FOREWORD.
“I keep hearing about laws for women. Where are they?” This was the question asked by a woman working twelve hours a day in a restaurant. What must we tell her? What excuse have we to offer for excluding her from the protection the law gives to women working in factories and mercantile establishments? That we have safeguarded women in these fields of employment from overwork proves that we know the dangers of overwork, that long hours interpreted in terms of human life mean exhaustion, disease, immorality, pauperism and a weaker generation to follow our own. This is an old story, it has been told again and again. Yet with our over-sensitiveness to an encroachment upon the rights and liberties of American citizens, we have failed to extend the protection of our laws to all who need their protection.
The New York State Labor Law as it stands makes it illegal to employ women in factories and mercantile establishments more than fifty-four hours or six days in any one week, or between ten o’clock at night and six o’clock in the morning. So far, so good. If these laws are enforced, we may feel fairly confident that women in these branches of industry at least have some measure of protection. But what of the women not safeguarded by the law? Who are they, and why should they be neglected?
Between fifteen and twenty thousand of these women are workers in restaurants—waitresses, cooks, kitchen girls, pantry hands—upon whose services all of us depend at one time or another for our comfort and pleasure. The Consumers’ League of New York City has long felt the need of including restaurant workers under the provisions of the Labor Law. The State Department of Labor lays special stress upon this need.[1]Believing, therefore, both from casual observation and from the statement of the Labor Department that women in restaurants are not properly guarded from industrial strain, the League planned to explore the field further, to discover just what actually are the hours, wages and general conditionsof work in this branch of industry and to learn their effect upon the life and health of the worker.
A valuable study of this subject was made in 1910 by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics for New York and several of the larger cities of the country.[2]Though the Consumers’ League has not entered upon wholly new ground, yet with adequate time for detailed study it has been possible for it to make a more exhaustive inquiry than any made heretofore, and to bring to light new phases of the question. The story of its discoveries is told in the pages that follow, to this end, that with wider knowledge of facts, public interest may be reawakened and stimulated to demand adequate legal protection for women employed in restaurants.