“You’d never dream how many kinds there have been, or, for that matter, how many kinds there are. We even make stocks for a few old-fashioned gentlemen that will have them. It’s a business that a lady turns to first thing almost if she wants to earn, and we give out hundreds on hundreds to such, besides sending loads into the country. I often think our house turns out enough for the whole United States, but we’re only a beginning. We pay well,—well as any, and better. Twenty-five cents a dozen is good pay now, and we see that our cutter leaves margin enough to keep the women from being cheated. That’s a great trick with some. Sometimes the cutter is paid by the number he can get out of a piece of goods; sometimes he screws just because he’s made so. But they cut by measure, and they allow so little to turn in that the thing frays in your hand, and no mortal could help it, and if one is frayed the foreman just throws out the dozen. Then lots of them advertise for girls to learn, and say they must give the first week or fortnight free; and when that is over they say work is slack or some other excuse, and take in a lot more that have been waiting. We’ve taken many a girl that came crying and told how she’d been kept on and cheated. There’s one man on Third Avenue that runs his place on this plan, and has got rich. But I say to every girl: ‘You’d better have something more than the last shape in neckties between you and starvation. You’ll never get beyond five or six dollars a week at most, and generally not that.’ It don’t make any difference. There are dozens waiting for the chance to starve genteelly. It’s a genteel trade and a pretty steady one, but if a dull time comes the girls go into cigar-making and manage along somehow. I’ve coaxed a good many into service, but it isn’t one in a hundred will try that.”
The third woman represented a hat-pressing factory in which she had been eleven years, and in which the wages had fallen year by year, till at present women, even when most expert, can earn not over six dollars per week as against from eight to twelve in previous years. The trade is regarded as a steady one, for spring and summer straws give place to felt, and a certain number of hands are sure of employment. In direct association with this trade must be considered that of artificial flowers and feathers, in which there is perpetual see-saw. If feathers are in vogue flowers are down, and vice versa. Five thousand women are employed on feathers, and the establishments, which in 1871 numbered but twelve, now number over fifty; but those for flowers far exceed them. Learners work for three dollars or less per week, the highest wages attainable in either being fifteen dollars, the average being about nine. The demand for one or the other is continuous, but when fashion in 1886 called for scarfs and flowers, four thousand feather-workers were thrown out and lived as they could till another turn in the wheel restored their occupation.
“One or the other of ’em is always steady” said a woman who had learned both trades, and thus stood prepared to circumvent fate. “The trouble is, you never know a week ahead which will be up and which down. Lots of us have learned both, and when I see the firm putting their heads together I know what it means and just go across the way to Pillsbury’s, and the same with them. It’s good pay and one or the other steady, but the Lord only knows which.”
“If you want steadiness you’ve got to take to jute,” said a girl who with her sister lived in one of the upper rooms. “There ain’t many jute-mills in the country, and you go straight ahead. We two began in a cotton-mill, but there’s this queer thing about it. Breathe cotton-fluff all day and you’re just sure to have consumption; but breathe a peck of jute-fluff a day and it didn’t seem to make any difference. That isn’t my notion. Our doctor said he’d noticed it, and he took home some of the fibre to examine it. For my part we’re called a rough lot, but I’d rather take that discredit and keep on in the mill. You can stir round and don’t have to double up over sewing or that kind of thing. I can earn seven dollars a week, and I’d rather earn it that way than any other.”
An hour or two in the mill, which included every form of manufacture that jute has yet taken, from seamless bags of all sizes and grades up to carpets, convinced one that if nerves were hardened to the incessant noise of machinery, there were distinct advantages associated with it. The few Scotch in the mill, men and women who had been brought over from Dundee, the headquarters of the jute industry abroad, insisted that jute was healthy, and long life for all who handled it a forgone conclusion. A tour among the workers seemed to confirm this impression, though here and there one found the factory face, with its dead paleness and dark-ringed eyes. Children as small as can be held to be consistent with the assumption of their thirteen years are preferred, their work as “doffers” or spool-changers requiring small quick hands. So, too, in fixing the pattern for carpets, where the threads must be manipulated with speed and light touch. It is preferred that children should grow up in the mill, passing from one room to another as they master processes, and the employees thus stay on and regard themselves as portions of the business. Some three or four thousand women and girls find occupation here. The waste from the carding-rooms is sent to the paper-mills and enters into manila paper and pasteboard, and this brings one to the paper-box makers, of whom there are several thousand at work.
This trade, while nominally one of the steadiest, has its short periods of depression. Competition is also as severe here as in every other present form of industry, and thus prices are kept down, the highest rate of wages earned being nine dollars, while seven dollars is considered fair. There must be a certain apprenticeship, not less than six months being required to master details and understand each stage of the work. In one of the best of these establishments, where space was plenty and ventilation and other conditions all good, one woman had been in the firm’s employ for eighteen years and was practically forewoman, though no such office is recognized. Beginners were placed in her hands and did not leave her till a perfect box could be turned off. Cutting is all done by special machines, and the paper for covering is prepared in the same way, glue or paste being used according to the degree of strength desired in the box. The work is all piece-work, from fifty to seventy cents a hundred being paid; a fair worker making two hundred a day and an expert nearly or quite three hundred. But competition governs the price and cuts are often made. A firm will underbid and an order be transferred to it, unless the girls will consent to do the work five or, it may be, ten cents less on the hundred, and thus wages can seldom pass beyond nine dollars a week, dull seasons and cuts reducing the average to seven and a half. Many even good workers fall far below this, as they prefer to come late and go early, piece-work admitting of this arrangement. The woman who takes up this trade may be confident of earning from twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month, but she never exceeds this amount; nor is there promotion beyond a certain point. In paper hangings wages do not rise above twenty-five dollars at most, and in paper collars and cuffs, as in everything connected with clothing, the rate is much less. Rags are the foundation industry in all these forms of paper manufacture, but the two thousand women who work at sorting these seldom pass beyond five dollars, and more often receive but two and a half or three dollars per week.
Under much the same head must come the preparation of sample cards, playing cards, and various forms of stationers’ work. The latter has short dull seasons when girls may, for two or three weeks, have no work; but it is otherwise a steady trade, the wages running from three and a half to seven dollars per week. They stamp initials and crests with large hand presses, and stamp also the cheaper order of lithographs; they run envelope machines, color mourning paper, apply mucilage to envelopes, and pack small boxes of paper and envelopes. In all of the last mentioned trades hours are from eight A. M. to half-past five P. M., with half an hour for lunch, and a girl of fifteen can earn the same wages as the woman of fifty, a light, quick touch and care being the only essentials.
The trades mentioned here and in preceding papers form but a portion of the ninety and more open to women. Thirty-eight of these are directly connected with clothing, and include every phase of ornament or use in braid, gimp, button, clasp, lining, or other article employed in its manufacture. In every one of these competition keeps wages at the lowest possible figure. Outside of the army here employed come the washers and ironers who laundry shirts and underwear, whose work is of the most exhausting order, who “lean hard” on the iron, and in time become the victims of diseases resulting from ten hours a day of this “leaning hard,” and who complain bitterly that prisons and reformatories underbid them and keep wages down. It is quite true. Convict labor here as elsewhere is the foe of the honest worker, and complicates a problem already sufficiently complicated. These ironers can make from ten to twelve dollars per week, but soon fail in health and turn to lighter work, many of them taking up cigar-making, which soon finishes the work of demoralization.
Fringes, gimps, plush, and bonnet ornaments are overcrowded with workers, for here, as in flowers and feathers, fashion determines the season’s work, and the fringe-maker has for a year or so had small call for her knowledge save in some forms of upholstery. One and all are so hedged in by competition that to pass beyond a certain limit is impossible, and all wages are kept at the lowest point, not only by this fact, but by the fact that many women who had learned the trade continue it after marriage as a means of adding a trifle to the family income. An expert in any one of them is tolerably certain of steady employment, but wages have reached the lowest point and it does not appear that any rise is probable. Sharp competition rules and will rule till the working class themselves recognize the necessity of an education that will make them something more than adjuncts to machinery, and of an organization in which co-operation will take the place of competition. That both must come is as certain as that evolution is upward and not downward, but it is still a distant day, and neither employer nor employed have yet learned the possibilities of either.