The West Side factories take in the majority of the work seekers. A few with especial pretensions to “refinement,” or whose families sincerely dread the physical strain and supposedly lower social and moral standards of the factory, go into department stores or become errand girls to milliners or dressmakers. But most of the girls prefer the higher wages of the factory. Lizzie Wade, herself a laundry worker, was perfectly clear in her sixteen-year-old mind as to the advantages of factory work over department store work. “In the first place,” she pointed out, “the factory girl gets better pay, and if she hasn’t any home, she can always get a family to live with. The girl that works in a store lives in the cheapest boarding houses, and gets soaked for her board just the same.”
Few sixteen-year-old workers are as wise as Lizzie. Many of them, no doubt, are vaguely influenced by reasons just as practical in preferring the factory to the store, though they are less able to express them. But if they are asked to justify their preferences, they are likely to return very childish answers. “Tootsie” O’Brien had achieved her working papers at fourteen and a half and was looking for a place. It was significant that Tootsie, who had qualified as a wage-earner, had not yet outgrown her baby name at home. She was willing to take any kind of work, she said, but liked housework best. She wanted to “live out” because her brother was always fighting with her. However, she soon changed her mind, as her sister, who had been a servant before her marriage, told her that she wouldn’t be allowed out when at service. She finally went to work in a factory.
Girls of this type do the most unskilled work in the entire scale of factory occupations. They are not equal to the high grade, skilled work of the garment trades and textile industries. An inquiry concerning the occupations of 26 girls showed the following results: One was a trimmer in a necktie factory; three were folding or slip-sheeting in bookbinderies; one was rolling wall paper; one was working in a tin can factory, operating a machine which fixed the bails in lard cans; nine were packers or wrappers in factories producing biscuits, candy, cigarettes, or drugs; three were markers and shakers in steam laundries; eight were errand girls and messengers for milliners or dressmakers.
These occupations are patently without educational value. The factory processes are the sort of lightweight machine work usually assigned to young girls after the last drop of individual responsibility has been squeezed out. Their chief characteristic is a degree of monotony in which no discipline for the young worker is possible because their effect is stupefaction. The work soon palls on the girl’s restless spirit. Martie Sheridan, after five months of this grinding monotony, secretly cut the belt of her machine just to get a day off. Another girl probably, long before the end of five months, would have thrown up her job and tried another, if not several others.
Finding a new place is always something of an adventure, and in the process of shifting she enjoys a few days of freedom. Pauline Stark, throughout her four years of wage-earning, had been a “rover.” She had had no trouble in finding new places and had tried so many that she had lost count of the number. “I see a sign up an’ I go an’ try. Then sometimes I meet some one I know. I stop an’ get to talking an’ mebbe I won’t look any more that day. But it don’t take long. Sometimes I throw up a job the first day. I can tell. I take a look around an’ see that it ain’t for me. Then I work out the day an’ don’t go back.”
It is difficult for the girls to give an accurate account as to where they have worked and the changes they have made. They are hazy as to places and quite unreliable as to the length of stay. With great effort we pieced together the industrial histories of girls who had been employed for some time. Although most of them had been at work less than a year, they had tried a great number of occupations. The 30 wage-earners in our club mustered among them 120 different jobs, an average of four apiece. Two girls of sixteen had held 12 positions each; one girl of sixteen, 10 positions; and one fifteen-year-old had had nine. One-third of the 30 had had five or more positions. These instances give some idea of the way in which the girl of fourteen and fifteen flits from job to job. It is no wonder that she is inaccurate concerning the details of her industrial experience when each connection is so brief and episodic. A further reason for her haziness is that her point of contact with the great factory and its processes is so slight. Nellie Sherin, aged fourteen, worked in one of the largest and best of the West Side factories. Her childish description of her work is the best indication of her incompetence. “I have to run a machine that pastes the labels. If you don’t get the boxes in right the knife breaks and a man comes and hollers at you.”
The girl of this class accepts in a matter-of-fact way conditions of work that impress the outsider as very hard. Sometimes she tells of having cried with weariness when she started. But complaints of the long day, the meager reward, and the monotony are few. She has not thought out the general aspects of the factory. Comparisons between individual places are constant, as also are personal grievances, usually against a “cranky forelady.” She rebels against the tediousness of her job. “You can hear talkin’ all over our room when the forelady goes out. Then we’ll hear her comin’ in an’ it stops short. Soon’s she goes, we all start again.” As often as not she throws up her job for a personal grievance—a quarrel with another worker, a grudge against a “boss.” Fanny Mullens left the Excelsior Laundry because her friend quarreled with the foreman and Fanny’s loyalty would not permit her to remain. The human factor is the strongest with these young workers.
The girl starts in a store at $3.00 or $3.50 a week; in a factory, at $4.00 or $5.00. The 26 wage-earning girls concerning whom information was obtained were receiving sums which varied from $3.00 to $7.50. Of this group, three were earning $3.00 or $3.50; eight were earning $4.00, and eight were earning $5.00. Thus 19 out of 26 were earning $5.00 or less. The remaining seven girls were receiving $6.00 or over; three received $6.00; two, $6.50; and two, $7.50.
One of the girls earning $6.00 had been working five years; another earning the same amount had been working but a few months. Of the two girls earning $7.50, one had been working four years in the same position and the other five months. As far as our little group of girls was concerned, there was no connection between age or experience and wages. Practically all the girls were doing such unskilled work that additional years and additional experience were idle commodities. There was, on the other hand, some divergence between what the different factories of the district were accustomed to pay for the same grade of labor.
Along with her first humble job and her first meager wage, there comes to the young girl her first taste of power. Her first pay envelope is the outward and visible sign of many changes. Her position at home is altered. She has more prestige, the first beginning of authority. Her family may be actually dependent for comfort on what she brings in. This gives to her desires and wishes a new importance. However autocratic her parents’ rule may have been, they must now turn to her for assistance. There must follow a certain loosening of the reins. Every now and again there is a girl who in these early, headstrong years will press her advantage to the full.