VAUDEVILLE ARTISTS
Vaudeville actresses have to be grateful for the safer and more decent conditions which their mixed union has brought to them. Separate and sanitary dressing rooms are now to be found in the unionized five and ten-cent theaters in Chicago. An act which formerly might have had to be repeated fifteen times, cannot be asked for more than eight times on a holiday and four times on other days.
WAITRESSES
Unorganized waitresses often have to work seven days a week and sometimes fourteen hours a day; they have to provide their own uniform and pay for its laundering. Organized waitresses have a ten-hour day and a six-day week. Their wages have risen from $5 and $6 to $7 and $8 per week and meals. Their uniforms and laundry expenses are found for them. They enjoy a $3 sick benefit for thirteen weeks and the union pays a $50 death benefit.
There are some trades which have been organized and which yet record thus far no marked improvement in the condition of the workers. This may be either because the organization has been in existence too short a time or because of other reasons. Among such trades are sheepskin workers, badge, banner and regalia workers, human hair workers and commercial telegraphers. Even in these trades steady educational and organizing work is proceeding. Moreover the union may have been an influence preventing further wage cutting, higher speeding up or the imposition of more overtime.
The trade union is the great school for working girls. There they are taught the principles of collective bargaining. They learn to discuss difficulties with employers, free from the rasping sense of personal grievance. They learn to give and take with equanimity, to balance a greater advantage against a lesser one. In union meetings and conferences where they meet on an equality with their brothers it is the girl of sober judgment, good humor and ready wit who becomes a leader, and influences her more inexperienced sister to follow her.
The trade union is educating the community as well as the girl. There is a growing tendency among men and women of the teaching, clerical and other non-manual occupations to recognize the common interest of all workers, and to form under one name or another associations to affiliate with the labor movement. One of the largest of these is the Teachers’ Federation of Chicago which has now been many years in existence. More recently stenographers’ and typists’ associations have been formed in New York and Chicago. The formation of actors’ and musicians’ associations is additional proof of the same spirit.
The influence upon the whole community of organized insistence upon human conditions for the worker is marked. Trade-union standards tend eventually to become the standards toward which all non-union establishments that claim to treat their employees well voluntarily approximate. Trade-union standards are the standards up to which decent non-union employers keep steadily inching along in respect to hours and conditions of work, and often even in respect to that most crucial test of all, wages. Trade-union standards are, in short, always tending to become in the eyes of the public the normal standards in the whole world of industry. Indeed everywhere the paradox is to be noticed that the non-union girl benefits remarkably as the result of the existence of a union in her trade. Under pressure of competition employers frequently state that their trade will not bear shorter hours or higher wages. Curiously enough, such statements are much more frequently made in unorganized than organized trades, and the employers more frequently act up to their statements.
Unions, furthermore, have an important indirect influence on legislation. In trade after trade, the benefits of shorter hours have been gained through organization in states where there was no legislation and no prospect of it. This is seen in many branches of the garment-making industry, among waitresses, tobacco strippers, printers and bindery women all over the United States. A ten-hour day, a nine-hour day, an eight-hour day, even a forty-four-hour week, for different bodies of these workers, have been for them the fruits of organization. These advantages gained, the evidence of workers who enjoy shorter hours and the experience of employers who conduct their establishments under a system of shorter hours form the strongest and most practical argument by which legislators are influenced to consider the practicability and desirability of the shorter working day.
Trade unions, indeed, cannot beat back the ocean, though they have been known to think they could. They cannot raise wages beyond certain limits, though the obstacles that bar further upward movement in a particular trade may be quite beyond the ken of the wisest in or out of the labor movement. They cannot always prevent wages from falling, whether that fall be expressed in actual cash or measured in purchasing power. International competition, the introduction of machinery, or the opening of fresh reservoirs of cheaper foreign labor may press wages down with irresistible force.