CHAPTER II

[ToC]

THE SHIRT-WAIST MAKERS' STRIKE

I

Among the active members of the Ladies Waist Makers' Union in New York, there is a young Russian Jewess of sixteen, who may be called Natalya Urusova. She is little, looking hardly more than twelve years old, with a pale, sensitive face, clear dark eyes, very soft, smooth black hair, parted and twisted in braids at the nape of her neck, and the gentlest voice in the world, a voice still thrilled with the light inflections of a child.

She is the daughter of a Russian teacher of Hebrew, who lived about three years ago in a beech-wooded village on the steppes of Central Russia. Here a neighbor of Natalya's family, a Jewish farmer, misunderstanding that manifesto of the Czar which proclaimed free speech, and misunderstanding socialism, had printed and scattered through the neighborhood an edition of hand-bills stating that the Czar had proclaimed socialism, and that the populace must rise and divide among themselves a rich farm two miles away.

Almost instantly on the appearance of these bills, this unhappy man and a young Jewish friend who chanced to be with him at the time of his arrest were seized and murdered by the government officers—the friend drowned, the farmer struck dead with the blow of a cudgel. A Christian mob formed, and the officers and the mob ravaged every Jewish house in the little town. Thirty innocent Jews were clubbed to death, and then literally cut to pieces. Natalya and her family, who occupied the last house on the street, crept unnoticed to the shack of a Roman Catholic friend, a woman who hid sixteen Jewish people under the straw of the hut in the fields where she lived, in one room, with eight children and some pigs and chickens. Hastily taking from a drawer a little bright-painted plaster image of a wounded saint, this woman placed it over the door as a means of averting suspicion. Her ruse was successful. "Are there Jews here?" the officer called to her, half an hour afterward, as the mob came over the fields to her house.

"No," said the woman.

"Open the door and let me see."

The woman flung open the door. But, as he was quite unsuspecting, the officer glanced in only very casually; and it was in utter ignorance that the rage of the mob went on over the fields, past the jammed little room of breathless Jews.

As soon as the army withdrew from the town, Natalya and her family made their way to America, where, they had been told, one had the right of free belief and of free speech. Here they settled on the sixth floor of a tenement on Monroe Street, on the East Side of New York. Nothing more different from the open, silent country of the steppes could be conceived than the place around them.

The vista of the New York street is flanked by high rows of dingy brick tenements, fringed with jutting white iron fire-escapes, and hung with bulging feather-beds and pillows, puffing from the windows. By day and by night the sidewalks and roads are crowded with people,—bearded old men with caps, bare-headed wigged women, beautiful young girls, half-dressed babies swarming in the gutters, playing jacks. Push carts, lit at night with flaring torches, line the pavements and make the whole thronged, talking place an open market, stuck with signs and filled with merchandise and barter. Everybody stays out of doors as much as possible. In summer-time the children sleep on the steps, and on covered chicken coops along the sidewalk; for, inside, the rooms are too often small and stifling, some on inner courts close-hung with washing, some of them practically closets, without any opening whatever to the outer air.

Many, many of Natalya's neighbors here are occupied in the garment trade. According to the United States census of 1900, the men's clothing made in factories in New York City amounted to nearly three times as much as that manufactured in any other city in the United States. The women's clothing made in factories in New York City amounted to more than ten times that made in any other city; the manufacture of women's ready-made clothing in this country is, indeed, almost completely in the hands of New York's immense Jewish population. [[12]]

As soon after her arrival as her age permitted, Natalya entered the employment of a shirt-waist factory as an unskilled worker, at a salary of $6 a week. Mounting the stairs of the waist factory, one is aware of heavy vibrations. The roar and whir of the machines increase as the door opens, and one sees in a long loft, which is usually fairly light and clean, though sometimes neither, rows and rows of girls with heads bent and eyes intent upon the flashing needles. They are all intensely absorbed; for if they be paid by the piece, they hurry from ambition, and if they be paid by the week, they are "speeded up" by the foreman to a pace set by the swiftest workers.

In the Broadway establishment, which may be called the Bruch Shirt-waist Factory, where Natalya worked, there were four hundred girls—six hundred in the busy season. The hours were long—from eight till half past twelve, a half hour for lunch, and then from one till half past six.

Sometimes the girls worked until half past eight, until nine. There were only two elevators in the building, which contained other factories. There were two thousand working people to be accommodated by these elevators, all of whom began work at eight o'clock in the morning; so that, even if Natalya reached the foot of the shaft at half past seven, it was sometimes half past eight before she reached the shirt-waist factory on the twelfth floor. She was docked for this inevitable tardiness so often that frequently she had only five dollars a week instead of six. This injustice, and the fact that sometimes the foreman kept them waiting needlessly for several hours before telling them that he had no work for them, was particularly wearing to the girls.

Natalya was a "trimmer" in the factory. She cut the threads of the waists after they were finished—a task requiring very little skill. But the work of shirt-waist workers is of many grades. The earnings of makers of "imported" lingerie waists sometimes rise as high as $25 a week. Such a wage, however, is very exceptional, and, even so, is less high than might appear, on account of the seasonal character of the work.

The average skilled waist worker, when very busy, sometimes earns from $12 to $15 a week. Here are the yearly budgets of some of the better paid workers, more skilled than Natalya—operatives receiving from $10 to $15 a week.

Rachael, a shirt-waist operative of eighteen, had been at work three years. She had begun at $5 a week and her skill had increased until in a very busy week she could earn from $14 to $15 by piece-work. "But," she said, "I was earning too much, so I was put back at week's work, at $11 a week. The foreman is a bad, driving man. Ugh! he makes us work fast—especially the young beginners."

Rachael, too, had been driven out of Russia by Christian persecution. Her little sister had been killed in a massacre. Her parents had gone in one direction, and she and her two other sisters had fled in another to America.

Here in New York she lived in a tenement, sharing a room with two other girls, and, besides working in the shirt-waist factory, did her own washing, made her own waists, and went to night school.

Her income was seriously depleted by the seasonal character of her work. Out of the twelve months of the year, for one month she was idle, for four months she had only three or four days' work a week, for three months she had five days' work a week, and for four months only did she have work for all six days. Unhappily, during these months she developed a severe cough, which lost her seven weeks of work, and gave her during these weeks the expense of medicine, a doctor, and another boarding place, as she could not in her illness sleep with her two friends.

Her income for the year had been $348.25. Her expenses had been as follows: rent for one-third of room at $3.50 a month, $42; suppers with landlady at 20 cents each, $63; other meals, approximately, $90; board while ill, seven weeks at $7, $49; doctor and medicine (about) $15; clothing, $51.85; club, 5 cents a week, $2.60; total, $313.45, thus leaving a balance of $34.80.

Shoes alone consumed over one-half of the money used for clothing. They wore out with such amazing rapidity that she had needed a new pair once a month. At $2 each, except a best pair, costing $2.60, their price in a year amounted to $24.60. [[13]]

In regard to Rachael's expenditure and conservation in strength, she had drawn heavily upon her health and energy. Her cough continued to exhaust her. She was worn and frail, and at eighteen her health was breaking.

Anna Klotin, another older skilled worker, an able and clever Russian girl of twenty-one, an operative and trimmer, earned $12 a week. She had been idle twelve weeks on account of slack work. For four weeks she had night work for three nights a week, and payment for this extra time had brought her income up to $480 for the year. Of this sum she paid $312 ($6 a week) for board and lodging alone in a large, pleasant room with a friendly family on the East Side. To her family in Russia she had sent $120, and she had somehow contrived, by doing her own washing, making her own waists and skirts, and repairing garments left from the previous year, to buy shoes and to pay carfare and all her other expenses from the remaining $48. She had bought five pairs of shoes at $2 each, and a suit for $15.

Fanny Wardoff, a shirt-waist worker of twenty, who had been in the United States only a year, helped her family by supporting her younger brother.

For some time after her arrival in this country the ill effects of her steerage voyage had left her too miserable to work. She then obtained employment as a finisher in a skirt factory, where her best wage was $7. But her earnings in this place had been so fluctuating that she was uncertain what her total income had been before the last thirteen weeks. At the beginning of this time she had left the skirt factory and become a finisher in a waist factory, where she earned from $10 to $12 a week, working nine and a half hours a day.

Her place to sleep, and breakfast and dinner, in a tenement, cost $2.50 a week. She paid the same for her younger brother, who still attended school. The weekly expense was palpably increased by 60 cents a week for luncheon and 30 cents for carfare to ride to work. She walked home, fifteen blocks.

Her clothing, during the eight months of work, had cost about $40. Of this, $8 had been spent for four pairs of shoes. Two ready-made skirts had cost $9, and a jacket $10. Her expense for waists was only the cost of material, as she had made them herself.

She spent 35 cents a week for the theatre, and economized by doing her own washing.

Here are the budgets of some shirt-waist operatives earning from $7 to $10 a week, less skilled than the workers described above, but more skilled than Natalya.

Irena Kovalova, a girl of sixteen, supported herself and three other people, her mother and her younger brother and sister, on her slight wage of $9 a week. She was a very beautiful girl, short, but heavily built, with grave dark eyes, a square face, and a manner more mature and responsible than that of many women of forty. Irena Kovalova had not been out of work for one whole week in the year she described. She had never done night work; but she had almost always worked half a day on Sunday—except in slack weeks. She was not certain how many of these there had been; but there had been enough slack time to reduce her income for her family for the year to $450. They had paid $207 rent for four rooms on the East Side, and had lived on the remaining $243, all of which Irena had given to her mother.

Her mother helped her with her washing, and she had worn the clothes she had the year before, with the exception of shoes. She had been forced to buy four pairs of these at $2 a pair. They all realized that if Irena could spend a little more for her shoes they would wear longer. "But for shoes," she said, with a little laugh, "two dollars—it is the most I ever could pay."

She was a girl of unusual health and strength, and though sometimes very weary at night and troubled with eye strain from watching the needle, it was a different drain of her vitality that she mentioned as alarming. She was obliged to work at a time of the month when she normally needed rest, and endured anguish at her machine at this season. She had thought, she said gravely, that if she ever had any money ahead, she would try to use it to have a little rest then.

Molly Zaplasky, a little Russian shirt-waist worker of fifteen, operated a machine for fifty-six hours a week, did her own washing, and even went to evening school. She had worked for five months, earning $9 a week for five weeks of this time, and sometimes $6, sometimes $7, for the remainder. She and her sister Dora, of seventeen, also a shirt-waist maker, had a room with a cousin's family on the East Side.

Dora had worked a year and a half. She, too, earned $9 a week in full weeks. But there had been only twenty-two such weeks in that period. For seventeen weeks she had earned $6 a week. For four weeks she had been idle because of slackness of work, and for nine weeks recently she had been too ill to work, having developed tuberculosis. Dora, too, did her own washing. She made her own waists, and went to evening school. She had paid $2.75 a week for partial board and for lodging. The food, not included in her board, cost about $1 a week. The little Molly had paid for Dora's board and lodging in her nine weeks' illness. Dora, who had worked so valiantly, was quietly expecting just as valiantly her turn in the long waiting list of applicants for the Montefiore Home for consumptives. She knew that the chance of her return to Molly was very slight.

Her expenditure for food, shelter, and clothing for the year had been as follows: room and board (exclusive of nine weeks' illness), $161.25; clothing, $41.85; total, $203.10. As her income for the year had been $297.50, this left a balance of $94.40 for all other expenses. Items for clothing had been: suit, $12; jacket, $4.50; a hat, $2.50; shoes (two pairs), $4.25; stockings (two pairs a week at 15 cents), $15.60; underwear, $3; total, $41.85.

One point should be accentuated in this budget—the striking cost of stockings, due to the daily walk to and from work and the ill little worker's lack of strength and time for darning. The outlay for footwear in all the budgets of the operators is heavy, in spite of the fact that much of their work is done sitting.

Here are the budgets of some of the shirt-waist makers who were earning Natalya's wage of $6 a week, or less than this wage.

Rea Lupatkin, a shirt-waist maker of nineteen, had been in New York only ten months, and was at first a finisher in a cloak factory. Afterward, obtaining work as operator in a waist factory, she could get $4 in fifty-six hours on a time basis. She had been in this factory six weeks.

Rea was paying $4 a month for lodging in two rooms of a tenement-house with a man and his wife and baby and little boy. She saved carfare by a walk of three-quarters of an hour, adding daily one and a half hours to the nine and a half already spent in operating. Her food cost $2.25 a week so that, with 93 cents a week for lodging, her regular weekly cost of living was $3.18, leaving her 82 cents for every other expense. In spite of this, and although she had been forced to spend $3 for examination of her eyes and for eyeglasses, Rea contrived to send an occasional $2 back to her family in Europe.

Ida Bergeson, a little girl of fifteen, was visited at half past eight o'clock one evening, in a tenement on the lower East Side. The gas was burning brightly in the room; several people were talking; and this frail-looking little Ida lay on a couch in their midst, sleeping, in all the noise and light, in complete exhaustion. Her sister said that every night the child returned from the factory utterly worn out, she was obliged to work so hard and so fast.

Ida received the same wage as Natalya—$6 a week. She worked fifty-six hours a week—eight more than the law allows for minors. She paid $4 a week for board and a room shared with the anxious older sister, who told about her experience. Ida needed all the rest of her $2 for her clothing. She did her own washing. As the inquirer came away, leaving the worn little girl sleeping in her utter fatigue, she wondered with what strength Ida could enter upon her possible marriage and motherhood—whether, indeed, she would struggle through to maturity.

Katia Halperian, a shirt-waist worker of fifteen, had been in New York only six months. During twenty-one weeks of this time she was employed in a Wooster Street factory, earning for a week of nine-and-a-half-hour days only $3.50. Katia, like Natalya, was a "trimmer."

After paying $3 a week board to an aunt, she had a surplus of 50 cents for all clothing, recreation, doctor's bills, and incidentals.

To save carfare she walked to her work—about forty minutes' distance. Her aunt lived on the fourth floor of a tenement. After working nine and a half hours and walking an hour and twenty minutes daily, Katia climbed four flights of stairs and then helped with the housework.

Sonia Lavretsky, a girl of twenty, had been self-supporting for four years. She lived in a most wretched, ill-kept tenement, with a family who made artificial flowers. She had been totally unable to find work for the last five months, but this family, though very poor, had kept her with them without payment through all this time.

She had been three months an operative, putting cuffs on waists. Working on a time basis, she earned $3 the first week and $4 the second. She was then put on piece-work, and in fifty-four hours and a half could earn only $3. Laid off, she found employment at felling cloaks, earning from $3 to $6 a week. But after twelve weeks, trade in this place also had grown dull.

During her idle time she became "run down" and was ill three weeks. Fortunately, a brother was able to pay her doctor's bills, until he also was laid off during part of her idle time.

When Sonia had any money she gave her landlady, for part of a room in the poor tenement with the flower-makers, $3.50 a month, and about $2.50 a week for food. Before her dull season and slack work began, she had paid 20 cents a week dues to a self-education society and social club.

Her brother had given her all the clothing she had. The burden of her support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken family of her hostess. And Sonia was in deep discouragement. She was about to go away from New York in hopes of finding work in Syracuse.

Getta Bursova, an attractive Russian girl of twenty, had worked for eight years—ever since she was twelve. She had been employed as a waist operative for six years in London and for two in New York.

Here she worked nine and a half hours daily in a factory on Nineteenth Street, earning $5 to $6 a week. Of this wage she paid her sister $4 a week for food and lodging in an inside tenement room in very poor East Side quarters, so far from her work that she was obliged to spend 60 cents a week for carfare. In her busy weeks she had never more than $1.40 a week left, and often only 60 cents, for her clothing and every other expense.

Getta had been idle, moreover, for nearly six months. During this time she had been supported by her sister's family.

In spite of this defeat in her fortunes, her presence had a lovely brightness and initiative, and her inexpensive dress had a certain daintiness. She was eager for knowledge, and through all her busy weeks had paid 10 cents dues to a self-education society.

Nevertheless, her long dull season was a harassing burden and disappointment both for herself and her sister's struggling family.

Betty Lukin, a shirt-waist maker of twenty, had been making sleeves for two years. For nine months of the year she earned from $6 to $10 a week; for the remaining three months only $2 a week. Her average weekly wage for the year would be about $6. Of this she spent $3 a week for suppers and a place in a tenement to sleep, and about 50 cents a week for breakfast and luncheon—a roll and a bit of fruit or candy from a push cart. Her father was in New York, doing little to support himself, so that many weeks she deprived herself to give him $3 or $4.

She spent 50 cents a week to go to the theatre and 10 cents for club dues. She had, of course, very little left for dress. She looked ill clad, and she was, naturally, improperly nourished and very delicate.

Two points in Betty's little account are suggestive: one is that she could always help her father. In listening to the account of an organizer of the Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a man who had known some 40,000 garment workers, I exclaimed on the hardships of the trade for the number of married men it contained, and was about to make a note of this item when he eagerly stopped me. "Wait, wait, please," he cried generously. "When you put it down, then put this down, too. It is just the same for the girls. The most of them are married to a family. They, too, take care of others."

To this truth, Betty's expense of $3 to $4 for her father from her average wage of $6, and little Molly's item of nine weeks' board and lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. On the girls' part they were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic.

The other fact to be remarked in Betty's account is that she spent 60 cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only 50 cents for all her casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. Such an eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in themselves a true romance. Nearly all the Russian shirt-waist makers visit the theatre and attend clubs and night classes, whatever their wage or their hours of labor. Most of them contribute to the support of a family.

These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all—with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who supported a family of four—living away from home. Natalya lived with her mother and father.

She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother. But her story is given because in other ways—in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to obtain juster and better terms of living—her experience has seemed characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.

In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it," said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters' out on the street, then?"

Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their trade.

The factories had continued work with strike breakers. Some of the companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling their work on unfair terms. Some had employed special police protection and thugs against the pickets.

There is, of course, no law against picketing. Every one in the United States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his belief in the tariff. But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each. The chairman of the strikers from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for weeks.

A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in the side and broke one of her ribs. She was in bed for four weeks, and will always be somewhat disabled by her injury. These and other illegal oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the Woman's Trade-Union League to assist the girls in peaceful picketing.

Early in November, a policeman arrested Miss Mary E. Dreier, the President of the Woman's Trade-Union League, because she entered into a quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers. Miss Dreier is a woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout New York and Brooklyn. When the sergeant recognized her as she came into the station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and assured Miss Dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had known who she was.

This flat instance of discrimination inspired the officers of the Woman's Trade-Union League to protest to Police Commissioner Baker against the arbitrary oppression of the strikers by the policemen. He was asked to investigate the action of the police. He replied that the pickets would in future receive as much consideration as other people. The attitude of the police did not, however, change.

It was to these events, as Natalya Urusova found, that the foreman of the Bruch factory had referred when he asked the girls, with a sneer, why they didn't join their "sisters." Going to the Union headquarters on Clinton Street, she learned all she could about the Union. Afterward, in the Bruch factory, whenever any complaints arose, she would say casually, in pretended helplessness, "But what can we do? Is there any way to change this?" Vague suggestions of the Union headquarters would arise, and she would inquire into this eagerly and would pretend to allow herself to be led to Clinton Street. So, little by little, as the long hours and low wages and impudence from the foreman continued, she induced about sixty girls to understand about organization and to consider it favorably.

On the evening of the 22d of November, Natalya, and how many others from the factory she could not tell, attended a mass meeting at Cooper Union, of which they had been informed by hand-bills. It was called for the purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in New York City. The hall was packed. Overflow meetings were held at Beethoven Hall, Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall. In the Cooper Union addresses were delivered by Samuel Gompers, by Miss Dreier, and by many others. Finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor. She said: "I have listened to all the speeches. I am one who thinks and feels from the things they describe. I, too, have worked and suffered. I am tired of the talking. I move that we go on a general strike."

The meeting broke into wild applause. The motion was unanimously indorsed. The chairman, Mr. Feigenbaum, a Union officer, rapped on the table. "Do you mean faith?" he called to the workers. "Will you take the old Jewish oath?" Thousands of right hands were held up and the whole audience repeated in Yiddish: [[14]] "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

This was the beginning of the general shirt-waist strike. A committee of fifteen girls and one boy was appointed at the Cooper Union meeting, and went from one to the other of the overflow meetings, where the same motion was offered and unanimously indorsed.

II

"But I did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at that meeting. I could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory the next day," said Natalya, afterward. "When we came back the next morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. The foreman had no work for us when we got there. But, just as always, he did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all that day. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines: 'Shall we wait like this?' 'There is a general strike,' 'Who will get up first?' 'It would be better to be the last to get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do well for you,' But I told them," observed Natalya, with a little shrug, "'What difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?' Well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would do, not making up our minds, for two hours. Then I started to get up." Her lips trembled. "And at just the same minute all—we all got up together, in one second. No one after the other; no one before. And when I saw it—that time—oh, it excites me so yet, I can hardly talk about it. So we all stood up, and all walked out together. And already out on the sidewalk in front the policemen stood with the clubs. One of them said, 'If you don't behave, you'll get this on your head.' And he shook his club at me.

"We hardly knew where to go—what to do next. But one of the American girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the Woman's Trade-Union League, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away. After we were there, we wrote out on paper what terms we wanted: not any night work, except as it would be arranged for in some special need for it for the trade; and shorter hours; and to have wages arranged by a committee to arbitrate the price for every one fairly; and to have better treatment from the bosses.

"Then a leader spoke to us and told us about picketing quietly, and the law.[[15]]

"Our factory had begun to work with a few Italian strike breakers.[[16]] The next day we went back to the factory, and saw five Italian girls taken in to work, and then taken away afterward in an automobile. I was with an older girl from our shop, Anna Lunska. The next morning in front of the factory, Anna Lunska and I met a tall Italian man going into the factory with some girls. So I said to her: 'These girls fear us in some way. They do not understand, and I will speak to them, and ask them why they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all—only to speak about our work.'

"I moved toward them to say this to them. Then the tall man struck Anna Lunska in the breast so hard, he nearly knocked her down. She couldn't get her breath. And I went to a policeman standing right there and said, 'Why do you not arrest this man for striking my friend? Why do you let him do it? Look at her. She cannot speak; she is crying. She did nothing at all,' Then he arrested the man; and he said, 'But you must come, too, to make a charge against him.' The tall Italian called a man out of the factory, and went with me and Anna Lunska and the three girls to the court."

But when Natalya and Anna reached the court, and had made their charge against the tall Italian, to their bewilderment not only he, but they, too, were conducted downstairs to the cells. He had charged them with attacking the girls he was escorting into the factory.

"They made me go into a cell," said Natalya, "and suddenly they locked us in. Then I was frightened, and I said to the policeman there, 'Why do you do this? I have done nothing at all. The man struck my friend. I must send for somebody.'

"He said, 'You cannot send for any one at all. You are a prisoner.'

"We cried then. We were frightened. We did not know what to do.

"After about an hour and a half he came and said some one was asking for us. We looked out. It was Miss Violet Pike. A boy I knew had seen us go into the prison with the Italian, and not come out, and so he thought something was wrong and he had gone to the League and told them.

"So Miss Pike had come from the League; and she bailed us out; and she came back with us on the next day for our trial."

On the next morning the case against the tall Italian was rapidly examined, and the Italian discharged. He was then summoned back in rebuttal, and Natalya and Anna's case was called. Four witnesses, one of them being the proprietor of the factory, were produced against them, and stated that Natalya and Anna had struck one of the girls the Italian was escorting. At the close of the case against Natalya and Anna, Judge Cornell said:[ [17]] "I find the girls guilty. It would be perfectly futile for me to fine them. Some charitable women would pay their fines or they could get a bond. I am going to commit them to the workhouse under the Cumulative Sentence Act, and there they will have an opportunity of thinking over what they have done."

"Miss Violet Pike came forward then," said Natalya, "and said, 'Cannot this sentence be mollified?'

"And he said it could not be mollified.

"They took us away in a patrol to the Tombs.

"We waited in the waiting-room there. The matron looked at us and said, 'You are not bad girls. I will not send you down to the cells. You can do some sewing for me here.' But I could not sew. I felt so bad, because I could not eat the food they gave us at noon for dinner in the long hall with all the other prisoners. It was coffee with molasses in it, and oatmeal and bread so bad that after one taste we could not swallow it down. Then, for supper, we had the same, but soup, too, with some meat bones in it. And even before you sat down at the table these bones smelled so it made you very sick. But they forced you to sit down at the table before it, whether you ate or drank anything or not. And the prisoners walked by in a long line afterward and put their spoons in a pail of hot water, just the same whether they had eaten anything with the spoons or not.

"Then we walked to our cells. It was night, and it was dark—oh, so dark in there it was dreadful! There were three other women in the cell—some of them were horrid women that came off the street. The beds were one over the other, like on the boats—iron beds, with a quilt and a blanket. But it was so cold you had to put both over you; and the iron springs underneath were bare, and they were dreadful to lie on. There was no air; you could hardly breathe. The horrid women laughed and screamed and said terrible words.

"Anna Lunska felt so sick and was so very faint, I thought what should we do if she was so much worse in the night in this terrible darkness, where you could see nothing at all. Then I called through the little grating to a woman who was a sentinel that went by in the hall all through the night, 'My friend is sick. Can you get me something if I call you in the night?'

"The woman just laughed and said, 'Where do you think you are? But if you pay me, I will come and see what I can do.'

"In a few minutes she came back with a candle, and shuffled some cards under the candlelight, and called to us, 'Here, put your hand through the grate and give me a quarter and I'll tell you who your fellows are by the cards.' Then Anna Lunska said, 'We do not care to hear talk like that,' and the woman went away.

"All that night it was dreadful. In the morning we could not eat any of the breakfast. They took us in a wagon like a prison with a little grating, and then in a boat like a prison with a little grating. As we got on to it, there was another girl, not like the rest of the women prisoners. She cried and cried. And I saw she was a working girl. I managed to speak to her and say, 'Who are you?' She said, 'I am a striker. I cannot speak any English.' That was all. They did not wish me to speak to her, and I had to go on.

"From the boat they made us go into the prison they call Blackwell's Island. Here they made us put on other clothes. All the clothes they had were much, much too large for me, and they were dirty. They had dresses in one piece of very heavy, coarse material, with stripes all around, and the skirts are gathered, and so heavy for the women. They almost drag you down to the ground. Everything was so very much too big for me, the sleeves trailed over my hands so far and the skirts on the ground so far, they had to pin and pin them up with safety-pins.

"Then we had the same kind of food I could not eat; and they put us to work sewing gloves. But I could not sew, I was so faint and sick. At night there was the same kind of food I could not eat, and all the time I wondered about that shirt-waist striker that could not speak one word of English, and she was all alone and had the same we had in other ways. When we walked by the matron to go to our cells at night, at first she started to send Anna Lunska and me to different cells. She would have made me go alone with one of the terrible women from the street. But I was so dreadfully frightened, and cried so, and begged her so to let Anna Lunska and me stay together, that at last she said we could.

"Just after that I saw that other girl, away down the line, so white, she must have cried and cried, and looking so frightened. I thought, 'Oh, I ought to ask for her to come with us, too' But I did not dare. I thought, 'I will make that matron so mad that she will not even let Anna Lunska and me stay together,' So I got almost to our cell before I went out of the line and across the hall and went back to the matron and said: 'Oh, there is another Russian girl here. She is all alone. She cannot speak one word of English. Please, please couldn't that girl come with my friend and me?'

"She said, 'Well, for goodness' sake! So you want to band all the strikers together here, do you? How long have you known her?'

"I said, 'I never saw her until to-day.'

"The matron said, 'For the land's sake, what do you expect here?' but she did not say anything else. So I went off, just as though she wasn't going to let that girl come with us; for I knew she would not want to seem as though she would do it, at any rate.

"But, after we were in the cell with an Irish woman and another woman, the door opened, and that Russian girl came in with us. Oh, she was so glad!

"After that it was the same as the night before, except that we could see the light of the boats passing. But it was dark and cold, and we had to put both the quilt and the blanket over us and lie on the springs, and you must keep all of your clothes on to try to be warm. But the air and the smells are so bad. I think if it were any warmer, you would almost faint there. I could not sleep.

"The next day they made me scrub. But I did not know how to scrub. And, for Anna Lunska, she wet herself all over from head to foot. So they said, very cross, 'It seems to us you do not know how to scrub a bit. You can go back to the sewing department.' On the way I went through a room filled with negresses, and they called out, 'Look, look at the little kid,' And they took hold of me, and turned me around, and all laughed and sang and danced all around me. These women, they do not seem to mind at all that they are in prison.

"In the sewing room the next two days I was so sick I could hardly sew. The women often said horrid things to each other, and I sat on the bench with them. There was one woman over us at sewing that argued with me so much, and told me how much better it was for me here than in Russian prisons, and how grateful I should be.

"I said, 'How is that, then? Isn't there the same kind of food in those prisons and in these prisons? And I think there is just as much liberty.'"

On the last day of Natalya's sentence, after she was dressed in her own little jacket and hat again and just ready to go, one of the most repellent women of the street said to her, "I am staying in here and you're going out. Give me a kiss for good-by." Natalya said that this woman was a horror to her. "But I thought it was not very nice to refuse this; so I kissed her a good-by kiss and came away."

The officers guarded the girls to the prison boat for their return to New York. There, at the ferry, stood a delegation of the members of the Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union waiting to receive them.

Such is the account of one of the seven hundred arrests made during the shirt-waist strike, the chronicle of a peaceful striker.

As the weeks went on, however, in spite of the advice of the Union officers, there were a few instances of violence on the part of the Union members. Among thirty thousand girls it could not be expected that every single person should maintain the struggle in justice and temperance with perfect self-control. In two or three cases the Union members struck back when they were attacked. In a few cases they became excited and attacked strike breakers. In one factory, although there was no violence, the workers conducted their negotiations in an unfair and unfortunate manner. They had felt that all their conditions except the amount of wages were just, and they admired and were even remarkably proud of the management, a firm of young and well-intentioned manufacturers. Early in the general strike, however, they went out without a word to the management, without even signifying to it in any way the point they considered unjust. The management did not send to inquire. After a few days it resumed work with strike breakers. The former employees began picketing. The management sent word to them that it would not employ against them, so long as they were peaceful and within the law, any of the means of intimidation that numbers of the other firms were using—special police and thugs. The girls sent word back that they would picket peacefully and quietly. But afterward, on their own admission, which was most disarming in its candor, they became careless and "too gay." They went picketing in too large numbers and were too noisy. Instantly the firm employed police. Before this, however, the girls had begun to discuss and to realize the unintelligence of their behavior in failing to send a committee to the management to describe their position clearly and to obtain terms. They now appointed and instructed such a committee, came rapidly to terms with the management, and have been working for them in friendly relations ever since.

While in general the strike was both peaceful in conduct and just in demand and methods of demand on the part of the strikers, these exceptions must, of course, be mentioned in the interests of truth. Further, it would convey a false impression to imply that every striker arrested had as much sense and force of character as Natalya Urusova. Natalya was especially protected in her ordeal by a vital love of observation and a sense of humor, charmingly frequent in the present writer's experience of young Russian girls and women. With these qualities she could spend night after night locked up with the women of the street, in her funny, enormous prison clothes, and remain as uninfluenced by her companions as if she had been some blossoming geranium or mignonette set inside a filthy cellar as a convenience for a few minutes, and then carried out again to her native fresh air. But such qualities as hers cannot be demanded of all very young and unprotected girls, and to place them wantonly with women of the streets has in general an outrageous irresponsibility and folly quite insufficiently implied by the experience of a girl of Natalya's individual penetration and self-reliance.

III

In the period since the strike began many factories had been settling upon Union terms. But many factories were still on strike, and picketing on the part of the Union was continuing, as well as unwarranted arrests, like Natalya's, on the part of the employers and the police. The few exceptions to the general rule of peaceful picketing have been stated. Over two hundred arrests were made within three days early in December. On the 3d of December a procession of ten thousand women marched to the City Hall, accompanying delegates from the Union and the Woman's Trade-Union League, and visited Mayor McClellan in his office and gave him this letter:—

Honorable George B. Mcclellan,
Mayor of the City of New York.

We, the members of the Ladies' Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a body of thirty thousand women, appeal to you to put an immediate stop to the insults and intimidations and to the abuses to which the police have subjected us while we have been picketing. This is our lawful right.

We protest to you against the flagrant discrimination of the Police Department in favor of the employers, who are using every method to incite us to violence.

We appeal to you directly in this instance, instead of to your Police Commissioner.

We do this because our requests during the past six months have had no effect in decreasing the outrages perpetrated upon our members, nor have our requests been granted a fair hearing.

Yours respectfully,

S. Shindler, Secretary.

The Mayor thanked the committee for bringing the matter to his attention, and promised to take up the complaint with the Police Commissioner.

But the arrests and violence of the police continued unchecked.

On the 5th of December the Political Equality League, at the instigation of Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, held a packed meeting for the benefit of the Shirt-waist Makers' Union. Many imprisoned girls were present, and gave to the public clear, straightforward stories of the treatment they had received at the hands of the city. The committee of the meeting had offered the Mayor and other city officials a box, but they refused to be present.

Again the arrests and violence continued without protection for the workers. Nevertheless their cause was constantly gaining, and although all attempts at general arbitration were unsuccessful, more and more employers settled with the operatives. They continued to settle during December and January until the middle of February. All but thirteen of the shops in New York had then made satisfactory terms with the Union workers. It was officially declared that the strike was over.

Natalya's shop had settled with the operatives on the 23d of January, and she went back to work on the next day.

She had an increase of $2 a week in wages—$8 a week instead of $6. Her hours were now fifty-two a week instead of sixty—that is to say, nine and one-half hours a day, with a Saturday half-holiday. But she has since then been obliged to enter another factory on account of slack work.

Among the more skilled workers than Natalya in New York to-day, Irena Kovalova, who supports her mother and her younger brother and sister, has $11 a week instead of $9. She is not obliged to work on Sunday, and her factory closes at five o'clock instead of six on Saturday. "I have four hours less a week," she said with satisfaction. The family have felt able to afford for her a new dress costing $11, and material for a suit, costing $6. A friend, a neighbor, made this for Irena as a present.

Among the older workers of more skill than Irena, Anna Klotin, who sent $120 home to her family last year, has now, however, only $6, $7, and $8 a week, and very poor and uncertain work, instead of her former $12 a week. Hers was one of the thirteen factories that did not settle. Of their one hundred and fifty girls, they wished about twenty of their more skilled operators to return to them under Union conditions, leaving the rest under the old long hours of overtime and indeterminate, unregulated wages. Anna was one of the workers the firm wished to retain on Union terms, but she felt she could not separate her chances in her trade from the fortunes of her one hundred and thirty companions. She refused to return under conditions so unjust for them. She has stayed on in her boarding place, as her landlady, realizing Anna's responsible character, is always willing to wait for money when work is slack. She has bought this year only two pairs of shoes, a hat for 50 cents, and one or two muslin waists, which she made herself. She has lived on such work as she could find from time to time in different factories. Anna did not grudge in any way her sacrifice for the less skilled workers. "In time," she said, "we will have things better for all of us." And the chief regret she mentioned was that she had been unable to send any money home since the strike.

The staunchest allies of the shirt-waist makers in their attempt to obtain wiser trade conditions were the members and officers of the Woman's Trade-Union League, whose response and generosity were constant from the beginning to the end of the strike. The chronicle of the largest woman's strike in this country is not yet complete. A suit is now pending against the Woman's Trade-Union League and the Union for conspiracy in restraint of trade, brought by the Sittomer Shirt-waist Co. A test suit is pending against Judge Cornell for false imprisonment, brought by one of the shirt-waist strikers.

The whole outcome of the strike in its effect on women's wages in the shirt-waist trade, their income and outlay in their work, both financially and in vitality, cannot, of course, yet be fully known. The statement that there has been a general rise of wages must be modified in other ways than that suggested by the depletion of Anna Klotin's income in the year since the strike. In factories where price on piece-work is subject to arbitration between a Union committee of the workers and the firm, the committee is not always able to obtain a fair price for labor. One of the largest factories made a verbal agreement to observe Union conditions, but it signed no written contract, and has since broken its word. It discriminates against Union members, and it insists on Sunday work and on night work for more than two nights a week. Further, during the seventeen weeks of the strike many shirt-waist orders ordinarily filled in New York were placed with New Jersey and Pennsylvania firms. The present New York season has been unusually dull, and now, on this writing, early in August, many girls are discouraged on account of the slight amounts they earn through slack work.

"But that is not the fault of the employers," said one of the workers. "You must be reasonable for them. You cannot ask them for work they are not able to obtain to give you." Her remark is quoted both from its wisdom and for another purpose. She was the girl who will always be disabled by the attack of her employer's thug. Her quiet and instinctive mention of the need of justice in considering conditions for employers had for the listener who heard her a most significant, unconscious generosity and nobility.

Looking back upon the shirt-waist strike nearly a year afterward, its profoundest common value would appear to an unprejudiced onlooker to be its spirit. Something larger than a class spirit, something fairer than a mob spirit, something which may perhaps be called a mass spirit, manifested itself in the shirt-waist makers' effort for better terms of life.

"The most remarkable feature of the strike," says a writer in the Call,[ [18]] "is the absence of leaders. All the girls seem to be imbued with a spirit of activity that by far surpasses all former industrial uprisings. One like all are ready to take the chairmanship, secretaryship, do picket duty, be arrested, and go to prison."

There has never before been a strike quite like the shirt-waist makers' strike. Perhaps there never will be another quite like it again. When every fair criticism of its conduct has been faced, and its errors have all been admitted, the fact remains that the New York strike said, "All for one and one for all," with a magnetic candor new and stirring in the voice of the greatest and the richest city of our country—perhaps new in the voice of the world. Wonderful it is to know that in that world to-day, unseen, unheard, are forces like those of that ghetto girl who, in the meanest quarter of New York, on stinted food, in scanty clothes, drained with faint health and overwork, could yet walk through her life, giving away half of her wage by day to some one else, enjoying the theatre at night, and, in the poorest circumstances, pouring her slight strength out richly like a song for pleasure and devotion. Wonderful it is to know that when Natalya Urusova was in darkness, hunger, fright, and cold on Blackwell's Island, she still could be responsibly concerned for the fortunes of a stranger and had something she could offer to her nobly. Wonderful to know that, after her very bones had been broken by the violence of a thug of an employer, one of these girls could still speak for perfect fairness for him with an instinct for justice truly large and thrilling. Such women as that ennoble life and give to the world a richer and altered conception of justice—a justice of imagination and the heart, concerned not at all with vengeance, but simply with the beauty of the perfect truth for the fortunes of all mortal creatures.

Besides the value to the workers of the spirit of the shirt-waist strike, they gained another advantage. This was of graver moment even than an advance in wages and of deeper consequences for their future. They gained shorter hours.

What, then, are the trade fortunes of some of those thousands of other women, other machine operatives whose hours and wages are now as the shirt-waist makers' were before the shirt-waist strike? What do some of these other women factory workers, unorganized and entirely dependent upon legislation for conserving their strength by shorter working hours, give in their industry? What do they get from it? For an answer to these questions, we turn to some of the white goods sewers, belt makers, and stitchers on children's dresses, for the annals of their income and outlay in their work away from home in New York.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Union Label Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. I, p. 1.

[13] This expense would at this date probably be heavier, as the working girls at one of the St. George's Working Girls' Clubs estimated early this summer that shoes of a quality purchasable two years ago at $2 would now cost $2.50.

[14] Constance Leupp, in the Survey.

[15] The circular of advice issued a little later by the Union reads as follows:—

RULES FOR PICKETS

  1. Don't walk in groups of more than two or three.
  2. Don't stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block.
  3. Don't stop the person you wish to talk to; walk along side of him.
  4. Don't get excited and shout when you are talking.
  5. Don't put your hand on the person you are speaking to. Don't touch his sleeve or button. This may be construed as a "technical assault."
  6. Don't call any one "scab" or use abusive language of any kind.
  7. Plead, persuade, appeal, but do not threaten.
  8. If a policeman arrest you and you are sure that you have committed no offense, take down his number and give it to your Union officers.

[16] In the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked side by side, their feeling for each other seems generally to have been friendly. After the beginning of the strike an attempt was made to antagonize them against each other by religious and nationalistic appeals. It met with little success. Italian headquarters for Italian workers wishing organizations were soon established. Little by little the Italian garment workers are entering the Union.

[17] Extract from the court stenographer's minutes of the proceedings in the Per trial.

[18] Therese Malkiel, December 22.