CHAPTER III
THE INCOME AND OUTLAY OF SOME NEW YORK FACTORY WORKERS
[Unskilled and Seasonal Factory Work]
I
Besides the accounts of the waist makers, the National Consumers' League received in its inquiry specific chronicles from skilled and from unskilled factory workers, both hand workers and machine operatives—among others, packers of drugs, biscuits, and olives, cigarette rollers, box makers, umbrella makers, hat makers, glove makers, fur sewers, hand embroiderers, white goods workers, skirt makers, workers on men's coats, and workers on children's dresses.
As will be seen, the situation occupied and described by any individual girl may in a year or five years be no longer hers, but that of some other worker. So that the synthesis of these chronicles is presented, not as a composite photograph of the industrial experiences in any one trade, but rather as an accurate kinetoscope view of the yearly life of chance passing factory workers.
For the purposes of record these annals may be loosely divided into those of unskilled and seasonal factory workers, and those whose narratives expressed the effects of monotony and fatigue, from speeding at their tasks. This division must remain loose to convey a truthful impression. For the same self-supporting girl has often been a skilled and an unskilled worker, by hand, at a machine, and in several industries.
Discouragement at the lack of opportunity to advance was expressed by almost all the narrators of their histories who were engaged in unskilled factory work. Among them, Emily Clement, an American girl, was one of the first workers who gave the League an account of her experience.
Emily was tending an envelope machine, at a wage of $6 a week. She was about twenty years old; and before her employment at the envelope machine she had worked, at the age of fourteen, for a year in a carpet mill; then for two years in a tobacco factory; and then for two years had kept house for a sister and an aunt living in an East Side tenement.
She still lived with them, sharing a room with her sister, and paying $3 a week for her lodging, with board and part of her washing. She did the rest of her washing, and made some of her sister's clothes and all of her own. This skill had enabled her to have for $5.20, the cost of the material, the pretty spring suit she wore—a coat, skirt, and jumper, of cloth much too thin to protect her from the chill of the weather, but stylishly cut and becoming.
In idle times she had done a little sewing for friends, for her income had been quite inadequate. During the twenty-two weeks she had been in the factory she had had full work for eleven and one-half weeks, at $6; half-time for eight and one-half weeks, at $3; and two weeks of slack work, in each of which she earned only $1.50.
She had no money at all to spend for recreation; and, in her hopelessness of the future and her natural thirst for pleasure, she sometimes accepted it from chance men acquaintances met on the street.
Another unskilled worker of twenty, Sarina Bashkitseff, intended to escape from her monotonous work and low wage by educating herself in a private evening school.
For this she contrived to save $4 a month out of her income of $4 a week. Sarina packed powders in a drug factory from eight to six o'clock, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch. She was a beautiful and brilliant girl, who used to come to work in the winter dressed in her summer coat, with a little woollen under-jacket to protect her from the cold, and a plain cheap felt hat, much mocked at by the American girls. Sarina scorned the mental scope of these girls; scorned to spend for dress, money with which she could learn to read "Othello" and "King Lear" in the original; and scorned to spend in giggling the lunch hour, in which she might read in Yiddish newspapers the latest tidings of the struggle in Russia.
In the drug factory, and in her East Side hall bedroom, she lived in a world of her own—a splendid, generous world of the English tragedies she studied at night school, and of the thrilling hopes and disappointments of the Russian revolution.
She had been in New York a year. In this time she had worked in an artificial flower factory, earning from $2 to $2.25 a week; then as a cutter in a box factory, where she had $3 a week at first, and then $5, for ten hours' work a day. She left this place because the employer was very lax about payment, and sometimes cheated her out of small amounts. She then tried finishing men's coats; but working from seven-thirty to twelve and from one to six daily brought her only $3 a week and severe exhaustion.[[19]]
From her present wage of $4 she spent 60 cents a week for carfare and $4.25 a month for her share of a tenement hall bedroom. Although she did not live with them, her mother and father were in New York, and she had her dinners with them, free of cost. Her luncheon cost her from 7 to 10 cents a day, and her breakfast consisted of 1½ cents' worth of rolls.
All that made Sarina Bashkitseff's starved and drudging days endurable for her was her clear determination to escape from them by educating herself. Her fate might be expressed in Whitman's words, "Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."
Whatever her circumstances, few persons in the world could ever be in a position to pity her.
Marta Neumann, another unskilled factory worker, an Austrian girl of nineteen, was also trying to escape from her present position by educating herself at night school, but was drained by cruel homesickness.
Marta had spent all her youth, since her childhood, at home,—four years in New York,—in factory work, without the slightest prospect of advancement. Her work was of the least skilled kind—cutting off the ends of threads from men's suspenders, and folding and placing them in boxes. She earned at first $3 a week, and had been advanced to $5 by a 50-cent rise at every one of the last four Christmases since she had left her mother and father. But she knew she would not be advanced beyond this last price, and feared to undertake heavier work, as, though she had kept her health, she was not at all strong.
She worked from eight to six, with half an hour at noon. On Saturday the factory closed at five in winter and at one in summer. Her income for the year had been $237.50. She had spent $28.50 for carfare; $13 for a suit; $2 for a hat; and $2 for a pair of shoes she had worn for ten months. Her board and lodging with a married sister had cost her $2.50 a week, less in one way than with strangers. But she slept with part of her sister's family, did her own washing and her sister's, scrubbed the floor, and rose every day at half past five to help with the work and prepare her luncheon before starting for the factory at seven.
Marta could earn so little that she had never been able to save enough to make her deeply desired journey back to Austria to see her mother and father. Although both their children were in the new country, her mother and father would not be admitted under the immigration law, because her father was blind.
The lack of opportunity to rise, among older unskilled factory workers, may be illustrated by the experience of Mrs. Hallett, an American woman of forty, a slight, gentle-voiced little widow, who had been packing candies and tying and labelling boxes for sixteen years. In this time she had advanced from a wage of $4 a week to a wage of $6, earned by a week of nine-hour days, with a Saturday half-holiday.
However, as with Marta, this had represented payment from the company for length of service, and not an advance to more skilled or responsible labor with more outlook. In Mrs. Hallett's case this was partly because the next step would have been to become a clerk in one of the company's retail stores, and she was not strong enough to endure the all-day standing which this would require. Mrs. Hallett liked this company. The foreman was considerate, and a week's vacation with pay was given to the employees.
Mrs. Hallett lived in an excessively small, unheated hall bedroom, on the fourth floor of an enormous old house filled with the clatter of the elevated railroad. On the night of the inquirer's call, she was pathetically concerned lest her visitor should catch cold because "she wasn't used to it." She lighted a small candle to show her the room, furnished with one straight hard chair, a cot, and a wash-stand with a broken pitcher, but with barely space besides for Mrs. Clark and her kind, public-spirited little hostess. They sat, drowned at times in the noise of the elevated, in almost complete darkness, as Mrs. Hallett insisted on making a vain effort to extract some heat for her guest from the single gas-jet, by attaching to it an extremely small gas-stove.
For this room, which was within walking distance of the candy factory, Mrs. Hallett paid $1.75 a week. Her breakfast of coffee and rolls in a bakery near by cost her 10 cents daily. She apportioned 15 or 25 cents each for her luncheon or dinner at restaurants. In her hungriest and most extravagant moments she lunched for 30 cents. Her allowance for food had to be meagre, because, as she had no laundry facilities, she was obliged to have her washing done outside. Sometimes she contrived to save a dollar a week toward buying clothing. But this meant living less tidily by having less washing done, or going hungrier. During the last year her expense for clothing had been a little more than $23: summer hat, $1; winter hat, $1.98; best hat, $2; shoes (2 pairs at $2.98, 2 pairs rubbers), $7.16; wrap (long coat), $2.98; skirt (a best black brilliantine, worn two years), at $5.50, $2.75; underskirt (black sateen), 98 cents; shirtwaist (black cotton, worn every day in the year), 98 cents; black tights, 98 cents; 2 union suits at $1.25 (one every other year), $1.25; 6 pairs stockings at 25 cents, $1.50; total, $23.56.
She said with deprecation that she sometimes went to the theatre with some young girl friends, paying 25 cents for a seat, "because I like a good time now and then."
These trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in New York.
II
The chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features most common to the trade fortunes the workers described—uncertain and seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and fatigue from speeding.
Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another. This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian white-goods worker living in the Bronx.
The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem, Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many self-supporting factory workers live. These newer-built lodgings, too, have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing. Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess dresses. These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots—small, strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide tide of Slav and Austrian immigration.
In this curious and bizarre neighborhood, Yeddie Bruker and her sister lived in a filthy tenement building, in one room of an extremely clean little flat owned by a family of their own nationality.
Yeddie was a spirited, handsome girl of twenty-one, though rather worn looking and white. At work for six years in New York, she had at first been a machine operative in a large pencil factory, where she fastened to the ends of the pencils the little corrugated tin bands to which erasers are attached. Then she had been a belt maker, then a stitcher on men's collars, and during the last four years a white-goods worker.
In the pencil factory of her first employment there was constant danger of catching her fingers in the machinery; the air was bad; the forewoman was harsh and nagging, and perpetually hurrying the workers. The jar of the wheels, the darkness, and the frequent illnesses of workers from breathing the particles of the pencil-wood shavings and the lead dust flying in the air all frightened and preyed upon her. She earned only $4 a week for nine and one-half hours' work a day, and was exhausting herself when she left the place, hastened by the accident of a girl near her, who sustained hideous injuries from catching her hair in the machinery.
In the collar factory she again earned $4 a week, stitching between five and six dozen collars a day. The stitch on men's collars is extremely small, almost invisible. It strained her eyes so painfully that she was obliged to change her occupation again.
As an operative on neckwear, and afterward on belts, she was thrown out of work by the trade seasons. These still leave her idle, in her present occupation as a white-goods worker, for more than three months in every year.
In the remaining nine months, working with a one-needle machine on petticoats and wash dresses, in a small factory on the lower East Side, she has had employment for about four days in the week for three months, employment for all the working days in the week for another three months, and employment with overtime three nights in a week and an occasional half day on Sunday, for between two and three months. Legal holidays and a few days of illness made up the year.
In full weeks her wage is $8. Her income for the year had been $366, and she had been able to save nothing. She had paid $208 for her board and lodging, at the rate of $4 a week; a little more than $100 for clothing; $38 for carfare, necessitated by living in the Bronx; $3 for a doctor; $2.60 to a benefit association, which assures her $3 a week in case of illness; $5 for the theatre; and $6 for Union dues.
Her work was very exhausting. Evenly spaced machine ruffling on petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do. She sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and was hard to thread. It may be said here that the number of needles does not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines; two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under the needle-point. It was not her eyes, Yeddie said, that were tired by the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the machines. Every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was open.
One of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades, is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen, frequently mentioned by other workers besides Yeddie. Two years ago, in a waist and dress factory where 400 operatives—more than 300 girls and about 20 men—were employed for the company by a well-known subcontractor, Jake Klein, a foreman asked Mr. Klein to beset some of the girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand. The manager discharged him. He asked to speak to the girls before he went away. The manager refused his request. As Mr. Klein turned to the girls, his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized Klein's collar, overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the stairs. "Brothers and sisters," Klein called to the operatives, "will you sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?" In one impulse of clear justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with Jake Klein, and stayed out till the company made overtures of peace. This adventure, widely related on the East Side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in many sewing shops.
The uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell heavily on Sarah Silberman, a delicate little Austrian Jewish girl of seventeen, who finished and felled women's cloaks.
She had always lived in poverty. She had worked in a stocking factory in Austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in Vienna and London and New York.
She had been in New York for about a year, lodging, or rather sleeping at night, in the tenement kitchen of some distant cousins of hers, practically strangers. The kitchen opened on an air-shaft, and it was used, not only as a kitchen, but as a dining room and living-room. For the first four months after her arrival Sarah earned about $5 a week, working from nine and one-half to ten hours a day as a finisher of boys' trousers. From this wage she paid $3 a week for her kitchen sleeping space and breakfast and supper. Luncheon cost her 7 cents a day. She had been able to buy so very little clothing that she had kept no account of it. She did her own washing, and walked to work.
She had never had any education until she came to America, and she now attended a night school, in which she was keenly interested. She was living in this way when her factory closed.
She then searched desperately for employment for two weeks, finding it at last in a cloak factory[ [20]] where she was employed from half past seven in the morning until half past six or seven in the evening, with a respite of only a few minutes at noon for a hasty luncheon. Her wage was $3 a week. Working her hardest, she could not keep the wolf from the door, and was obliged to go hungry at luncheon time or fail to pay the full rent for her place to sleep in the kitchen.
Sarah was very naturally unstrung and nervous in this hardness of circumstance and her terror of destitution. As she told her story, she sobbed and wrung her hands. In the next six months she had better occupation, however, in spasmodically busy shops, where the hours were shorter than in the cloak factory, and she managed to earn an average wage of $6 a week. She was then more serene; she said she had "made out good."
During her six weeks of better pay at $6 a week, however, which so few people would consider "making out good," she had suffered an especially mean exploitation.
She applied at an underwear factory which constantly advertises, in an East Side Jewish paper, for operatives. The management told her they would teach her to operate if she would work for them two weeks for nothing and would give them a dollar. She gave them the dollar; but on the first day in the place, as she received no instructions, and learned through another worker that after her two weeks of work for nothing were over she would not be employed, she came away, losing the dollar she had given to the firm.
Another worker who was distressed by the dull season, and had witnessed unjust impositions, was Katia Markelov, a young operative on corsets. She was a tiny, grave-looking girl of nineteen, very frail, with smooth black hair, a lovely refinement of manner, and a very sweet smile. Like many other operatives, she wore glasses. Katia was a good manager, and an industrious and clever student, a constant attendant at night school.
In the factory where she was employed she earned about $10 a week as a week worker, a skilled worker making an entire corset, after it was cut and before it was trimmed. But she had only twelve full weeks' work in the year; for two and a half months she was entirely idle, and for the remaining six and a half months she worked from two to five days a week. Her income for the year had been about $346.
Katia worked with a one-needle machine in a small factory off lower Broadway. Before that she had been employed as a week worker in a Fifth Avenue corset factory, which may be called Madame Cora's. Shortly before Katia left this establishment, Madame Cora changed her basis of payment from week work to piece-work. The girls' speed increased. Some of the more rapid workers who had before made $10 were able to make $12. On discovering this, Madame Cora cut their wages, not by frankly returning to the old basis, but by suddenly beginning to charge the girls for thread and needles. She made them pay her 2 cents for every needle. Thread on a five-needle machine, sometimes with two eyes in each of the needles, stitches up very rapidly. The girls were frequently obliged to pay from a dollar and a half to two dollars a week for the thread sewed into Madame Cora's corsets, and for needles. They rebelled when Madame Cora refused to pay for these materials herself. From among the three hundred girls, thirty girls struck, went to Union headquarters, and asked to be organized. But Madame Cora simply filled their places with other girls who were willing to supply her with thread for her corsets, and refused to take them back. Katia did not respect Madame Cora's methods, and had left before the strike.
Katia spent $2.50 a week for breakfast and dinner and for her share of a room with a congenial friend, another Russian girl, in Harlem. The room was close and opened on an air-shaft, but was quiet and rather pleasant. She paid from $1.25 to $1.50 for luncheons, and, out of the odd hundred dollars left from her income, had contrived, by doing her own washing and making her own waists, to buy all her clothing, and to spend $5 for books and magazines, $7 for grand opera, which she deeply loved, and $30 for an outing. On account of her cleverness Katia was less at the mercy of unjust persons than some of the less skilful and younger girls.
Among these, Molly Davousta, another young machine operative, was struggling to make payments to an extortionate ticket seller, who had swindled her in the purchase of a steamboat ticket.
When Molly was thirteen, her mother and father, who had five younger children, had sent her abroad out of Russia, with the remarkable intention of having her prepare and provide a home for all of them in some other country.
Like Dick Whittington, the little girl went to London, though to seek, not only her own fortune, but that of seven other people. After she had been in London for four years, her father died. She and her next younger sister, Bertha, working in Russia, became the sole support of the family; and now, learning that wages were better in America, Molly, like Whittington, turned again and came to New York.
Here she found work on men's coats, at a wage fluctuating from $5 to $9 a week. She lived in part of a tenement room for a rent of $3 a month. For supper and Saturday meals she paid $1.50 a week. Other food she bought from groceries and push carts, at a cost of about $2 a week. As she did her own washing, and walked to work, she had no other fixed expenses, except for shoes. Once in every two months these wore to pieces and she was forced to buy new ones; and, till she had saved enough to pay for them, she went without her push cart luncheon and breakfast.
In this way she lived in New York for a year, during which time she managed to send $90 home, for the others.
Her sister Bertha, next younger than herself, had then come to New York, and obtained work at sewing for a little less than $6 a week. Between them, in the following six months, the two girls managed to buy a passage ticket from Russia to New York for $42, and to send home $30. This, with the passage ticket and two other tickets, which they purchased on the instalment plan from a dealer, at a profit to him of $20, brought all the rest of the family into New York harbor—the girls' mother, their three younger sisters of fifteen, fourteen, and eight, and a little brother of seven.
Five months afterward Molly and Bertha were still making payments for these extortionate tickets.
In New York, the sister of fifteen found employment in running ribbons into corset covers, earning from $1 to $1.50 a week. The fourteen-year-old girl was learning operating on waists. The family of seven lived in two rooms, paying for them $13.50 a month; their food cost $9 or $10 a week; shoes came to at least $1 a week; the girls made most of their own clothing, and for this purpose they were paying $1 a month for a sewing-machine; and they gave $1 a month for the little brother's Hebrew schooling.
Molly was seen in the course of a coat makers' strike. She wept because the family's rent was due and she had no means of paying it. She said she suffered from headache and from backache. Every month she lost a day's work through illness.
She was only nineteen years old. By working every hour she could make a fair wage, but, owing to the uncertain and spasmodic nature of the work, she was unable to depend upon earning enough to maintain even a fair standard of living.
A point that should be accentuated in Molly Davousta's account is the price of shoes. No one item of expense among working girls is more suggestive. The cost of shoes is unescapable. A girl may make over an old hat with a bit of ribbon or a flower, or make a new dress from a dollar's worth of material, but for an ill-fitting, clumsy pair of shoes she must pay at least $2; and no sooner has she bought them than she must begin to skimp because in a month or six weeks she will need another pair. The hour or two hours' walk each day through streets thickly spread, oftener than not, with a slimy, miry dampness literally dissolves these shoes. Long after up-town streets are dry and clean, those of the congested quarters display the muddy travesty of snow in the city. The stockings inside these cheap shoes, with their worn linings, wear out even more quickly than the shoes. It is practically impossible to mend stockings besides walking to work, making one's waists, and doing one's washing.
All Molly Davousta's cares, her anxiety about shoes and her foreboding concerning seasonal work, were increased by her position of family responsibility.
In the same way, in the course of her seasonal work, family responsibility pressed on Rita Karpovna. She was a girl of nineteen, who had come to America a few years before with her older brother, Nikolai. Together they were to earn their own living and make enough money to bring over their widowed mother, a little brother, and a sister a year or two younger than Rita.
Soon after she arrived, she found employment in finishing men's vests, at $6 or $7 a week, for ten hours' work a day. Living and saving with her brother, she contrived to send home $4 a month. Between them, Nikolai and Rita brought over their mother and the little brother. But, very soon after they were all settled together, their mother died. They were obliged to put the little brother into an institution. Then Nikolai fell from a scaffolding and incapacitated himself, so that, after his partial recovery, his wage was sufficient only for his own support, near his work.
Rita now lived alone, spending $3.50 a month for a sleeping place in a tenement, and for suppers $1.25 a week. Her luncheons and breakfasts, picked up anywhere at groceries or push carts, amounted, when she was working, to about 12 cents a day. At other times she often went without both meals. For in the last year her average wage had been reduced to $4.33 a week by over four months and a half of almost complete idleness. Through nine weeks of this time she had an occasional day of work, and for nine weeks none at all.
When she was working, she paid 60 cents a week carfare, 25 cents a month to the Union, of which she was an enthusiastic member, and 10 cents a month to a "Woman's Self-Education Society." The Union and this club meant more to Rita than the breakfasts and luncheons she dispensed with, and more, apparently, than dress, for which she had spent only $20 in a year and a half.
Some months afterward, Mrs. Clark received word that Rita had solved many of her difficulties by a happy marriage, and could hope that many of her domestic anxieties were relieved.
The chief of these, worry over the situation of her younger sister, still in Russia, had been enhanced by her observations of the unhappiness of a friend, another girl, working in the same shop—a tragedy told here because of its very serious bearing on the question of seasonal work. Rita's younger sister was in somewhat the same position as this girl, alone, without physical strength for her work, and, indeed, so delicate that it was doubtful whether her admission to the United States could be secured, even if Rita could possibly save enough for her passage money. The friend in the shop, hard pressed by the dull season, had at last become the mistress of a man who supported her until the time of the birth of their child, when he left her resourceless. Slack and dull seasons in factory work must, of course, expose the women dependent on their wage-earning powers, most of them young and many of them with great beauty, to the greatest dangers and temptations. [[21]] Especially at the mercy of the seasons were some of the fur sewers, and the dressmakers, and milliners working, not independently, but in factories and workshops.
Helena Hardman, an Austrian girl, a fur sewer, had been employed for only twenty weeks in the year. She sewed by hand on fur garments in a Twelfth Street shop, for $7 a week, working nine hours a day, with a Saturday half-holiday. The air and odors in the fur shop were very disagreeable, but had not affected her health.
At the end of the twenty weeks she had been laid off, and had looked unsuccessfully for work for seventeen weeks, before she found employment as an operative in an apron factory. Here, however, in this unaccustomed industry, by working as an operative nine hours a day for five days a week, and six hours on Saturday, she could earn only $3 or $4.
She paid $4 a week for board and a tenement room shared with another girl. She had been obliged to go in debt to her landlady for part of her long idle time, after her savings had been exhausted.
During this time she had been unable to buy any clothing, though her expense for this before had been slender: a suit, $18; a hat, $3; shoes, $3; waists, $3; and underwear, $2.50. She looked very well, however, in spite of the struggle and low wages necessitated by learning a secondary trade.
The dull season is tided over in various ways. A few fortunate girls go home and live without expense. Many live partly at the expense of philanthropic persons, in subsidized homes. In these ways they save a little money for the dull time, and also store more energy from their more comfortable living.
On the horizon of the milliner the dull season looms black. All the world wants a new hat, gets it, and thinks no more of hats or the makers of hats. On this account a fast and feverish making and trimming of hats, an exhausting drain of the energy of milliners for a few weeks, is followed by weeks of no demand upon their skill.
Girl after girl told the investigator that the busy season more than wore her out, but that the worry and lower standard of living of the dull season were worse. The hardship is the greater because the skilled milliner has had to spend time and money for her training.
Many of these girls try to find supplementary work, as waitresses in summer hotels, or in some other trade. A great difficulty here is the overlapping of seasons. The summer hotel waitress is needed until September, at least, but the milliner must begin work in August. To obtain employment in a non-seasonal industry, it is often necessary to lie. In each new occupation it is necessary to accept a beginner's wage.
Regina Siegerson had come alone, at the age of fifteen, from Russia to New York, where she had been for seven years. The first winter was cruel. She supported herself on $3 a week. She had been forced to live in the most miserable of tenements with "ignorant" people. She had subsisted mainly by eating bananas, and had worn a spring jacket through the cold winter. It seemed, however, that no hardship had ever prevented her from attending evening school, where her persistence had taken her to the fourth year of high school. She was thinking of college at the time of the interview. Regina was a Russian revolutionist, and keenly thirsting for knowledge. She talked eagerly to the inquirer about Victor Hugo, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Bernard Shaw. With no less interest she spoke of the trade fortunes of milliners in New York, and her own last year's experience. She had worked through May, June, and July as a trimmer, making $11 in a week of nine hours a day, with Saturday closing at five. During August and September and the first weeks in October she had only six weeks' work, as a maker in a ready-to-wear hat factory, situated on the lower West Side over a stable, where she made $10 in a week of nine hours a day.
Regina and a girl friend had managed to furnish a two-room tenement apartment with very simple conveniences, and there they kept house. Rent was $10.50 a month; gas for heating and cooking, $1.80; and food for the two, about $5 a week. As Regina did her own washing, the weekly expense for each was but $3.67, less than many lodgers pay for very much less comfort.
The greatest pleasure the girls had in their little establishment was the opportunity it gave them for entertaining friends. Before, it had been impossible for them to see any one, except in other people's crowded living-rooms, or on the street.
Regina was engaged to a young apothecary student, whom she expected to marry in the spring. Like her, he was in New York without his family, and he took his meals at the two girls' little flat with them.
Regina's father, who was living in Russia with a second wife, had sent her $100 when she wrote him of her intended marriage. This, and about $40 saved in the six weeks of earning $10, were her reserve fund in the long dull season.
The inquirer saw Regina again a few days before Thanksgiving. She was still out of work, but was learning at home to do some mechanical china decorating for the Christmas trade.
Among the milliners, several girls were studying to acquire, not only a training in a secondary trade, but the better general education which Frances Ashton, a young American girl of twenty, had obtained through better fortunes.
Her father, a professional man, had been comfortably situated. Without anticipating the necessity of supporting herself, she had studied millinery at Pratt Institute for half a year. Then, because it was rather a lark, she had gone to work in New York. Most of her wage was spent for board and recreation, her father sending her an allowance for clothes.
After a year, his sudden death made it necessary for her to live more economically, as her inheritance was not large. The expenses of an attack of typhoid one summer, and of an operation the next year, entirely consumed it.
In the year she described, she had been a copyist in one of the most exclusive shops on Fifth Avenue. The woman in charge was exceptionally considerate, keeping the girls as long as possible. She used to weep when she was obliged to dismiss them, for she realized the suffering and the temptation of the long idle period.
However, the season had lasted only three or three and a half months at a time, from February 1 to May 15, and from August 18 to December 4. During the six busy weeks in the spring and the autumn, while the orders were piling up, work was carried on with feverish intensity. The working day lasted from eight-thirty until six, with an hour at noon for luncheon. Many employees, however, stayed until nine o'clock, receiving $1, besides 30 cents supper money, for overtime. But by six o'clock Frances was so exhausted that she could do no more, and she always went home at that hour.
In addition to her thirty weeks in the Fifth Avenue order establishment, Frances had two weeks' work in a wholesale house, where the season began earlier; so that she had been employed for thirty-two weeks in the year, and idle for twenty. She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to $14 a week.
The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to find anything to do. Application at department stores had been ineffectual, so had answered advertisements. She said she had lost all scruples about lying, because, the moment it was known that she wanted a place during the dull season only, she had no chance at all.
Frances lived in one of the pleasantest and most expensive subsidized homes for working girls, paying for board, and a large, delightful room shared with two other girls, $4.50 a week. Although she walked sometimes from work, carfare usually amounted to 50 cents a week. Laundering two sets of underwear and one white waist a week cost 60 cents. Thus, for a reasonable degree of cleanliness and comfort, partly provided by philanthropic persons, she spent $5.60 a week aside from the cost of clothing.
She dressed plainly, though everything she had was of nice quality. She said she could spend nothing for pleasure, because of her constant foreboding of the dull season, and the necessity of always saving for her apparently inevitable weeks of idleness. She was, at the time she gave her account, extremely anxious because she did not know how she was to pay another week's board.
Yet she had excellent training and skill, the advantage of living comfortably and being well nourished, and the advantage of a considerate employer, who did as well as she could for her workers, under the circumstances.
Something, then, must be said about these circumstances—this widespread precariousness in work, against which no amount of thrift or industriousness or foresight can adequately provide. Where industry acts the part of the grasshopper in the fable, it is clearly quite hopeless for workers to attempt to attain the history of the ant. Among the factory workers, the waist makers' admirable efforts for juster wages were, as far as yearly income was concerned, largely ineffectual, on account of this obstacle of slack and dull seasons, whose occurrence employers are as powerless as employees to forestall.
These chronicles, showing the effect of seasonal work on the fortunes of some self-supporting operatives and hand workers in New York factories and workshops, concern only one corner of American industry, in which, as every observer must realize, there are many other enormous fields of seasonal work. These histories are nevertheless clear and authentic instances of a strange and widespread social waste. Neither trade organization nor State legislation for shorter hours is primarily directed toward a more general regular and foresighted distribution of work among all seasonal trades and all seasonal workers. Until some focussed, specific attempt is made to secure such a distribution, it seems impossible but that extreme seasonal want, from seasonal idleness, will be combined with exhausting seasonal work from overtime or exhausting seasonal work in speeding, in a manner apparently arranged by fortune to devastate human energy in the least intelligent manner possible.
Further effects of speeding and of monotony in this labor were described by other self-supporting factory workers whose chronicles, being also concerned with industry in mechanical establishments, will be placed next.
Photograph by Lewis Hine
"Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound;—
But where is what I started for so long ago,
And why is it still unfound?"
—Walt Whitman.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] See Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States. Volume II, Men's Ready-made Clothing, pages 141-157; 160-165; 384-395.
[20] The income and outlay of other cloak makers will be separately presented.
[21] In the first report of the New York Probation Association the statement is made that out of 300 girls committed by the courts during the year to the charge of Waverley House, 72 had been engaged in factory work. Of these many had been at one time or other employed as operatives. On questioning the probation worker, Miss Stella Miner, who had lived with them and knew their stories most fully, it was learned, however, that almost every one of these girls had gone astray while they were little children, had been remanded by courts to the House of the Good Shepherd, where they had learned machine operating, and on going out of its protection to factories had drifted back again to their old ways of life. How far their early habit and experience had dragged these young girls in its undertow cannot of course, be known. The truth remains that factory work, when it is seasonal, must increase temptation by its economic pressure.