[8]. Pp. 354-5-6.
This latter statement is especially interesting in the light of a conversation with the manager of one of the Honolulu canneries. He was asked his opinion of the degree of danger to the cannery women employes from being obliged to go through Iwilei, especially on their way from work in the evening. He said: “After the girls have worked ten or twelve hours a day there is not much danger that they will skylark. They are only too glad to get home and to bed.”
But even though they are too tired to “skylark” they do not go to bed. Here as elsewhere the large majority of women workers have household tasks—cooking, washing and ironing—to perform both before and after working hours; and many have children to care for. This is especially true of the Hawaiian, Chinese and Japanese, and I have seen the women standing on first one foot and then the other to relieve the strain as early as nine o’clock in the morning, after a stretch of long hours.
Managers of the canneries say that the workers are at liberty to stop work at any hour of the day they wish, as the pay is by the hour. In common practice, however, it is made as difficult as possible to secure an accounting for time excepting at regular periods; and when work is pressing permission to leave before closing time is refused.
Managers themselves say that the habit of going home before closing time or at noon is more common among the younger girls who are working during their school vacation,—which occurs almost identically with the canning season,—than among the regular workers.
The Hawaiian enjoys her work, as she enjoys most of the things she does, and she is as yet too new to industry to show superficially any ill effects of labor. It was not possible, in the three and one-half months of the investigation, to make any study of the effects of work on her health.
The experience of the world, however, is more than likely to be the experience of Hawaii.
Hours of work and the resulting fatigue strains have been made the subject of a close, scientific investigation, covering a period of five years, by Miss Josephine Goldmark, publication secretary of the National Consumers’ League, which has now been published in book form under the title of “Fatigue and Efficiency,” and gives the results of the experience of both Europe and America concerning the effects of long hours, night work and occupational strains on women workers. Miss Goldmark also gives the substance of four briefs prepared by her under the direction of Mr. Louis D. Brandeis in his successful defense of various State laws limiting women’s hours of labor.
Her investigation shows that long hours of work by women, especially if performed in a standing position, mean to the community heightened infant mortality, a falling birth rate, and race degeneration, while to the workers themselves they mean every sort of disorder. In speaking of general injuries to health, Miss Goldmark says: “The fatigue which follows excessive working hours becomes chronic, and results in general deterioration of health. While it may not result in immediate disease, it undermines the whole system by weakness and anaemia.”
On the other hand the good effect of short hours is shown by the growth of temperance, and “wherever sufficient time has elapsed since the establishment of the shorter working day, the succeeding generation has shown extraordinary improvement in physique and morals.”[[9]]