The Tariff in Our Times

by Ida M. Tarbell

A second surprise awaits the student of these Rhode Island laborers blessed by protection. They are an unstable quantity. They must be constantly replaced. The “benefits” do not hold them. The success of the overseer in the textile factory has come to be judged largely by his ability to “hold labor.” One of the interesting proofs of the restlessness of the operatives is the small percentage of people in the state who own their own homes. A recent careful investigation into the housing conditions of the state shows that farm-houses aside, 75 per cent of Rhode Island’s population live in rented houses. That is, in one of the first settled states of the Union, one of the most advantageously situated, one offering the best opportunities for diversified occupations, one of the richest in its per capita product and bank deposits, only a fourth of the people live in houses which they own.

But why should the laborers in an industry which the people of the United States pay so handsomely to support be restless? Why in these seventy years and more of continued and constantly increasing protection have they not become a stable, settled, home-owning body of American workmen? Surely that is what we have been taught to believe the tariff would do. The answer to a question of this nature is always complicated. Nevertheless, in this case it is answered fairly well by a review of the conditions under which the textile operative works, the wages he receives, and the money he must expend to live.

Under the most perfect conditions yet devised the making of cotton and woollen cloth is hard and wearing labor. Under the conditions too general in Rhode Island it is exhausting and dangerous. The very atmosphere in which the work goes on is against the operative. The temperature throughout the factory runs high—80°, 90°, 100°, even, is not unusual. The work does not require this; the factory laws of England forbid the excessive temperature in which much of Rhode Island’s spinning and weaving is done. Worse than the high temperature is the degree of humidity which prevails. Without a certain moisture in the air the “work does not go well.” The result is a good deal of the time an atmosphere as oppressive as that which Washington and Philadelphia suffer in summer time. The ventilation in most of the factories is insufficient, and as any draft is bad for the work the windows are usually closed from end to end of the great barracks. A half hour in the atmosphere of a factory is sufficient to throw one unaccustomed to it into a steaming perspiration. The operative usually ends the day’s work in wet clothes.

Then there is the cotton lint, or “fly,” as it is called, which literally fills the air. It is no unusual thing to find the air around the factory for a hundred or more feet literally alive with cotton shreds. There are contrivances for carrying off a certain amount of this dust, but there are few Rhode Island factories which have installed them, and there is no one in which, so far as I know, any energetic and scientific efforts are making to solve the terrible problem. For terrible it is. Breathe a cotton-saturated air, a damp, hot air at that, for ten hours a day and consider the condition in which lungs and throat will be.

Now these are conditions natural to the making of cotton and woollen cloths, conditions which can never be entirely corrected. They are hard and wearing, but they become dangerous in the extreme when combined with certain other conditions not incident to the industry, due entirely to the ignorance or the greed or the indifference of factory owners.

It is hard to believe that men who ask other men and women and children to labor ten hours a day in a dripping heat and an atmosphere alive with cotton and wool particles will be slow to furnish them abundant supplies of pure flowing drinking water; but a bucket or barrel filled from some outside source is frequently all that is furnished a floor of workers.

It is difficult to believe that factory owners would not be eager to see that these workers of theirs were furnished with comfortably heated toilet rooms, with every sanitary appliance; but all up and down the Pawtucket River one finds factories with toilets that cannot by any stretch of words be called respectable.

When the day’s work is done the textile operative rarely has a comfortable cloak or dressing room in which to prepare for the street. If it were merely the matter of putting on a hat and coat, this would not be serious. But part at least of the clothes ought to be changed before going out. The heat, moisture, and dust under which he has worked for ten hours make it unsafe to go suddenly into the open air without dry garments. In cold weather a chill or shock is almost inevitable. But it is rare that the factory provides a dressing room. The result is that bronchitis and pneumonia are always attacking textile operatives, weakening lungs and throat and fitting the system for the white plague, which hangs like a perpetual shadow over a textile community.

Now for fifty-eight hours of labor a week under these conditions what do they earn? How well equipped are their pockets to fight the exhaustion, the threatening diseases which are incident to their labor? To avoid exaggeration accept the figures for 1907, one of the occasional boom years which cotton and woollen manufacturers have enjoyed in this country. The average weekly earnings for 58 hours in cotton factories in that year were: For the carding room $7.80, for mule spinners $12.92, for speeders $10.62, for weavers $10.38. In the woollen industry the picker received $8.00, the woman spinner $7.25, the man spinner $12.91, the weavers $15.34.

If a man could make these wages for fifty-two weeks a year throughout his working life, if he had a thrifty wife and healthy children, his lot, if not altogether rosy, would be far from hopeless; he might even be able to realize the dream of a little home and garden of his own which lurks in the mind of every normal man, and which in the case of the textile operative is almost imperative if he is to have a decent and independent old age. For this man, however husky he may be at the start, however skilful a laborer, has always a short working life. There are few old men and women in textile factories. By 55 they are unfit for the labor. The terrible strain on brain and nerve and muscle has so destroyed the agility and power of attention necessary that they must give up the factory, where, indeed, for several years their output has probably been gradually decreasing. As almost all textile operatives are paid by the piece the wage will gradually fall off as dexterity declines. By 55, then, if not earlier, he drops out, picking up thereafter any odd job he may.