Weekly Hours of Labor.
The salient characteristic of restaurant work is the length of the working day. Fifty-eight per cent. of the women employees work each week beyond the fifty-four-hour limit set by law for women in stores and factories. A twelve-hour day and a seven-day week is the lot of one-fifth of these workers. ([See Diagram 5.]) A fifteen-hour day is not uncommon. Not quite one-half of the waitresses work over 54 hours a week or 9 hours a day. The reason for this is that a large number of them, 31 per cent., are “one-meal girls.” Seventy-eight per cent. of all other restaurant workers, however, exceed the fifty-four hour week.
Comparing the hours of labor of these women with the hours of labor of all employees, both male and female, in the factories of New York State, four per cent. of the factory employees and thirty-five per cent. of the women restaurant employees work over sixty hours a week. Two per cent. of the factory employees and twenty per cent. of the women in restaurants work seventy-two hours or over.[4]
Diagram 6.—Comparison of Weekly Hours of Labor for Women in Restaurants and all Factory Employees in New York State.
Shorter hours have been brought about in factories by the voluntary action of manufacturers, who recognize the inefficiency of over-worked men and women; by concerted action of the workers, who have united to fight for their own protection; and by legal enactment, proving that the people of New York State are alive to the dangers of overwork. Some restaurant managers realize the waste and harm of too long hours and arrange their employees’ time accordingly; most of them do not. Women restaurant workers in New York State have never been successfully organized; they cannot protect themselves. They have no legal redress for overwork; the law has neglected them. In the course of this investigation, a girl of twenty was found working one hundred and twenty-two hours a week—longer than the law allows factory employees to work in two weeks. Yet this is within the law. Although restaurants differ from stores and factories in keeping open more hours a day, and sometimes for the whole twenty-four, a system of shifts would do away with the scandalously long hours to which thousands of girls and women are bound.
Diagram 5.—Weekly Hours of Labor of Women Employed in Restaurants.
That restaurant work is at best a great drain upon the physical strength and nervous force of the worker is evident. Standing, walking, lifting and carrying heavy weights is unavoidable. The report on restaurants made by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says: “There was much complaint among the waitresses that the work was very hard and they could stand it but a few years. A number of the girls interviewed had worked as three meal girls until their health was broken; then they took positions as one meal girls and barely made a living. Carrying the heavy trays and the constant standing and walking cause ill health. Usually a man is employed to carry away the empty dishes, but the waitresses must bring the trays loaded with food.”[5]
Besides the cost to endurance, nerves are at constant tension for hurry is the remorseless rule. A waitress must not only remember a multitude of orders and fill them quickly, but she must keep her temper under the exactions of the most trying customer. The cook must keep her head amid the confusion and noise of a hot, crowded kitchen. The kitchen girl must be everywhere at once with a helping hand and the dish-washer’s very job depends upon her quickness. One of this latter group said that she washes seven thousand articles in an hour and a half. A waitress, when asked the effect of the work upon her, answered, “Sore feet and a devilish mean disposition.” A man restaurant worker speaking of kitchen girls remarked, “It’s no work for a woman. They have to lift heavy pots full of vegetables and fill in all the gaps. A man has some endurance, but a woman can’t stand it more than nine hours a day.”
Many kinds of work are difficult and taxing in their performance, but if the working day is not prolonged beyond a certain point, and there is a sufficient period of rest, such work is not necessarily injurious to the health of the worker. If this point is passed, health is impaired.
