[9]. “Fatigue and Efficiency,” Part II, p. 290.
Several pages of testimony from all over the world are submitted in support of the statement that “even the lightest work becomes totally exhausting when carried on for an excessive length of time.” She quotes from Dr. Ludwig Hirt’s “The Disease of Working People”: “No attitude of the body is harmful in itself; only in prolonging it until it produces harmful results; all the well-known disturbances, such as varicose veins, etc., etc., arise not through sitting or standing, but through excessively prolonged sitting or standing.”[[10]]
[10]. “Fatigue and Efficiency,” Part II, p. 321.
For the protection of their women workers more than thirty American States have enacted laws limiting the hours of employment for women; but only three States,—Massachusetts, Indiana and Nebraska,—have passed a law in such form as to make it enforcible. Miss Goldmark defines “the rigid law, which prohibits overtime and night work,” as “one which provides fixed boundaries for working hours. It protects women from working after a specified hour at night, and more than a given number of hours by the day or week. The best exemplar of this kind of law in the United States is the Massachusetts statute which prohibits the employment of women in textile mills more than ten hours in one day, or more than fifty-four hours in one week, or before six o’clock in the morning or after six o’clock in the evening.... The law is final. Its provisions are clear cut. Employers, employes and inspectors know without disagreement or argument what constitutes a violation. Work continued after the specified closing hour is conclusive evidence of violation.”
As showing the beneficial effect of shorter hours on output, Miss Goldmark quotes at length from the testimony of various Massachusetts employers of labor. The Treasurer of the Atlantic Mills, in Lawrence, stated: “We saw an improvement in the operatives directly after adopting ten hours.... We have had more continuous and uninterrupted work throughout the year than before.” The Report of the Massachusetts District Police states: “One manufacturer stated to me a short time ago that he had run his mill sixty-six hours per week, supposing that by so doing he increased the production nearly one-eleventh, but was persuaded ... to reduce his running time to sixty hours per week, and at the end of six months found that the production of his mill had increased nearly ten per cent, while the quality of work done was more perfect.”
The entire question of the long day is as yet in its incipiency in Hawaii, and the closing paragraph of Miss Goldmark’s preface is peculiarly pertinent. She says:
“In the main opposition to laws protecting working women and children has come from the unenlightened employer, who has been blind to his own larger interests and who has always seen in every attempt to protect the workers an interference with business and dividends. To this day it is the short-sighted and narrow-minded spirit of money-making that is the most persistent enemy of measures designed to save the workers from exhaustion and to conserve their working capacities. Regular, continuous labor and exertion is as necessary for the worker’s health as it is for subsistence, and if legislation regulating the workday had sought to invade legitimate work, it would long ago have defeated its own end....
“First the new industry, then exploitation, then the demand for some measure of protection—such is the universal story. Nor is this a chance sequence. It is the relentless record of history, the more impressive for its unconscious testimony to a waste of human effort and experience, in retrospect scarcely credible among a thinking people, yet in our very midst persisting steadily to this day.”
Hawaiian employers, most of whom are kamaainas, sincerely interested in the welfare of the Hawaiian girls and women, have not given adequate thought to the broader social problems of their employes. Kind treatment, good air and light do much to mitigate matters, but no woman or girl can work standing continuously for ten or more hours a day and retain her health. Nor will she in this way become a homemaker, and an intelligent mother and member of the community.