have adopted the same methods, the working-woman not only pays the rent
that would be required for a factory, but gives them a profit on
expressage, thread, time lost in going to bank, and often the price on a
dozen of garments, payment for the dozen being deducted by many foremen
if there is a flaw in one. This foreman becomes the scapegoat if
unpleasant questions are asked by any whose investigation might bring
discredit on the firm. In some cases they refuse positively to give any
information, but in most, questions are answered with suspicious
glibness, and if reference is made to any difficulties encountered by
the women in their employ, they take instant refuge in the statement:--
"Oh, that was before the last foreman left. We discharged him as soon as
we found out how he had served the women."
"Do you see those goods?" another asked, pointing to a counter filled
with piles of chemises. "How do you suppose we make a cent when you can
buy a chemise like that for fifty cents? We don't. The competition is
ruining us, and we're talking of giving up the business."
"That's so. It's really more in charity to the women than anything else
that we go on," his partner remarked, with a look toward him which
seemed to hold a million condensed winks. "That price is just ruin;
that's what it is."
Undoubtedly, but not for the firm, as the following figures will
show,--figures given by a competent forewoman in a large establishment
where she had had eleven years' experience: twenty-seven yards and
three-quarters are required for one dozen chemises, the price paid for
such cotton as is used in one selling at fifty cents being five cents
per yard, or $1.40 for the whole amount; thirty yards of edging at 4-1/2
cents a yard furnishes trimming for the dozen, at $1.35; and four
two-hundred-yard spools of cotton are required, at twenty-five cents per
dozen, or eight cents per dozen garments. The seamer who sews up and
hems the bodies of the garments receives thirty cents a dozen, and the
"maker"--this being the technical term for the more experienced worker
who puts on band and sleeves--receives from ninety cents to one dollar
a dozen, though at present the rates run from seventy-five to ninety
cents. Our table, then, stands as follows:--
Cloth for one dozen chemises $1.40
Edging " " 1.35
Thread " " .08
Seamer " " .30
Maker " " .90
-----
Total cost of dozen $4.03
Wholesale price per dozen 5.25
Profit per dozen 1.22
The chemise which sells at seven dollars per dozen has the additional
value in quality of cloth and edging, the same price being paid the
work-women, this price varying only in very slight degree till the
excessively elaborate work demanded by special orders. One class of
women in New York, whose trade has been a prosperous one since ever time
began, pay often one hundred dollars a dozen for the garments, which are
simply a mass of lace and cobweb cambric, tucked and puffed, and
demanding the highest skill of the machine operator, who even in such
case counts herself happy if she can make eight or nine dollars a week.
And if any youth and comeliness remain to her, why need there be wonder
if the question frame itself: "Why am I the maker of this thing, earning
barest living, when, if I choose, I, too, can be buyer and wearer and
live at ease?"
Wonder rather that one remains honest when the only thing that pays is
vice.
For the garments of lowest grade to be found in the cheapest quarters of
the city the price ranges from twenty-five to thirty cents, the maker
receiving only thirty cents a dozen, and cloth, trimming, and thread
being of the lowest quality. The profit in such case is wellnigh
imperceptible; but for the class of employer who secures it, content to
grovel in foul streets, and know no joy of living save the one delight
of seeing the sordid gains roll up into hundreds of thousands, it is
still profit, and he is content. As I write, an evening paper containing
the advertisement of a leading dry-goods firm is placed before me, and I
read: "Chemises, from 12-1/2 cents up." Here imagination stops. No list
of cost prices within my reach tells me how this is practicable. But one
thing is certain. Even here it is not the employer who loses; and if it
is a question of but a third of a cent profit, be sure that that profit
is on his side, never on the side of the worker.
CHAPTER FOURTH.
THE BARGAIN COUNTER.
The problem of the last chapter is, if not plain, at least far plainer
than when it left the pen, and it has become possible to understand how
the garment sold at twelve and a half cents may still afford its margin
of profit. It has also been made plain that that profit is, as there
stated, "never on the side of the worker," but that it is wrung from her
by the sharpest and most pitiless of all the methods known to
unscrupulous men and the women who have chosen to emulate them. For it
has been my evil fortune in this quest to find women not only as filled
with greed and as tricky and uncertain in their methods as the worst
class of male employers, but even more ingenious in specific modes of
imposition. Without exception, so far as I can discover, they have been
workers themselves, released for a time it may be by marriage, but
taking up the trade again, either from choice or necessity. They have
learned every possibility of cheating. They know also far better than
men every possibility of nagging, and as they usually own a few machines
they employ women on their own premises and keep a watchful eye lest
the smallest advantage be gained. The majority prefer to act as
"sweaters," this releasing them from the uncertainties attending the
wholesale manufacturer, and as the work is given to them at prices at or
even below the "life limit," it is not surprising that those to whom
they in turn pass it on find their percentage to mean something much
nearer death than life.
"Only blind eyes could have failed to see all this before," some reader
is certain to say. "How is it possible that any one dealing directly
with the question could doubt for a moment the existence of this and a
thousand-fold worse fraud?"
Only possible from the same fact that makes these papers a necessity.
They hold only new phases of the old story. The grain has had not one
threshing alone, but many, and yet for the most patient and persistent
of searchers after truth is ever fresh surprise at its nature and
extent. Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle
instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely
conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying
power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight
paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all
good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the
Republic offers to-day, states calmly, "There is no such thing as
business without lying," what room remains for honor or justice or
humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no
advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are
civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision,
but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption
and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even
civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal
with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what
method will most surely mean destruction.
We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it
seems, that moments of despair come to all who would rouse men to
action. Not one generation nor many can answer the call sounding forever
in the ears of every son of man; but he who has heeded has at least made
heeding more possible for those that follow; and the time comes at last
when the way must be plain for all. To make it plainer many a popular
conviction must be laid aside, and among them the one that follows.
It is a deeply rooted belief that the poor understand and feel for the
poor beyond any possibility in those who have never known cold and
hunger and rags save as uncomfortable terms used too freely by
injudicious agitators. Like many another popular belief the groundwork
is in the believer's own mind, and has its most tangible existence in
story-books. There are isolated cases always of self-sacrifice and
compassion and all gentle virtues, but long experience goes to show that
if too great comfort is deadening, too little is brutalizing, and that
pity dies in the soul of man or woman to whom no pity has been shown. It
is easy to see, then, how the woman who has found injustice and
oppression the law of life, deals in the same fashion when her own time
comes, and tyrannizes with the comfortable conviction that she is by
this means getting even with the world. She knows every sore spot, and
how best to make the galled jade wince, and lightens her own task by the
methods practised in the past upon herself. This is one species to be
dealt with, and a far less dangerous one than the craftier and less
outspokenly brutal order, just above her in grade. It is by these last
that some of the chief frauds on women are perpetrated, and here we find
one source of the supplies that furnish the bargain counters.
We read periodically of firms detected in imposing upon women, and are
likely to feel that such exposure has ended their career as firms once
for all. In every trade will be found one or more of these, whose
methods of obtaining hands are fraudulent, and who advertise for "girls
to learn the trade," with no intention of retaining them beyond the time
in which they remain content to work without pay. There are a thousand
methods of evasion, even when the law faces them and the victim has made
formal complaint. As a rule she is too ignorant and too timid for
complaint or anything but abject submission, and this fact is relied
upon as certain foundation for success. But, if determined enough, the
woman has some redress in her power. Within a few years, after long and
often defeated attempts, the Woman's Protective Union has brought about
legislation against such fraud, and any employer deliberately
withholding wages is liable to fifteen days' imprisonment and the costs
of the suit brought against him, a fact of which most of them seem to be
still quite unaware. This law, so far as imprisonment is concerned, has
no application to women, and they have learned how to evade the points
which might be made to bear upon them, by hiring rooms, machines, etc.,
and swearing that they have no personal property that can be levied
upon. Or, if they have any, they transfer it to some friend or relative,
as in the case of Madame M----, a fashionable dressmaker notorious for
escaping from payment seven times out of ten. She has accumulated money
enough to become the owner of a large farm on Long Island, but so
ingeniously have all her arrangements been made that it is impossible to
make her responsible, and her case is used at the Union as a standing
illustration of the difficulty of circumventing a woman bent upon
cheating.
A firm, a large proportion of whose goods are manufactured in this
manner, can well afford to stock the bargain counters of popular
stores. They can afford also to lose slightly by work imperfectly done,
though, even with learners, this is in smaller proportion than might be
supposed. The girl who comes in answer to their advertisement is anxious
to learn the trade at once, and gives her best intelligence to mastering
every detail. Her first week is likely to hold an energy of effort that
could hardly last, and she can often be beguiled by small payments and
large promises to continue weeks and even months, always expecting the
always delayed payment. Firms dealing in such fashion change their
quarters often, unless in league with police captains who have been
given sufficient reasons for obliviousness of their methods, and who
have also been known to silence timid complaints with the threat of a
charge of theft. But there is always a multitude ready to be duped, and
no exposure seems sufficient to prevent this, and women who have once
established a business on this system seem absolutely reckless as to any
possible consequences.
There is at present on Third Avenue a Mrs. F----, who for eleven years
has conducted a successful business built upon continuous fraud. She is
a manufacturer of underwear, and the singular fact is that she has
certain regular employees who have been with her from the beginning, and
who, while apparently unconscious of her methods, are practically
partners in the fraud. She is a woman of good presence and address, and
one to whom girls submit unquestioningly, contending, even in court,
that she never meant to cheat them; and it is still an open question
with those who know her best how far she herself recognizes the fraud in
her system. The old hands deny that it is her custom to cheat, and
though innumerable complaints stand against her, she has usually paid on
compulsion, and insisted that she always meant to. Her machines never
lack operators, and the grade of work turned out is of the best quality.
Her advertisement appears at irregular intervals, is answered by swarms
of applicants, and there are always numbers waiting their turn. On a
side street a few blocks distant is a deep basement, crowded with
machines and presided over by a woman with many of her personal
characteristics. It is the lowest order of slop work that is done here,
but it helps to fill the bargain counters of the poorer stores, and the
workers are an always shifting quantity. It is certain that both places
are practically the property of Mrs. F----, but no man has yet been
cunning enough to determine once for all her responsibility, and no law
yet framed covers any ground that she has chosen as her own. Her
prototypes are to be found in every trade open to women, and their
numbers grow with the growth of the great city and strengthen in like
proportion. The story of one is practically the story of all. Popularly
supposed to be a method of trickery confined chiefly to Jews,
investigation shows that Americans must share the odium in almost as
great degree, and that the long list includes every nationality known to
trade.
We have dealt thus far with fraud as the first and chief procurer for
bargain counters. Another method results from a fact that thus far must
sum up as mainly Jewish. Till within very little more than a year, a
large dry-goods firm on the west side employed many women in its
underwear department. The work was piece-work, and done by the class of
women who own their own machines and work at home. Prices were never
high, but the work was steady and the pay prompt. The firm for a time
made a specialty of "Mother Hubbard" night-gowns, for which they paid
one dollar a dozen for "making," this word covering the making and
putting in of yoke and sleeves, the "seamer" having in some cases made
the bodies at thirty cents a dozen. Many of the women, however, made the
entire garment at $1.30 per dozen, ten being the utmost number
practicable in a day of fourteen hours. Suddenly the women were informed
that their services would not be required longer. An east-side firm
bearing a Jewish name had contracted to do the same work at eighty cents
a dozen, and all other underwear in the same proportions. Steam had
taken the place of foot-power, and the women must find employment with
firms who were willing to keep to slower methods. Necessarily these are
an always lessening minority. Competition in this race for wealth
crushes out every possibility of thought for the worker save as so much
producing power, and what hand and foot cannot do steam must. In several
cases in this special manufacture the factories have been transferred to
New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where rent is a mere song, and where girls
flock in from the adjacent country, eager for the work that represents
something higher than either ordinary mill work or the household service
they despise.
"What can we do?" said one manufacturer lately, when asked how he
thought the thing would end. "If there were any power quicker than
steam, or any way of managing so that women could feed five or six
machines, that would have to come next, else every one of us would go to
the wall together, the pressure is so tremendous. Of course there's no
chance for the women, but then you must remember there's precious little
chance for the employer either. This competition is a sort of insanity.
It gluts the market with cheap goods, and gives a sense of prosperity,
but it is the death of all legitimate, reasonable business. It won't
surprise me if this whole trade of manufacturing underwear becomes a
monopoly, and one man--like O'H----, for instance--swallows up the whole
thing. Lord help the women then, for there'll be no help in man!"
"Suppose co-operation were tried? What would be the effect?"
"No effect, because there isn't confidence enough anywhere to make men
dare a co-operative scheme. Even the workers would distrust it, and a
sharp business man laughs in your face if you mention the word. It
doesn't suit American notions. It might be a good thing if there were
any old-fashioned business men left,--men content with slow profits and
honest dealing,--as my father was, for instance. But he wouldn't have a
ghost of a chance to-day. The whole system of business is rotten, and
there will have to be a reconstruction clean from the bottom, though
it's the men that need it first. We're the maddest nation for money on
the face of the earth, and the race is a more killing one every year.
I'm half inclined to think sometimes that mankind will soon be pretty
much a superfluity, the machines are getting so intelligent; and it may
be these conditions that seem to upset you so are simply means of
killing off those that are not wanted, and giving place to a less
sensitive order of beings. Lord help them, I say again, for there's no
help in man."
The speaker nodded, as if this rather unexpected flight of imagination
was an inspiration in which might lie the real solution of all
difficulties, and hurried away to his waiting niche in the great
competitive system. And as he went, there came to me words spoken by one
of the workers, in whose life hope was dead, and who also had her theory
of any future under to-day's conditions:--
"I've worked eleven years. I've tried five trades with my needle and
machine. My shortest day has been fourteen hours, for I had the children
and they had to be fed. There's not one of these trades that I don't
know well. It isn't work that I've any trouble in getting. It's wages.
Five years ago I could earn $1.50 a day, and we were comfortable. Then
it began to go down,--$1.25, then $1.00. There it stopped awhile, and I
got used to that, and could even get some remains of comfort out of it.
I had to plan to the last half cent. We went cold often, but we were
never hungry. But then it fell again,--to ninety cents, to eighty-five.
For a year the best that I can do I have earned not over eighty cents a
day,--sometimes only seventy-five. I'm sixty-two years old. I can't
learn new ways. I am strong. I always was strong. I run the machine
fourteen hours a day, with just the stoppings that have to be to get the
work ready. I've never asked a man alive for a penny beyond what my own
hands can earn, and I don't want it. I suppose the Lord knows what it
all means. It's His world and His children in it, and I've kept myself
from going crazy many a time by saying it was His world and that somehow
it must all come right in the end. But I don't believe it any more. He's
forgotten. There's nothing left but men that live to grind the face of
the poor; that chuckle when they find a new way of making a cent or two
more a week out of starving women and children. I never thought I
should feel so; I don't know myself; but I tell you I'm ready for murder
when I think of these men. If there's no justice above, it isn't quite
dead below; and if men with money will not heed, the men and the women
without money will rise some day. How? I don't know. We've no time to
plan, and we're too tired to think, but it's coming somehow, and I'm not
ashamed to say I'll join in if I live to see it come. It's seas of tears
that these men sail on. It's our life-blood they drink and our flesh
that they eat. God help them if the storm comes, for there'll be no help
in man."
Employer and employed had ended in wellnigh the same words; but the gulf
between no words have spanned, and it widens day by day.
CHAPTER FIFTH.
A FASHIONABLE DRESSMAKER.
"Come now, be reasonable, won't you? You've got to move on, you know,
and why don't you do it?"
"I'm that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn't be more so; and
I'll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain't sure I
would for that. It's only a choice between starvation and going into the
next world in little bits, and I don't suppose it makes much difference
which way it's done."
The small, pale, dogged-looking little woman who announced this
conviction did not even rise from the steps where she sat looking up to
the big policeman, who faced her uneasily, half turning as if he would
escape the consequences of rash action if he knew how. Nothing could be
more mysterious. For it was within sight of Broadway, on one of the
best-known side streets near Union Square, where business signs were few
and of the most decorous order, and where before one door, bearing the
name of one of the best-known fashionable dressmakers, a line of
carriages stood each day during the busy season. A name hardly less
known was on the door-plate of the great house before which she sat, and
which still bore every mark of prosperous ownership, while from one of
the windows looked the elaborately dressed head of Madame herself, the
anxiety in her eyes contradicting the scornful smile on her thin lips.
The door just beyond No. -- opened, and a stout gentleman descended one
step and stood eying the policeman belligerently. That official looked
up the street as if wishing for cry of "murder" or "stop thief" around
the corner, but hearing neither, concentrated again on the antagonist
whose irregular methods defied precedent and gave him a painful sense of
insecurity. If two could listen, why not three?--and I paused near the
steps, eyed considerately by the stout gentleman, who was evidently on
the outlook for allies. A look of intelligence passed between Madame and
the policeman, and her head disappeared from the window, a blind on the
second story moving slightly and announcing a moment later that she had
taken a less conspicuous post of observation.
"Move on now, I tell you!" began the policeman again, but paused, for as
he spoke a slender, bright-eyed girl came swiftly toward them, and
paused on the first step with a glance of curiosity at the little group.
"Have you come to answer Madame M----'s advertisement?" the little woman
said, as she rose from the steps and laid her hand detainingly on the
hurrying figure.
"Yes," the girl answered hesitatingly, pulling away from the hand that
held.
"Then, unless you've got anything else to do and like to give your time
and strength for naught, keep away. You'll get no wages, no matter
what's promised. I've been there six months, kept on by fair promises,
and I know. I'll let no girl go in there without warning."
"It's a good-looking place," the girl said doubtfully.
"It's a den of thieves all the same. If you don't believe me, come down
to the Woman's Protective Union on Clinton Place, and you'll see my case
on the book there, and judgment against this woman, that's no more mercy
than a Hottentot and lies that smoothly that she'd humbug an angel of
light. Ah! that's good!" she added, for the girl had shaken off her hand
and sped away as swiftly as she had come. "That's seven since yesterday,
and I wish it were seven hundred. It's time somebody turned watchdog."
"That ain't your business. That's a matter for the law," said the big
policeman, who had glanced anxiously up to the second-story window and
then looked reassured and serene, as the stout gentleman made a
significant movement, which indicated that bribery was as possible for
one sex as for the other. "The law'll straighten out anything that
you've a mind to have it."