities, from New York to San Francisco. The
organization of women is, so far, hardly touched in any of the
provinces.
One encouraging circumstance, and significant of the intimate
connection between the two halves of North America, is the fact that
the international union of each trade includes those dwelling both in
the United States and in Canada; these internationals are in their
turn, for the most part affiliated with both the American Federation
of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.
Whenever, then, the women of Canada seriously begin to unionize,
advance will be made through these existing international
organizations. As mentioned elsewhere, the Canadian Trades and Labor
Congress of Canada has endorsed the work of the National Women's Trade
Union League of America, and seats a fraternal delegate from the
League at its conventions.
It can only be a question of time, and of increasing industrial
pressure, when an active trade-union movement will spring up among
Canadian women. Among those who advocate and are prepared to lead in
such a movement are the President of the Trades and Labor Congress,
Mr. J.C. Watters, Mr. James Simpson of the Toronto _Industrial
Banner_, Mrs. Rose Henderson of Montreal, Mr. J.W. Wilkinson,
President of the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, and Miss Helena
Gutteridge, also of Vancouver.
The President of the National Women's Trade Union League, in her
opening address before the New York convention in June, 1915, summed
up the situation as to the sweated trades tellingly:
For tens of thousands of girl and women workers the average wage
in sweated industries still is five, eight and ten cents an hour,
and these earnings represent, on the average, forty weeks' work
out of a fifty-two week year. Further, in the report of the New
York State Factory Investigation Commission we find that out of a
total of 104,000 men and women 13,000 receive less than $5.00 a
week, 34,000 less than $7.00 a week, 68,000 less than $10.00 a
week and only 17,000 receive $15.00 a week or more. These low
wages are not only paid to apprentices either in factories or
stores but to large numbers of women who have been continuously
in industry for years. Again, the New York State Factory
Investigating Commission tells us that half of those who have five
years' experience in stores are receiving less than $8.00 a week,
and only half of those with ten years' experience receive $10.00 a
week. Dr. Howard Woolston of the Commission has pointed out: "Even
for identical work in the same locality, striking differences in
pay are found. In one wholesale candy factory in Manhattan no male
laborer and no female hand-dipper is paid as much as $8 a week,
nor does any female packer receive as much as $5.50. In another
establishment of the same class in the same borough every male
laborer gets $8 or over, and more than half the female dippers and
packers exceed the rates given in the former plant. Again, one
large department store in Manhattan pays 86 per cent. of its
saleswomen $10 or over; another pays 86 per cent. of them less.
When a representative paper-box manufacturer learned that cutters
in neighboring factories receive as little as $10 a week, he
expressed surprise, because he always pays $15 or more. This
indicates that there is no well-established standard at wages in
certain trades. The amounts are fixed by individual bargain, and
labor is 'worth' as much as the employer agrees to pay."
It has been estimated by the Commission that to raise the wages of two
thousand girls in the candy factories from $5.75 to $8.00 a week, the
confectioners in order to cover the cost will have to charge eighteen
cents more per hundred pounds of candy. It is also estimated that if
work shirts cost $3.00 a dozen, and the workers receive sixty cents
for sewing them we can raise the wages ten per cent. and make the
labor cost sixty-six cents. The price of those dozen shirts has been
raised to $3.06. The cost of labor in the sweated industries is a
small fraction of the manufacturing cost.
In the face of such evidence is there anyone who can still question
that individual bargaining is a menace against the social order and
that education and equipment in organization and citizenship become a
social necessity?
Women unionists, like men in the labor movement, are continually asked
to support investigations into industrial conditions, investigations
and yet more investigations. They are asked to give evidence before
boards and commissions, they are asked to furnish journalists and
writers of books with information. They have done so willingly,
but there is a sense coming over many of us that we have had
investigations a-plenty; and that the hour struck some time ago for at
least beginning to put an end to the conditions of needless poverty
and inexcusable oppression, which time after time have been unearthed.
No one who heard Mrs. Florence Kelley at the Charities and Corrections
Conference in St. Louis in 1910 can forget the powerful plea she
made to social workers that they should not be satisfied with
investigation. Not an investigation has ever been made but has told
the same story, monotonous in its lesson, only varying in details;
workers, and especially women workers, are inadequately paid. Further
she considers that investigations would be even more thorough and
drastic if the investigators, the workers and the public knew that
something would come out of the inquiry beyond words, words, words.
Investigation alone never remedied any evil, never righted any
injustice. Yet as far as the community are concerned, average men and
women seem quite content when the investigation has been made, and
stop there. What is wrong? Will no real improvement take place till
the workers are strong enough individually and collectively to
manage their own affairs, and through organization, coöperation, and
political action, or its equivalent insure adequate remuneration,
and prevent overwork, speeding up, and dangerous and insanitary
conditions?
In a degree investigation has prepared the way for legislation.
Legislation will undoubtedly play even a bigger part than it has done
in the protection of the workers. Almost all laws for which organized
labor generally works affect women as well as men, whether they are
anti-injunction statutes, or workmen's compensation acts, or factory
laws. But there is another class of laws, specially favoring women,
about which women have naturally more decided opinions than men. These
are laws as to hours, and more recently as to wages, which are or are
to be applicable to women alone. A just and common-sense argument
extends special legislative protection to women, because of their
generally exploited and handicapped position; but the one strong plea
used in their behalf has been health and safety, the health and safety
of the future mothers of society. At this point we pause. In all
probability such protection will be found so beneficial to women that
it will be eventually extended to men.
One group of laws in which labor is vitally interested is laws
touching the right of the workers to organize. Many of the most
important judicial decisions in labor cases have turned upon this
point. In this are involved the right to fold arms, and peacefully to
suggest to others to do the same; the right to band together not to
buy non-union goods, and peacefully to persuade others not to buy.
One angle from which labor views all law-making is that of
administration. A law may be beneficial. It is in danger on two sides.
The first the risk of being declared unconstitutional, a common fate
for the most advanced legislation in this country; or, safe on that
side, it may be so carelessly or inefficiently administered as to be
almost useless. In both cases, strong unions have a great influence in
deciding the fate and the practical usefulness of laws.
Whether in the making, the confirming, or the administering of laws,
the trade unions form the most important channel through which the
wishes of the workers can be expressed. Organized labor does not speak
only for trade unionists; it necessarily, in almost every case, speaks
for the unorganized as well, partly because the needs of both are
usually the same, and partly because there is no possible method
by which the wishes of the working people can be ascertained, save
through the accepted representatives of the organized portion of the
workers.
An excellent illustration of how business can and does adjust itself
to meet changing legal demands is seen in what happened when the
Ten-Hour Law came in force in the state of Illinois in July, 1909.