CHILD LABOR IN THE DEPARTMENT STORE
By Franklin N. Brewer
General Manager Wanamaker Store, Philadelphia
The topic assigned me, “Child Labor in (so called) Department Stores,” interests us, I take it, from but one point of view: that of the education and development of the child into the man or woman who shall contribute and receive a normal share of the world’s good growth in life, liberty and happiness.
I cannot claim comprehensive thought or research, under this topic, and my paper must be the brief and superficial one of a man whose too short days are full of the work of the builder rather than the study of the architect.
If my coming before you is justified at all, it must be by the simple statement I am able to make of how one establishment,[[15]] a typical one of the class under consideration, is trying to meet its responsibility for its children.
First entrance into the employ of this house is, to the extent possible, with a clear understanding between parent, or guardian, and the employer, that the child’s business career shall continue with the same house, at least until maturity in years and efficiency in some distinct branch of the business shall have been reached.
Following our State law, thirteen years is the minimum age. The smaller boys begin as “cash boys.” Girls are not given this work, positions of less freedom being considered safer for them. The girls up to, usually, seventeen years of age, and the boys, other than cash boys, usually, from sixteen to eighteen, are engaged directly in the general corps of the junior employees—we call it “The Cadet Corps”—and into this corps the cash boys come by promotion. Except at Christmas, the cash boys will average two hundred in number; the cadets four hundred, of whom about one hundred are girls. These six hundred young people are assigned to duty in the various departments and divisions of the business, according to natural aptitude and fitness, and are under the direction of their respective department or section heads; but always, also, and until graduation from the Cadet Corps, they are under the care and discipline of the chief of the corps and a lady assistant. The young people are not lost sight of individually, but are known and studied by the managers with view to advancement according to capacity and natural abilities.
Cultivation of good manners, neatness, elevated personal habits, the general requirements of the store service, lessons from their individual experiences, etc., are considered with them individually and at general meetings, and are emphasized by a system of monthly averages bearing upon questions of promotion and increase of salary. To illustrate: Each of the smaller boys (the cash boys) has his record card which he must carry for a month. It is no small departure from small-boy nature, simply to have and hold this card during a month without a forbidden accumulation of dirt and damage upon it. One of the early signs of progress, after the adoption of this feature of our plan, was an increased average whiteness and remaining area in the cards surrendered at the month’s end. This card epitomizes the boy’s early business life and he reverences it and guards it. On one side are rules to be committed to memory, but this is merely incidental. The other is the serious side, where an array of spaces gradually fill up, like the rising of the tide. Weekly ratings by his section manager for neatness, promptness, truthfulness, etc.; a weekly rating at morning “inspection,” by his general chief; daily strokes of the pencil (if occasion require) for misconduct or neglect of duty—“bluies” the boys call these latter marks and there is no levity or disrespect in the term. Protest against what is felt to be an undeserved “bluie” is made to his chief, or even to the general manager, with all the earnestness of an appeal to the Supreme Court, and, needless to say, such appeals are patiently entertained and decided with honest effort after justice. Upon these cards, also, are entered the monthly figures given for the boys’ school-work. The average of all the ratings is the “store average” and the misconduct marks (“bluies”) reckon so much off. The card goes home for inspection and signing by parent or guardian. Upon the “store average” depend increase of salary and promotion. If advance in salary is not won reasonably soon (six weeks or two months usually bring the first upward step) the conclusion is apt to be reached that the boy is unfitted for our service and he is dropped from the ranks. The simple expedient of these cards, and that which they represent, secures in discipline what the harsh word and impulsive discharge never could secure, and a month or two bring about in the little “raw recruit” a surprising improvement.
I mention these details as illustrative of the spirit, character and thoroughness with which, to the best of our ability, the problems of the discipline and development of our young people are met, along their whole course from first entrance into the business up to graduation into the ranks of men and women. And this line of procedure is simple recognition of the fact that these are children still, whose characters are forming, and that faults and defects, which in man or woman might require discharge, in the child simply demand correction.
The boys above the cash boy grade, and the girls, are placed, as early as wisely possible (depending upon their own developing tendencies and the business conditions), where some distinct branch of the business, or class of merchandise, will be learned thoroughly. Stock boy, salesman, stock-head, buyer’s assistant, is the usual line of advancement in merchandising. Development in clerical lines makes the bookkeeper, the auditor, the office assistant, the stenographer. In trades lines grow up among us, the milliner, the dressmaker, the paper shade and flower worker, the plate engraver and printer, the designer, draughtsman, decorator, show-card painter, the mechanic in repair of bicycles, dolls, and so on. Exceedingly numerous and varied are the paths open, and in so far as possible an early and definite selection and patient reasonable progress along some one of these paths are insisted upon. Meanwhile salaries are advanced systematically according to a minimum scale which is increased as progress above the average and promotion to higher duties may mark the course of the individual.
Does the program, thus far, sound too serious and strict for normal happiness and hopefulness in the children? See our young people and you will find the reverse to be true. Granted a child, normal in body and mind, happily busy and interested in duties of genuine importance to and among other busy people, and the question of training in the business proper answers itself: the child learns, absorbs, grows by the easy process of nature. His capital knowledge, as a business man, becomes to him like the mud on the carpet at Willie’s home: “I didn’t bring it into the house, mamma; it just stuck to my shoes and came in itself.” But the youthful business students of to-day require for normal development more than the round of duty of a succession of business days in a fixed place can supply, and more than the average home and home circle of friends and interests of the working boy or girl do supply.
And so we have found it practicable to bring into the business lives of our young people most of the activities usual in the schools. The smaller boys are organized into school and military companies. Each company assembles in the school-rooms, on the fifth floor of the store building, two mornings in the week, where regular instruction is given in arithmetic, grammar, spelling, writing, composition and singing. On two other mornings they have the setting-up exercises and drill of the school of the soldier, with some other physical culture features. The boys elect their own military officers, save, of course, their chief, and these officers become successful disciplinarians, retaining well the respect and obedience of their companies. A very successful fife, bugle and drum corps, composed of the boys themselves, is a feature of this branch of their organization. As fairly indicating the standard of these special activities, let me mention here that this fife, bugle and drum corps has twice marched at the head of the combined Boys’ Brigades of Philadelphia, and has been pronounced the best junior organization of the sort in the city.
Our girls have their school organization, also, each division having two mornings in the week. The branches taught are those above mentioned and also business correspondence, stenography and typewriting, and bookkeeping. Attention is given to singing and physical culture, while an elocution class and a mandolin club are successful outgrowths of this branch of the store school.
The older boys, in number about three hundred, have supper in the store and remain for their school, two evenings in a week. The branches taught are arithmetic, spelling, writing, commercial correspondence, English, stenography, bookkeeping, metric system, mechanical and free-hand drawing, rapid calculation. Military and gymnastic training are given, and as outgrowths of the school are a club for debate and literary exercises, an orchestra, a field music band, a mandolin club, a glee club, an elocution and dramatic class, and a minstrel troupe. Monthly report of the standing and progress of each pupil is made to the parents.
Each of these three branches of the store school has its separate annual commencement exercises conducted similarly to those of other schools and not falling below the latter in general merit. Association Hall has been used in later years for this purpose, but is now much too small for the gathering of the parents and friends interested. Certificates (they call them diplomas) are given to the graduates, but these papers have double significance. They testify to the attainment of a certain standard in the school-work proper and also to the actual number of years of satisfactory service in the business, with promotion from the Cadet Corps to a position in the regular ranks of some one of the store departments—equivalent to a stepping out of the ranks of the business boy or girl into those of the business man or woman.
These graduates have organized themselves into Alumni and Alumnæ Associations and maintain their fellowship, principally in social, but partly in educative work. The school button or pin and the alumni pin prove that these young folks are quite as human as those of other schools and colleges. The standard of class-work done, while perhaps less in quantity for the same length of time, does not, in quality, seem to fall below the standard of other schools. The business training, the business authority and the fact that excellence in school-work is also an important element in business promotion, all give the teacher an advantage, and the scholar an incentive greater than in ordinary schools, and these substantially offset the disadvantage of shorter class-hours. With justifiable pride we call the schools, collectively, the “J. W. C. I.,” “John Wanamaker Commercial Institute.” The “Junior Savings Fund” is another feature of the young people’s organizations of the store, largely taken advantage of and helpfully stimulating to habits of care with money. A summer camp, the outfit for which is owned by the boys, provides for the vacation of many.
The results are very manifest. Jacob Riis says, “the small boy is a boiler with steam up all the time, and if authority sits on the safety-valve there is bound to be an explosion.” We have but few explosions. There is so much of varied and interesting demand upon his activities that our future business man has but little time to scheme out mischief and practically no surplus steam to explode. The incentive to faithful doing of his best is strong. Participation in the actual work of the business daily is the broadest end of school-work. Beginning early and with awakening interest and ambition, the children are in less danger of developing wrong habits, temptation to dishonesty, a sullen or resistful spirit toward those in control, and many another cause by which a naturally well-equipped child fails to fulfill the promise of his childhood.
While children here are children still, yet I know not of an equal number of young people gathered together with an equal standard in present character and ability and promise of future success and usefulness. As would be supposed, such care in the early training of the young people necessarily and naturally carries with it the advancing of these people as the years go on, so that what is practically a system of civil service promotion has resulted, and the higher positions are continually filling with those who have grown up in the business from childhood.
To be sure, it often happens that a young man, having made himself fit for a larger position than is open to him at the time in this his business home, goes out with our approval to some other establishment which needs a chief and bids for him, but, on the other hand, it is true that no young man or woman, having won a foothold in the regular store service and continuing faithfully to do his or her best, need look elsewhere for advancement or a business future.
Sometimes these changes to other service are invited before we think the young man or woman fully qualified, and in any case much is risked in the search elsewhere for sudden and uncertain advancement.
From these conditions develop three important features of modern business life: First: A fair equivalent for the apprentice system still so strong in the Old World, and for want of which our young business men and mechanics have suffered in comparison with Old World competitors, in point of thoroughness and detail knowledge; second: civil service promotion; and third: service and disability pension.
May I presume further upon your patience with an additional question or two? Are we prepared to say that better results than these I have tried to indicate are observable in those trained solely in academic courses? It is too large a question for me to attempt to answer. An answer is, however, suggested by R. T. Crane in a pamphlet issued in 1901 in Chicago, entitled “An Investigation as to the Utility of Academic Education for Young Men Who Have to Earn Their Own Living and Who Expect to Pursue a Commercial Life.” Mr. Crane comes, among other conclusions, to this: “The truth of the matter is that, when it comes to considering an applicant for a position, few of these gentlemen (employers in various lines) will be found to pay any attention to the amount of knowledge he may have of Greek, Latin, literature, etc., or care a straw about the mental drill and discipline or the well-rounded character that he may have acquired through a course at college. What they are particularly interested in knowing is whether he understands their business and can promote it. This is all that has any weight with them in the selection of help.”
And further, “The great majority of our strongest and most successful men in the country to-day came from farms and villages and obtained very little education.... In my opinion, few of them would have been anywhere near so successful in business had they gone to college, for their success was largely due to the fact, which was impressed upon them in the early part of their career, that they would have to struggle if they expected to succeed.
“I feel quite sure that if the men who have been successful in business were asked whether they regretted starting in business at the time they did, in place of going to college and taking the chances of afterward being able to gain the success which they have achieved, all would answer in the negative.... I think it can be safely said that the great men at the head of our railroads are the strongest business men the world has ever produced, and so far as I have been able to ascertain, not one of them is a consistent believer in college education.
“Certainly none of them have expressed in their letters any regret on account of not having received such education themselves.
“On the contrary, Mr. Roswell Miller remarks that he spent one year in college, and considers it fortunate that he did not spend more.”
Without depreciating the value of a college course, our business experience tends to the conclusion that men and women trained up from youth in the business are the most successful; that length of service, with its unconscious absorption of and self-adjustment to the principles and needs of the business, will carry a given degree of natural capacity to a higher point of efficiency and success than an originally greater degree of capacity will be likely to reach by the shorter road of business training begun in maturer years.
I am aware that business success is but a partial test of true education, and my mark is missed if I seem to have set up that as my test alone. Perhaps from the unfavorable conditions of child labor in the past, has arisen the assumption that to work for wages in early years is necessarily a misfortune to the child, and, until now at least, the instinctive choice of parents is for long years in the schools. But as time brings to working men and women improved conditions, shortened hours, higher standards of intelligence, increased rate of earnings, may not a proportionate bettering for the child bring conditions so normal, to the best education and development, as that labor in the real world of business or trade will accomplish more, and more desirably, for the child that which is striven for in business and trades courses of the schools?
Modern educational methods have carried much of the shop and counting-house into the school-room, while but little in the reverse order has been accomplished, at least in this country. Pennsylvania State law has done little more for the child than to forbid his being employed in manufacturing or mercantile establishments before the age of thirteen, and thereafter to surround his employment with some safeguards against danger to life or limb. But considerably greater progress has been made in Germany. Some present here will recall a paper read in this room by our Consul at Chemnitz, the Hon. J. C. Monaghan, on “Industrial Education, a German Example.” Mr. Monaghan tells of industrial schools established in manufacturing districts for the benefit of the workers of the factories, where the law requires so many hours in the week to be spent in these schools by the younger employees, who thus combine the practical of their business with the theoretical of their school. I quote from Mr. Monaghan: “I have had exceptional opportunities during three periods, since the war of 1870, of investigating the industrial progress of Germany, and to make what might easily be a long story short, I may say it is due mainly to education. When you are building a house, you begin with the foundations. When you are building up a man, you begin with the child. Germany a century ago, after its exhaustion and humiliation caused by the great wars, fixed the foundation of its new life and development on the rock of education. The country was poor, its people could only exist by hard work, and their education was organized so as to help them with their work.... Germany has a system of further-developing schools, and industrial art schools, so close to the people that they aid the trades and industries in such a way as to commend themselves to all parties concerned therewith. Education in Germany is compulsory. After graduating from the public schools (or leaving the public school, for reference here is to the lower grade schools which boys leave at fourteen or fifteen for work, as they do with us at thirteen) and entering upon an employment, they are not only expected but compelled to attend these further-developing schools for a period of three years. They go two or three times each week, sometimes on Sunday. They are developing the scientific side, if one may put it thus, of the trade or business with which they are connected.” Here, then, is the child at work and yet the school brought to him. But a step further brings to him also those branches of study usually associated with the school alone and suggested more by the liberal than the strictly business and trade view of education. Instead, then, of commercial and mechanical work in the school of the schools, we have school-work in the school of actual commerce and industry, in the store and factory.
And shall we say that this reversal of the older plan may not have a wise and lasting place in educational life?
Is the labor of the store, shop or office more truly educative when imitated in the class-rooms of commercial and trade schools, than when done in course of actual business? Do not the labor and experiences of business life, with their real responsibilities, their unartificial rewards and retributions, their contact with men in real life, do all the former can do and much more? Certainly the real thing done in business or shop, and shaped and regulated to serve the ends of the world’s actual economic life, must have an educative advantage above the like thing theorized over in the school-room; while of unquestionably great value is that further reward which the school of actual business gives to its pupils, namely—a knowledge of men and affairs, confidence, judgment, association with practical workers at the centre of the world’s daily life.
Keep the children young, we are tempted to say as we see them in our own home circles. A dangerous plan! Rather, let the children learn what they must, of the best masters, and as their years are able! So wise and devoted a parent as Lord Chesterfield wrote his young son: “Do not imagine that the knowledge, which I so much commend to you, is confined to books, pleasing, useful, and necessary as that knowledge is; but I comprehend in it the great knowledge of the world, still more necessary than that of books. The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.” “Happy the man who, with a certain fund of parts and knowledge, gets acquainted with the world early enough to make it his bubble, at an age when most people are the bubbles of the world, for that is the common case of youth.”
If, then, the commercial and trades training, the business or manual, or whatever the course be called, can be found in actual commerce and trade; if a sufficient degree of scholastic education can there be added, and if with this the maturing man or woman shall gain a higher degree of technical skill and a safer knowledge of men and affairs, does not the plan of the school in business best meet the educational problem for at least a majority of childkind? Answer as you may for present or future, this is true now—that child labor in the Wanamaker store means education, physical, scholastic, commercial; development in character, fitness for intelligent work, and fitting into a place in the bread-and-butter belt of the world; an open path and a helping hand to the career of the man or woman who shall add a due part to the sum of life and win the crown fashioned by the Great Father for each of us, His children, who finds his duty and does it.
Discussion.
“Q. Has the store any difficulty in keeping out boys under thirteen?
“A. Practically no difficulty. I have no doubt the truth is stretched occasionally and those not yet thirteen brought in, but there must be an affidavit as to age, and few of the class of people from whom our employees are drawn are willing to swear to a lie in order to secure earlier employing of the child.
“Q. Is there a physical examination, a physician in charge?
“A. There is no physical examination other than that which the eye of the employer can give. The first weeks or months of the boy’s service, or girl’s, develop the fact whether physically, mentally and otherwise, the child is suited for the business.
“Q. How long has this system been in operation?
“A. I think it was six years ago that we began with the school for cash boys. It was some two or three years before that the initial step, out of which all the rest has grown, was taken. The plan arose originally from a recognition of the fact that the young people who came into the store were not sufficiently looked after. They were apt to be lost sight of, as distributed in the various departments, and when the busy season passed and some reduction in the force became necessary, the department head was often not far-sighted enough to consider that the small boy now would be his best man in the years to come. It was the recognition of this fact that led to the beginning of the plan of which the first step was merely the placing of the smaller boys of the establishment under one head. All the other steps came one by one, as our experience led to them.
“Q. You referred to the fact that your experience had shown that college training was not useful in business career. Are there many college men in your departments, or are you able to find that out?
“A. I did not give this as our own experience and conclusion, but was quoting that of others as given in the pamphlet of Mr. Crane’s, to which I referred, and which contains my answer to a letter from him. Mr. Crane sent letters to representatives of various establishments, asking that question. So far as I can recall the answer, it was that we were unable to say exactly, but taking such departments as required salesmen, bookkeepers and so on (that is, dropping out the delivery and packing rooms, where the more highly educated would naturally not be found), aggregating some five hundred and fifty men, we found twenty-six who had had either a full or partial college education. It is not our custom to inquire as to the college education. The difference in the success of the college-educated man and the one not so educated has not, in our experience, been sufficiently marked to make that a point of distinction in engaging the rank and file of our men, although in the man of college education we naturally look for quicker progress or brighter mental work.”