MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE
The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity
to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later
the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it
was unconstitutional.
The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective
legislation for working women was invalid.
The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
appear obscure.
The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.
The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know
anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial
conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in
trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
the real facts.
We have seen how the women of the Consumers' League taught the United
States Supreme Court something about working women; showed them a few of
the calamities resulting from the unrestricted labor of women and
immature girls. The Supreme Court's decision forever abolished the old
fallacy that the American Constitution _forbids_ protective legislation
for women workers. It remains for women's organizations in the various
States to educate local courts up to the knowledge that community
interest _demands_ protective legislation.
Following the decision of the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, which
flatly contradicted the decision of the Illinois Supreme Court, the
working women of Illinois began their educational campaign. They had
now, for the first time, a fighting chance to secure the restoration of
their shortened work day. The women of fifteen organized trades in the
city of Chicago determined to take that chance.
The women first appealed to the Industrial Commission, appointed early
in 1908 by Governor Dineen, to investigate the need of protective
legislation for workers, men and women alike.
The women were given a courteous hearing, but were told frankly that
limited hours of work for women was not one of protective measures to be
recommended by the Commission.
The Waitresses' Union, Local No. 484, of Chicago, entered the lists, led
by a remarkable young woman, Elizabeth Maloney, financial secretary of
the union. Miss Maloney and her associates drafted and introduced into
the Illinois Legislature a bill providing an eight-hour working day for
every woman in the State, working in shop, factory, retail store,
laundry, hotel, or restaurant, and providing also ample machinery for
enforcing the measure.
The "Girls' Bill," as it immediately became known, was the most hotly
contested measure passed by the Illinois Legislature during the
session. Over five hundred manufacturers appeared at the public hearing
on the bill to protest against it. One man brought a number of meek and
tired women employees, who, he declared, were opposed to having their
working day made shorter. Another presented a petition signed by his
women employees, appealing against being prevented from working eleven
hours a day!
Nine working girls appeared in support of the bill, and after learned
counsel for the Manufacturers' Association had argued against the
measure, two of the girls were allowed to speak. The Manufacturers'
Association presented the business aspect of the question, the girls
confined themselves to the human side. Agnes Nestor, secretary of the
Glove Makers' Union of the United States and Canada, was one of the two
girls who spoke. Miss Nestor, whose eyes are blue, whose manners are
gentle, and whose best weight is ninety-five pounds, had to stand on a
chair that the law makers might see her when she made her plea:
Elizabeth Maloney, of the Waitresses' Union, was the other speaker.
They described details in the daily lives of working women not generally
known except to the workers themselves. Among these was the piece-work
system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed
is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
The legislators were asked to imagine themselves operating a machine
whose speed was gauged up to nine thousand stitches a minute; to
consider how many stitches the operator's hand must guide in a week, a
month, a year, in order to earn a living; working thus eleven, twelve
hours a day, knowing that the end was nervous breakdown, and decrease
of earning power.
"I am a waitress," said Miss Maloney, "and I work ten hours a day. In
that time a waitress who is tolerably busy _walks_ ten miles, and the
dishes she carries back and forth aggregate in weight fifteen hundred to
two thousand pounds. Don't you think eight hours a day is enough for a
girl to walk?"
Only one thing stood in the way of the passage of the bill after that
day. The doubt of its constitutionality proved an obstacle too grave
for the friends of the workers to overcome. It was decided to
substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"
established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of
limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois,
the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.
The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law
of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit
to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours
to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
by the ten-hour law.
There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved
in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched
state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.
Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
a digest of the evidence of governmental commissions, laboratories, and
bodies of scientific research, on the effects of overwork, and
especially of overtime work, on girls and women, and through them on
the succeeding generation. Incidentally the brief contained three
pages of law.
The most striking part of the argument contained in the brief was the
testimony of physicians on the toxin of fatigue.
"Medical Science has demonstrated," says this most important paragraph,
"that while fatigue is a normal phenomenon ... excessive fatigue or
exhaustion is abnormal.... It has discovered that fatigue is due not
only to actual poisoning, but to a specific poison or toxin of fatigue,
entirely analogous in chemical and physical nature to other bacterial
toxins, such as the diphtheria toxin. It has been shown that when
artificially injected into animals in large amounts the fatigue toxin
causes death. The fatigue toxin in normal quantities is said to be
counteracted by an antidote or antitoxin, also generated in the body.
But as soon as fatigue becomes abnormal the antitoxin is not produced
fast enough to counteract the poison of the toxin."
The Supreme Court of the State of Illinois decided that the American
Constitution was never intended to shield manufacturers in their
willingness to poison women under pretense of giving them work. The
ten-hour law was sustained.
That the "Girls' Bill" passed, or that it was even introduced, was due
in large measure to an organization of women, more militant and more
democratic than any other in the United States. This is the Women's
Trade Union League. Formed in New York about seven years ago, the
League consists of women members of labor unions, a few men in organized
trades, and many women outside the ranks of wage earners. Some of these
latter are women of wealth, who are believers in the trade-union
principle, but more are women who work in the professional
ranks,--teachers, lawyers, physicians, writers, artists, settlement
workers. These are the first professional workers, men or women, who
ever asked for and were given affiliation with the American Federation
of Labor. They are the first people, outside the ranks of wage earners,
to appear in Labor Day parades.
The object of the League, which now has branches in five cities,--New
York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland,--is to educate women
wage earners in the doctrine of trade unionism. The League trains and
supports organizers among all classes of workers. As quickly as a group
in any trade seems ready for organizing the League helps them. It
raises funds to assist women in their trade struggles. It acts as
arbitrator between employer and wage earners in case of shop disputes.
The Women's Tracle Union League reaches not only women in factory
trades, but it has succeeded in organizing women who until lately
believed themselves to be a grade above this social level. One hundred
and fifty dressmakers in New York City belong to a union. Seventy
stenographers have organized in the same city. The Teachers' Federation
of Chicago is a labor union, and although it was formed before the
Women's Trade Union League came into existence, it is now affiliated.
The women telegraphers all over the United States are well organized.
The businesslike, resourceful, and fearless policy of the League was
brilliantly demonstrated during the famous strike of the shirt-waist
makers in New York and Philadelphia in the winter of 1910. The story of
this strike will bear retelling.
On the evening of November 22, 1909, there was a great mass meeting of
workers held at Cooper Union in New York. Samuel Gompers, President of
the American Federation of Labor, presided, and the stage was well
filled with members of the Women's Trade Union League. The meeting had
been called by the League in conjunction with Shirt-Waist Makers' Union,
Local 25, to consider the grievances of shirt-waist makers in general,
and especially of the shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, who
had been, for more than two months, on strike.
The story of the strike, the causes that led up to it, and the bitter
injustice which followed it were rehearsed in a dozen speeches. It was
shown that for four to five dollars a week the girl shirt-waist makers
worked from eight in the morning until half-past five in the evening
two days in the week; from eight in the morning until nine at night
four days in the week; and from eight in the morning until noon one day
in the week--Sunday.
The shirt-waist makers in the Triangle factory, in hope of bettering
their conditions, had formed a union, and had informed their employers
of their action. The employers promptly locked them out of the shop, and
the girls declared a strike.
The strike was more than two months old when the Cooper Union meeting
was held, and the employers showed no signs of giving in. It was agreed
that a general strike of shirt-waist makers ought to be declared. But
the union was weak, there were no funds, and most of the shirt-waist
makers were women and unused to the idea of solidarity in action. Could
they stand together in an industrial struggle which promised to be long
and bitter?
President Gompers was plainly fearful that they could not.
Suddenly a very small, very young, very intense Jewish girl, known to
her associates as Clara Lemlich, sprang to her feet, and, with the
assistance of two young men, climbed to the high platform. Flinging up
her arms with a dramatic gesture she poured out a flood of speech,
entirely unintelligible to the presiding Gompers, and to the members of
the Women's Trade Union League. The Yiddish-speaking majority in the
audience understood, however, and the others quickly caught the spirit
of her impassioned plea.
The vast audience rose as one man, and a great roar arose. "Yes, we
will all strike!"
"And will you keep the faith?" cried the girl on the platform. "Will you
swear by the old Jewish oath of our fathers?"
Two thousand Jewish hands were thrust in air, and two thousand Jewish
throats uttered the oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge,
may this hand wither and drop off from this arm I now raise."
Clara Lemlich's part in the work was accomplished. Within a few days
forty thousand shirt-waist makers were on strike.
The Women's Trade Union League, under the direction of Miss Helen Marot,
secretary, at once took hold of the strike.
There were two things to be done at once. The forty thousand had to be
enrolled in the union, and those manufacturers who were willing to
accept the terms of the strikers had to be "signed up." Clinton Hall,
one of the largest buildings on the lower East Side, was secured, and
for several weeks the rooms and hallways of the building and the street
outside were crowded almost to the limit of safety with men and women
strikers, anxious and perspiring "bosses," and busy, active associates
of the Women's Trade Union League.
The immediate business needs of the organization being satisfied the
League members undertook the work of picketing the shops. Picketing, if
this activity has not been revealed to you, consists in patrolling the
neighborhood of the factories during the hours when the strike breakers
are going to and from their nefarious business, and importuning them to
join the strike.
Peaceful picketing is legal. The law permits a striker to speak to the
girl who has taken her place, permits her to present her cause in her
most persuasive fashion, but if she lays her hand, ever so gently on the
other's arm or shoulder, this constitutes technical violence.
Up to the time when the League began picketing there had been a little
of this technical, and possibly an occasional act of real, violence.
After the League took a hand there was none. Each group of union girls
who went forth to picket was accompanied by one or more League members.
Some of these amateur pickets were girls fresh from college, and among
these were Elsie Cole, the brilliant daughter of Albany's Superintendent
of Schools, Inez Milholland, the beautiful and cherished daughter of a
millionaire father, leader of her class, of 1909, in Vassar College,
Elizabeth Dutcher and Violet Pike, both prominent in the Association of
Collegiate Alumnae. These young women went out day after day with girl
strikers, endured the insults and threats of the police, suffered arrest
on more than one occasion, and faced the scorn and indignation of
magistrates who--well, who did not understand.
The strike received an immense amount of publicity, and organizations of
women other than the Women's Trade Union League began to take an
interest in it. They sent for Miss Marot, Miss Cole, Miss Gertrude
Barnum, and other women known to be familiar with the industrial world
of women, and begged for enlightenment on the subject of the strike.
They particularly asked to hear the story from the striking women in
person.
The exclusive Colony Club, to which only women of the highest social
eminence are eligible, was called together by Miss Anne Morgan and
several others, including Mrs. Egerton Winthrop, wife of the president
of the New York Board of Education, to hear the story from the strikers'
own lips. The Colony Club was swept into the shirt-waist strike. More
than thirteen hundred dollars was collected in a few minutes. A dozen
women promised influence and personal service in behalf of the strikers.
A week later Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, mother of the Duchess of Marlborough,
leader of a large Woman Suffrage Association, engaged the Hippodrome,
and packed it to the roof with ten thousand interested spectators.
Something like five thousand dollars was donated by this meeting.
At the beginning of the strike fully five hundred waist houses were
involved. Many of these settled within a few days on the basis of
increased pay, a fifty-two-hour working week, and recognition of the
union. Others settled later, and under the influence of the "uptown
scum," as the employers' association gallantly termed the Women's Trade
Union League, the Colony Club, and the Suffragists, still others
reluctantly gave in. Late in January all except about one hundred out of
the five hundred had settled with the union, and only about three
thousand of the workers were still out of work.
Women have been called the scabs of the labor world. That they would
ever become trade unionists, ever evolve the class consciousness of the
intelligent proletarian men, was deemed an impossible dream. Above all,
that their progress towards industrial emancipation would ever be helped
along by the wives and daughters of the employing classes was
unthinkable. That the releasing of one class of women from household
labor by sending another class of women into the factory, there to
perform their historic tasks of cooking, sewing, and laundry work, was
to result in the humanizing of industry, no mind ever prophesied.
Yet these things are coming. The scabs of the labor world are becoming
the co-workers instead of the competitors of men. The women of the
leisure classes, almost as fast as their eyes are opened to the
situation, espouse the cause of their working sisters. The woman in the
factory is preparing to make over that factory or to close it.
The history of a recent strike, in a carpet mill in Roxbury,
Massachusetts, is a perfect history, in miniature, of the progress of
the working women.
That particular mill is very old and very well known. When it was
established, more than a generation ago, the owner was a man who knew
every one of his employees by name, was especially considerate of the
women operatives, and was loved and respected by every one. Hours of
labor were long, but the work was done in a leisurely fashion, and wages
were good enough to compensate for the long day's labor.
The original owner died, and in time the new firm changed to a
corporation. The manager knew only his office force and possibly a few
floor superintendents and foremen. The rest of the force were "hands."
The whole state of the industry was altered. New and complicated
machinery was introduced. The shortened work day was a hundred times
more fatiguing to the workers because of the increased speed and
nerve-racking noise and jar of the machinery. Other grievances
developed. The quality of the yarn furnished the weavers was often so
bad that they spent hours of unpaid labor mending a broken warp or
manipulating a rotten shuttle full of yarn. Wages, fixed according to
the piece system, declined, it is said, at least one-fourth. Women who
had formerly earned thirteen dollars a week were reduced to seven and
eight dollars.
The women formed a union and struck. Some of them had been in the mills
as long as forty years, but they walked out with the girls.
There you have the story of women's realization of themselves as a
group. Next you encounter the realization of the sisterhood of women.
The Boston Branch of the Women's Trade Union League, through its
secretary, Mabel Gillespie, Radcliffe graduate, joined the strikers.
Backed up by the Boston Central Labor Union, and the United Textile
Workers of Fall River, the strikers fought their fight during ten weeks
of anxiety and deprivation.
The employers were firm in their determination to go out of business
before treating with the strikers as a group. A hand, mind you, exists
as an individual, a very humble individual, but one to be received and
conferred with. Hands, considered collectively, have no just right to
exist. An employers' association is a necessity of business life. A
labor union is an insult to capital.
This was the situation at the end of ten weeks. One day a motor car
stopped in front of the offices of the mills and a lady emerged. Mrs.
Glendower Evans, conservative, cultured, one might say Back Bay
personified, had come to Roxbury to see the carpet manufacturer. Her
powers of persuasion, plus her social position and her commercial
connections, were sufficient to wring consent from the firm to receive
John Golden, president of the United Textile Workers.
John Golden, intelligent, honest, a fine type of workingman, educated
in the English school of unionism, held two conferences with the firm.
He was able to make the employers see the whole situation in an entirely
new light. They were men of probity; they wanted to be fair; and when
they saw the human side of the struggle they surrendered. When they
perceived the justice of the collective bargain, the advantages to both
sides of a labor organization honestly conducted, they consented to
recognize the union. And the women went back, their group unbroken.
Thus are women working, women of all classes, to humanize the factory.
From the outside they are working to educate the legislatures and the
judiciary. They are lending moral and financial support to the women of
the toiling masses in their struggle to make over the factory from the
inside. Together they are impressing the men of the working world, law
makers and judges, with the justice of protecting the mothers of the
race.
Now that the greatest stumbling block to industrial protective
legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal
decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not
yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the
late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not
every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more
valuable to a nation than mere property. But in time they will learn.
In distant New Zealand, not long ago, there was a match factory in which
a number of women worked for low wages. After fruitless appeals to the
owner for better wages the workers resorted to force. They did not
strike. In New Zealand you do not have to strike, because in that
country a substitute for the strike is provided by law. To this
substitute, a Court of Arbitration, the women took their grievance. The
employer in his answer declared, just as employers in this country might
have done, that his business would not stand an increase in wages. He
explained that the match industry was newly established in New Zealand,
and that, until it was on a secure basis, factory owners could not
afford to pay high wages.
The judge ordered an inquiry. In this country it would have been an
inquiry into the state of the match industry. There it was an inquiry
into the cost of living in the town where the match factory was located.
And then the judge summoned the factory owner to the Court of
Arbitration, and this is what he said to the man:
"It is impossible for these girls to live decently or healthfully on the
wages you are now paying. It is of the utmost importance that they
should have wholesome and healthful conditions of life. The souls and
bodies of the young women of New Zealand are of more importance than
your profits, and if you cannot pay living wages it will be better for
the community for you to close your factory. _It would be better to
send the whole match industry to the bottom of the ocean, and go back to
flints and firesticks, than to drive young girls into the gutter._ My
award is that you pay what they ask."
Does that sound like justice to you? It does to me; it does to the eight
million women in the world who have learned to think in human terms.