CHAPTER EIGHTEENTH.
STEADY TRADES AND THEIR OUTLOOK.
“I used to think there were steady trades; but somehow now everything gets mixed, and you can’t tell what’s steady and what isn’t.”
“What makes the mix?”
“The Lord only knows! I’ve studied over it till I’m dazed, and sometimes I’ve wondered if my mind was weakening.”
The speaker, a middle-aged Scotchwoman, whose tongue still held a little of the burr that thirty years of American life had not been able to extract, put her hand to her head as if the fault must concentrate there.
“If it was my trade alone,” she said, “I might think I was to blame for not learning new ways, but it’s the same in all. Now, take mattress-making. I learned that because I could help my father best that way. He was an upholsterer in Aberdeen, and came over to better himself, and he did if he hadn’t signed notes for a friend and ruined himself. He upholstered in the big families for thirty years, and everybody knew his little place on Hudson Street. People then bought furniture to last, and had it covered with the best of stuff, and so with curtains and hangings. Damask was damask, I can tell you, and velvet lambrequins meant money. No cotton-back stuff. They got shaken and brushed and done up from moths. People had some respect for good material. Nobody respects anything now. I saw a rich woman the other day let her boy six years old empty a box of candy on a pale-blue satin couch, and then sit down on it and rub his shoes up and down on the edge. I say that when there’s no respect left for anything it’s no wonder decent work comes to an end. I make a mattress and there isn’t an inch of it that isn’t sewed to last and that isn’t an honest piece of work, but you can go into any house-furnishing department and buy one that looks just as well for a third less money. Everything’s so cheap that people don’t care whether anything lasts or not, and so there’s no decent work done; and people pretend to have learned trades when really they just botch things together. I just go round in houses and make over,—places that I’ve had for years; and I’ve been forewoman in a big factory, but somehow a factory mattress never seems to me as springy and good as the old kind. Upholsterers make pretty good wages, but it can’t be called steady any more, though it used to be. I’ve thought many a time of going into business for myself, but competition’s awful, and I’m afraid to try. I won’t cheat, and there’s no getting ahead unless you do.”
“What are the wages?”
“A picker gets about three dollars a week. She just picks over the hair, and most any kind of girl seems to do now that everything is steamed or done by machinery. The highest wages now are nine dollars a week, though I used to earn fifteen and eighteen sometimes, and the dull season makes the average about six dollars. I earn nine or ten because I do a good deal of private work, but a woman that can make forty dollars a month straight ahead is lucky.”
Several women of much the same order of intelligence, two of them forewomen for years in prosperous establishments, added their testimony as to the shifting character of wages and of employments. One had watched the course of neckties for seventeen years,—a keen-eyed little widow who had fought hard to educate her two children and preserve some portion of the respectability she loved.