WOMEN'S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS
Nearly every state federation of women's clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department. It is these industrial sections of the women's clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National Manufacturers' Association. In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women's clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man supposed them to be. In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers' Association, the labor leaders. By which he meant that the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the worker's side of industrial subjects. "Soon," exclaimed Mr. Kirby, "we shall have to fight the women as well as the unions."
The richest and most aristocratic woman's club in the country is the Colony Club of New York. The Colony Club was organized by a number of women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner of men's clubs. The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful roof-garden. For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more than a beautiful toy which its members played with. But soon it began to develop into a sort of a woman's forum, where all sorts of social topics were discussed. Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers, lecturers, were entertained there.
Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in industrial economics. The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia University to address them. They asked John Mitchell and many lesser lights of the labor world. They wanted to learn, at first hand, the facts concerning conditions of industry. Most of them are stockholders in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments. Many own real estate on which factories stand.
"It is not fair," they have openly declared, "that we should enjoy wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death. We do not want wealth on such terms."
The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in governmental institutions. A few conscientious employers have spent a part of their profits to make their employees comfortable. They have given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and comfortable seats. They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation houses, and the like.
No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers. Equally, no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem. Nor should they be used as a substitute for justice.
Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed, untactfully administered. Too often it has been instituted, not to benefit the workers, but to advertise the business. Too often its real object was a desire to play the philanthropist's role, to exact obsequience from the wage earner.
I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms. Since they work on a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday. This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their employers. It always fails.
It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner's due. They are a part of the laborer's hire, and should be guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed. An employer deserves gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.
Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers' League, women's clubs, and women's labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of the employers.
The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a benevolent institution. Its directors know that its profits depend on the excellence of its service. There is one exchange in the Borough of Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic. This traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer resorts along the coast. In the fall and winter the traffic is very light. Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round. "We cannot afford to do anything else," explains the traffic manager. "We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages."
The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen. He believed that he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human working conditions. Then came the Consumers' League and mercantile laws, and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that is exhausted and uncomfortable.
The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will provide for it.
It used to be the invariable custom in stores—it is so still in a few—to lay off many clerks during the dull seasons. Now the best stores find that they can better afford to give all their employees vacations with pay. A clerk coming home after a vacation can sell goods, even in dull times. More and more employers are coming to appreciate the money value of the Saturday half-holiday in summer. Hearn, in New York, closes his department store all day Saturday during July and August. The store sells more goods in five days than it previously sold in six.