CHAPTER III THE SWEAT-SHOP
The sudden closing of the window made her prison cell seem darker than before. It needed the contrast of the vision to make her see the sordidness and squalor—the grim reality—of that long dark room, with its chaos of noise, its nerve-destroying "speed."
Scattered through the East Side of New York there are hundreds such "sweat-shops," engaged in the various branches of the "garment trade." Sometimes there will be half a dozen in the same tenement; one above another. Even the factory inspectors are never sure of the exact number. They are running so close a race with bankruptcy, it is hard to keep track of them. Often half a dozen will fail on the same day, and as many new ones will start the next. It is not on record that any one ever found a good word to say for the "sweating system." Such "shops" exist because I and you and the good wife and the priest who married you like to buy our clothes as cheaply as possible.
Yetta's "shop" manufactured vests. The four women at each table formed a "team." With separate operations on the same garment, they had to keep in exact unison. If any one slowed up, they all lost money by the delay. They were paid "by the piece," and long hours, seven days a week, brought them so infinitesimal a margin over the cost of brute necessities that the loss of a few cents a day was a tragedy for the older women with children to feed.
Yetta, the youngest of all, was Number One at her table.
The name of Number Two was Mrs. Levy. She was anywhere between twenty-five and fifty, bovine in appearance, but her fingers were as agile as a monkey's. She sat stolidly before her machine, her big body, which had lost all form, almost motionless, her arms alone active. Her face was void of any expression. Her washed-out eyes were half closed, for they were inflamed with tracoma. Eight years before she had brought her three children over from Galicia to join her husband and had found him dying of tuberculosis. She had been making vests ever since. She was an ideal sweat-shop worker, reliable—the kind that lasts.
Opposite her Mrs. Weinstein grabbed the vests as they left Mrs. Levy's machine. She also was a large woman, but not much over thirty, and just entering the trade. She was of merry disposition and had kept much of her youthful charm. Her hair, of course, was disordered; the cloth-dust stuck in blotches to her perspiring face. There was a smudge of machine grease over one cheek, but where her blouse—unbuttoned—exposed her throat and the rise of her breasts, the skin was still soft and white. Her husband, of whom she always spoke with fond admiration as a very kind and wise man, had deserted her a few months before. Engaged in another branch of the garment trades, he had become involved in one of the strikes which with increasing frequency were shaking the sweating system. He had been black-listed. After weeks of fruitless search for work, he had disappeared. If he found work elsewhere, he would send for his wife. He could not bear to stay and be supported by her. She had a sister, who had married well and who would not let the babies starve. Besides, she did not consider herself a regular vest-maker. Some day, soon, her husband would find work, in Boston, Philadelphia—somewhere. She was always expecting a letter to-morrow. So Mrs. Weinstein could afford to be cheerful.
But if Number Two had an unusually stolid body and phlegmatic brain—the type which suffers least from sweating; and if Number Three had been blessed with a merry, hopeful soul, Mrs. Cohen, at the foot of the table, had none of these advantages. She had been Number One, not so very long before—a marvel of speed. Then she had begun to cough. It is impossible to cough without breaking the regular rhythm which means speed. In a few months she had slipped down to the bottom. She was no older than Mrs. Weinstein, but her skin was as yellow as Mrs. Levy's, and even more unlovely, for the flesh behind it had melted away; the only prominences on her body were where her bones pushed out.
She had begun at twenty-one, when her husband died leaving her with two children. There had been another baby a couple of years later—because she had hoped the man would marry her and take her out of the inferno. He had not. And there was no hope any more, for who would marry a woman with bad lungs and three children?