INDUSTRIAL SERVICE MOVEMENT OF THE Y. M. C. A.
FRED H. RINDGE, Jr., M. A.
INDUSTRIAL DEPARTMENT, INTERNATIONAL Y. M. C. A.
Six years ago at Yale was started the industrial service movement of the Young Men’s Christian Association. There are at present 3,500 students from 150 colleges throughout the country engaged in this service under the direction of city and student association branches. Engineering students particularly are enlisted in this volunteer service for industrial workers which presents an effective laboratory for practical work, backed by the training, encouragement and supervision of association officials whose co-operation is extended to the larger efforts for industrial and social betterment which students engage in after graduation.
Among the forty different lines of service are: teaching English, history, and citizenship to foreigners; teaching drawing, electricity, manual training, music and other subjects; conducting men’s and boys’ clubs and boy scout and big brothers work; giving noon shop talks in factories; giving instruction in hygiene and first aid, athletics, etc.; holding educational classes in labor unions; conducting socials, entertainments, observation trips and week-end camps; doing charity organization work; investigating working, living and recreative conditions, etc.
The idea is permeating the leading colleges and universities. The old Yale boat house is being used as a school for teaching English, civics, and hygiene to foreigners. Students at the University of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ames are holding classes for foreign men and boys in railroad box-cars. Men from Columbia, Harvard, Williams, Brown, Pennsylvania, and other colleges are conducting educational classes in labor unions, talking in shop meetings, and leading clubs of working boys. University of Wisconsin engineering students are instructing American mechanics and boiler makers in the round house, and convicts in the jail. Undergraduates of Amherst, Massachusetts Agricultural College, Princeton, Penn State and other institutions are doing deputation work in rural industrial communities. Men from Cornell, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, McGill University, California and the University of Puget Sound are visiting the homes of immigrants and are teaching groups in boarding houses. Students of South Carolina, Furman, and other southern colleges, are doing extension work in cotton mill villages.
CLASS OF RUSSIAN AND ROUMANIAN JEWS
Students have made possible unusual community meetings. In New York city sixty classes in English and civics for foreigners have been taught by students, and on several occasions the members of these classes, representatives of sixteen nationalities, came together under their respective flags to hear a lecture on American citizenship, to tell what the work was doing for them, to sing their national songs and to unite in learning “America.” The Working boys’ clubs came together on one occasion to hear addresses by Ernest Thompson Seton and Dr. George J. Fisher. In Pittsburgh, a foreign singing contest was attended by several thousand people, and a huge American flag of silk was awarded to the winning group. In San Francisco a mass meeting and entertainment was attended by men of twenty-five nationalities.
In Tacoma last spring, the notable immigration conference, attended by several hundred delegates, including five state governors, a Canadian premier and representatives of capital and labor, was planned and promoted by the Y. M. C. A. immigration secretary and his student workers. The conference resulted in the formation of the Coast-wide Immigration League, to cope with the problems of Pacific immigration which will be aggravated on the opening of the Panama Canal. In April of this year a similar conference was held in San Francisco. The man who conceived and is promoting these conferences acquired his first experience in teaching foreigners English as a graduate student at college. It was this effort that determined his life work.
The interest that college men have in this service which brings no financial compensation is due to the natural sympathy that most students have for those less fortunate than themselves. To awaken that sympathy they need only to be shown a real and definite job to do and how to do it. They can also be shown that industrial service is not only an altruistic privilege and patriotic duty but also “blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” This service affords an experience which students need, for it enlarges a man’s vision, increases his sympathy with “the other half” and gives a knowledge of how to deal with men.
Enlisting Students the Service
The methods of enlisting students are interesting. Lectures on industrial conditions and needs and the college man’s responsibility are given before students by carefully selected employers, labor leaders, and social workers. Especially prepared literature is distributed, articles are written for student periodicals, and an industrial library installed in the college Y. M. C. A. building. Interested students meet weekly, often under expert leadership, for a discussion of industrial subjects. The student and city branches of the Y. M. C. A. join hands in the movement, and, in co-operation with churches, missions, social settlements, boys’ clubs, libraries, civic associations, factories, labor unions, foreign societies, etc., discover definite opportunities for industrial service where students can be useful. Experience has proved beyond a doubt that volunteer service can be conscientious and efficient. A settlement worker writes: “I don’t see how we could have done without the splendid work of those college men.” After a few men are put to work, others become interested through observation, and the movement naturally spreads.
A NOON CLASS CONDUCTED IN POLISH
In a three-day-campaign in New York, the industrial service movement was presented to selected classes of students at Columbia, New York University, and the College of the City of New York, with the result that 280 students signified their hearty interest and 125 were willing to undertake immediate work. In a single year 165 undergraduates engaged in industrial service in New York city, and the movement has become of such importance that a secretary gives all his time to it. This man was captain of his university football team two years ago and became interested at college. It is noticeable that generally the strongest and most popular students volunteer for service. A list of those at work from Yale includes varsity football, basketball, baseball, and track men, intercollegiate debaters, class and fraternity officers, and honor men. In many places the matter has been presented to the various fraternities and has met a most cordial response.
Recently at the University of Michigan the movement was presented to 1,200 students in two days, to employers of the city at a luncheon, to labor leaders at a dinner in the city Y. M. C. A., and to a special meeting of engineering professors. At Cornell University over 1,600 students were addressed, and 525 signed up as interested and willing to promote the ideas and ideals of the movement. One hundred and thirty men volunteered for definite service, and many are already teaching in the homes of foreigners, leading boys’ clubs, and doing other similar work. Others will teach this summer where they live and work. The movement was presented also at meetings of engineering professors and at a gathering of the Business Men’s Association. The city and student branches of the Y. M. C. A. are financing the scheme, and a strong student committee is heading the work in the university.
In practically every college the faculty heartily supports the scheme, and the sentiment of many professors was expressed when one said, “I hope every one of my students will make a place in his program for some volunteer altruistic service. They will have opportunity to do a great deal of good, but will gain far more than they can give.” Recently at the University of Iowa the movement was presented to a faculty meeting which had not been addressed by any outsider for nineteen years. A number of college faculties have met to discuss the movement, and to consider the re-adaptation of engineering courses to give more attention to the “human side of the engineering profession.” Already many engineering schools have courses in “management,” but professors feel increasingly that even these courses have too much of the “material” and not enough of the “human” element. Such instruction supplemented by personal friendly contact in service for industrial workers will do much to remove prejudices and promote mutual understanding between college men and workingmen.
Appreciation of the Work
Some quotations from letters written by working men show better than any other testimony how they feel about this work:
“I have not found words to thank the best friend I ever had on earth for all he has done for me. I am a better man.”
“I have learn some English, got better job, will be good American citizen. I am grateful forever.”
A foreign convict writes: “Now I got good chance to learn English to read and write because I got long time to do in this prison, and if I learn, that will help me when I get out from here. I no like to work all my life with pick and shovel.”
In the West a lumber company has provided a room where its foreign employes can learn English under student leadership. A newspaper clipping tells the story in these headlines: “Slavonians eager to acquire knowledge of English after back-breaking work in mill.”
That American working men are also open to friendliness of this kind is splendidly illustrated by an experience with a large labor union. When the students first spoke to the members of the union, the men naturally wondered and were suspicious of an ulterior motive. But when they went down to the union rooms two nights a week, often at considerable sacrifice, and taught mathematics, mechanics, and electricity, the men warmed up. As the students proved that they were not “snobs” but good fellows, the men unhesitatingly showed their appreciation. The work was so successful that it has been carried on for several years. The president of the union testifies that the wages of some of his men have been raised from $18 to $28 a week, as a result of the instruction given. A series of lectures has been given before 500 men in the union and the men have now asked the students to plan the entertainments for their social meetings. This latter request is particularly significant, as the class of entertainment formerly enjoyed was of very low grade. The work is spreading to unions in many other cities, and the students are getting an entirely different view of the rights of the workingman. In a number of instances the labor union, sometimes the Central Labor Union, has invited selected students to act as fraternal delegates, with full power to discuss and to introduce motions. This is a remarkable development, and in no case have the unions had cause to regret the step.
In one city the students discovered a Syrian who spoke six languages fluently, had been a school superintendent in his own country, but because he knew no English, was sweeping out a market for one dollar a day. The man was befriended, educated and has become a power for good among his countrymen.
An Italian lad lived in America four years before an American treated him as a friend. By that time he was so discouraged that he had several times attempted suicide. A college student met him on a street corner, invited him to an English class in one of the settlements, helped him, trained him for leadership, and he is now a social worker of remarkable ability among his people.
Engineering Students Especially Interested
Social workers in our colleges have in many instances found engineering students “too busy,” and as a rule not so open to the altruistic appeal as those in other departments of the universities. Yet, it is a fact that 70 per cent of the 3,000 men engaged in industrial service are engineers. The reason is obvious: A football captain (an engineer) said the other day:
“This industrial work is the livest thing that’s struck college since I’ve been here. It’s a real job and it’s practical. Everyone of us who goes into it is bound to acquire an experience in dealing with men, which the curriculum can’t give, and we need it!”
Indeed a prominent general manager, himself a college graduate, recently said to the writer:
“The college graduates in my employ are frequently a confounded nuisance. They come to us with a splendid knowledge of books, but when as foremen or superintendents, they get out into the shop, and deal with working men, they make a mess of it. A good part of my time is spent in straightening out difficulties and restoring harmony. They haven’t any real sympathy with men and don’t know how to handle them.”
Here then is a great need in the training of an engineer, which the industrial service movement is designed to meet. Engineering students are quick to see the point. As they teach English to foreigners or lead a club of working men they come to understand these men, not as a “class,” but as individuals. They get a friendly insight into their working and living conditions and a first-hand knowledge of how to deal with them intelligently and sympathetically. Thus one student writes:
“My class of Italians is the finest bunch of men I’ve ever come into contact with—bright, keen, appreciative to an embarrassing extent. They have done me more good than I can ever do them.”
Another says:
“My club of working men was the big thing needed to complete my college education. It taught me things I could have learned in no other way, and as an engineer, I am already deriving great benefit.”
It is also true that many a college man has been kept straight and acquired higher ideals because of the responsibility of some group of men or boys who were looking up to him. One such man, an engineer of promise, says:
“Before I undertook any of this work, my one ideal in life was to make all the money I could, regardless of anyone under me. Since I gave some of my time in volunteer service my ideals have all changed. Now I don’t care where I go or what my salary, so long as it is some place where I can help my fellow men.”
AN ENGLISH CLASS FOR RUSSIANS AND POLES
This naturally raises the great question of what these students will do with their experience after they graduate from college.
Larger Significance of the Movement
As already indicated, after students have had a real service experience, their changed attitude toward the world’s needs and their sense of responsibility is bound to lead to greater activity in their larger spheres of influence after graduation. Thus, it is not surprising that we have in our central office a mailing list of 3000 graduates, most of them engineers who were interested as undergraduates, and many of whom are now in the forefront of movements for social and industrial betterment. Here is what some of them write from various parts of the country:
“It is surely satisfactory to feel one is doing something for the betterment of the human race. You can count on me to co-operate in the work wherever I go.”
“As a student I got interested in industrial service and resolved that any men whom I might later control should get a square deal. I’ve just investigated the living conditions of the men in this lumber camp, and found them sleeping on old vermin-producing wooden bunks, that hadn’t been changed in six years. I’ve had the whole outfit burned up and an iron cot put in for every man in camp.”
“I am sending you my personal check to cover cost of equipment for English classes in my steel mill.”
“We have put in a fine welfare club for our men, with reading, writing and smoking rooms. No gambling or liquor allowed. It certainly pays and I am delighted with my share in it.”
“As foreman in the steel mill, I see that my men get a square deal on the job, a better job if they deserve it, and I have taken pains to render personal service to many. We must get rid of the seven-day, twelve-hour labor schedule before we can have real men with real homes.”
“I have signed up eight hundred working men for a Y. M. C. A. membership in our mining town. After a thorough investigation, we feel that the Association will meet the needs of the men better than any other agency.”
“I am superintendent of schools here and am putting in evening classes for the first time in this city, and an using Roberts’ method of English for foreigners.”
“Have just been elected president of the Social Hygiene Society in this community.”
“I have been traveling all over the country and have noticed that the heart has almost been educated out of some of my friends with degrees. I am convinced that every undergraduate enlisted in this volunteer work will have the broad field of humanity opened before him. It’s great business.”
One of America’s greatest football captains, a few months after graduation, wrote from a construction camp in Colorado:
“Remembering what I learned in this movement at Yale, when I became foreman I treated my gang of Italians as men and not as dogs, and it was really pitiful to see the way they returned the little kindness I showed them. Each day I was met with cheery words of greeting. When the job was complete the men came to me in a bunch, thanked me for the fair way I had treated them, and said they would like to work for me always.”
What greater satisfaction could an engineer ask? And what may it not mean to the industrial world of tomorrow, as hundreds and hundreds of engineering and other students graduate from college with a new vision of their service opportunities, and a knowledge of how to help. In one college town through the entire winter, the son of a railway magnate, who has 25,000 men under him, taught a group of foreign laborers in one of the worst districts of the city. Who can judge of that man’s influence a few years hence?
This in brief is the story of the industrial service movement, which heads up in the Industrial Department of the Y. M. C. A. International Committee, in which state committees and nearly 300 student and city associations co-operate, and for which thousands of college men are conscientiously working. From the central office of the secretary a letter of news, suggestion and inspiration, and quantities of helpful literature go each month to the local secretaries who are co-operating.
Thus, quietly but rapidly, without undue advertising has been advancing a great movement, broad in scope, submerging creed and class in altruistic service; deep in influence, reaching to the very heart of many vital industrial problems of the day. At a conservative estimate 3,500 undergraduates are reaching over 60,000 working men and boys each week in definite constructive service, which will make for better understanding, the improvement of industrial and social conditions and the transforming of individual lives. No one can measure the helpful service of the 3,000 graduates who also are promoting the ideals of the movement. As hundreds of men continue to graduate with a new vision of their service opportunities and responsibilities, who can foresee their influence in maintaining industrial righteousness and industrial peace?
MAKING INCOME EQUAL OUTGO[[7]]
WHAT THE STRUGGLE MEANS TO COTTON MILL WORKERS
MARGARET F. BYINGTON
CHARITY ORGANIZATION DEPARTMENT, RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
[7]. See Federal Report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States, 19 volumes. Edited by Charles P. Neill. Volume XVI. Family Budgets of Typical Cotton Mill Workers. By Wood F. Worcester and Daisy Worthington Worcester.
Hidden in monotonous uniformity there is to be found in the volumes of the federal report on the Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States a most illuminating analysis of the budgets of cotton mill families. It is notable for simplicity rather than for comprehensiveness. Budgets of twenty-one families employed in southern cotton mills and of fourteen in the cotton mills of Fall River, Mass., have been secured and the conditions of the families studied. Because the number is so small no attempt is made to use the figures as a basis for generalizations, but the full statement of the circumstances as well as the expenditures of each family gives the study a compensating vividness.
The study of the fourteen families in Fall River is not as satisfactory as the southern investigation because the standards of English, Italian, French Canadian, Portuguese and Polish operatives are so different. Also it was not possible, as it often was in the South, to get an almost complete record both of family income and expenditure through the books of the companies where the families worked. For these reasons the analysis of the southern families’ budgets is more deserving of attention.
Special interest attaches to the study of the twenty-one southern families as it was the first budget study of southern families, I believe. As a background we may quote from the report a brief description of life in a southern cotton mill town:
“Certain conditions of the new industrial life foster this isolation. The whole family—men, women, and children—are engaged in the same industry in which every other family in their community is engaged. They have their own churches and their own schools, in many cases furnished by the mill owners. They live, with few exceptions, in houses owned by the mill company. They buy their provisions, in many cases, from the company store. The cotton mill is the center of their lives. Their present and their future are bounded by it. In less isolated industrial communities there is always the prospect of working into some other and higher industrial group. The vision of the southern cotton operative, however, is so limited by his surroundings that this possibility rarely occurs to him. In other industries the father may feel that he can never hope for anything more for himself, but he can at least plan and struggle for a better life for his children. Here the mill demands the children as well as the fathers.”
This dependence on the mills serves to make the study more accurate than is usually possible. The rent of company houses was, of course, known and through the courtesy of the mill owners the investigators were allowed to copy from the books of the company not only the detailed expenditures for food, clothing, etc., but what was of more importance, the actual wage of the various members of the family from week to week for an entire year. The total income, in some cases practically every item of expenditure, is therefore known.
The families chosen for study are considered typical, though probably on the whole having somewhat better than average conditions. This necessity for making an arbitrary choice is, of course, the one uncertain point in the study. As the investigators, however, had taken part in the larger investigation of the cotton mill industry made by the Federal Bureau of Labor, reliance can probably be placed upon their judgment as to what families were representative. Moreover the report states that the names of the families working in one of the three mills were furnished by a mill official as representative families, and in another they were frankly avowed by the mill officials to be among the best. It may therefore be assumed that while there is really no “typical family” and while there are wide variations in circumstances, the stories of these twenty-one families give an accurate picture of the home life of cotton mill employes.
In view of the discussion of the effects of the work of young children in cotton mills it is interesting to note that of the twenty-one families studied not one was wholly dependent on the wages of the man. The average number of wage earners in these families was 3.6 and the average number of individuals 8.5.
Practically all the families live in company houses for which they pay a low rent, usually $.75 to $1 a room per month. A typical house is “a one-story frame, built upon brick piers instead of a solid foundation. It is rectangular in form and divided into four rooms. The rooms are about fourteen by sixteen or sixteen by sixteen feet, and they are ceiled instead of plastered. Two rooms have fireplaces or grates, a third is arranged for a cooking stove, and the fourth has no means of heating. The flooring is of a single thickness and, as it is seldom carpeted, furnishes little protection against the cold.” Most of the homes are but meagerly furnished and only partly heated.
In the discussion of food, the menus and daily expenditures of many families are given and repay careful study. As a standard for judging the adequacy of the food supply, the dietary for the federal prison in Georgia is used (20.5 cents per man per day). Eleven of the twenty-one families fell below even this meagre diet. “Corn bread, biscuit, pork and coffee form a large part of the diet of all families.”
In the matter of clothing the study is detailed and brings out some interesting points as to the different standards of dress for various members of the same family. The daughter who works in the mills spends many times as much on clothes as does the mother who works at home. In some cases, at least, the mother wears the cast-off clothing of the daughter. One such mother spent $1.98 for clothing in an entire year, while her daughter of twenty-one who was married that year spent $113.84; another daughter of nineteen spent $77, and a third girl of sixteen spent $86.
After giving the budgets of these twenty-one families in full, the investigators attempt to formulate a “minimum standard” and a “fair standard” of living. For the former the food cost is based on the prison dietary; the housing standard on the rent of a mill house; and the other items—clothing, furniture, fuel, light, and sundries—on the least amount spent by any family for each item, excluding those that were manifestly impossibly low. On this basis the “minimum standard” for a family consisting of a man, his wife, and three children under twelve was reckoned as possible at an expenditure of $408.26 a year. This amount, the authors state, is “so low that one would expect few families to live on it.” Frankly, from the description of what is included, I should be inclined to say that no family could:
“If the family live upon this sum without suffering, wisdom to properly apportion the income is necessary. There can be no amusements or recreations that involve any expense. No tobacco can be used. No newspapers can be purchased. The children cannot go to school, because there will be no money to buy their books. Household articles that are worn out or destroyed cannot be replaced. The above sum provides for neither birth nor death nor any illness that demands a doctor’s attention or calls for medicine. Even though all these things are eliminated, if the family is not to suffer, the mother must be a woman of rare ability. She must know how to make her own and her children’s clothing; she must be physically able to do all of the household work, including the washing. And she must know enough to purchase with her allowance food that has the proper nutritive value.”
Such a “standard of living” cannot be considered adequate, falls far short of being scientific and it seems to me doubtful wisdom to consider as a “standard” at all a program so bankrupt of actual family needs.
The “fair standard” is worked out on a similar scheme. It includes somewhat more generous provision of food and allowance for certain other factors which “these people have come to regard ... as essential to their every-day life.” This “fair standard” is estimated at $600.74 for the average family.
CHART OF THE WEEKLY EARNINGS OF ONE OF THE TWENTY-ONE SOUTHERN FAMILIES
A series of novel diagrams is presented showing, for each family, their earnings from week to week, their average earnings for the year and a comparison of this with the minimum and fair standards.
An additional study was made of the wages of seventy-five families for a year, the figures being secured from the mill pay roll. The income of fifteen families fell below even the minimum; twenty-two had more than the fair standard, and thirty-eight between the two. Of the seventy-five families, fifty had fathers working in the mill and only two of these fifty fathers, both overseers, earned enough to support a wife and three young children according to the fair standard, and four according to the minimum. A decent home life for the families of these men would be impossible were it not for the wages of the children or the income from boarders. The great variations in incomes from week to week would increase the difficulty of planning household expenditures even when the average indicates a living wage.
The results of this low standard of living on physical vitality are shown by the fact that each of the twenty-one families studied spent some money for medicine or doctor. As illustrating the amount of sickness in these families, with its resulting loss of income and added expense we may quote from the description of one family which has suffered extensively: “The father was injured in the mill twice during the year and lost six weeks. The mother is ill with lung trouble. The boy has tuberculosis, and the fourteen-year-old girl is very frail and is constantly taking patent medicines. During the year they spent $108.25 on medicines and doctor’s bills. The year before the fourteen-year-old girl, whose earnings were a large share of the family income, lost twenty-four weeks because of sickness.” Another family, though in good general health, suffered as a result of bad sanitary conditions: “The members of the family appear to be in good health. The daughter, aged eighteen, had typhoid fever during the year and was unable to work for eight weeks. The son, aged sixteen, had malaria and lost from one to two weeks at different times.”
This is the picture of southern cotton mill life—a family living in a four-room mill-owned house without running water and indoor toilets, with but one room heated; a meager diet of pork and beans, biscuit, coffee and syrup; an irregular income, not allowing on an average enough for a fair standard of living for most of the families, yet tempting often to extravagance in those weeks when it is high; a twelve-year limit permitted by the child labor law, and adult wages that necessitate the children’s going to work as soon as that law allows; the father rarely earning much more, and sometimes even less, than the younger members of the family; scant amusement, usually only the moving picture show, possible on the meager income; poor health with the doctor often an impossible luxury.