THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS
[Unskilled and Seasonal Factory Work]
I
Besides the accounts of the waist makers, the National Consumers' League
received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from
unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine
operatives--among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives,
cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers,
fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers
on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses.
As will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual
girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some
other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not
as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade,
but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance
passing factory workers.
For the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those
of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives
expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their
tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression.
For the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an
unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries.
Discouragement at the lack of opportunity to advance was expressed by
almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled
factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, an American girl, was one of the
first workers who gave the League an account of her experience.
Emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was
about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine
she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then
for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house
for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.
She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3
a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the
rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her
own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the
material, the pretty spring suit she wore--a coat, skirt, and jumper, of
cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but
stylishly cut and becoming.
In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income
had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in
the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6;
half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack
work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.
She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness
of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted
it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.
Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to
escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a
private evening school.
For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week.
Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with
three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant
girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat,
with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a
plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina
scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress,
money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the
original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she
might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in
Russia.
In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a
world of her own--a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she
studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments
of the Russian revolution.
She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an
artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a
cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5,
for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was
very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts.
She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to
twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe
exhaustion.[19]
From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and
$4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did
not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had
her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10
cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1-1/2 cents' worth of rolls.
All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable
for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating
herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I
ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."
Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a
position to pity her.
Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of
nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by
educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.
Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,--four years
in New York,--in factory work, without the slightest prospect of
advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind--cutting off the ends
of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes.
She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent
rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her
mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this
last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had
kept her health, she was not at all strong.
She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the
factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the
year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit;
$2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her
board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less
in one way than with strangers. But she slept with part of her sister's
family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and
rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her
luncheon before starting for the factory at seven.
Marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to
make her deeply desired journey back to Austria to see her mother and
father. Although both their children were in the new country, her mother
and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her
father was blind.
The lack of opportunity to rise, among older unskilled factory workers,
may be illustrated by the experience of Mrs. Hallett, an American woman
of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing
candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years. In this time she
had advanced from a wage of $4 a week to a wage of $6, earned by a week
of nine-hour days, with a Saturday half-holiday.
However, as with Marta, this had represented payment from the company for
length of service, and not an advance to more skilled or responsible
labor with more outlook. In Mrs. Hallett's case this was partly because
the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's
retail stores, and she was not strong enough to endure the all-day
standing which this would require. Mrs. Hallett liked this company. The
foreman was considerate, and a week's vacation with pay was given to the
employees.
Mrs. Hallett lived in an excessively small, unheated hall bedroom, on the
fourth floor of an enormous old house filled with the clatter of the
elevated railroad. On the night of the inquirer's call, she was
pathetically concerned lest her visitor should catch cold because "she
wasn't used to it." She lighted a small candle to show her the room,
furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a
broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for Mrs. Clark and her
kind, public-spirited little hostess. They sat, drowned at times in the
noise of the elevated, in almost complete darkness, as Mrs. Hallett
insisted on making a vain effort to extract some heat for her guest from
the single gas-jet, by attaching to it an extremely small gas-stove.
For this room, which was within walking distance of the candy factory,
Mrs. Hallett paid $1.75 a week. Her breakfast of coffee and rolls in a
bakery near by cost her 10 cents daily. She apportioned 15 or 25 cents
each for her luncheon or dinner at restaurants. In her hungriest and most
extravagant moments she lunched for 30 cents. Her allowance for food had
to be meagre, because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged
to have her washing done outside. Sometimes she contrived to save a
dollar a week toward buying clothing. But this meant living less tidily
by having less washing done, or going hungrier. During the last year her
expense for clothing had been a little more than $23: summer hat, $1;
winter hat, $1.98; best hat, $2; shoes (2 pairs at $2.98, 2 pairs
rubbers), $7.16; wrap (long coat), $2.98; skirt (a best black
brilliantine, worn two years), at $5.50, $2.75; underskirt (black
sateen), 98 cents; shirtwaist (black cotton, worn every day in the year),
98 cents; black tights, 98 cents; 2 union suits at $1.25 (one every other
year), $1.25; 6 pairs stockings at 25 cents, $1.50; total, $23.56.
She said with deprecation that she sometimes went to the theatre with
some young girl friends, paying 25 cents for a seat, "because I like a
good time now and then."
These trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual
industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who
gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in
New York.
II
The chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different
kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features
most common to the trade fortunes the workers described--uncertain and
seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and
fatigue from speeding.
Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the
New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another.
This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian
white-goods worker living in the Bronx.
The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the
longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem,
Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many
self-supporting factory workers live. These newer-built lodgings, too,
have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing.
Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair
workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and
German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs
of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess
dresses. These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their
fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like
great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff
ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and
several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots--small,
strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide
tide of Slav and Austrian immigration.
In this curious and bizarre neighborhood, Yeddie Bruker and her sister
lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean
little flat owned by a family of their own nationality.
Yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn
looking and white. At work for six years in New York, she had at first
been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to
the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers
are attached. Then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's
collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker.
In the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger
of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman
was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of
the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from
breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust
flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4
a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting
herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near
her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the
machinery.
In the collar factory she again earned $4 a week, stitching between five
and six dozen collars a day. The stitch on men's collars is extremely
small, almost invisible. It strained her eyes so painfully that she was
obliged to change her occupation again.
As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out
of work by the trade seasons. These still leave her idle, in her present
occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every
year.
In the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on
petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower East Side,
she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months,
employment for all the working days in the week for another three months,
and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional
half day on Sunday, for between two and three months. Legal holidays and
a few days of illness made up the year.
In full weeks her wage is $8. Her income for the year had been $366, and
she had been able to save nothing. She had paid $208 for her board and
lodging, at the rate of $4 a week; a little more than $100 for clothing;
$38 for carfare, necessitated by living in the Bronx; $3 for a doctor;
$2.60 to a benefit association, which assures her $3 a week in case of
illness; $5 for the theatre; and $6 for Union dues.
Her work was very exhausting. Evenly spaced machine ruffling on
petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do. She
sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and
was hard to thread. It may be said here that the number of needles does
not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines;
two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even
twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily
constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under
the needle-point. It was not her eyes, Yeddie said, that were tired by
the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the
machines. Every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed
every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was
open.
One of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades,
is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen,
frequently mentioned by other workers besides Yeddie. Two years ago, in a
waist and dress factory where 400 operatives--more than 300 girls and
about 20 men--were employed for the company by a well-known
subcontractor, Jake Klein, a foreman asked Mr. Klein to beset some of the
girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand. The
manager discharged him. He asked to speak to the girls before he went
away. The manager refused his request. As Mr. Klein turned to the girls,
his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized Klein's collar,
overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the
stairs. "Brothers and sisters," Klein called to the operatives, "will you
sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?" In one impulse of clear
justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with Jake Klein, and
stayed out till the company made overtures of peace. This adventure,
widely related on the East Side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled
by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in
many sewing shops.
The uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell
heavily on Sarah Silberman, a delicate little Austrian Jewish girl of
seventeen, who finished and felled women's cloaks.
She had always lived in poverty. She had worked in a stocking factory in
Austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting
ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in Vienna and London and New
York.
She had been in New York for about a year, lodging, or rather sleeping at
night, in the tenement kitchen of some distant cousins of hers,
practically strangers. The kitchen opened on an air-shaft, and it was
used, not only as a kitchen, but as a dining room and living-room. For
the first four months after her arrival Sarah earned about $5 a week,
working from nine and one-half to ten hours a day as a finisher of boys'
trousers. From this wage she paid $3 a week for her kitchen sleeping
space and breakfast and supper. Luncheon cost her 7 cents a day. She had
been able to buy so very little clothing that she had kept no account of
it. She did her own washing, and walked to work.
She had never had any education until she came to America, and she now
attended a night school, in which she was keenly interested. She was
living in this way when her factory closed.
She then searched desperately for employment for two weeks, finding it
at last in a cloak factory[20] where she was employed from half past
seven in the morning until half past six or seven in the evening, with a
respite of only a few minutes at noon for a hasty luncheon. Her wage was
$3 a week. Working her hardest, she could not keep the wolf from the
door, and was obliged to go hungry at luncheon time or fail to pay the
full rent for her place to sleep in the kitchen.
Sarah was very naturally unstrung and nervous in this hardness of
circumstance and her terror of destitution. As she told her story, she
sobbed and wrung her hands. In the next six months she had better
occupation, however, in spasmodically busy shops, where the hours were
shorter than in the cloak factory, and she managed to earn an average
wage of $6 a week. She was then more serene; she said she had "made out
good."
During her six weeks of better pay at $6 a week, however, which so few
people would consider "making out good," she had suffered an especially
mean exploitation.
She applied at an underwear factory which constantly advertises, in an
East Side Jewish paper, for operatives. The management told her they
would teach her to operate if she would work for them two weeks for
nothing and would give them a dollar. She gave them the dollar; but on
the first day in the place, as she received no instructions, and learned
through another worker that after her two weeks of work for nothing were
over she would not be employed, she came away, losing the dollar she had
given to the firm.
Another worker who was distressed by the dull season, and had witnessed
unjust impositions, was Katia Markelov, a young operative on corsets. She
was a tiny, grave-looking girl of nineteen, very frail, with smooth black
hair, a lovely refinement of manner, and a very sweet smile. Like many
other operatives, she wore glasses. Katia was a good manager, and an
industrious and clever student, a constant attendant at night school.
In the factory where she was employed she earned about $10 a week as a
week worker, a skilled worker making an entire corset, after it was cut
and before it was trimmed. But she had only twelve full weeks' work in
the year; for two and a half months she was entirely idle, and for the
remaining six and a half months she worked from two to five days a week.
Her income for the year had been about $346.
Katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower
Broadway. Before that she had been employed as a week worker in a Fifth
Avenue corset factory, which may be called Madame Cora's. Shortly before
Katia left this establishment, Madame Cora changed her basis of payment
from week work to piece-work. The girls' speed increased. Some of the
more rapid workers who had before made $10 were able to make $12. On
discovering this, Madame Cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning
to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for
thread and needles. She made them pay her 2 cents for every needle.
Thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the
needles, stitches up very rapidly. The girls were frequently obliged to
pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed
into Madame Cora's corsets, and for needles. They rebelled when Madame
Cora refused to pay for these materials herself. From among the three
hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to Union headquarters, and asked
to be organized. But Madame Cora simply filled their places with other
girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and
refused to take them back. Katia did not respect Madame Cora's methods,
and had left before the strike.
Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a
room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem. The room
was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant.
She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred
dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and
making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books
and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an
outing. On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of
unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.
Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was
struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had
swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.
When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger
children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable
intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in
some other country.
Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek,
not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. After she had
been in London for four years, her father died. She and her next younger
sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family;
and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like
Whittington, turned again and came to New York.
Here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a
week. She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month. For
supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week. Other food she bought
from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week. As she did
her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses,
except for shoes. Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she
was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for
them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.
In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she
managed to send $90 home, for the others.
Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York,
and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between
them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage
ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with
the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the
instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the
rest of the family into New York harbor--the girls' mother, their three
younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of
seven.
Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for
these extortionate tickets.
In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons
into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The
fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of
seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost
$9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most
of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month
for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's
Hebrew schooling.
Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because
the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she
suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's
work through illness.
She was only nineteen years old. By working every hour she could make a
fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work,
she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair
standard of living.
A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the
price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more
suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old
hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a
dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes
she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must
begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another
pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly
spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves
these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the
congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The
stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out
even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible to mend
stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's
washing.
All Molly Davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding
concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family
responsibility.
In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family
responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna. She was a girl of nineteen, who
had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai.
Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to
bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or
two younger than Rita.
Soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men's vests,
at $6 or $7 a week, for ten hours' work a day. Living and saving with her
brother, she contrived to send home $4 a month. Between them, Nikolai and
Rita brought over their mother and the little brother. But, very soon
after they were all settled together, their mother died. They were
obliged to put the little brother into an institution. Then Nikolai fell
from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial
recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his
work.
Rita now lived alone, spending $3.50 a month for a sleeping place in a
tenement, and for suppers $1.25 a week. Her luncheons and breakfasts,
picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was
working, to about 12 cents a day. At other times she often went without
both meals. For in the last year her average wage had been reduced to
$4.33 a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness.
Through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and
for nine weeks none at all.
When she was working, she paid 60 cents a week carfare, 25 cents a month
to the Union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and 10 cents a
month to a "Woman's Self-Education Society." The Union and this club
meant more to Rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with,
and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $20 in a
year and a half.
Some months afterward, Mrs. Clark received word that Rita had solved many
of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her
domestic anxieties were relieved.
The chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still
in Russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a
friend, another girl, working in the same shop--a tragedy told here
because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work.
Rita's younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl,
alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate
that it was doubtful whether her admission to the United States could be
secured, even if Rita could possibly save enough for her passage money.
The friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last
become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the
birth of their child, when he left her resourceless. Slack and dull
seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on
their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great
beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations.[21] Especially at the
mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers,
and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops.
Helena Hardman, an Austrian girl, a fur sewer, had been employed for only
twenty weeks in the year. She sewed by hand on fur garments in a Twelfth
Street shop, for $7 a week, working nine hours a day, with a Saturday
half-holiday. The air and odors in the fur shop were very disagreeable,
but had not affected her health.
At the end of the twenty weeks she had been laid off, and had looked
unsuccessfully for work for seventeen weeks, before she found employment
as an operative in an apron factory. Here, however, in this unaccustomed
industry, by working as an operative nine hours a day for five days a
week, and six hours on Saturday, she could earn only $3 or $4.
She paid $4 a week for board and a tenement room shared with another
girl. She had been obliged to go in debt to her landlady for part of her
long idle time, after her savings had been exhausted.
During this time she had been unable to buy any clothing, though her
expense for this before had been slender: a suit, $18; a hat, $3; shoes,
$3; waists, $3; and underwear, $2.50. She looked very well, however, in
spite of the struggle and low wages necessitated by learning a secondary
trade.
The dull season is tided over in various ways. A few fortunate girls go
home and live without expense. Many live partly at the expense of
philanthropic persons, in subsidized homes. In these ways they save a
little money for the dull time, and also store more energy from their
more comfortable living.
On the horizon of the milliner the dull season looms black. All the world
wants a new hat, gets it, and thinks no more of hats or the makers of
hats. On this account a fast and feverish making and trimming of hats, an
exhausting drain of the energy of milliners for a few weeks, is followed
by weeks of no demand upon their skill.
Girl after girl told the investigator that the busy season more than wore
her out, but that the worry and lower standard of living of the dull
season were worse. The hardship is the greater because the skilled
milliner has had to spend time and money for her training.
Many of these girls try to find supplementary work, as waitresses in
summer hotels, or in some other trade. A great difficulty here is the
overlapping of seasons. The summer hotel waitress is needed until
September, at least, but the milliner must begin work in August. To
obtain employment in a non-seasonal industry, it is often necessary to
lie. In each new occupation it is necessary to accept a beginner's wage.
Regina Siegerson had come alone, at the age of fifteen, from Russia to
New York, where she had been for seven years. The first winter was cruel.
She supported herself on $3 a week. She had been forced to live in the
most miserable of tenements with "ignorant" people. She had subsisted
mainly by eating bananas, and had worn a spring jacket through the cold
winter. It seemed, however, that no hardship had ever prevented her from
attending evening school, where her persistence had taken her to the
fourth year of high school. She was thinking of college at the time of
the interview. Regina was a Russian revolutionist, and keenly thirsting
for knowledge. She talked eagerly to the inquirer about Victor Hugo,
Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw. With no less interest she spoke of the
trade fortunes of milliners in New York, and her own last year's
experience. She had worked through May, June, and July as a trimmer,
making $11 in a week of nine hours a day, with Saturday closing at five.
During August and September and the first weeks in October she had only
six weeks' work, as a maker in a ready-to-wear hat factory, situated on
the lower West Side over a stable, where she made $10 in a week of nine
hours a day.
Regina and a girl friend had managed to furnish a two-room tenement
apartment with very simple conveniences, and there they kept house. Rent
was $10.50 a month; gas for heating and cooking, $1.80; and food for the
two, about $5 a week. As Regina did her own washing, the weekly expense
for each was but $3.67, less than many lodgers pay for very much less
comfort.
The greatest pleasure the girls had in their little establishment was the
opportunity it gave them for entertaining friends. Before, it had been
impossible for them to see any one, except in other people's crowded
living-rooms, or on the street.
Regina was engaged to a young apothecary student, whom she expected to
marry in the spring. Like her, he was in New York without his family, and
he took his meals at the two girls' little flat with them.
Regina's father, who was living in Russia with a second wife, had sent
her $100 when she wrote him of her intended marriage. This, and about $40
saved in the six weeks of earning $10, were her reserve fund in the long
dull season.
The inquirer saw Regina again a few days before Thanksgiving. She was
still out of work, but was learning at home to do some mechanical china
decorating for the Christmas trade.
Among the milliners, several girls were studying to acquire, not only a
training in a secondary trade, but the better general education which
Frances Ashton, a young American girl of twenty, had obtained through
better fortunes.
Her father, a professional man, had been comfortably situated. Without
anticipating the necessity of supporting herself, she had studied
millinery at Pratt Institute for half a year. Then, because it was rather
a lark, she had gone to work in New York. Most of her wage was spent for
board and recreation, her father sending her an allowance for clothes.
After a year, his sudden death made it necessary for her to live more
economically, as her inheritance was not large. The expenses of an attack
of typhoid one summer, and of an operation the next year, entirely
consumed it.
In the year she described, she had been a copyist in one of the most
exclusive shops on Fifth Avenue. The woman in charge was exceptionally
considerate, keeping the girls as long as possible. She used to weep
when she was obliged to dismiss them, for she realized the suffering and
the temptation of the long idle period.
However, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a
time, from February 1 to May 15, and from August 18 to December 4. During
the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were
piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. The working day
lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon.
Many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $1, besides
30 cents supper money, for overtime. But by six o'clock Frances was so
exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that
hour.
In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment,
Frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began
earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year,
and idle for twenty. She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to
$14 a week.
The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to
find anything to do. Application at department stores had been
ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. She said she had lost all
scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a
place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.
Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized
homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room
shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week. Although she walked sometimes
from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week. Laundering two
sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents. Thus, for a
reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by
philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of
clothing.
She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. She
said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant
foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her
apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. She was, at the time she gave
her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to
pay another week's board.
Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living
comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate
employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the
circumstances.
Something, then, must be said about these circumstances--this widespread
precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or
industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. Where industry acts
the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless
for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant. Among the
factory workers, the waist makers' admirable efforts for juster wages
were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on
account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence
employers are as powerless as employees to forestall.
These chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work on the fortunes of
some self-supporting operatives and hand workers in New York factories
and workshops, concern only one corner of American industry, in which, as
every observer must realize, there are many other enormous fields of
seasonal work. These histories are nevertheless clear and authentic
instances of a strange and widespread social waste. Neither trade
organization nor State legislation for shorter hours is primarily
directed toward a more general regular and foresighted distribution of
work among all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers. Until some
focussed, specific attempt is made to secure such a distribution, it
seems impossible but that extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness,
will be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime or
exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner apparently arranged by
fortune to devastate human energy in the least intelligent manner
possible.
Further effects of speeding and of monotony in this labor were described
by other self-supporting factory workers whose chronicles, being also
concerned with industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed
next.
[Illustration: Photograph by Lewis Hine
"Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound;--
But where is what I started for so long ago,
And why is it still unfound?"
--WALT WHITMAN.]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: See Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in
the United States. Volume II, Men's Ready-made Clothing, pages 141-157;
160-165; 384-395.]
[Footnote 20: The income and outlay of other cloak makers will be
separately presented.]
[Footnote 21: In the first report of the New York Probation Association
the statement is made that out of 300 girls committed by the courts
during the year to the charge of Waverley House, 72 had been engaged in
factory work. Of these many had been at one time or other employed as
operatives. On questioning the probation worker, Miss Stella Miner, who
had lived with them and knew their stories most fully, it was learned,
however, that almost every one of these girls had gone astray while they
were little children, had been remanded by courts to the House of the
Good Shepherd, where they had learned machine operating, and on going out
of its protection to factories had drifted back again to their old ways
of life. How far their early habit and experience had dragged these young
girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known. The truth remains that
factory work, when it is seasonal, must increase temptation by its
economic pressure.]