The tailors of New York are striking for better wages and shorter hours. They want laws to protect them, for they complain that their wages are often left unpaid.
Several of the Unions in neighboring cities have joined the New Yorkers, and it is expected that the strike will be a long one.
This strike is peculiar in one sense, for, while the workmen are really fighting the contractors, these same contractors are heartily in sympathy with them, and hope that they will win.
The contractors are the people who make the garments for the large wholesale houses, and they declare that the low prices the wholesale houses pay for the clothes is the cause of all the trouble.
Formerly the contractor was able to get $1.25 for making a coat, now the manufacturers will only pay 75 cents.
As the manufacturers' prices went down, the contractors had less money to pay their hands with, and they were obliged in turn to reduce the wages of the workers.
When the wages were as low as the contractors dared make them, they increased the day's task, and forced the workers to make more coats in their day's work.
For the first time in six years all the branches of the tailors' trade have joined in the strike.
The leaders from all the various organizations have had meetings, and consulted as to the scale of wages to be demanded from the contractors, and the terms on which the strikers will return to work.