migration of population, the entrance of women into trades followed by
men, or even the paltriest change of fashion in shirtwaists or hatpins,
may bring in its train frightful suffering and destruction of life
and all that makes life valuable, instead of a peaceful shifting of
workers and re-alloting of tasks. All this might be largely prevented.
The right of the worker, for instance, to demand notice when any
great alteration in a factory process is impending would in itself do
much to make adjustment to social changes smooth and relatively easy.
Great suffering unquestionably resulted from the introduction of the
linotype, but it was nothing to what would have been but for the fact
that the printers were a strongly organized body and were able to make
conditions with employers when the machine was first introduced. What
the printers were able to do on a small scale the organized labor
movement ought to be able to do for all workers.
On another side, moreover, the woman trade unionist comes up against
a dead wall. No matter what her standing in her union, no matter how
justly and fairly she be treated by her men fellow workers in the labor
movement, the fact remains that she is not a voter. One hand is tied.
Till she has the vote she can not as a member of the union have the
same influence upon its policies as if she were a man and a voter, nor
outside can her services be of the same value to the union as if she
were enfranchised.
As regards her special needs as a woman, her organization does not
speak for her, nor can she insist that it shall speak for her as it
would do if she were a man. For instance, badly as striking men are
often treated at the hands of the courts, striking women fare worse. It
was not a trade unionist but a suffragist, Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery,
who drew attention to the widely different treatment meted out to the
striking chauffeurs and the striking shirtwaist makers in New York
City, where the offenses with which the women were charged were far
more trivial than those of which the men were accused. Whether it is
in an industrial dispute, in the legislature, or in the courts, that
woman is struggling for what she considers her rights, it is always
political weapons which in the last resort are turned against her, and
she stands helpless, for she has no political weapon wherewith she may
defend herself and press her claim to attention.
If the trade union be the only audible voice of the worker in any
trade, the association of women’s unions known as the National
Women’s Trade Union League is the expression of the women’s side of
the whole trade-union movement of the United States. It has taken
up the special work of organization among women undistracted by the
much larger mass of general field work that falls to men. The idea
of the league originated with William English Walling, who got the
suggestion from observation of the working of the British Women’s Trade
Union League. Their plan was adapted to suit American conditions. The
American league is a federation of women’s trade unions, which admits
also organizations such as clubs and societies declaring themselves
in sympathy with the cause of labor. It has also a large individual
membership composed of trade unionists (men and women) and of other
sympathizers. In this broad basis of membership lies its strength. It
links into bonds of active practical endeavor after better conditions
persons in every class of society, while any tendency to slip into
unreal or unpractical methods is checked by the provision that on all
boards whether national or local a majority of the members must always
be trade-unionist women.
The league platform demands:
1. Organization of all workers into trade unions.
2. Equal pay for equal work.
3. An eight-hour day.
4. A minimum wage scale.
5. Full citizenship for women.
6. All principles involved in the economic program of the American
Federation of Labor.
In both its national and its local organizations the league spends
much of its energy in the adjustment of labor difficulties among
women workers, in giving active assistance in time of strikes and in
presenting actual industrial conditions through lectures and literature
to universities, churches, clubs and trade unions. It presses home the
increasing dangers of industrial overstrain on the health of women,
the necessity for collective bargaining, wise labor legislation and
full citizenship for women. Through its membership, representing many
thousands of working women, the league is able to obtain for the
use of social workers, investigators and students actual first-hand
information regarding the dangers of wrong industrial conditions.
The reasons why such an organization must be more elastic than a body
like the American Federation of Labor, is because of the very different
relation in which women stand to organized industry. The connection
of the great bulk of women with their trade is not permanent. Seven
years is the average duration of women’s wage-earning life. The average
woman unionist is a mere girl. An organization of men, in which mature
men are the leaders and in which the rank and file join for life, has
a solidity and permanence which unaided groups of young girls, groups
with membership necessarily fluctuating, can never achieve.
What more right and fitting then that the maternal principle in the
community as represented by the motherhood of the country should ally
itself with this movement in support of good conditions and happy
lives for the future mothers of the country? This is strikingly put
in Mrs. Raymond Robins’ address as president at the second biennial
convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League: “It has happily
fallen to the lot of the Women’s Trade Union League to have charge
and supervision of the kindergarten department in the great school of
organized labor. It is for this reason that music and merry-making is
so essential a feature of our league work, with books and story telling
and all that makes for color and music and laughter and that leads to
essential human fellowship--a sure foundation for the industrial union
of our younger sisters. We know that we need them; they will later know
how greatly they needed us.”
A WOMAN’S STRIKE--AN APPRECIATION OF THE SHIRTWAIST MAKERS OF NEW YORK
HELEN MAROT
Women’s Trade Union League, New York City.
The usual object of monographs on strikes which appear in economic
journals is to state impartially both sides of the controversy, so
that students and a public more or less remote from labor struggles
may estimate their merits. Such monographs are presentations of
well-defined facts which are reducible at times to mathematical
certainties. They recognize that passionate human feeling has swayed
action on both sides and the endeavor is to lift labor disputes from
the heat of emotion to intellectual consideration. These monographs may
give correct estimates of strikes in industries thoroughly organized
both as to capital and labor. Strikes in such industries are often
the result of bad business management or a slip in judgment on one
side or the other. But the great number of strikes occur in industries
imperfectly organized; the passion or emotion which swings the battle
is as important a factor as is either an extortionate demand for
wages or a flagrant exploitation of wage earners. It is well that the
public shall estimate this strike and that, but to do so it must also
understand the motive forces.
The present article does not attempt to estimate either the moral or
the economic factors in the recent shirtwaist-makers’ strike of New
York, but to lay before the reader some of those motive forces which
may be counted upon in strikes composed of like elements, especially in
strikes of women in unorganized trades.
The shirtwaist-makers’ “general strike,” as it is called, followed an
eleven years’ attempt to organize the trade. The union had been unable
during this time to affect to any appreciable extent the conditions of
work. In its efforts during 1908-9 to maintain the union in the various
shops and to prevent the discharge of members who were active union
workers, it lost heavily. The effort resolved itself in 1909 into the
establishment of the right to organize. The strike in the Triangle
Waist Company turned on this issue.
The story of the events leading up to the Triangle strike as told by a
leading member of the firm practically agrees with the story told by
the strikers. The company had undertaken to organize its employes into
a club, with benefits attached. The good faith of the company as well
as the working-out of the benefit was questioned by the workers. The
scheme failed and the workers joined the waist-makers’ union. One day
without warning a few weeks later one hundred and fifty of the employes
were dropped, the explanation being given by the employers that there
was no work. The following day the company advertised for workers. In
telling the story later they said that they had received an unexpected
order, but admitted their refusal to re-employ the workers discharged
the day previous. The union then declared a strike, or acknowledged a
lockout, and picketing began.
The strike or lockout occurred out of the busy season, with a large
supply at hand of workers unorganized and unemployed. Practical trade
unionists believed that the manufacturers felt certain of success
on account of their ability to draw to an unlimited extent from an
unorganized labor market and to employ a guard sufficiently strong
to prevent the strikers from reaching the workers with their appeals
to join them. But the ninety girls and sixty men strikers were not
practical; they were Russian Jews who saw in the lockout an attempt at
oppression. In their resistance, which was instinctive, they did not
count their chances of winning; they felt that they had been wronged
and they rebelled. This quick resentment is characteristic of the
Russian Jewish factory worker. The men strikers were intimidated and
lost heart, but the women carried on the picketing, suffering arrest
and abuse from the police and the guards employed by the manufacturers.
At the end of the third week they appealed to the women’s trade union
league to protect them, if they could, against false arrest.
The league is organized to promote trade unions among women, and its
membership is composed of people of leisure as well as of workers.
A brief inspection by the league of the action of the pickets, the
police, the strike breakers and the workers in the factory showed that
the pickets had been intimidated, that the attitude of the police was
aggressive and that the guards employed by the firm were insolent. The
league acted as complainant at police headquarters and cross-examined
the arrested strikers; it served as witness for the strikers in the
magistrates’ court and became convinced of official prejudice in the
police department against the strikers and a strong partisan attitude
in favor of the manufacturers. The activity and interest of women, some
of whom were plainly women of leisure, was curiously disconcerting to
the manufacturers and every effort was used to divert them. At last a
young woman prominent in public affairs in New York and a member of the
league, was arrested while acting as volunteer picket. Here at last was
“copy” for the press.
During the five weeks of the strike, previous to the publicity, the
forty thousand waist makers employed in the several hundred shops in
New York were with a few exceptions here and there unconscious of the
struggle of their fellow workers in the Triangle. There was no means of
communication among them, as the labor press reached comparatively few.
In the weeks before the general strike was called the forty thousand
shirtwaist makers were forty thousand separate individuals. So far were
they from being conscious of their similarity that they might have been
as many individual workers employed in ways as widely separated as
people of different trades, or as members of different social groups.
The arrests of sympathizers aroused sufficient public interest for the
press to continue the story for ten days, including in the reports the
treatment of the strikers. This furnished the union its opportunity.
It knew the temper of the workers and pushed the story still further
through shop propaganda. After three weeks of newspaper publicity and
shop propaganda the reports came back to the union that the workers
were aroused. It was alarming to the friends of the union to see the
confidence of the union officers before issuing the call to strike.
Trade unionists reminded the officers that the history of general
strikes in unorganized trades was the history of failure. They
invariably answered with a smile of assurance, “Wait and see.”
The call was issued Monday night, November 22nd, at a great mass
meeting in Cooper Union addressed by the president of the American
Federation of Labor. “I did not go to bed Monday night;” said the
secretary of the union, “our Executive Board was in session from
midnight until six a. m. I left the meeting and went out to Broadway
near Bleecker street. I shall never again see such a sight. Out of
every shirtwaist factory, in answer to the call, the workers poured and
the halls which had been engaged for them were quickly filled.” In some
of these halls the girls were buoyant, confident; in others there were
girls who were frightened at what they had done. When the latter were
asked why they had come out in sympathy, they said; “How could you help
it when a girl in your shop gets up and says, ‘Come girls, come, all
the shirtwaist makers are going out’?”
As nearly as can be estimated, thirty thousand workers answered the
call, or seventy-five per cent of the trade. Of these six thousand
were Russian men; two thousand Italian women; possibly one thousand
American women and about twenty or twenty-one thousand Russian Jewish
girls. The Italians throughout the strike were a constantly appearing
and disappearing factor but the part played by the American girls was
clearly defined.
The American girls who struck came out in sympathy for the “foreigners”
who struck for a principle, but the former were not in sympathy with
the principle; they did not want a union; they imagined that the
conditions in the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked
were worse than their own. They are in the habit of thinking that the
employers treat foreign girls with less consideration, and they are
sorry for them. In striking they were self-conscious philanthropists.
They were honestly disinterested and as genuinely sympathetic as were
the women of leisure who later took an active part in helping the
strike. They acknowledged no interests in common with the others, but
if necessary they were prepared to sacrifice a week or two of work.
Unfortunately the sacrifice required of them was greater than they
had counted on. The “foreigners” regarded them as just fellow workers
and insisted on their joining the union, in spite of their constant
protestation, “We have no grievance; we only struck in sympathy.” But
the Russians failed to be grateful, took for granted a common cause
and demanded that all shirtwaist makers, regardless of race or creed,
continue the strike until they were recognized by the employers as a
part of the union. This difference in attitude and understanding was a
heavy strain on the generosity of the American girls. It is believed,
however, that the latter would have been equal to what their fellow
workers expected, if their meetings had been left to the guidance of
American men and women who understood their prejudices. But the Russian
men trusted no one entirely to impart the enthusiasm necessary for the
cause. It was the daily, almost hourly, tutelage which the Russian men
insisted on the American girls’ accepting, rather than the prolongation
of the strike beyond the time they had expected, that sent the American
girls back as “scabs.” There were several signs that the two or three
weeks’ experience as strikers was having its effect on them, and that
with proper care this difficult group of workers might have been
organized. For instance, “scab” had become an opprobrious term to
them during their short strike period, and on returning to work they
accepted the epithet from their fellow workers with great reluctance
and even protestation. Their sense of superiority also had received a
severe shock; they could never again be quite so confident that they
did not in the nature of things belong to the labor group.
If the shirtwaist trade in New York had been dominated by any other
nationality than the Russian, it is possible that other methods of
organizing the trade would have been adopted rather than the general
strike. The Russian workers who fill New York factories are ever
ready to rebel against suggestion of oppression and are of all people
the most responsive to an idea to which is attached an ideal. The
union officers understood this and it was because they understood the
Russian element in the trade that they answered, “Wait and see,” when
their friends urged caution before calling a general strike in an
unorganized trade. They knew their people and others did not.
The feature of the strike which was as noteworthy as the response
of thirty thousand unorganized workers, was the unyielding and
uncompromising temper of the strikers. This was due not to the
influence of nationality, but to the dominant sex. The same temper
displayed in the shirtwaist strike is found in other strikes of women,
until we have now a trade-union truism, that “women make the best
strikers.” Women’s economic position furnishes two reasons for their
being the best strikers; one is their less permanent attitude toward
their trade, and the other their lighter financial burdens. While these
economic factors help to make women good strikers, the genius for
sacrifice and the ability to sustain, over prolonged periods, response
to emotional appeals are also important causes. Working women have been
less ready than men to make the initial sacrifice that trade-union
membership calls for, but when they reach the point of striking they
give themselves as fully and as instinctively to the cause as they give
themselves in their personal relationships. It is important, therefore,
in following the action of the shirtwaist makers, to remember that
eighty per cent were women, and women without trade-union experience.
When the shirtwaist strikers were gathered in separate groups,
according to their factories, in almost every available hall on the
East Side, the great majority of them received their first instruction
in the principles of unionism and learned the necessity of organization
in their own trade. The quick response of women to the new doctrine
gave to the meetings a spirit of revival. Like new converts they
accepted the new doctrine in its entirety and insisted to the last on
the “closed shop”. But it was not only the enthusiasm of new converts
which made them refuse to accept anything short of the closed shop. In
embracing the idea of solidarity they realized their own weakness as
individual bargainers. “How long,” the one-week or two-weeks-old union
girls said, “do you think we could keep what the employer says he will
give us without the union? Just as soon as the busy season is over it
would be the same as before.”
Instructions were given to each separate group of strikers to make out
a wage scale if they thought they should be paid an increase, or to
make out other specific demands before conferring with their employers
on terms of settlement. The uniform contract drawn up by the union,
beside requiring a union shop, required also the abolition of the
sub-contract system; payment of wages once a week; a fifty-two-hour
week; limitation of overtime in any one day to two hours and to not
later than 9 p. m.; also payment for all material and implements by
employers. Important as were the specific demands, they were lightly
regarded in comparison with the issue of a union shop.
Nothing can illustrate this better than the strikers’ treatment of the
arbitration proposal which was the outcome of a conference between
their representatives and the employers. In December word came to
the union secretary that the manufacturers would probably consider
arbitration if the union was ready to submit its differences to a
board. The officers made reply in the affirmative and communicated
their action at once to the strikers. Many of the strikers had no idea
what arbitration meant, but as it became clear to them they asked,
some of them menacingly, “Do you mean to arbitrate the recognition of
the union?” It took courage to answer these inexperienced unionists
and uncompromising girls that arbitration would include the question
of the union as well as other matters. The proposition was met with
a storm of opposition. When the strikers at last discovered that all
their representatives counseled arbitration, with great reluctance
they gave way, but at no time was the body of strikers in favor of it.
A few days later, when the arbitrators who represented them reported
that the manufacturers on their side refused to arbitrate the question
of the union, they resumed their strike with an apparent feeling of
security and relief. Again later they showed the same uncompromising
attitude when their representatives in the conference reported back
that the manufacturers would concede important points in regard to
wage and factory conditions, but would not recognize the union. The
recommendations of the conference were rejected without reservation by
the whole body.
The strikers at this time lost some of their sympathizers. An
uncompromising attitude is good trade-union tactics up to a certain
point, but the shirtwaist makers were violating all traditions. Their
refusal to accept anything short of the closed shop indicated to many
a state of mind which was as irresponsible as it was reckless. Their
position may have been reckless, but it was not irresponsible. Their
sometime sympathizers did not realize the endurance of the women or
the force of their enthusiasm, but insisted on the twenty to thirty
thousand raw recruits becoming sophisticated unionists in thirteen
short weeks.
It was after the new year that the endurance of the girls was put to
the test. During the thirteen weeks benefits were paid out averaging
less than $2 for each striker. Many of them refused to accept benefits,
so that the married men could be paid more. The complaints of hardships
came almost without exception from the men. Occasionally it was
discovered that a girl was having one meal a day and even at times none
at all.
In spite of being underfed and often thinly clad, the girls took upon
themselves the duty of picketing, believing that the men would be more
severely handled. Picketing is a physical and nervous strain under the
best conditions, but it is the spirit of martyrdom that sends young
girls of their own volition, often insufficiently clad and fed, to
patrol the streets in mid-winter with the temperature low and with snow
on the ground, some days freezing and some days melting. After two
or three hours of such exposure, often ill from cold, they returned
to headquarters, which were held for the majority in rooms dark and
unheated, to await further orders.
It takes uncommon courage to endure such physical exposure, but these
striking girls underwent as well the nervous strain of imminent arrest,
the harsh treatment of the police, insults, threats and even actual
assaults from the rough men who stood around the factory doors. During
the thirteen weeks over six hundred girls were arrested; thirteen were
sentenced to five days in the workhouse and several were detained a
week or ten days in the Tombs.
The pickets, with strangely few exceptions, during the first few
weeks showed remarkable self-control. They had been cautioned from the
first hour of the strike to insist on their legal rights as pickets,
but to give no excuse for arrest. Like all other instructions, they
accepted this literally. They desired to be good soldiers and every
nerve was strained to obey orders. But for many the provocations were
too great and retaliation began after the fifth week. It occurred
around the factories where the strikers were losing, where peace
methods were failing and where the passivity of the pickets was taunted
as cowardice. But curiously enough, during this time the arrests in
proportion to the number still on strike were fewer than during the
earlier period and the sentences in the courts were lighter. The
change in the treatment of pickets came with the change in the city
administration. Apparently, peaceful picketing during the first two
months of the strike had been treated as an unlawful act.