The manager paused and looked reflectively at his well-kept finger-nails.
“My dear madam, that’s a question I have no time to consider. I dare say they earn a living somehow. Indeed, I’m told they go into cigar factories. There’s always plenty of work.”
“Plenty of work,”—a form of words so familiar that I looked for it now from both employer and employed. But for the last was an addition finding no place on the lips of the first: “Plenty of work? Oh, yes! I can always get plenty of work. The trouble is to get the wages for it.”
A block or so below, and further west, one great window of a cheaper establishment held jackets and wraps large and small, marked down for the holidays, their advertisement in a morning paper having read, “Jackets from $4 up.” Still further over, another window displayed numbers as great, and a placard at one side announced: “These elegant jackets from $2.87 up.” The cloth might be shoddy, but here was a garment, fashionably cut, well finished to all appearance, and unexceptionable in pattern and color. All along the crowded avenue the story was the same, and as east took the place of west, and Grand Street and the Bowery and Third Avenue gave in their returns, “These elegant jackets from $2.35 up” gave the final depth to which cheapness could descend.
If this was retail, what could be the wholesale price, and what was likely to be the story of the worker from whose hands they had come? It is worth while to follow these jackets as they emerge from the cutting-room, and in packages holding such number of dozens as has been agreed upon, pass to the express wagon which distributes them among the workers, the firm in mind at present, like many others, preferring this arrangement to any which involves dealing directly with the women.
First on the list stands the name of a woman a little over fifty years old, whose husband is a painter and who left Germany eight years ago, urged to come over by a daughter more adventurous than the rest, who had married and emigrated at once. Work was plentiful when they arrived, and the husband found immediate employment at his trade, with wages so high that the wife had no occasion for any employment outside her own rooms. The youngest child, a girl of nine, went to school. They lived in comfortable rooms on a decent street, put money in a savings bank, and felt that America held more good even than the name had always seemed to promise. Then came the financial troubles of 1879 and 1881, the gradual fall of wages, the long seasons when there was no work, and last, the fate that overtakes the worker in lead, whether painter or in any other branch,—first painter’s colic, and the long train of symptoms preceding the paralysis which came at last, the stroke a light one, but leaving the patient with the “drop hand” and all the other complications, testifying that the working days were over. Strength enough returned for an odd job now and then, and the little man accepted his fate cheerily, and congratulated himself that the bank held a little fund and that thus the lowering wages could be pieced out. The bank settled this question by almost immediate failure; a long and expensive illness for the wife followed; and when it ended furniture and small valuables of every sort had been pawned, and they left the empty rooms for narrower quarters and sought for work in which all could share. To add to the complication, the daughter, who had had good sense enough to take a place as child’s nurse, broke her leg, and became, even when able to walk again, too disabled to return to this work. She could run the machine, and her mother was an expert buttonhole-maker and had already learned various forms of work on cloth, both in cheap coats and pantaloons, and in jackets and cloaks. The jackets seemed to promise most, for in 1884 each one brought to the maker sixty cents, buttonholes being $1.50 per hundred, the presser receiving ten cents each and the finisher six cents, these amounts being deducted from the price paid on each. To save this amount the husband learned how to press, and though his crippled hands can barely grasp the iron, and often his wife must help him place the cramped fingers in position, he stands there smiling and well content to add this mite to the fund. For a year their home has been in a deep basement, where, save at noonday, it is impossible to run the machines without artificial light. A dark room opens from the one in which they work, itself dark, unventilated save from the hall, and chosen as abiding place because it represents but four dollars a month in rent. Two machines run by mother and daughter stand as near the window as possible, and close by is the press-board and the pale but optimistic little man, who looks proudly at each seam as he lays it open. Jackets are everywhere,—piled on chairs and scattered over the floor,—waiting the various operations necessary before they can at last be bundled on the ex-painter’s back, who smiles to himself as he toils down to the firm’s headquarters, reflecting that he has saved the expressage another week. What are the returns? Lisa will give them,—the wife whose English is still uncertain, and whose gentle, anxious eyes grow eager and bright as she talks, the husband nodding confirmation, or shaking his head as he sees the tears come suddenly, with a “Not so, not so, Lisa.”
“I know not if we shall live at all,” she says. “For see. We two, my Gretchen and I, we make but ten for a day. Tree dollar? Yes, but you must take from it de buttonhole an’ finish and much else, and it is so short—so short that we can work on them. The season, that is it—six weeks—two months, maybe, and then pantaloon till spring jacket come. See. It is early that we begin,—seven, maybe,—and all day we shall sew and sew. We eat no warm essen. On table dere is bread and beer in pitcher and cheese to-day. We sit not down, for time goes away so. No, we stand and eat as we must, and sew more and more. Ten jackets to one day—so Gretchen and me can make ten jackets to one day, but we sit always—we go not out. It is fourteen hours efery day—yes, many time sixteen—we work and work. Then we fall on bed and sleep, and when we wake again it is work always. And I must stop a leetle; not much, but a leetle, for my back have such pain that I fall on the bed to say, ‘Ach Gott! is it living to work so in this rich, free America?’ But he is sick always, my man, even if he will laugh. He say he must laugh alway for two because I cannot. For when this work is past it is only pantaloons, and sew so hard as we may it is five, six pair maybe, for Gretchen and me all day, and that not always. Many day we do nothing because they say work is dull, and then goes away all we save before. But we need not to ask help. So much is good that we work and earn, but I think I die soon of my pain, and who then helps his fingers so stiff to press or thinks how he will ache even when he will laugh? It is because America is best that we come, but how is it best to die because it is always work and no joy, no hope, never one so small stop?”
“Never one so small stop.” The attic had the same story, and the white-faced, hollow-eyed woman who tried to smile as she spoke turned also from the waiting pile of jackets and drew one or two back to the sheet spread for them on the floor to which they had slipped. A table and two chairs, a small stove in which burned bare handful of coals, the two machines, at one of which a girl of twenty still sewed on, and in the corner a bed, on which lay another girl of the same age, but with the crimson spot on her cheeks and the shining eyes of advanced consumption. It had been one of the faces so often seen behind the counters of the great stores, delicate in features and coloring, with soft dark eyes and fair masses of hair loose on the pillow.
“I try to keep her tidy,” the mother said, “but she can’t bear her hair up a minute, it’s so heavy on her head, an’ I’ve no time to ’tend to it but the minute I take in the morning. It’s jackets now that I’m on. I thought maybe there’d be less risk in them than cloaks. Cloaks seem to give ’em so much chance to cheat. I wouldn’t work at all at home, I’d be out doing by the day, for I had a good run of work, but there’s Maggie, and I can’t leave her, though God knows she gets little good of me but the knowing I’m here. I’ll tell you what they did to me on cloaks. I work for S—— & Co., far down on Broadway, and they give out the most expensive kind of cloaks, and nine dollars a dozen for the making; other kinds, too, but I’d been on them a good while and knew just how. The pay was regular, but before I’d had work from them a month I saw they were bound to make complaints and dock pay whether there was any fault in the work or not. One and another took their turn, and no help for it; for if they complained the foreman just said: ‘You needn’t take any work unless you like. There are plenty waiting to fill your place.’ Poor souls! What could they do but go on?
“At last came my turn. He tossed them all over. ‘It’s poor work,’ he said. ‘They’re not finished properly. You can’t be paid for botching. There’s three dollars, and that’s too much.’ ‘The work is the same it’s always been. There’s no botching,’ I said; but he held out the three dollars. ‘No,’ I said, ‘If you won’t pay fair I’ll go to the Woman’s Protective Union and see what they’ll do.’ His face was black as thunder. ‘Take your money,’ he says, holding out the rest, ‘but you may sing for more work from this establishment,’ and he flung the money on the floor. That didn’t trouble me, because I knew I could get work just below, and I did that same day; twenty cloaks, ten to be made at sixty cents apiece, and ten at fifty-five cents. I had Angie here to help, and when they were done I carried them down. This man was a Jew, but there’s small difference. If the Jew knew best how to cheat in the beginning, the Christian caught up with him long ago. ‘The buttons are all on wrong,’ he said. ‘I told you to set them an inch further back. We’ll have to alter them every one and charge you for the time.’ ‘I can take oath they are on as I was told to put them on,’ I said, ‘but if they must be changed I’ll change them myself and save the money.’