WOMEN'S DEMANDS ON THE RULERS OF INDUSTRY
The big elevator, crowded with shoppers to the point of actual
discomfort, contained only one man. He wore a white-duck uniform, and
recited rapidly and monotonously, as the car shot upward: "Corsets,
millinery, muslin underwear, shirt-waists, coats and suits, infants'
wear, and ladies' shoes, second floor; no ma'am, carpets and rugs on the
third floor; this car don't go to the restaurant; take the other side;
groceries, harness, sporting goods, musical instruments, phonographs,
men's shoes, trunks, traveling bags, and toys, fifth floor."
Buying and selling, serving and being served--women. On every floor, in
every aisle, at every counter, women. In the vast restaurant, which
covers several acres, women. Waiting their turn at the long line of
telephone booths, women. Capably busy at the switch boards, women. Down
in the basement buying and selling bargains in marked-down summer
frocks, women. Up under the roof, posting ledgers, auditing accounts,
attending to all the complex bookkeeping of a great metropolitan
department store, women. Behind most of the counters on all the floors
between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running
back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the
aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing
throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of
femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk,
and man supervisor, looks lost and out of place.
To you, perhaps, the statement that six million women in the United
States are working outside of the home for wages is a simple, unanalyzed
fact. You grasp it as an intellectual abstraction, without much
appreciation of its human significance. The mere reading of statistics
does not help you to realize the changed status of women, and of
society. You need to see the thing with your own eyes.
Standing on the corner of the Bowery and Grand Street, in New York, when
the Third Avenue trains overhead are roaring their way uptown packed
with homeward-bound humanity, or on the corner of State and Madison
streets, in Chicago, or on the corner of Front and Lehigh streets, in
Philadelphia; pausing at the hour of six at the junction of any city's
great industrial arteries, you get a full realization of the change. Of
the pushing, jostling, clamoring mob, which the sidewalks are much too
narrow to contain, observe the preponderance of girls. From factory,
office, and department store they come, thousands and tens of thousands
of girls. Above the roar of the elevated, the harsh clang of the
electric cars, the clatter of drays and wagons, the shouting of
hucksters, the laughter and oaths of men, their voices float, a shrill,
triumphant treble in the orchestra of toil.
You may get another vivid, yet subtle, realization of the
interdependence of women and modern industry if you manage to penetrate
into the operating-room of a telephone exchange. Any hour will do. Any
day in the week. There are no nights, nor Sundays, nor holidays in a
telephone exchange. The city could not get along for one single minute
in one single hour of the twenty-four without the telephone girl. Her
hands move quickly over the face of the switch board, picking up long,
silk-wound wires, reaching high, plugging one after another the holes of
the switch board. The wires cross and recross, until the switch board is
like a spider web, and in the tangle of lines under the hands of the
telephone girl are enmeshed the business affairs of a city.
What would happen if this army of women was suddenly withdrawn from the
telephone exchanges? Men could not take their places. That experiment
has been tried more than once, and it has always failed.
Having seen how well women serve industry, go back to the department
store and see how they dominate it also.
The department store apparently exists for women. The architect who
designed the building studied her necessities. The makers of store
furniture planned counters, shelves, and seats to suit her stature.
Buyers of goods know that their jobs are forfeit unless they can guess
what her taste in gowns and hats is going to be six months hence.
WOMEN'S DEMAND ON INDUSTRY Woman dominates the department store for the
plain reason that she supports it. Whoever earns the income, and that
point has been somewhat in question lately, there is no doubt at all as
to who spends it. She does. Hence, she is able to control the conditions
under which this business is conducted.
You can see for yourself that this is so. Walk through any large
department store and observe how much valuable space is devoted to
making women customers comfortable. There is always a drawing-room with
easy-chairs and couches; plenty of little desks with handsome stationery
where the customer may write notes; here, and in the retiring-room
adjoining, are uniformed maids to offer service. But these things are
not all that the women who support industry demand of the men in power.
They demand that industry be carried on under conditions favorable to
the health and comfort of the workers.
Not until the development of the department store were women able to
observe at close range the conduct of modern business. Not unnaturally
it was in the department store that they began one of the most ambitious
of their present-day activities,--that of humanizing industry.
It was just twenty years ago that New York City was treated to a huge
joke. It was such a joke that even the miserable ones with whom it was
concerned were obliged to smile. An obscure group of women, calling
themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement
that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor
union.
These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving
wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman
in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
half.
They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen
was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail
clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.
The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the
counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably
never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social
being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The
exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires
then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
trades union plan.
There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous
protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working
women in New York City was born a movement which has spread beyond the
Atlantic Ocean, which has effected legislation in many States of the
Union, which has even determined an extremely important legal decision
in the Supreme Court of the United States.
A group of rich and influential women, prominent in many philanthropic
efforts, became interested in the Working Women's Society. They
investigated the charges brought against the department stores, and what
they discovered made them resolve that conditions must be changed.
In May, 1890, the late Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell, Mrs. Frederick
Nathan, and others, called a large mass meeting in Chickering Hall. Mrs.
Nathan had a constructive plan for raising the standard in shop
conditions, especially those affecting women employees.
If women would simply withdraw their patronage from the stores where,
during the Christmas season, women and children toiled long hours at
night without any extra compensation, sooner or later the night work
would cease. A few stores, said Mrs. Nathan, maintained a standard
above the average. It was within the power of the women of New York to
raise all the others to that standard, and afterwards it might be
possible to go farther and establish a standard higher than the present
highest.
"We do not desire to blacklist any firm," declared Mrs. Nathan, "but we
can _whitelist_ those firms which treat their employees humanely. We can
make and publish a list of all the shops where employees receive fair
treatment, and we can agree to patronize only those shops. By acting
openly and publishing our White List we shall be able to create an
immense public opinion in favor of just employers."
Thus was the Consumers' League of New York ushered into existence. Eight
months after the Chickering Hall meeting the committee appointed to
co-operate with the Working Women's Society in preparing its list of
fair firms had finished its work and made its report. The new League was
formally organized on January 1, 1891.
[Illustration: Mrs. Frederick Nathan]
THE CONSUMERS' LEAGUE "WHITE LIST"
The first White List issued in New York contained only eight firm names.
The number was disappointingly small, even to those who knew the
conditions. Still more disappointing was the indifference of the other
firms to their outcast position. Far from evincing a desire to earn a
place on the White List, they cast aspersions on a "parcel of women" who
were trying to "undermine business credit," and scouted the very idea of
an organized feminine conscience.
"Wait until the women want Easter bonnets," sneered one merchant. "Do
you think they will pass up anything good because the store is not on
their White List?"
Clearly something stronger than moral suasion was called for. Even as
far back as 1891 a few women had begun to doubt the efficacy of that
indirect influence, supposed to be woman's strongest weapon. What was
the astonishment of the merchants when the League framed, and caused to
be introduced into the New York Assembly, a bill known as the Mercantile
Employers' Bill, to regulate the employment of women and children in
mercantile establishments, and to place retail stores, from the
smallest to the largest, under the inspection of the State Factory
Department.
The bill was promptly strangled, but the next year, and the next, and
still the next, it obstinately reappeared. Finally, in 1896, four years
after it was first introduced, the bill struggled through the lower
House. In spite of powerful commercial influences the bill was reported
in the Senate, and some of the senators became warmly interested in it.
A commission was appointed to make an official investigation into
conditions of working women in New York City.
The findings of this Rheinhard Commission, published afterwards in two
large volumes, were sensational enough. Merchants reluctantly testified
to employing grown women at a salary of _thirty-three cents a day_. They
confessed to employing little girls of eleven and twelve years, in
defiance of the child-labor law. They declared that pasteboard and
wooden stock boxes were good enough seats for saleswomen; that they
should not expect to sit down in business hours anyhow. They defended,
on what they called economic grounds, their long hours and uncompensated
overtime. They defended their systems of fines, which sometimes took
away from a girl almost the entire amount of her weekly salary. They
threatened, if a ten-hour law for women under twenty-one years old were
passed, to employ older women. Thus thousands of young and helpless
girls would be thrown out of employment into the hands of charity.
The Senate heard the report of the Rheinhard Commission, and in spite of
the merchants' protests the women's bill was passed without a dissenting
vote.
The most important provision of the bill was the ten-hour limit which it
placed on the work of women under twenty-one. The overwhelming majority
of department-store clerks are girls under twenty-one. The bill also
provided seats for saleswomen, and specified the number of
seats,--one to every three clerks. It forbade the employment of
children, except those holding working certificates from the
authorities. These, and other minor provisions, affected all retail
stores, as far as the law was obeyed.
As a matter of fact the Consumers' League's bill carried a "joker" which
made its full enforcement practically impossible. The matter of
inspection of stores was given over to the local boards of health,
supposedly experts in matters of health and sanitation, but, as it
proved, ignorant of industrial conditions. In New York City, after a
year of this inadequate inspection, political forces were brought to
bear, and then there were no store inspectors.
Year after year, for twelve years, the Consumers' League tried to
persuade the legislature that department and other retail stores needed
inspection by the State Factory Department. A little more than a year
ago they succeeded. After the bill placing all retail stores under
factory inspection was passed, a committee from the Merchants'
Association went before Governor Hughes and appealed to him to veto what
they declared was a vicious and wholly superfluous measure. Governor
Hughes, however, signed the bill.
In the first three months of its enforcement over twelve hundred
infractions of the Mercantile Law were reported in Greater New York. No
less than nine hundred and twenty-three under-age children were taken
out of their places as cash girls, stock girls, and wrappers, and were
sent back to their homes or to school. The contention of the Con sumers'
League that retail stores needed regulation seems to have been
justified.
To the business man capital and labor are both abstractions. To women
capital may be an abstraction, but labor is a purely human proposition,
a thing of flesh and blood. The department-store owners who so bitterly
fought the Mercantile Law, and for years afterwards fought its
enforcement, were not monsters of cruelty. They were simply business
men, with the business man's contracted vision. They could think only
in terms of money profit and money loss.
In spite of this radical difference in the point of view, women have
succeeded, in a measure, in controlling the business policy of the
stores supported by their patronage.
The White List would be immensely larger if the Consumers' League would
concede the matter of uncompensated overtime at the Christmas season.
Hundreds of stores fill every condition of the standard except this one.
The League stands firm on the point, and up to the present so do the
stores. Only the long, slow process of public education will remove the
custom whereby _thousands of young girls and women are compelled every
holiday season to give their employers from thirty to forty hours of
uncompensated labor_.
No one has ever tried to compute the amount of unpaid overtime extorted
in the business departments of nearly all city stores during three to
five months of every winter. The customer, by declining to purchase
after a certain hour, is able to release the weary saleswoman at six
o'clock. She is not able to release the equally weary girls who toil in
the bookkeeping and auditing departments.
That, in these days of adding and tabulating machines, accounting in
most stores is still done by cheap hand labor, is a statement which
strains credulity. Merely from the standpoint of business economy it
seems absurd. But it is a fact easily verified.
I tested it by obtaining employment in the auditing department of one of
the largest and most respectable stores in New York. In this store, and,
according to the best authorities, in most other stores, the accounting
force is made up of girls not long out of grammar school, ignorant and
incapable--but cheap. They work slowly, and as each day's sales are
posted and audited before the close of the day following, the business
force has to work until nine and ten o'clock several nights in the week.
In some cases they work every night.
Only the enlightening power of education of employers, education of
public opinion, can be expected to overcome this blight, and the
Consumers' League, realizing this, is preparing the way for education.
The Consumers' League began with a purely benevolent motive, and in
this early philanthropic stage it gained immediate popularity. City
after city, State after State, formed Consumers' Leagues, until, in
1899, a National League, with branches in twenty-two States, was
organized. The National League, far from being a philanthropic society,
has be come a scientific association for the study of industrial
economics.
When the original Consumers' League undertook its first piece of
legislation in behalf of women workers the members knew that they were
right, but they had very few reasons to offer in defense of their
claim. The New York League and all of the others have been collecting
reasons ever since. To-day they have a comprehensive and systematized
collection of reasons why women should not work long hours; why they
should not work at night; why manufacturing should not be carried on in
tenements; why all home wage-earning should be forbidden; why the speed
of machines should be regulated by law; why pure-food laws should be
extended; why minimum wage rates should be established.
In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of
trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of
facts concerning the human side of industry. It is ammunition which
tells. One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in
Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing
a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States.
There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in
factories and laundries should be ten hours long. The law was constantly
violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland. One night a
factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found
working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher. The inspector
promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.
The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars. Instead of
paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other
laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women
workers was unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right
freely to contract. A man or a woman may contract with an employer to
work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever
dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, _unless_ "there is fair
ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or
safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general
welfare...." This is the legal decision on which most protective
legislation in the United States has been based.
Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for
women was declared unconstitutional because nobody's health or safety
was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York
law forbidding all-night employment of women.
So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to
believe that they could attack the Oregon law. The case was appealed,
and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme
Court of the United States. Then the Consumers' League took a hand.
The brief for the State of Oregon, "defendant in error," was prepared by
Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the
most effective workers in the League's New York headquarters. This brief
is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence. It
consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few
paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State. All the rest was
contributed, under Miss Goldmark's direction, from the Consumers'
League's wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be
protected.
The League's reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work
their women employees far into the night was, "The World's Experience
upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is
Based." It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the
English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from
the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of
industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical
books; from reports of boards of health.
REASONS FOR PROTECTING WOMEN WORKERS The brief included a short and
interesting chapter, containing a number of things the League had
collected on the subject of laundries. Supreme Court judges cannot be
expected to know that laundry work is classed by experts among the
dangerous trades. That washing clothes, from a simple home or backyard
occupation, has been transformed into a highly-organized factory trade
full of complicated and often extremely dangerous machinery; that the
atmosphere of a steam laundry is more conducive to tuberculosis and the
other occupational diseases than cotton mills; that the work in
laundries, being irregular, is conducive to a general low state of
morals; that, on the whole, women should not be required to spend more
time than necessary in laundries; all this was set forth.
Medical testimony showed the physical differences between men and
women; the lesser power of women to endure long hours of standing; the
heightened susceptibility of women to industrial poisons--lead, naphtha,
and the like. A long chapter of testimony on the effect of child-bearing
in communities where the women had toiled long hours before marriage, or
afterwards, was included.
The testimony of factory inspectors, of industrial experts, of employers
in England, Germany, France, America, revealed the bad effect of long
hours on women's safety, both physical and moral. It revealed the good
effect, on the individual health, home life, and general welfare, of
short hours of labor.
Nor was the business aspect of the case neglected. That people
accomplish as much in an eight-hour day as in a twelve-hour day has
actually been demonstrated. The brief stated, for one instance, the
experience of a bicycle factory in Massachusetts.
In this place young women were employed to sort the ball bearings which
went into the machines. They did this by touch, and no girl was of use
to the firm unless her touch was very sensitive and very sure. The head
of this firm became convinced that the work done late in the afternoon
was of inferior quality, and he tried the experiment of cutting the
hours from ten to nine. The work was done on piece wages, and the girls
at first protested against the nine-hour day, fearing that their pay
envelopes would suffer. To their astonishment they earned as much in
nine hours as they had in ten. In time the employer cut the working day
down to eight hours and a half, and in addition gave the girls
ten-minute rests twice a day. Still they earned their full wages, and
they continued to earn full wages after the day became eight hours
long. The employer testified before the United States Industrial
Commission of 1900 that he believed he could successfully shorten the
day to seven hours and a half and get the same amount of work
accomplished.
What can you do against testimony like that? The Consumers' League
convinced the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Oregon
ten-hour law was upheld.
The importance of this decision cannot be overestimated. On it hangs the
validity of nearly all the laws which have been passed in the United
States for the protection of women workers. If the Oregon law had been
declared unconstitutional, laws in twenty States, or practically all
the States where women work in factories, would have been in perpetual
danger, and the United States might easily have sunk to a position
occupied now by no leading country in Europe.
Great Britain has had protective legislation for women workers since
1844. In 1847 the labor of women in English textile mills was limited to
ten hours a day, the period we are now worrying about, as being possibly
contrary to our Constitution. France, within the past five years, has
established a ten-hour day, broken by one hour of rest. Switzerland,
Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy, limit the hours of women's labor. In
several countries there are special provisions giving extra time off to
women who have household responsibilities. What would our
Constitution-bound law makers say to such a proposition, if any one had
the hardihood to suggest it?
If this law had not been upheld by the United States Supreme Court the
women of no State could have hoped to secure further legislation for
women workers. As it is, women in many States are preparing to establish
what is now known as "The Oregon Standard," that is, a ten-hour day for
all working women.
Nothing in connection with the woman movement is more significant,
certainly nothing was more unexpected, than the voluntary abandonment,
on the part of women, of class prejudice and class distinctions. Where
formerly the interest of the leisured woman in her wage-earning sisters
was of a sentimental or philanthropic character, it has become practical
and democratic.
The Young Women's Christian Association has had an industrial
department, which up to a recent period concerned itself merely with the
spiritual welfare of working girls. Prayer meetings in factories, clubs,
and classes in the Association headquarters, working-girls' boarding
homes, and other philanthropic efforts were the limits of the
Association's activities. The entire policy has changed of late, and
under the capable direction of Miss Annie Marian MacLean, of Brooklyn,
New York, the industrial department of the Association is doing
scientific investigation of labor conditions of women.
In a cracker factory I once saw a paid worker in the Young Women's
Christian Association pause above a young girl lying on the floor,
crimson with fever, and apparently in the throes of a serious illness.
With angelic pity on her face the Association worker stooped and
slipped a tract into the sick girl's hand. The kind of industrial
secretary the Association now employs would send for an ambulance and
see that the girl had the best of hospital care. She would inquire
whether the girl's illness was caused by the conditions under which she
worked, and she would know if it were possible to have those conditions
changed.
WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of
women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a
corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's
clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the
new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his
inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs
were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man
supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and
daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the
Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that
the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the
worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we
shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the
Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of
women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner
of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison
Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful
roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more
than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to
develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics
were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers,
lecturers, were entertained there.
Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in
industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia
University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser
lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the
facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders
in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real
estate on which factories stand.
"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy
wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do
not want wealth on such terms."
The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the
National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the
working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in
governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a
part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have
given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and
comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation
houses, and the like.
No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally,
no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor
should they be used as a substitute for justice.
Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed,
untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to
benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real
object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact
obsequience from the wage earner.
[Illustration: MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New
York, the most exclusive Women's Club in the country]
I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the
perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the
girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on
a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their
expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a
printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.
This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their
employers. It always fails.
It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper
sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for
rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage
earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be
guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves
gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's
clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good
working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly
increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of
the employers.
The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a
benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on
the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of
Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This
traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer
resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very
light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only
half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.
"We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager.
"We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
[Illustration: MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]
The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business
would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that
he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human
working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws,
and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found
out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one
that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved
itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent
employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will
provide for it.
It used to be the invariable custom in stores--it is so still in a
few--to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores
find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations
with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in
dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money
value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes
his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store
sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.
THE FILENE SYSTEM OF DEVELOPING EFFICIENT WORKERS There is one
department store which has demonstrated that it is profitable to pay
higher wages than its competitors, and that it pays to allow the
employees to fix the terms of their own employment. This is the Filene
store in Boston, which has developed within the past ten years from a
conservative, old-fashioned dry-goods business into an extremely
original and interesting experiment station in commercial economics.
The entire policy of the Filene management is bent on developing to the
highest possible point the efficiency of each individual clerk. The best
possible material is sought. No girl under sixteen is employed, and no
girl of any age who has not graduated with credit from the grammar
schools. There are a number of college-bred men and women in the Filene
employ.
[Illustration: A DEPARTMENT STORE REST-ROOM FOR WOMEN]
Good wages are paid, even to beginners, and experienced employees are
rewarded, not according to a fixed rate of payment, but according to
earning capacity. Taken throughout the store, wages, plus commissions,
which are allowed in all departments, average about two dollars a week
higher than in other department stores in Boston.
No irresponsible, automatic employee can develop high efficiency. She
does not want to become efficient; she wants merely to receive a pay
envelope at the end of the week. In order to develop responsibility and
initiative in their employees the Filenes have put them on a
self-governing basis. The workers do not literally make their own rules,
but the vote of the majority can change any rule made by the firm. The
firm furnishes its employees with a printed book of rules, in which the
policy of the store is set forth. If the employees object to any of the
rules, or any part of the policy, they can vote a change.
The medium through which the clerks express their opinions and desires
is the Filene Co-operative Association, of which every clerk and every
employee in the place is a member. No dues are exacted, as is the custom
in the usual employees' association. The executive body, called the
Store Council, and all other officers are elected by the members. All
matters of grievance, all subjects of controversy, are referred to the
Store Council, which, as often as occasion demands, calls a meeting of
the entire association after business hours.
For example: Christmas happens on a Friday. The firm decides to keep the
store open on the following day--Saturday. There is an expression of
dissatisfaction from a number of clerks. A meeting of the association is
called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra
holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the
commissions on a day's sales, for, of course, salaries continue. The
vote reveals that the majority want the holiday. The Store Council so
reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.
All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the
Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board
of Employees, also elected by popular vote. All disagreements as to
wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between
saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the
Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no
tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a
department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she
is an efficient saleswoman.
Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far
distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry
adjusted by law to human standards. In enlightened America the courts,
presided over by men to whom manual labor is known only in theory, have
persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws
protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most
of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women
citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--even
though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
this terrible delusion.