The drain and exhaustion experienced after a day of speeding at a machine was described by another worker, a girl of good health and lively mind, who afterwards found more attractive employment. She said that in her factory days she used to walk home, a distance of a mile, at nine o'clock, after her work was done, with a cousin. The cousin was another clever and spirited Russian girl of the same age. They had a hundred things to talk about, but as they left the factory, one would almost always say to the other: "Please do not speak to me on my way home. I am so tired I can scarcely answer." Instantly after supper they went to bed. In the morning they hurried through breakfast to be at the factory at eight, to go through the round of the day before.
"We only went from bed to work, and from work to bed again," one of the girls said, "and sometimes if we sat up a little while at home, we were so tired we could not speak to the rest, and we hardly knew what they were talking about. And still, although there was nothing for us but bed and machine, we could not earn enough to take care of ourselves through the slack season."
It is significant to compare with the account of these ill-paid operatives, exhausted from speeding, the chronicle of a skilled worker in a belt-factory, Theresa Luther, earning $17 a week.
She was a young German-American Protestant woman of 27, born in New York. After her father died, she instantly helped her older brother shoulder the support of the family, as readily as though she had been a capable and adventurous boy. Strong, competent, and high-spirited, Miss Luther was a tall girl, fair-haired, with dark blue eyes, and a very beautiful direct glance.
Her father had been a wood-carver, an artist responsible for some of the most interesting work in his craft done in New York. Theresa, too, had dexterity with her hands. At the age of fifteen she entered a leather belt factory as a "trimmer." She was so quick that she earned almost immediately $7 a week, a remarkable wage for a beginner of fifteen. Soon she was permitted to fold and pack. Not long afterwards, overhearing a forewoman lamenting the absence of machine operatives, she observed that she could run a sewing-machine at home. The forewoman, amused, placed her at the machine. After that she had stitched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory.
Leather belt stitching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of stitching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation from a straight line in the stitch spoils the entire piece of work. Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so much strength that the stitching through the doubled leather, necessitated by putting on the buckle, can be performed only by men. Theresa used to complete two gross of belts a day. She and other Americans in the factory were hard-pressed by some Russian girls, who could finish in a day four gross of very badly sewed belts with enormous stitches and loose threads. When the forewoman blamed Theresa for finishing less work than these girls, she freely expressed her contempt for their slovenly belts. She had a strong handicraft pride, and it was pleasant to see her instinctive scorn in quoting the forewoman's reply that "None of them (the badly made belts) ever came back"—as though their selling quality were the one test of their workmanship.
She had left the factory because of a complete breakdown from long hours of overwork. In one winter she had been at the machine seventy-one hours a week for ten weeks. After this severe experience, she had a long prostration and was depleted, exhausted, in a sort of physical torpor in which she was unable to do anything for months.
On her recovery she entered another factory, where the hours are not so excessive, the treatment is fair, and she has now an excellent position as forewoman at $18 a week.
Theresa was a very earnest, clear-minded girl, with strong convictions concerning the bad effect of excessive hours for working women. At the time when the hearing on the New York State Labor Law was held at Albany last spring, she had been active in obtaining a petition, signed by a body of New York working girls and placed in the hands of Labor Commissioner Williams, to aid in securing a shortening of their present legal hours. Theresa had advanced beyond the drudgery of her trade to one of its better positions by extraordinary ability. Some of the skilled machine operatives, like some of the unskilled factory workers, were buoyed through the monotony of their present calling by the hope of leaving it for another occupation.
Alta Semenova, a Polish glove maker, twenty years old, worked nine hours a day at a machine for $7 a week, and studied five evenings a week in a private evening school, for which she paid $4 a month tuition.