The majority of restaurant employees live with their family or relatives ([See Diagram 3]), but this does not mean that they are not entirely self-dependent. As large a proportion of a girl’s wage goes into the family exchequer as she would have to pay for board and lodging elsewhere. The financial advantage of living at home appears chiefly in giving her a place of refuge when she is out of a job.
Restaurant workers are a tenement house population. A few, to be sure, can afford comfortable little apartments of their own, but as a whole their lot falls within the congested tenement districts of the city. Confusion, over-crowding, dirt, lack of sunlight, air and privacy, and unwholesome surroundings are only too common in their homes. The janitor of an East Side tenement house said: “A little while ago down in Third Street there were twenty-three girls sleeping in two rooms. They’d put their mattresses down on the floor at night and pile them on top of each other in the day time. Most of them were kitchen hands at ⸺’s,” naming a well-known chain of restaurants.
The low standards of the European peasant class from which restaurant workers are largely recruited, drag down all standards. No other result is possible under present conditions. They live—but how? Low wages, miserably long hours, no opportunity to fit themselves for their new surroundings—this is what we offer these young peasant girls who come to America confidently expecting better things than they have left behind.
HOURS.
Weekly Hours of Labor.
The salient characteristic of restaurant work is the length of the working day. Fifty-eight per cent. of the women employees work each week beyond the fifty-four-hour limit set by law for women in stores and factories. A twelve-hour day and a seven-day week is the lot of one-fifth of these workers. ([See Diagram 5.]) A fifteen-hour day is not uncommon. Not quite one-half of the waitresses work over 54 hours a week or 9 hours a day. The reason for this is that a large number of them, 31 per cent., are “one-meal girls.” Seventy-eight per cent. of all other restaurant workers, however, exceed the fifty-four hour week.
Comparing the hours of labor of these women with the hours of labor of all employees, both male and female, in the factories of New York State, four per cent. of the factory employees and thirty-five per cent. of the women restaurant employees work over sixty hours a week. Two per cent. of the factory employees and twenty per cent. of the women in restaurants work seventy-two hours or over.[4]
Diagram 6.—Comparison of Weekly Hours of Labor for Women in Restaurants and all Factory Employees in New York State.