I said to one of the men in the line, “How often do you get a job of this kind?”
“That depends,” he replied. “A banana boat comes in about every three weeks and then I have about two days’ work.”
“What do you do between times?” I asked.
“Well, not much of anything. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Just kind of live along between the trips of these boats.”
Millinery and Dresses. A little girl in Chicago wanted to learn the millinery business. She easily found a position. It only paid four dollars a week, but she was learning, so she was willing to begin at that price. Just before Easter the shop where she worked was crowded with orders, and she was forced to work from early in the morning until late at night. When Easter was over she said, “All I know about making hats is how to sew wire together and line frames.” The girls in this shop who had been so busy were now thrown out of employment. They either had to find other employment or else live on what little money had been saved during the rush time. “I can never get ahead,” said one of the workers in the shop. “Last year I was able to make just enough to carry me through the dull season.” What is true of the millinery trade is also true of some lines of garment trades, especially the makers of evening gowns. At one period they are rushed to the limit of their endurance: at another there is nothing to do. Business demands cannot be regulated perfectly. The clerks in the stores at Christmas time must expect to do extra work.
The Vagabond Workers. One night in Seattle I saw a large group of men gathered on a street corner and singing at the top of their voices. The strange chorus was led by a young fellow who was standing on a soap box. The song he was teaching was mere doggerel; the refrain of it being “Oh, Mr. Block, you take the cake. You make me ache.” The leader would pronounce a line, then say, “Now, fellow workingmen, all sing and sing with all your might. Let us show them what we can do.” And the motley crowd shouted out the words of the song which told the story of a poor “blanket stiff”—a fellow who has to carry his blankets when he goes looking for a job—who got through work in one place, went into an employment agency to ask for a new job and was told that if he would put up the money he could get the job. He paid two dollars and was sent out into the woods. When he got off the train there was no job in sight. He came back and made his complaint, but nothing could be done because that was the method by which the employment agency made its money. He then applied to Samuel Gompers of the Federation of Labor, but all he got from Gompers was “sympathy.” This man’s name was “Block,” and to accentuate the significance of the name the leader would hold up his hand, stop the crowd from singing, and then tapping on his head would say, “What was his name?” and they would reply “Block.” “What was it made of?” and they shouted “wood.”
It was amusing to listen to this crowd but in the midst of the grotesquery of the leader and the raucous howling of the song there was a moral quality and a spiritual earnestness that even a casual listener could feel. These men had just come in from the woods. They were laborers who had been lumbering all through the winter, and now at the end of the season were thrown on the city with nothing to do. The Industrial Workers of the World, that revolutionary organization that was formed in Colorado early in this century, had found a fertile soil in the minds of these men and had not been slow to sow the seed. I stood with one of the group and listened. My friend was an elderly man who had just reached the city from the mines in Alaska. In his youth he had been a miner in Wales. Said he, “This carries me back to the days of my boyhood. The Welsh sang as these men do, and the discontent of the miners in our district gathered headway under the leadership of the local Methodist preacher. The men sang and from their singing began an enthusiasm that rolled throughout the whole region in a wave of protest against the bitter conditions under which we were forced to work. We got results. If these men keep on singing, some day they are going to make their message heard.” The main reason for the I. W. W. and similar organizations is that nothing has been done for the laborer who is at the bottom of the industrial ladder. He is considered a tramp, pushed into the out-of-the-way places, forced to do the hardest, most perilous work, and society forgets him. He is a bum, a tramp, or hobo. No one has a good word for him. Every effort to improve his condition is looked upon with disfavor. This little poem expresses the feeling of many of these men:
“The world is housed, and homed, and wived,
It takes no note as I pass by.
Nobody shared in the life I lived,
Nobody’ll share in the death I die.
“East, west, north, and south I’ve hiked,
Seen more things than I’d care to tell;
Part of the world that I’ve seen I liked—
None of it liked me overwell.
“I cheated once—or twice—in my time,
But the joy of crime I never could see,
So I never went the way of crime—
No pull-and-haul with the cops for me.