The Hawaiian foreman is a great favorite, and he knows the intimate personal history of all the workers—the Japanese girl who wishes to learn English; the Hawaiian woman who was closely related to the victim of the last white slave trial; the stout, but asthmatic and idle husband of one of the women, who “always shows up on pay day.”
Coffee packing pays $3.00 to $5.00 a week, according to length of service, the latter amount being paid after three years. I asked the foreman if anyone was earning $5.00 now, and he said: “No, not since my daughter left to be married.”
Few of the employes understand or speak any English, and it was therefore not possible to converse with them.
LAUNDRIES
The 150 workers normally employed in Honolulu’s three steam laundries are exempt from all the minor and some of the major ills which commonly beset this class of wage-earners.
The greatest gain is perhaps in the all-year-round opening of doors and windows, entirely obviating the collection of steam, gas fumes and other impurities. Then, too, the fact that two laundries conduct their work entirely on one floor removes the discomfort which ascending steam and heat brings when the wash-room is in a basement or lower floor. The only two-story laundry in the city has its wash-room on the second floor.
A test of all the power-driven machinery demonstrates that no more effort than stepping down is required to operate any one of them:—a great and welcome contrast with the exhausting work described in Miss Butler’s “Women and the Trades” as performed by the Pittsburgh operators of laundry machinery. To cite only one instance:
(1) Pages 182-183.
“Cuff, neckband and yoke presses, and the wing point tipper for collars, operate in the same way as the body ironers. The cuff is placed over the saddle-shaped padded head; pressure of a treadle raises the head against a steam chest and the pressure of another treadle causes the head to drop back as the cuff is finished. Only by violent exertion can hot metal and padded head be forced together. By sheer physical effort, therefore, the operator presses each cuff four times, twice on a side, and the whole body of the girl is shaken by the force she is obliged to use. In one laundry the manager said: ‘No American girl can stand this. We have to use Hungarians or other foreigners. It seems to be unhealthful, but I don’t know——’ Yet American girls do stand it. I have seen them ironing at the rate of three cuffs a minute. The motion required for operating the tipper is as violent as that of the old-style cuff press, the pressure of either treadle requiring the utmost physical effort, but in each case where I saw the machine in use the operator was a young girl not over fifteen years of age, and she was white with the strain.”
Another favorable feature characterizing the work in laundries here is the shifting of occupation made possible in small establishments. While one machine, a body-ironer for example,—on which 600 shirts may be turned out in one day, each shirt requiring ten motions, making a total of 6,000 motions of the arms and of the foot in operating the treadle,—is operated by the right foot, the collar-presser is a left-footed machine, and the girls are shifted from one machine to another, so that the strain on one part of the body exclusively is regulated. I asked one manager why this was not done in all laundries, and he said the difficulty lay in the fact that union wage scales were made for certain kinds of work; whereas he paid his employes by the month, raising wages according to ability and length of service.