WOMEN AND THE TRADE-UNION MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
ALICE HENRY
Editor Woman’s Department, Union Labor Advocate of Chicago.
The story of woman in the labor movement has yet to be written. In its completeness no one knows the story, and those who know sections of it most intimately are too busy living their own parts in that story to be able to pause long enough to play at being its chroniclers. For to be part of a movement is more absorbing than to write about it. Whom then shall we ask? To whom shall we turn for even an imperfect knowledge of the story, at once great and sordid, tragic and commonplace, of woman’s side of the labor movement? To whom, you would say, but the worker herself? And where does the worker speak with such clearness, such unfaltering steadiness, as through her union, the organization of her trade?
In the industrial maze the individual worker cannot interpret her own life story from her knowledge of the little patch of life which is all her hurried fingers ever touch. Only an organization can be the interpreter here. Fortunately for the student the organization can act as interpreter, both for the organized women who have been drawn into the labor movement and for those less fortunate who are struggling on single-handed. Organized and unorganized workers almost always come into pretty close relations in one way and another. Besides, the movement in its modern developments is still so young among us that there is scarcely a woman worker in the organizations who has not begun her trade life as an unorganized toiler.
Speaking broadly, the points upon which the trade-union movement concentrates are the raising of wages, the shortening of hours, the diminution of seasonal work, the abolition or reduction of piece work, with its resultant of speeding-up, the maintaining of sanitary conditions, the enforcement of laws against child labor and other industrial abuses, the abolition of taxes for power, thread and needles, and of unfair fines for petty or unproved offenses. A single case taken from a non-union trade must serve to suggest the conditions that make organization a necessity. Seventeen years ago in the bag and hemp factories of St. Louis, girl experts turned out 460 yards of material in a twelve-hour day, the pay being 24 cents per bolt (of from 60 to 66 yards). These girls earned $1.84 per day (on the 60-yard bolt). Now a girl cannot hold her job under a thousand yards in a ten-hour day. The fastest possible worker can turn out only 1200 yards, and the price has dropped to 15 cents per 100 yards as against the old rate of 24 cents per bolt of from 60 to 66 yards. The workers have to fill the shuttle every two or three minutes, so that the strain of vigilance is never relaxed. One year is spent in learning the trade, and operators last only three years after that.
How successful organization has been is well shown by numerous examples. In the instances which follow, taken from the convention handbook of the National Woman’s Trade Union League, the advantages gained in some of the trades apply to all establishments working under agreement with any and every local union of the national organization. In other cases the diminution of hours, the increase of wages and the improvement of conditions are limited to the factories or shops in certain cities only. Even bearing this qualification in mind, these gains, following in the train of collective bargaining, are sufficiently impressive.