As it happened I worked there two days, received my training and was made an inspector at fifteen dollars a week, then decided to find another job. The fumes of gasolene gave me a hideous headache, and besides I had seen large crowds of women turned away from the doors every day.
Returning to the employment offices of the Y. W., I stipulated that my next job must be work for the government, preferably in a munition plant. There were plenty of openings, and taking cards of introduction to several plants near New York City, I set out.
“Even if you don’t find anything to suit you,” the woman at the employment desk told me, “it will be helping us, letting us know what you think of the places.”
“Send only mature women to that plant in Hoboken. They want night-workers,” I advised her on my return. “Those other two places over in Jersey? If you have girls who have twenty dollars to spend before their wages begin to come in, send them there.”
“But the clubwomen?” she questioned. “We were told that the clubwomen had thrown open their homes, would board women workers in those plants.”
I showed her my figures, the lowest that I had been able to get, though directed by the employment office of the munition plant: three dollars a week for a small room, up two flights, seven dollars a week for two meals a day and three on Sundays, sixty cents car-fare,—that is if you caught a particular train making the trip for the purpose of taking munition workers.
“The wage being eleven dollars a week, girls working there who room with and are fed by those clubwomen, will have just forty cents with which to get lunch, laundry, and any other little luxury,” I went on. “And don’t forget she doesn’t get a dollar until the end of her second week. Her first week’s pay is held until she leaves—God knows for why—and she is not paid for her second week until she finishes it. In the meantime she has to pay for everything in advance, board, lodging, and car-fare.”
“Those clubwomen!” she exclaimed, in disgust. “The fuss they made about taking munition workers in their homes for the sake of helping the government.”
“That’s what being a worker means—everybody’s prey,” I replied, and the thought did not make me any the happier. “It’s gouge and squeeze, and when only a flicker of life remains fling them in an almshouse or a pauper’s grave. Ours is a Christian country.”
During the two months that followed I worked a few days in a cigarette factory, in a second cracker factory, folded circulars, addressed envelopes, stamped envelopes, and folded more circulars. It was on this last job that I was taken for a labor organizer.