These places referred to in this affidavit by Dr. Stiebling, who is a wealthy and respectable medical practitioner, are places where goods are made almost exclusively for Boston houses.
Another physician of standing and repute, Dr. Markierez, who made an investigation of the sweating district, in connection with a commission from the advisory board of the operative tailors of Boston, in August, 1889, states that the section of New York City in which the tenement-house system of clothing manufacture is carried on, is filthy and infested with vermin; and he further affirms that the sanitary condition of these tenement houses is so low that the death rate is frightful and almost beyond comprehension.
That the sweating system in New York degrades the men and women employed in the sweatshops, may be inferred from the fact that men and women to the number of twelve have been found sleeping together in one of these workrooms. The tenement-house factories are so crowded that no such thing as privacy or modesty, on the part of men or women, is possible; the usual water-closet is a wooden bucket upon every landing, which fills the air with its vile and death-breeding stench.
The New York sweaters, like some of their English prototypes, take advantage of the newly arrived foreigners who do not understand the language. Green hands, who have just arrived at Castle Garden, are pure gold for the contractors. Full-grown men among these will receive, probably, two dollars a week, but one case was discovered where a man was only paid eighty cents for his week's labor. A fourteen-year-old boy was found in a Jewish sweatshop, who, although he had been in the shop eight months, was still receiving only his board. If that is not slavery, what is it?
But now let us come to Boston. To begin with, I. S. Mullen, State Inspector of factories and workshops, testified, before the committee on public health, of the Massachusetts Legislature, on the 30th of last March, that he had found two places in Boston as bad as anything he had seen in New York. How much that means, you can imagine, after the descriptions I have given.
The State inspectors of factories and public buildings, in their report to Chief Wade of the Massachusetts district police, say that "the confidential clerk of perhaps the largest concern in town assured us that but a small part of their goods were made in New York, and that in shops; that all of their nice work was done in Boston; admitted the fact of tenement-house clothing, but thought the greater part of it was worn in New York, and wished that its manufacture could be prohibited by law. This gentleman, as well as some others questioned, believed that relatively there was as much tenement-house work done in Boston as in New York, and under nearly as unwholesome conditions."
[Illustration: PAUL, REVERE HOUSE, NORTH SQUARE.]
The Boston Evening Record, of September 29, 1890, speaks as follows of Boston sweating: "The shops are scattered all over the city proper, and a visit to one is a visit to all. The cheapest shop in the city is on lower Hanover Street. The work is done in a square, low-studded room about twenty-four feet square. Within this space are sixteen women and three men at work. There are also half a dozen sewing-machines, a large stove (kept in full blast to heat the flat-irons, necessary at every stage of clothing manufacture), two pressing-machines, and piles of unfinished clothing. Two windows illumine the room, furnishing light for the nineteen workers. Working hours are from seven A. M. to six P. M., with no clipping of time at either end of the day. The proprietor is a Hebrew. One of the operatives thus describes the life: 'We make from two dollars and a half to four dollars a week, depending on how strong we are, but none of us can make the last figure very long. The air is bad, and the room is kept too hot. In the warm, summer days the heat was something awful. Every little while there is a cut-down, and about once in so often the boss fails, and leaves the girls in the lurch about their pay.
"'Another bad thing is the "sample" game. A small lot of garments are brought in, which, we are told, must be made up very carefully. We are made to rip, and do work over, to suit the notions of the big firms, who want the garments to send out on the road. It takes twice as long to make such a coat, but we get no more for it. Of course the game is played on us when the coats are not really samples. If we accidentally scorch the cloth a little, in pressing, we have to pay for that.'"
An officer of the Operatives' Union puts the number of sweat-shops in Boston at one hundred and fifty, but this does not include the smaller tenement-house shops that are beginning to develop here very rapidly.