The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

The shirtwaist-makers’ “general strike,” as it is called, followed an eleven years’ attempt to organize the trade. The union had been unable during this time to affect to any appreciable extent the conditions of work. In its efforts during 1908-9 to maintain the union in the various shops and to prevent the discharge of members who were active union workers, it lost heavily. The effort resolved itself in 1909 into the establishment of the right to organize. The strike in the Triangle Waist Company turned on this issue.

The story of the events leading up to the Triangle strike as told by a leading member of the firm practically agrees with the story told by the strikers. The company had undertaken to organize its employes into a club, with benefits attached. The good faith of the company as well as the working-out of the benefit was questioned by the workers. The scheme failed and the workers joined the waist-makers’ union. One day without warning a few weeks later one hundred and fifty of the employes were dropped, the explanation being given by the employers that there was no work. The following day the company advertised for workers. In telling the story later they said that they had received an unexpected order, but admitted their refusal to re-employ the workers discharged the day previous. The union then declared a strike, or acknowledged a lockout, and picketing began.

The strike or lockout occurred out of the busy season, with a large supply at hand of workers unorganized and unemployed. Practical trade unionists believed that the manufacturers felt certain of success on account of their ability to draw to an unlimited extent from an unorganized labor market and to employ a guard sufficiently strong to prevent the strikers from reaching the workers with their appeals to join them. But the ninety girls and sixty men strikers were not practical; they were Russian Jews who saw in the lockout an attempt at oppression. In their resistance, which was instinctive, they did not count their chances of winning; they felt that they had been wronged and they rebelled. This quick resentment is characteristic of the Russian Jewish factory worker. The men strikers were intimidated and lost heart, but the women carried on the picketing, suffering arrest and abuse from the police and the guards employed by the manufacturers. At the end of the third week they appealed to the women’s trade union league to protect them, if they could, against false arrest.

The league is organized to promote trade unions among women, and its membership is composed of people of leisure as well as of workers. A brief inspection by the league of the action of the pickets, the police, the strike breakers and the workers in the factory showed that the pickets had been intimidated, that the attitude of the police was aggressive and that the guards employed by the firm were insolent. The league acted as complainant at police headquarters and cross-examined the arrested strikers; it served as witness for the strikers in the magistrates’ court and became convinced of official prejudice in the police department against the strikers and a strong partisan attitude in favor of the manufacturers. The activity and interest of women, some of whom were plainly women of leisure, was curiously disconcerting to the manufacturers and every effort was used to divert them. At last a young woman prominent in public affairs in New York and a member of the league, was arrested while acting as volunteer picket. Here at last was “copy” for the press.

During the five weeks of the strike, previous to the publicity, the forty thousand waist makers employed in the several hundred shops in New York were with a few exceptions here and there unconscious of the struggle of their fellow workers in the Triangle. There was no means of communication among them, as the labor press reached comparatively few. In the weeks before the general strike was called the forty thousand shirtwaist makers were forty thousand separate individuals. So far were they from being conscious of their similarity that they might have been as many individual workers employed in ways as widely separated as people of different trades, or as members of different social groups.

The arrests of sympathizers aroused sufficient public interest for the press to continue the story for ten days, including in the reports the treatment of the strikers. This furnished the union its opportunity. It knew the temper of the workers and pushed the story still further through shop propaganda. After three weeks of newspaper publicity and shop propaganda the reports came back to the union that the workers were aroused. It was alarming to the friends of the union to see the confidence of the union officers before issuing the call to strike. Trade unionists reminded the officers that the history of general strikes in unorganized trades was the history of failure. They invariably answered with a smile of assurance, “Wait and see.”

The call was issued Monday night, November 22nd, at a great mass meeting in Cooper Union addressed by the president of the American Federation of Labor. “I did not go to bed Monday night;” said the secretary of the union, “our Executive Board was in session from midnight until six a. m. I left the meeting and went out to Broadway near Bleecker street. I shall never again see such a sight. Out of every shirtwaist factory, in answer to the call, the workers poured and the halls which had been engaged for them were quickly filled.” In some of these halls the girls were buoyant, confident; in others there were girls who were frightened at what they had done. When the latter were asked why they had come out in sympathy, they said; “How could you help it when a girl in your shop gets up and says, ‘Come girls, come, all the shirtwaist makers are going out’?”

As nearly as can be estimated, thirty thousand workers answered the call, or seventy-five per cent of the trade. Of these six thousand were Russian men; two thousand Italian women; possibly one thousand American women and about twenty or twenty-one thousand Russian Jewish girls. The Italians throughout the strike were a constantly appearing and disappearing factor but the part played by the American girls was clearly defined.

The American girls who struck came out in sympathy for the “foreigners” who struck for a principle, but the former were not in sympathy with the principle; they did not want a union; they imagined that the conditions in the factories where the Russian and Italian girls worked were worse than their own. They are in the habit of thinking that the employers treat foreign girls with less consideration, and they are sorry for them. In striking they were self-conscious philanthropists. They were honestly disinterested and as genuinely sympathetic as were the women of leisure who later took an active part in helping the strike. They acknowledged no interests in common with the others, but if necessary they were prepared to sacrifice a week or two of work. Unfortunately the sacrifice required of them was greater than they had counted on. The “foreigners” regarded them as just fellow workers and insisted on their joining the union, in spite of their constant protestation, “We have no grievance; we only struck in sympathy.” But the Russians failed to be grateful, took for granted a common cause and demanded that all shirtwaist makers, regardless of race or creed, continue the strike until they were recognized by the employers as a part of the union. This difference in attitude and understanding was a heavy strain on the generosity of the American girls. It is believed, however, that the latter would have been equal to what their fellow workers expected, if their meetings had been left to the guidance of American men and women who understood their prejudices. But the Russian men trusted no one entirely to impart the enthusiasm necessary for the cause. It was the daily, almost hourly, tutelage which the Russian men insisted on the American girls’ accepting, rather than the prolongation of the strike beyond the time they had expected, that sent the American girls back as “scabs.” There were several signs that the two or three weeks’ experience as strikers was having its effect on them, and that with proper care this difficult group of workers might have been organized. For instance, “scab” had become an opprobrious term to them during their short strike period, and on returning to work they accepted the epithet from their fellow workers with great reluctance and even protestation. Their sense of superiority also had received a severe shock; they could never again be quite so confident that they did not in the nature of things belong to the labor group.

If the shirtwaist trade in New York had been dominated by any other nationality than the Russian, it is possible that other methods of organizing the trade would have been adopted rather than the general strike. The Russian workers who fill New York factories are ever ready to rebel against suggestion of oppression and are of all people the most responsive to an idea to which is attached an ideal. The union officers understood this and it was because they understood the Russian element in the trade that they answered, “Wait and see,” when their friends urged caution before calling a general strike in an unorganized trade. They knew their people and others did not.