There was no work to be had anywhere in the winter of 1913-14. The C. P.
R. and G. T. R. had discharged men by the hundreds. Factories had shut
down, stores closed. Hundreds, nay, thousands, were starving. What had
happened? A financial depression! Over-valuation, speculation and other
explanations could not still the hunger of the poor and their families.
The cost of living and rent went up, and nature seemed to help the rich.
What a winter!
Some good-hearted men started a campaign for a kitchen where the hungry
could get a complete meal for 5 cents. No sooner was the campaign
started and the necessary fund covered, the kitchen well started, when
hundreds of men and women went there to satisfy their hunger. Naturally
enough, among the chief contributors were the same Mr. W. and Mr. M. D.
as well as other manufacturers. My suspicions were aroused. I found
there men, newly arrived immigrants, that an Immigrants' Aid Society had
sent to work at certain places. They naturally displaced other better
paid men, and ridiculously low wages were paid.
"And how do you live on two or three dollars per week?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't spend it all," I was answered. "I send a portion of my
wages home to my wife and children to Russia," said one.
"How do you live, then?"
"We eat at the Folks' Kitchen," was the answer.
And there and then I found that nine men out of every ten eating there
were employed by one of the other of the manufacturers who contributed
to the fund of the kitchen. Any wonder the project immediately
materialised? And not only have they given money but the rich send their
wives and daughters to serve the poor.
In investigating the cases of those that applied for clothes for their
children, the charities eliminated those whose fathers or mothers were
on strike at the factories of W. or M. D.--"Fortunate he who can know
the causes of things."
I took this kitchen as a sample. Those in other cities, cosmopolitan
centres, are the same. Take the Baron de Rothschild kitchen in Paris.
Aside from the fact that the food given there is rotten, that the
potatoes served are alcoholised, the bread green with mould and the meat
unspeakably odorous, aside from all this, a swarm of little sweatshop
keepers are continually around the kitchen where they engage cheap
labour.
Cheap! Ye gods. I have tried it myself. They paid me 20 cents a day for
fourteen hours' work in an umbrella and cane factory. I worked there a
full week and was not the only one. Next to my bench, in front and
across, all over, newly arrived men and boys were polishing the sticks,
rubbing them so hard that the hands bled. A brother of the manufacturer
was watching and driving.
"Come on, come on."
Then in the evening they all ran to the kitchen to get their meal. When
they found out I was not green, I was immediately discharged. They
wanted only ignorant men, newly arrived men.
Down in the painting room they employed girls. It was more a house of
prostitution than a working room. The poor ignorant girls, harvested
from the kitchen, were debauched while they painted canes and polished
handles.
So many of these sweatshops grew around the kitchen that rent rose in
the neighbourhood. Still a bookbinding concern found it convenient to
abandon a lease of years and move the whole factory to where it was
nearer the blessed spot. More than half of the men working around never
received more than one dollar per day and when they went on strike it
was an easy matter to fill their places with the people of the dung
hill.
In my presence a prospective manufacturer, discussing the merits of
different localities for his plant, was willing to pay $80 per month
more for one site than the other because it was in the neighbourhood of
the kitchen. He would have cheaper labour. He did underbid all the other
contractors and prospered and is an influential member of organised
charity to-day.
The small manufacturer advises his men where to get cheap meals. At the
kitchen. Cheap kitchens for the poor? Cheap kitchens are _for the rich_.
Kitchens! A place where the spiders spread their web to catch the hungry
flies--to suck their blood.