THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY-WORKERS
[Monotony and Fatigue in Speeding]
One of the strangest effects of the introduction of machinery into
industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of
workers from mechanical drudgery, it has often tended to devitalize and
warp these forces to the functions of machines.[22]
This stupefying and wearying effect of machine-work from concentration
and intensity of application and attention was frequently mentioned by
the factory workers in their accounts.
Tina Levin, a young girl eighteen years old, had worked two years in an
underwear factory in New York; and before her arrival in America, six
years in an underwear factory in Russia. She had come from abroad to her
fiancé, Ivan Levin, whom she had recently married. She still worked in
the underwear factory, although she was not entirely self-supporting. She
and her young husband met the League's Inquirer at a Jewish Girls'
Self-Education Club, where they gave between them the account of Tina's
self-supporting years.
Before her marriage, Tina had worked at a machine ten hours a day for an
underwear manufacturer on Canal Street. In the height of the season the
shop often worked overtime until 8 o'clock, two or three nights a week.
Besides this, many of the girls took hand work home, where they sewed
till eleven or twelve o'clock. But Tina was so exhausted by her long day
that she never did this. Working as hard as possible, she earned $7, and
sometimes $8 a week, during the six busy months.
For part of this time she lived a full hour-and-a-half's car ride from
the factory. So that with dressing, and eating two meals at her lodging,
when she was at the machine twelve hours a day, she had only about six
hours sleep.
At least half the year was so dull that she could earn only $3 or $3.50 a
week; and she was so worn out that every month she was utterly unable to
work for three or four days. This loss had reduced her income by $32. She
had been obliged to pay $9 for medicine. Her income for the year had been
about $262. For board and lodging in a tenement she had paid $3.50 a
week; for carfare 60 cents a week; and she had sent $5 home in the year;
and given $9 for medicine; $36 for the dentist; and $1 a month to the
Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society. She had less than $10 left for
dress for the year. But her lover had helped her with many presents; and
had given her many good times and pleasures, besides those obtainable at
the Jewish Girls' Self-Education Society.
Tina had the advantage of a knowledge of English. This lack of
opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was
poignantly regretted by another machine operative, Fanny Leysher, a
white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in America four years.
She lived in one room of a tenement off the Bowery, where she boarded and
lodged for $4 a week. She worked in a factory within walking distance,
earning $7 a week in the busy season.
Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile,
and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked,
however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for
four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a
week by stitching up and down the fronts and stitching on the belts of
108 corset covers--9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly
complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of
stitching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to
attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from
headache and from backache.
Fanny worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks
she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For
three weeks she had been ill.
She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a
nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night
school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes.
Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of
Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses.
Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress
showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of
line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every
advantage." It was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white
piqué collar and a loose blue tie. She had tan stockings and low russet
shoes. Fanny belonged to the Working-man's Circle. She said she went as
often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. And when she was
asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness
and eagerness, "Oh, I want nothing but the best. Only what will tell me
about real life."
She said she had spent too much money for dress last year; but she had
been able to buy clothing of a quality which she thought would last her
for a long time. The little plain gold watch in her list she had partly
needed and partly had been unable to resist. One of the three summer
dresses costing $14 was her blue linen dress, for which she had given $7.
She expected to wear it for two summers with alterations.
Last year's suit cleaned $ 3
Shoes 11
Hat 10
Dresses (1 winter, $10; 3 summer, $14) 24
Coat 9
Every-day hat 4.50
Muslin (for white waists and corset covers made by herself) 5
Umbrella 2
Gloves 2
Pocket-book 1
Watch 11
______
$82.50
Painful as it was in some ways to see Fanny Leysher, who liked "nothing
but the best," pouring her life force into stitching 108 corset covers a
day, she yet seemed less helpless than some still younger workers.
Minna Waldemar, a girl of sixteen, an operative in an umbrella factory,
had been in the United States for six months. For five months of this
time she had been stitching the seams and hems of umbrella covers for 35
cents a hundred. Her usual output was about 200 a day. By working very
fast, she could in a full day make 300, but when she did, it left her
thumb very sore.
Minna paid $3 a month for sleeping space in a tenement; $1.75 a week for
suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.
She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1. A suit had cost $8; a
hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2. Working her hardest and fastest, she
had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings,
and was obliged to have assistance from her brother, her only relative in
New York.
Every line of Minna's little figure looked overworked. This was true,
too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who
had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.
In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she
had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she
earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy
weeks she had earned $9 a week.
After the slack season, the factory closed. Hunting desperately for a way
to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children's
dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a
week. In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at
this for the next three or four months.
After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. She had returned
to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week. Her busiest days were
eleven hours long, and her others nine.
She spent nothing for pleasure. She could send nothing to her family. In
the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a
suit for $12. She went to night school, but was generally so weary that
she could learn really nothing. She did her own washing, and for $3 a
month she rented a sleeping space in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded
East Side tenement. It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken
landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes
late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and
flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. Supper with the
landlady cost her 20 cents a night. Sadie's breakfasts and dinners
depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. As in the
weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a
week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40
cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is
easily understood.
Sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner
and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant,
is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for
lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any
definite space at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her
own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could.
If she had attempted to find a better and less expensive place for
sleeping, in a less congested quarter of the city, she would have been
obliged to pay, besides her rent, a sum at least half as large, for
transportation. In the same way, for this really very large sum of $15 or
$20 paid yearly to the city railroads, she would not have received in
their cars any definite place at all, honestly provided for her as her
own, but simply a chance of getting a foothold when she could on a
cross-town car or the Bronx elevated during the rush hours. The yearly
sums paid to the car companies by factory workers too exhausted to walk
home are very striking in these budgets. Tina Levin had paid nearly
$30--more than she had spent for her clothing during the year. This
expense of carfare and the wretched conditions in transportation which
most of the car companies supply to the workers compelled to use their
lines in rush hours is a difficulty scarcely less than that of New York
rents and congestion, and inseparably connected with them.
Anna Flodin, a girl of eighteen, forced by illness to leave the congested
quarters of New York for the Bronx, did not attempt to return to work
until she was able to live again within walking distance of the factory.
Anna Flodin was a pale, quiet girl with smooth black hair and a serious,
almost poignant expression. All her life had been one of poverty, a sheer
struggle to keep the wolf from the door. She spoke no English, though she
could understand a little.
She stitched regularly in the busy season 1568 yards of machine sewing
daily in fastening belts to cheap corset covers. The forewoman gave her
in the course of the day 28 bundles, each containing 28 corset covers
with the belts basted to the waist lines and the loose ends of the belts
basted ready to finish.
The instant Anna failed to complete this amount, or seemed to drop behind
in the course of the day, the forewoman blamed her, and threatened to
reduce her wage.
Anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $6 a week. If she were
five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. She was docked for
every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in
the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then
been only $5 a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she
stitched into the white-goods company's output.
In order to complete 784 yards of belting a day--over 1600 yards of
stitching, for she fastened both edges of the belt--she was forced, of
course, to work as fast as she could feed and guide belts under the
needle. She had strong eyes. But her back ached from the stooping to
guide the material, and she suffered cruelly from pain in her shoulders.
There had been seventeen weeks of this work. Then there had been ten
weeks of two or three days' work a week, when it seemed impossible to
earn enough to live on. Then, ten weeks when the factory closed. Then she
had an illness lasting over two months, which began a few weeks after the
factory closed.
She said the doctor had told her that her illness was consumption and
that he had cured it. It must have been, of course, not consumption or
not arrested in that space of time. But, during it, she had paid him
$28.50 and given $22.50 for her board and lodging, with an uncle in the
Bronx, and for milk and eggs.
Almost as soon as she was declared able to return to stitching seven
hundred belts a day, she hurried back to work. But within a few days the
girls struck against the company's practice of making them buy thread,
and were out for five weeks. At the end of this time they won their
point.
Altogether her income for the year had been about $150; and the severity
and amount of labor she had given in earning it had left her cruelly
spent.
She could not possibly live on this amount, as board and lodging alone
had cost her $3 a week--$126 for the year. She had been obliged to borrow
$50 for her treatment in her illness; and she had not yet paid back this
sum. Besides, her landlady had trusted her for some board bills she had
not yet paid. For clothing she had spent $26.59,--one dress for $7; one
hat for $2; one jacket for $6; two pairs of shoes at $2; a pair for $4;
36 pairs of stockings at 10 cents a pair for $3.60; three waists at 98
cents each for $2.94; and three suits of winter underwear for $1.05. But
she said winter underwear of this quality failed to keep her really warm.
In the evening she was too tired to leave the tenement for night school
or for anything else. She did her own washing. In the course of a year
her only pleasure had been a trip to the theatre for 35 cents.
Anna Flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the Bowery; and she told
her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to
express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost
ambassadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching.
That spirit--a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear
interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and
expenditure of strength--was evinced by countless girls. None, indeed,
were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless
they wished to help in the inquiry. But perhaps because it arose from
such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of
Anna Flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling.
She told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a
little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy,
ill-smelling inner court. The only brightening of her grave, young face
throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of
her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she
spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about
thread. She was a member of the Union. In the shop there were girls not
members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread
indefinitely. Anna Flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that
she would never have anything to do with such girls.
Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with
every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.
She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the
sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing
eyes imparted. There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness
of dissipation in youth. Too little is said of the fact that such an
enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin's is in
youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb passage as the
painful sense of wreck. All tragedies are not those of violence, but of
depletion, too, and of starvation.
The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine
was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind,
who afterwards found more attractive employment. She said that in her
factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine
o'clock, after her work was done, with a cousin. The cousin was another
clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age. They had a hundred
things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost
always say to the other: "Please do not speak to me on my way home. I am
so tired I can scarcely answer." Instantly after supper they went to bed.
In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at
eight, to go through the round of the day before.
"We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the
girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were
so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they
were talking about. And still, although there was nothing for us but bed
and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through
the slack season."
It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid
operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in
a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.
She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York.
After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder
the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable
and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther
was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful
direct glance.
Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the
most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had
dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather
belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost
immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon
she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a
forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that
she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her
at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years,
though not in the same factory.
Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of
stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation
from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work.
Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so
much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather,
necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men.
Theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day. She and other
Americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some Russian girls, who
could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous
stitches and loose threads. When the forewoman blamed Theresa for
finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt
for their slovenly belts. She had a strong handicraft pride, and it was
pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman's reply
that "None of them (the badly made belts) ever came back"--as though
their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship.
She had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours
of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours
a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long
prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in
which she was unable to do anything for months.
On her recovery she entered another factory, where the hours are not so
excessive, the treatment is fair, and she has now an excellent position
as forewoman at $18 a week.
Theresa was a very earnest, clear-minded girl, with strong convictions
concerning the bad effect of excessive hours for working women. At the
time when the hearing on the New York State Labor Law was held at Albany
last spring, she had been active in obtaining a petition, signed by a
body of New York working girls and placed in the hands of Labor
Commissioner Williams, to aid in securing a shortening of their present
legal hours. Theresa had advanced beyond the drudgery of her trade to one
of its better positions by extraordinary ability. Some of the skilled
machine operatives, like some of the unskilled factory workers, were
buoyed through the monotony of their present calling by the hope of
leaving it for another occupation.
Alta Semenova, a Polish glove maker, twenty years old, worked nine hours
a day at a machine for $7 a week, and studied five evenings a week in a
private evening school, for which she paid $4 a month tuition.
She lived in a small hall bedroom with an admired girl friend. Each paid
$4.25 a month rent. Her food amounted to $2.90 a week. Saturday evening
she spent in doing her washing. She lived near enough to the factory to
walk to work in five or ten minutes. She paid 25 cents a month for Union
dues.
Alta was working for "counts" toward entering college or Cooper Union. In
spare moments she read the modern Russians. During her year in New York
she has mastered sufficient English to read Shakespeare in the original.
In a few years she will be a teacher. Alta was an eager Russian
revolutionist. She had the student's passion, and her head was full of
plans for a life of intellectual work.
These chronicles of the income and outlay of some New York factory
workers have described monotony and speeding in machine-work. The annals
of the New York factory workers presented below describe monotony and
speeding in hand-work.
Yetta Sigurdin, an Austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in New York
three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a
tobacco factory, a Union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work.
Her hours were eight a day. In a full day, Yetta could roll 2200
cigarettes. So her best wage was about $12 a week. The average was,
however, not more than $8, as the factory had been idle four weeks, and
very dull for five months, though busy for the remaining six.
Yetta looked very robust and happy. She seemed comfortable in her work
and with her income, in spite of the extra labor of washing some of her
own clothes and making her own waists. This, no doubt, was due largely to
her sane and reasonable working hours, and partly to the fact that her
work did not require the intensity of watching and application demanded
by rapid machine-work. Indeed in some Union tobacco factories the rollers
sometimes make up a sum among themselves to pay a reader by the hour to
read aloud to them while they are at work.
Yetta paid $3 a week for room, breakfast, and supper in a tenement. It
was in an extremely poor neighborhood, but was fresh, pleasant, and well
aired. Her dinners cost about $1.50 a week. She did part of her washing
and part was included in the charge for board. Her Union fee was 15 cents
a week. The members of the Cigarette Makers' Union pay a weekly due of 5
cents for the support of a sanatorium in Colorado for tubercular tobacco
workers. Yetta contributed to this sanatorium and gave a 10-cent monthly
fee for Union agitation.
She estimated the cost of her clothing at about $82 for the year. A
winter suit cost $14; a spring suit, $15; a summer dress, $5; and a
winter dress, $18. Six pairs of shoes cost $15. She could not remember
the items of the rest of her expenditure for dress. Part of it was for
underwear and part of it for material for waists she had made herself.
In spite of the monotony and speed of Yetta's work, it did not exhaust
her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor
was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours.
Barbara Cotton, an American woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in
an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than
eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment.
In the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was
split into the thinnest possible sheets. She was paid by the number she
succeeded in splitting. The constant repetition of an act of such
accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made
her extremely nervous.
For six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $8 or $8.50 a week.
During the other six months there was no work on Saturdays, and she
earned about $7 a week. She had a week's vacation with pay. She had lost
during the year she described two months' work from illness, due to her
run-down condition. This she said, however, was not caused by her work,
but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a
sister, who had been sick.
Miss Cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she
had received an allowance of $5 a week.
Her income for the year had been about $367, an average of $7.06 a week.
Miss Cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and
although the expense was about the same, the places were much less
attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was
staying at the time of the interview.
For half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for
breakfasts and dinners, she paid $4.50 a week. Luncheons in addition cost
her $1 a week. As she was within walking distance of work, she had no
other expense but 35 cents for part of her washing. The rest she did
herself.
She bought very little clothing, as out of the $1.15 a week she had left
after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a
sick sister and niece. After eighteen years of hard, steady work--nine
years of it skilled work--she had saved nothing except in the form of
benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving.
Although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was
less exhausted by her industrial experience than Katherine Ryan, an Irish
worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing trimmings for six
years in an appliqué factory.
Eight and a quarter hours of this work a day exhausted her. She received
$7 a week. Her eyes were fast failing her from the close watch she had
to keep on her scissors to guard against cutting too far.
She often went to bed at eight or half past eight o'clock, worn out by
one day's task and eager to be fresh for the next, for she was hard
pressed by the competition of young eyes and quick fingers.
Newer workers were given finer and more profitable work to do. In spite
of her faithfulness, and straining for speed, she was laid off two months
earlier in the last season than in any previous year, and newer helpers
were retained. She thought the forewoman was prejudiced against her, and
naturally could not understand the truth that from the standpoint of
modern industry she was aged at forty-five.
She had been paying $3 a week for board in a philanthropic home, and
there she was permitted to stay and to pay for her board and lodging when
she had no money by helping with the housework. Miss Ryan, however, had
exhausted herself less rapidly than Elena and Gerda Nakov, two young
Polish women of thirty-three and twenty-nine, skilled hand-workers on
children's dresses.
Elena had come from South Russia to seek her fortunes when she was
sixteen years old. Her mother and father were dead. She had been educated
by an uncle, with whom her younger sister, Gerda, remained.
According to the testimony of Elena's brother-in-law, the kind-hearted
husband of a married sister living in New York, and also according to the
testimony of Gerda, Elena at sixteen was a very beautiful girl. She was
small, but very strong and well knit, with a fresh, glowing color, deep
gray eyes, and heavy reddish gold hair, growing low upon her forehead in
a widow's peak.
Elena first found work as a cigarette roller, earning $4 a week. Here she
was subjected to constant insolence and scurrilous language from the
foreman and the men working with her. Her eyes turned black with contempt
when she spoke of this offence--"Oh" she exclaimed, "I thought, 'I am
poor, but I will never in my life be so poor as to stand things like
that.'"
She left the tobacco factory and found employment as a neckwear worker.
Here, too, she earned $4, but the season grew dull, and she entered a
small factory, where she worked on children's dresses, embroidering,
buttonholing, faggoting, and feather-stitching. In this craft she proved
to have such deftness, nicety of touch, and speed that she could do in an
hour twice as much as most of the other girls and women in the factory.
She sewed from eight to six, with half an hour for lunch. She always took
work home and sometimes she sewed for half of Sunday, for living expenses
consumed all of her $4 a week. Her stomach had failed her in the
intensity of her occupation and from the insufficient food she was able
to purchase, and she needed all the extra money she could earn for
doctor's bills and medicine.
She was thin, spent, worn, and pale, when Gerda came over from Russia,
four years after Elena had arrived. Gerda was a strong, attractive girl,
with good health, dark curling hair, and a lovely color.
Entering the same factory with Elena, she soon became almost as able as
her sister in fine sewing, and almost as ill. She earned $3 a week.
The factory was owned by a young German widow, Mrs. Mendell, an extremely
attractive, pretty, and skilful person, appearing in her office an
agreeable and well-educated young woman, and able to produce the most
engaging little dresses, caps, and undermuslins for children, at a high
profit, by paying extremely small wages to skilled immigrant
seamstresses. In her workroom, Mrs. Mendell alternately terrorized and
flattered the girls. She speeded them constantly. Unless they had done as
much work as she wished to accomplish through the day, she refused to
speak to them. She made the younger girls put on her boots, and dress her
when she changed her office frock for the clothes in which she motored
home at night. And in the morning she punished girls who had not
finished as much work as she wished over night by giving them the worst
paid and hardest sewing in the factory.
One night she sent Elena and Gerda home with two great bundles of
infants' bands--shoulder-straps and waistbands--to be made ready to be
fastened to long skirts the next morning. They were all to be
feather-stitched around the shoulder-bands and upper edges of the
waist-bands, three buttons sewed on, and three buttonholes made in each.
This was to be done for 2-1/2 cents a piece--a quarter a dozen.
In the morning after she had completed this work, Elena felt so nervous
and ill when she went to the factory, that as she handed Mrs. Mendell
back the bundle and received the quarter, she burst into tears. She told
Mrs. Mendell she was sick. She could not live and work as she was
working. Gerda's eyes were always strained. Their wages must be raised.
Mrs. Mendell replied with calm and self-approbation, that she herself
stayed in the factory all day, but she never complained in any such way.
However, she raised Elena's wages 50 cents.
At this time the two girls lived in a tiny, inner room with one window,
on an air-shaft in an East Side tenement. For this they paid $8 a month.
It was scarcely more than a closet, holding one chair, one table, and a
bed; and so small that Elena and Gerda could scarcely squeeze in between
their meagre furnishings. They did their own washing, cooked their own
breakfasts on the landlady's stove, prepared a lunch they took with them
to the factory, and paid 20 cents a night apiece for dinner. Almost all
the money they had left, after their lodging and board and the barest
necessities for clothing were paid for, went for medicines and doctors.
Their clothing was so poor that they were ashamed to go out on
Sunday--when everybody else put on "best dresses"--and would sit in their
room all day. However, in the evenings they sometimes went to see
relatives in the Bronx, and on one of these occasions they had a piece of
good fortune of the oddest character. On the elevated road on which they
happened to be riding there was an accident--a collision. They were
neither of them injured; but they saw the collision, and were summoned as
witnesses for the road. They were obliged to spend several mornings away
from making children's dresses, waiting to give their testimony in the
criminal court, which they found highly pleasant and recreative. However,
after all, the road settled with the prosecutors before the girls were
ever called on for their testimony, and the case never came to trial. But
the railroad gave Elena and Gerda for the time they had spent on its
behalf a check for $20.
At this they determined to move to better quarters. The factory, besides,
had grown and moved into larger rooms farther up-town (though its
workrooms had always been well lighted and ventilated), so that the girls
were obliged to spend more than they could afford for carfare. With the
$20 they furnished their room in Harlem. They were in a wild,
disreputable neighborhood, of which the girls remained quite independent.
But the rooms were airy and attractive. Having now their own furnishings,
they paid only $8 a month for all this added space and comfort, so that
they could continue to live in these accommodations, but only with severe
effort and industry on Elena's part. For Gerda's optic nerve was now so
affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and
illness, that she was unable to go to the factory. She kept the house,
doing some sewing at home.
Elena's wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with
Mrs. Mendell, were raised to $7 a week after her thirteen years of
service. But she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health.
She was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis.
At last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she
would die. Her stomach was almost completely worn out. This doctor sent
her to a hospital, and visited Gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital.
This was four years ago. But both the young women are so broken down that
no efforts of public or private philanthropic medical care in the state
and the city have been able to restore their health. The doctors in whose
charge they have been say that these young women's strength is simply
worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty
food, and that they can never again be really well.
They leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning,
six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all.
Their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various
forms of charitable cure and the great charitable institutions of the
community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they
have lost in its industries.
It may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has
involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory
management, which has been obliged to employ in Elena's place two other
less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists
of New York who support charity hospitals and vacation homes.
These chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed,
monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women,
operatives and hand-workers.
While one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into
modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and
initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp
these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange
that it cannot seem inevitable. Speeding for long hours at machines,
rather than machine labor itself, appears most widely responsible for the
fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been
narrated. Further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most
drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers
encountered--the experience of Elena and Gerda Nikov, who were employed
not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy
be called a handicraft.
The exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable to their custom
of pursuing their trade not only in factory hours, but outside the
factory, at home. Within the last year, the most widely constructive
effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle trades ever
undertaken in this country has been initiated by the New York cloak
makers, to whom we next turned for an account of their industrial
fortunes.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 22: These testimonies are cited from the brief for the Illinois
Ten-Hour Law, prepared by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark.
_Investigations into the Conditions of Health of the Swiss Factory
Workers._ Dr. Fridlion Schuler, Swiss Factory Inspector, and Dr. A. E.
Burckhardt, Professor of Hygiene.
"Instead of becoming wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of
industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching
the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the worker."
_Dangerous Trades._ Thomas Oliver, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P. London. 1902.
"The introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... While
machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has
not diminished fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its relentless
course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious,
especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal,
for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. Present-day
factory labor is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and
muscle against insensitive iron."
_Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography_, Berlin,
September, 1907. Fatigue Resulting from Occupation. Dr. Emil Roth,
Regierungsrat, Potsdam.
"With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more
mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially
neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony--to the absence of
spontaneity or joy in work."
_Proceedings of the First International Convention on Industrial
Diseases_, Milan, 1906. Imbecility and Criminality in Relation to
Certain Forms of Labor. Professor Crisafuli.
"When only one brain-centre works, it becomes overfatigued much more
easily than if the functions were alternately performed by the various
centres.
"Here, then, is another factor in overfatigue due to the _monotony_ of
work, interrupted only at long intervals.
"This monotony is the determining cause of local disturbances and
endangers the entire organism."]