As has been shown in a former chapter, innumerable valuable lives of
workmen, women and, in former years, children have been sacrificed
through the unreasonable exploitation by employers, who in their greed
for profits had lost all consideration for the welfare of their
fellow-men. Hundreds of thousands of laborers have been slowly worked to
death as no sufficient amount of time for recuperation was granted them.
The only possible excuse for such incredible waste of human lives is
that neither the employers nor the law-makers of those bygone days
realized that the physical and mental abilities of the large laboring
classes belong to the resources of a nation just as truly as do the
water-power, the soil, the mineral deposits, the forests, and other
natural means. Moreover, nobody was aware of the fact that it is one of
the supreme duties of a wise government to guard these resources, so
fundamentally necessary to the prosperity of a nation, from unscrupulous
exploitation and possible destruction.
The danger of the reckless exploitation of laborers, especially of women
workers, has increased considerably with the improvement of many
machines, the greater speed and output of which demand far greater
attention and strain than before on the part of the men or women
operating them.
This is what Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, said in 1917 at the
annual meeting of the National Consumers’ League:
“Machinery has given us one great delusion. People have imagined that
when a machine was operated by a steam engine or by an electric motor,
the steam engine or the electric motor actually did all the work, and
the people who were attending it while it operated were more or less
negligible. As a consequence, we indulged in the very unfortunate and
often fatal belief that unlimited hours of labor were possible because
it was the machines which were doing the work. We overlooked the fact,
which we have lately begun to appreciate, that the person who tends the
power-driven machine is far more susceptible to exhaustion, is far more
open to fatigue and to the poisons that affect the system and that come
from over-exertion than ever before.”
Mrs. Florence Kelley, the able General Secretary of the National
Consumers’ League, who studied woman’s occupation in the sewing trade,
states that of late years the speed of the sewing machines has been
increased so that girls using these improved machines are now
responsible for twenty times as many stitches as twenty years ago, and
that many girls and women, not capable of the sustained speed involved
in this improvement, are no longer eligible for this occupation. Those
who continue in the trade are required to feed twice as many garments to
the machine as were required five years ago. The strain upon their eyes
is, however, far more than twice what it was before the improvement. In
the case of machines carrying multiple needles this is obvious; but it
is true of the single needle machines as well.
When a girl cannot keep the pace she is thrown out. A comment frequently
made by the girls about such an unfortunate comrade is: “She got too
slow. She couldn’t keep up with her machine any longer.” It amounts to
this, that the girl can earn a living wage, if she is unusually gifted,
=until she is worn out=.
The nerve strain caused by innumerable rapid-working machines of the
present day has become obvious in many cases. As the compressed
air-hammer has shattered the nerves of many robust men, so the latest
machines used in the sewing and other trades have impaired the health of
many women. “Such nerve strain,” says Rheta Childe Dorr, “cannot be
regulated. It is a Gordian knot that cannot be untied. The only thing to
do is to cut it. The only solution of it is a shortened work-day. This
is true for men as well as for women, but, in all probability, not to
the same degree. Nerve strain affects men, certainly, and it demands,
even in their case, a progressively shortened work-day as an alternative
to a progressively shortened work-life. But with women the case becomes
infinitely more urgent, infinitely more tragic, in exact proportion as
woman’s nervous system is more unstable than man’s and more easily
shaken from its equilibrium.”
The advantages of an eight-hour day with rest at night for women and
children have been summed up as follows:
1.—Where the working day is short, the workers are less predisposed to
diseases arising from fatigue. They are correspondingly less in danger
of being out of work, for sickness is in turn one of the great causes of
unemployment.
2.—Accidents have diminished conspicuously wherever working hours have
been reduced.
3.—The workers have better opportunity for continuing their education
out of working hours. Where they do this intelligently they become more
valuable and are correspondingly less likely to become victims of
unemployment.
4.—A short working day established by law tends automatically to
regularize work. The interest of the employer is to have all hands
continuously active, and no one sitting idly waiting for needles, or
thread, or materials, or for machines to be repaired. Every effort is
bent towards having work ready for every hour of every working day in
the year. In unregulated industry, on the contrary, there are cruel
alternations of idleness and overwork.
5.—For married women wage-earners it is especially necessary to have the
working day short and work regular. For when they leave their workplace
it is to cook, sew, and clean at home, sometimes even to care for the
sick.—
In the movement for an eight-hour day for the women workers its
advocates have already succeeded in Australia, Great Britain, Germany,
Denmark, Porto Rico, and Mexico. The eight-hour day has also been
secured for all employees of the U. S. Government and for the women and
workmen of a large number of the states.