The number of books on the labor problem is indeed legion. The tragedy
of the literature on any dynamic subject is that most of it is written
by people who have time to do little else. Perhaps the best books on
many subjects will never be written because those folk, who would be
most competent to do the writing, through their vital connection with
the problem at hand, never find the spare minutes to put their
findings down on paper.
There could be no more dynamic subject than labor, since labor is
nothing less than human beings, and what is more dynamic than human
beings? It is, therefore, the last subject in the world to be
approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of
labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the
endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual
background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the
interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill,
theorize--and another volume is added to the study of labor.
But, points out some one, there are books on labor written by
bona-fide workers. First, the number is few. Second, and more
important, any bona-fide worker capable of writing any kind of book on
any subject, puts himself so far above the rank and file that one is
justified in asking, for how many does he speak?
Suppose that for the moment your main intellectual interest was to
ascertain what the average worker--not the man or woman so far
advanced in the cultural scale that he or she can set his ideas
intelligently on paper--thought about his job and things in general.
To what books could you turn? Indeed I have come to feel that in the
pages of O. Henry there is more to be gleaned on the psychology of the
working class than any books to be found on economic shelves. The
outstanding conclusion forced upon any reader of such books as
consciously attempt to give a picture of the worker and his job is
that whoever wrote the books was bound and determined to find out
everything that was wrong in every investigation made, and tell all
about the wrongs and the wrongs only. Goodness knows, if one is
hunting for the things which should be improved in this world, one
life seems all too short to so much as make a start. In all honesty,
then, such books on labor should be classified under "Troubles of
Workers." No one denies they are legion. Everybody's troubles are, if
troubles are what you want to find.
The Schemer of Things has so arranged, praise be, that no one's life
shall be nothing but woe and misery. Yea, even workers have been known
to smile.
* * * * *
The experiences lived through in the following pages may strike the
reader as superficial, artificial. In a way they were. Yet, they
fulfilled their object in my eyes, at least. I wanted to feel for
myself the general "atmosphere" of a job, several jobs. I wanted to
know the worker without any suspicion on the part of the girls and
women I labored among that they were being "investigated." I wanted to
see the world through their eyes--for the time being to close my own
altogether.
There are no startling new facts or discoveries here recorded. Nothing
in these pages will revolutionize anything. To such as wish the lot of
the worker painted as the most miserable on earth, they will be
disappointing.
Yet in being as honest as I could in recording the impressions of my
experiences, I am aware that I have made possible the drawing of false
conclusions. Already such false conclusions have been drawn. "See,"
says an "old-fashioned" employer, "the workers are happy--these
articles of Mrs. Parker's show it. Why should they have better
conditions? They don't want them!"
A certain type of labor agitator, or a "parlor laborite," prefer to
see only the gloomy side of the worker's life. They are as dishonest
as the employer who would see only the contentment. The picture must
be viewed in its entirety--and that means considering the workers not
as a labor problem, but as a social problem. Workers are not an
isolated group, who keep their industrial adversities or industrial
blessings to themselves. They and their families and dependents are
the majority of our population. As a nation, we rise no higher in the
long run than the welfare of the majority. Nor can the word "welfare,"
if one thinks socially, ever be limited to the word "contentment." It
is quite conceivable--nay, every person has seen it in actuality--that
an individual may be quite contented in his lot and yet have that lot
incompatible with the welfare of the larger group.
It is but as a part of the larger group that worker, employer, and the
public must come to view the labor problem. When a worker is found who
appears perfectly amenable to long hours, bad air, unhygienic
conditions in general--and many are--somebody has to pay the price.
There are thousands of contented souls, as we measure contentment, in
the congested tenement districts of East Side New York. Does that fact
add to our social welfare? Because mothers for years were willing to
feed their children bad milk, was then the movement to provide good
milk for babies a waste of time and money? Plenty of people always
could be found who would willingly drink impure water. Society found
that too costly, and cities pride themselves to-day on their pure
water supply and low typhoid rate.
There are industrial conditions flourishing which insidiously take a
greater toll of society than did ever the death of babies from unclean
milk, the death of old and young from impure water. The trouble is
that their effects permeate in ways difficult for the unwilling eye to
see.
Perhaps in the long run, one of the most harmful phases of modern
civilization is this very contentment of not only the workers, but the
employer and society at large, under conditions which are not building
up a wholesome, healthy, intelligent population. Indeed, it is not so
much the fault of modern industrialism as such. Perhaps it is because
there are so many people in the world and the ability of us human
beings, cave men only ten thousand years ago, to care for so many
people has not increased with the same rapidity as the population. Our
numbers have outrun our capacities. Twentieth century development
calls for large-scale organization for which the human mind has shown
itself inadequate.
It is well to keep in mind that no situation is the product of its own
day. The working woman, for instance, we have had with us since the
beginning of women--and they began a good spell ago. The problem of
the working woman, as we think of it to-day, began with the beginning
of modern industry. Nor is it possible to view her past without
realizing that the tendency has ever been, with but few interruptions,
toward improvement.
In the early factory days in our country it is known that women rose
at four, took their breakfast with them to the mills, and by five were
hard at work in badly constructed buildings, badly heated, badly
lighted. From seven-thirty to eight-thirty there was an hour for
breakfast, at noon half an hour, and from then on steady work until
half past seven at night. It would be perhaps eight o'clock before the
mill girls reached home, sometimes too tired to stay awake till the
end of supper. Later, hours were more generally from five in the
morning until seven at night. In Lowell the girls worked two hours
before breakfast and went back to the mills again in the evening after
supper. By 1850 twelve hours had come to be the average working
day.[1]
[Footnote 1: Abbot, _Women in Industry_.]
Wages were very low--around seventy-five cents or a dollar a week with
board. Mills and factories were accustomed to provide room and board
in the corporation boarding houses, poorly constructed, ill-ventilated
buildings, girls often sleeping six and eight in a room. In 1836 it
was estimated that the average wage for women in industry (excluding
board) was thirty-seven and one-half cents a day, although one
thousand sewing women investigated received on an average twenty-five
cents a day. In 1835 the New York _Journal of Commerce_ estimated that
at the beginning of the century women's labor brought about fifty
cents a week, which was equivalent to twenty-five cents in 1835. In
1845 the New York _Tribune_ reported fifty thousand women averaging
less than two dollars a week wages, and thousands receiving one dollar
and fifty cents. Another investigation in 1845 found "female labor in
New York in a deplorable degree of servitude, privation and misery,
drudging on, miserably cooped up in ill-ventilated cellars and
garrets." Women worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day to earn one to
three dollars a week.
And yet authorities tell us that some of the mill towns of New
England, Lowell in particular, are looked back upon as being almost
idyllic as regards the opportunities for working women. On examination
it is found that what was exceptional from our point of view was not
the conditions, but the factory employees. In those days work in the
mills was "socially permissible." Indeed there was practically no
other field of employment open to educated girls. The old domestic
labors had been removed from the household--where could a girl with
spirit and ability make the necessary money to carry out her
legitimate desires? Her brothers "went west"--she went into the
factories--with the same spirit. Ambitious daughters of New England
farmers formed the bulk of cotton mill employees the first half of the
nineteenth century. Their granddaughters are probably college
graduates of the highest type to-day. After the long factory hours
they found time for reading, debating clubs, lectures, church
activities, French, and German classes. Part of the time some of the
mill operatives taught school. Many of them looked forward to
furthering their own education in such female seminaries as existed in
those days, the expense to be met from their mill earnings. Poorly
paid as mill hands were, it was often six to seven times what teachers
received.
"The mills offered not only regular employment and higher wages, but
educational advantages which many of the operatives prized even more
highly. Moreover, the girl who had worked in Lowell was looked upon
with respect as a person of importance when she returned to her rural
neighborhood. Her fashionable dress and manners and her general air of
independence were greatly envied by those who had not been to the
metropolis and enjoyed its advantages."[2]
[Footnote 2: Abbot, _Women in Industry_.]
By 1850 the situation had altered. With the opening of the west,
opportunities for women of gumption and spirit increased. The
industrial depression of 1848-49 lowered wages, and little by little
the former type of operative left the mill, her place being filled
largely by Irish immigrants.
The Civil War saw a great change in the world of working women.
Thousands of men were taken from industry into war, and overnight
great new fields of opportunity were opened to women. The more
educated were needed as nurses, for teaching positions, and for
various grades of clerical work deserted by men. After the close of
the war farmers became more prosperous and their daughters were not
forced to work for the wherewithal to acquire advantages. Add to all
this the depression caused in the cotton industry due to the war--and
the result of these new conditions was that when the mills reopened it
was with cheap immigrant labor. What then could have been considered
high wages were offered in an attempt to induce the more efficient
American women operatives back to the mills, but the cost of living
had jumped far higher even than high wages. The mills held no further
attractions. Even the Irish deserted, their places being filled with
immigrants of a lower type.
Since the Civil War look at us--8,075,772 women in industry, as
against 2,647,157 in 1880. Almost a fourth of the entire female
population over ten years of age are at work, as against about
one-seventh in 1880. The next census figures will show a still larger
proportion. Those thousands of women the World War threw into
industry, who never had worked before, did not all get out of industry
after the war. Take just the railroads, for example. In April, 1918,
there were 65,816 women employed in railroad work; in October, 1918,
101,785; and in April, 1919, 86,519. In the 1910 census, of all the
kinds of jobs in our country filled by men, only twelve were not also
filled by women--and the next census will show a reduction there:
firemen (either in manufacturing or railroads), brakemen, conductors,
plumbers, common laborers (under transportation), locomotive
engineers, motormen, policemen, soldiers, sailors, and marines. The
interesting point is that in only one division of work are women
decreasing in proportion to men--and that was women's work at the
beginning--manufacturing. In agriculture, in the professions, in
domestic and personal service, in trade and transportation, the number
of women is creeping up, up, in proportion to the number of men. From
the point of view of national health and vitality for this and the
next generation, it is indeed a hopeful sign if women are giving way
to men in factories, mills, and plants, and pushing up into work
requiring more education and in turn not demanding such physical and
nervous strain as does much of the machine process. Also, since on
the whole as it has been organized up to date, domestic service has
been one of the least attractive types of work women could fill, it is
encouraging (though not to the housewife) to find that the proportion
of women going into domestic and personal service has fallen from
forty-four and six-tenths per cent, in 1880, to thirty-two and
five-tenths per cent, in 1910.
Women working at everything under the sun--except perhaps being
locomotive engineers and soldiers and sailors. Why?
First, it is part of every normal human being to want to work.
Therefore, women want to work. Time was when within the home were
enough real life-sized jobs to keep a body on the jump morning and
night. Not only mother but any other females handy. There are those
who grumble that women could find enough to do at home now if they
only tried. They cannot, unless they have young children or unless
they putter endlessly at nonessentials, the doing of which leaves them
and everybody else no better off than before they began. And it is
part of the way we are made that besides wanting to work, we need to
work at something we feel "gets us some place." We prefer to work at
something desirable and useful. Perhaps what we choose is not really
so desirable and useful, looked at in the large, but it stacks up as
more desirable and more useful than something else we might be doing.
And with it all, if there is to be any real satisfaction, must go some
feeling of independence--of being on "one's own."
So, then, women go out to work in 1921 because there is not enough to
do to keep them busy at home. They follow in part their age-old
callings, only nowadays performed in roaring factories instead of by
the home fireside. In part they take to new callings. Whatever the job
may be, women _want_ to work in preference to the nonproductiveness of
most home life to-day.
Graham Wallas, in his _Great Society_, quotes the answers given by a
number of girls to a woman who held their confidence as to why they
worked. He wished to learn if they were happy. The question meant to
the girls evidently, "Are you happier than you would have been at
home?" and practically every answer was "Yes."
In a "dismal and murky," but fairly well-managed laundry, six Irish
girls all answered they were happy. One said the work "took up her
mind, she had been awfully discontented." Another that "you were of
some use." Another, "the hours went so much faster. At home one could
read, but only for a short time. Then there was the awful lonesome
afternoon ahead of you." "Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a
good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was
worth something."
At another laundry, the first six girls all answered they were happy
because the "work takes up your mind," and generally added, "It's
awful lonesome at home," or "there is an awful emptiness at home."
However, one girl with nine brothers and sisters was happy in the
collar packing room just because "it was so awful lonesome"--she
could enjoy her own thoughts. An Irishwoman at another laundry who had
married an Italian said, "Sure I am always happy. It leaves me no time
to think." At a knitting plant one girl said "when she didn't work,
she was always thinking of dead people, but work always made her cheer
up directly."
The great industrial population comes from crowded tenements. It is
inconceivable that enough work could be found within those walls to
make life attractive to the girls and young women growing to maturity
in such households.
So much for the psychological side. The fact remains that the great
bulk of women in industry work because they _have_ to work--they enter
industrial life to make absolutely necessary money. The old tasks at
which a woman could be self-supporting in the home are no longer
possible in the home. She earns her bread now as she has earned it for
thousands of years--spinning, weaving, sewing, baking, cooking--only
to-day she is one of hundreds, thousands in a great factory. Nor is
she longer confined to her traditional tasks. Men are playing a larger
part in what was since time began and up to a few years ago woman's
work. Women, in their need, are finding employment at any work that
can use unskilled less physically capable labor.
Ever has it been the very small proportion of men who could by their
unaided effort support the entire family. At no time have all the men
in a country been able to support all the women, regardless of
whether that situation would be desirable. Always must the aid of
womenfolk be called in as a matter of course. We have a national ideal
of a living wage to the male head of the family which will allow him
to support his family without forcing his wife and children into
industry. Any man who earns less than that amount during the year must
depend on the earnings of wife and children or else fall below the
minimum necessary to subsistence, with all which that implies. In
1910, four-fifths of the heads of families in the United States earned
under eight hundred dollars a year. At that same time, almost
nine-tenths of the women workers living at home in New York City
working in factories, mills, and such establishments, paid their
entire earnings to the family. Of 13,686 women investigated in
Wisconsin in 1914, only 2 per cent gave nothing to the family support.
Of girls in retail stores living at home in New York City, 84 per cent
paid their entire earnings to the family. Work, then, for the majority
of women, is more apt to be cold economic necessity--not only for
herself, but for her family.
Besides the fact that great numbers of women must work and many want
to work, there are the reasons for women's work arising in modern
industry itself. First, a hundred years ago, there was the need for
hands in the new manufactures, and because of the even more pressing
agricultural demands, men could not be spared. The greater the
subdivisions of labor up to a certain point, the simpler the process,
and the more women can be used, unskilled as they are ever apt to be.
Also they will work at more monotonous, more disagreeable work than
men, and for less wages. Again, women's entrance into new industries
has often been as strike breakers, and once in, there was no way to
get them out. Industrial depressions throw men out of work, and also
women, and in the financial pressure following, women turn to any sort
of work at any sort of pay, and perhaps open a new wedge for women's
work in a heretofore untried field, desirable or undesirable.
The freedom from having to perform every and all domestic functions
within the four walls of home is purchased at the expense of millions
of toilers outside the home, the majority of whom do not to-day
receive enough wages, where they are the menfolk, to support their own
families; nor where they are single women, to support themselves. The
fact that men cannot support their families forces women in large
numbers into industry. There would be nothing harmful in that, if only
industry were organized so that participation in it enriched human
lives. Remembering always that where industry takes women from the
care of young children, society and the nation pay dearly; for,
inadequate and ignorant as mothers often are regarding child care,
their substitutes to-day are apt to be even less efficient.
Pessimists marshal statistics to show that modern industrialism is
going to rack and ruin. Maybe it is. But pessimism is more a matter of
temperament than statistics. An optimist can assemble a most cheerful
array of figures to show that everything is on the up. Temperament
again. Industry is what industry does. If you are feeling gloomy
to-day, you can visit factories where it is plain to see that no human
being could have his lot improved by working there. Such factories
certainly exist. If you would hug your pessimism to your soul, then
there are many factories you must stay away from. Despite all the
pessimists, there is a growing tendency to increase the welfare of
human beings in industry.
It is but an infinitesimal drop any one individual can contribute to
hasten a saner industrialism. Yet some of us would so fain contribute
our mite! Where the greatest need of all lies is that the human beings
in industry, the employer and the employees, shall better understand
one another, and society at large better understand both. My own
amateur and humble experiences here recorded have added much to my own
understanding of the problems of both manager and worker.
Can they add even a fraction to the understanding of anyone else?