“Yes, wages is coming down some, and I’m willing they should,” he told me, looking over the rim of his saucer, from which he was drinking steaming-hot coffee. “What I ain’t willing is they should cut from the bottom more than from the top. There ain’t no sense in my boss paying me two dollars for doing work on which he collects twenty or more from a house-owner. ’Tain’t a fair division, and none of us is going to stand for it.”
Again the education of their children came up. There were four sons, and the eldest was attending the Stuyvesant High School with the intention of becoming an engineer. The mother explained that she was loath to allow the boy to enter for this additional training when he might have had his working papers and gotten a good job.
“What’s the use of us working if we can’t get better for our children than we had ourselves?” the husband cut in on her plaintive fears. “I always wanted to do something,” he explained to me. “I wanted to build houses. I’d got a bit handy with a saw and a hammer; they was all the tools I could borrow, when my father lost his job and I had to go to work. I had to take the best thing I could get—helper to a sort of half-way plumber. For a long time I used to think I’d change, but the chance never come my way. I’m bound my boy shall, though.”
“We’re for a minimum wage if they’ll make it high enough and cut the maximum low enough,” a young Jewess, an operator in a shirt-waist factory, told me one evening when chance brought us together in adjoining seats in the top gallery of a Broadway theatre.
“What do you mean by cutting the maximum low enough?” I questioned.
“The manager of our plant gets twenty-five thousand a year; I make around twenty-five a week, piece-work, you know; but some of the girls don’t get above twenty—can’t get up to my speed,” she explained. “T’other day the assistant manager let out a hint that wages was to be cut. ‘All right,’ I tells ’im, ‘cut, but begin where they begin to trim a tree—on the top. Just clip off a hundred a week from the manager, shave off fifty of yours, twenty-five of your assistants, and then I’ll let you take one off me.’”
“What did he say to that?” I asked, hoping that some hitch would occur to prevent the curtain from rising on time.
“Oh, he’s a snitcher. He was getting something to carry his chief—feeling our pulse,” she smiled back at me.
“You gave him something.”
“Sure. I gave him an earful. Next week we’re going to have a meeting at the house of the girl who lives nearest the shop. When the cut comes we’ll be ready for them.”