WAITRESSES
Unorganized waitresses often have to work seven days a week and sometimes fourteen hours a day; they have to provide their own uniform and pay for its laundering. Organized waitresses have a ten-hour day and a six-day week. Their wages have risen from $5 and $6 to $7 and $8 per week and meals. Their uniforms and laundry expenses are found for them. They enjoy a $3 sick benefit for thirteen weeks and the union pays a $50 death benefit.
There are some trades which have been organized and which yet record thus far no marked improvement in the condition of the workers. This may be either because the organization has been in existence too short a time or because of other reasons. Among such trades are sheepskin workers, badge, banner and regalia workers, human hair workers and commercial telegraphers. Even in these trades steady educational and organizing work is proceeding. Moreover the union may have been an influence preventing further wage cutting, higher speeding up or the imposition of more overtime.
The trade union is the great school for working girls. There they are taught the principles of collective bargaining. They learn to discuss difficulties with employers, free from the rasping sense of personal grievance. They learn to give and take with equanimity, to balance a greater advantage against a lesser one. In union meetings and conferences where they meet on an equality with their brothers it is the girl of sober judgment, good humor and ready wit who becomes a leader, and influences her more inexperienced sister to follow her.
The trade union is educating the community as well as the girl. There is a growing tendency among men and women of the teaching, clerical and other non-manual occupations to recognize the common interest of all workers, and to form under one name or another associations to affiliate with the labor movement. One of the largest of these is the Teachers’ Federation of Chicago which has now been many years in existence. More recently stenographers’ and typists’ associations have been formed in New York and Chicago. The formation of actors’ and musicians’ associations is additional proof of the same spirit.
The influence upon the whole community of organized insistence upon human conditions for the worker is marked. Trade-union standards tend eventually to become the standards toward which all non-union establishments that claim to treat their employees well voluntarily approximate. Trade-union standards are the standards up to which decent non-union employers keep steadily inching along in respect to hours and conditions of work, and often even in respect to that most crucial test of all, wages. Trade-union standards are, in short, always tending to become in the eyes of the public the normal standards in the whole world of industry. Indeed everywhere the paradox is to be noticed that the non-union girl benefits remarkably as the result of the existence of a union in her trade. Under pressure of competition employers frequently state that their trade will not bear shorter hours or higher wages. Curiously enough, such statements are much more frequently made in unorganized than organized trades, and the employers more frequently act up to their statements.
Unions, furthermore, have an important indirect influence on legislation. In trade after trade, the benefits of shorter hours have been gained through organization in states where there was no legislation and no prospect of it. This is seen in many branches of the garment-making industry, among waitresses, tobacco strippers, printers and bindery women all over the United States. A ten-hour day, a nine-hour day, an eight-hour day, even a forty-four-hour week, for different bodies of these workers, have been for them the fruits of organization. These advantages gained, the evidence of workers who enjoy shorter hours and the experience of employers who conduct their establishments under a system of shorter hours form the strongest and most practical argument by which legislators are influenced to consider the practicability and desirability of the shorter working day.
Trade unions, indeed, cannot beat back the ocean, though they have been known to think they could. They cannot raise wages beyond certain limits, though the obstacles that bar further upward movement in a particular trade may be quite beyond the ken of the wisest in or out of the labor movement. They cannot always prevent wages from falling, whether that fall be expressed in actual cash or measured in purchasing power. International competition, the introduction of machinery, or the opening of fresh reservoirs of cheaper foreign labor may press wages down with irresistible force.
But more and more unions ought to be able to lessen the cruel abruptness with which such changes fall upon the worker. By no known means can the action of economic forces be prevented, but their incidence can and should be altered.
Under our present chaotic no-system every mechanical improvement, every 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.”