“Never was there a time when women could dress with as much real elegance on as small an expenditure of money. Bargains abound, and there is small excuse for dowdiness. The American woman is fast taking her place as the best-dressed woman in the civilized world.”
“Never was there a time when women could dress with as much real elegance on as small an expenditure of money. Bargains abound, and there is small excuse for dowdiness. The American woman is fast taking her place as the best-dressed woman in the civilized world.”
Believing very ardently that the right of every woman born includes not only “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but beauty also, it being one chief end of woman to include in her own personality all beauty attainable by reasonable means, I am in heartiest agreement with one side of the views quoted. But in this quest we have undertaken, and from which, once begun, there is no retreat, strange questions arise; and in this new dawn of larger liberty and wider outlook is seen the little cloud which, if no larger than a man’s hand, holds the seed of as wild a storm as has ever swept over humanity.
For emancipation on the one side has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other; and as one woman selects, well pleased, garment after garment, daintily tucked and trimmed and finished beyond any capacity of ordinary home sewing, marvelling a little that a few dollars can give such lavish return, there arises, from narrow attic and dark, foul basement, and crowded factory, the cry of the women whose life-blood is on these garments. Through burning, scorching days of summer; through marrow-piercing cold of winter, in hunger and rags, with white-faced children at their knees, crying for more bread, or, silent from long weakness, looking with blank eyes at the flying needle, these women toil on, twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours even, before the fixed task is done. The slice of baker’s bread and the bowl of rank black tea, boiled to extract every possibility ofstrength, are taken, still at the machine. It is easier to sit there than in rising and movement to find what weariness is in every limb. There is always a child old enough to boil the kettle and run for a loaf of bread; and all share the tea, which gives a fictitious strength, laying thus the foundation for the fragile, anæmic faces and figures to be found among the workers in the bag-factories, paper-box manufactories, etc.
“Why don’t they go into the country?” is often asked. “Why do they starve in the city when good homes and ample pay are waiting for them?”
It is not with the class to whom this question is applicable that we deal to-day. Of the army of two hundred thousand who battle for bread, nearly a third have no resource but the needle, and of this third many thousands are widows with children, to whom they cling with a devotion as strong as wiser mothers feel, and who labor night and day to prevent the scattering into asylums, and consequent destruction of the family as a family. They are widows through many causes that can hardly be said to come under the head of “natural.” Drunkenness leads, and the thousand accidents that are born of drunkenness, but there are other methods arising from the same greed that underlies most modern civilization. The enormous proportion of accidents, which, if not killing instantly, imply long disability and often death as the final result, come nine tenths of the time fromcriminal disregard of any ordinary means of protecting machinery. One great corporation, owning thousands of miles of railroad, saw eight hundred men disabled in greater or less degree in one year, and still refused to adopt a method of coupling cars which would have saved the lives of the sixty-eight brakemen who were sacrificed to the instinct of economy dominating the superintendent. The same man refused to roof over a spot where a number of freight-handlers were employed during a stormy season, rheumatism and asthma being the consequences for many, and his reason had at least the merit of frankness,—a merit often lacking in explanations that, even when most plausible, cover as essential a brutality of nature.
“Men are cheaper than shingles,” he said. “There’s a dozen waiting to fill the place of one that drops out.”
In another case, in a great saw-mill, the owner had been urged to protect a lath-saw, swearing at the persistent request, even after the day when one of his best men was led out to the ambulance, his right hand hanging by a bit of skin, his death from lockjaw presently leaving one more widow to swell the number. It is of such men that a sturdy thinker wrote last year, “Man is a self-damnable animal,” and it is on such men that the curse of the worker lies heaviest. That they exist at all is hardly credited by the multitude who believe that, for this countryat least, oppression and outrage are only names. That they exist in numbers will be instantly denied; yet to one who has heard the testimony given by weeping women, and confirmed by the reluctant admissions of employers themselves, there comes belief that no words can fully tell what wrong is still possible from man to man in this America, the hope of nations.
Is this a digression hardly to be pardoned in a paper on the trades and lives of women,—a deliberate turning toward an issue which has neither place nor right in such limits? On the contrary, it is all part of the same wretched story. The chain that binds humanity in one has not one set of links for men and another for women; and the blow aimed at one is felt also not only by those nearest, but by successive ranks to whom the shock, though only by indirect transmission, is none the less deadly in effect. And thus the wrong done on the huge scale appropriate to a great corporation finds its counterpart in a lesser but quite as well organized a wrong, born also of the spirit of greed, and working its will as pitilessly.
“If you employed on a large scale you would soon find that you ceased to look at your men as men,” said an impatient iron-worker not long ago. “They are simply so much producing power. I don’t propose to abuse them, but I’ve no time even to remember their faces, much less their names.”
Precisely on this principle reasons the employer of women, who are even less to be regarded as personalities than men. For the latter, once a year at least the employer becomes conscious of the fact that these masses of “so much producing power” are resolvable into votes, and on election day, if on no other, worthy of analysis. There is no such necessity in the case of women. The swarming crowd of applicants are absolutely at the mercy of the manager or foreman, who, unless there is a sudden pressure of work, makes the selections according to fancy, youth and any gleam of prettiness being unfailing recommendations. There are many firms of which this could not be said with any justice. There are many more in which it is the law, tacitly laid down, but none the less a fact. With such methods of selection go other methods supposed to be confined to the lowest grade of work and the lowest type of employer, both being referred to regions like Baxter or Division Streets. But they are to be found east or west indifferently, the illustration at present in mind being on Canal Street, within sound of Broadway. It is a prosperous firm, one whose trade-mark can be trusted; and here are a few of the methods by which this prosperity has been attained, and goes on in always-increasing ratio.
In the early years of their existence as a firm they manufactured on the premises, but, like many other firms, found that it was a very unnecessaryexpense. A roof over the heads of a hundred or more women, with space for their machines, meant not less than twenty-five hundred dollars a year to be deducted from the profits. Even floors in some cheaper quarter were still an expense to be avoided if possible. The easy way out of the difficulty was to make the women themselves pay the rent, not in any tangible imposition of tax, but none the less certainly in fact. Nothing could be simpler. Manufacturing on the premises had only to cease, and it could even be put as a favor to the women that they were allowed to work at home. The rule established itself at once, and the firm, smiling serenely at the stoppage of this most damaging and most unnecessary leak, proceeded to make fresh discoveries of equally satisfactory possibilities. To each woman who applied for work it was stated:—
“We send all packages from the cutting-room by express, the charges to be paid by you. It’s a small charge, only fifteen cents, to be paid when the bundle comes in.”
“We can come for ours. We live close by. We don’t want to lose the fifteen cents,” a few objected, but the answer was invariable:—
“It suits us best to make up the packages in the cutting-room, and if you don’t like the arrangement there are plenty waiting that it will suit well enough.”
Plenty waiting! How well they knew it, and always more and more as the ships came in, and thegreat tide of “producing power” flowed through Castle Garden, and stood, always at high-water mark, in the wards where cheap labor may be found. Plenty waiting; and these women who could not wait went home and turned over their small store of pennies for the fifteen cents, the payment of which meant either a little less bread or an hour or two longer at the sewing-machine, defined as the emancipator of women.
In the mean time the enterprising firm had made arrangements with a small express company to deliver the packages at twelve cents each, and could thus add to the weekly receipts a clear gain of three cents per head. It is unnecessary to add that they played into each other’s hands, and that the wagon-drivers had no knowledge of anything beyond the fact that they were to collect the fifteen cents and turn it over to their superiors. But in some manner it leaked out; and a driver whose feelings had been stirred by the sad face of a little widow on Sixth Street told her that the fifteen cents was “a gouge,” and they had all better put their heads together and refuse to pay more than twelve cents.
“If we had any heads, it might do to talk about putting them together,” the little widow said bitterly. “For my part, I begin to believe women are born fools, but I’ll see what I can do.”
This “seeing” involved earning a dollar or two less for the week, but the cheat seemed so despicablea one that indignation made her reckless, and she went to the woman who had first directed her to the firm and had been in its employ almost from the beginning.
“It’s like ’em; oh, yes, it’s like ’em!” she said, “but we’ve no time to spend in stirring up things, and you know well enough what would be the end of it if we did,—discharged, and somebody else getting our wages. You’d better not talk too much if you want to keep your place.”
“That isn’t any worse than the thread dodge,” another woman said. “I know from a clerk in the house where they buy their thread, that they charge us five cents a dozen more than it costs them, though they make a great point of giving it to us at cost and cheaper than we could buy it ourselves.”
“Why don’t you club together and buy, then?” the little widow asked, to hear again the formula, “And get your walking-ticket next day? We know a little better than that.”
A few weeks later a new system of payment forced each worker to sacrifice from half an hour to an hour of precious time, her only capital. Hitherto payments had been made at the desk when work was brought in, but now checks were given on a Bowery bank, and the women must walk over in heat and storm alike, and wait their turn in the long line on the benches. If paid by the week this would make little difference, as any loss of time would be theemployers’, but this form of payment is practically abolished, piece-work done at home meaning the utmost amount of profit to the employer, every loss in time being paid by the workers themselves. When questioned as to why the check system of payment had been adopted by this and various other firms, the reply was simply:—
“It saves trouble. The bank has more time to count out money than we have.”
“But the women? Does it seem quite fair that they should be the losers?”
“Fair? Anything’s fair in business. You’d find that out if you undertook to do it.”
As the case then at present stands, for this firm, and for many which have adopted the same methods, the working-woman not only pays the rent that would be required for a factory, but gives them a profit on expressage, thread, time lost in going to bank, and often the price on a dozen of garments, payment for the dozen being deducted by many foremen if there is a flaw in one. This foreman becomes the scapegoat if unpleasant questions are asked by any whose investigation might bring discredit on the firm. In some cases they refuse positively to give any information, but in most, questions are answered with suspicious glibness, and if reference is made to any difficulties encountered by the women in their employ, they take instant refuge in the statement:—
“Oh, that was before the last foreman left. We discharged him as soon as we found out how he had served the women.”
“Do you see those goods?” another asked, pointing to a counter filled with piles of chemises. “How do you suppose we make a cent when you can buy a chemise like that for fifty cents? We don’t. The competition is ruining us, and we’re talking of giving up the business.”
“That’s so. It’s really more in charity to the women than anything else that we go on,” his partner remarked, with a look toward him which seemed to hold a million condensed winks. “That price is just ruin; that’s what it is.”
Undoubtedly, but not for the firm, as the following figures will show,—figures given by a competent forewoman in a large establishment where she had had eleven years’ experience: twenty-seven yards and three-quarters are required for one dozen chemises, the price paid for such cotton as is used in one selling at fifty cents being five cents per yard, or $1.40 for the whole amount; thirty yards of edging at 4½ cents a yard furnishes trimming for the dozen, at $1.35; and four two-hundred-yard spools of cotton are required, at twenty-five cents per dozen, or eight cents per dozen garments. The seamer who sews up and hems the bodies of the garments receives thirty cents a dozen, and the “maker”—this being the technical term for the more experienced worker who puts onband and sleeves—receives from ninety cents to one dollar a dozen, though at present the rates run from seventy-five to ninety cents. Our table, then, stands as follows:—
The chemise which sells at seven dollars per dozen has the additional value in quality of cloth and edging, the same price being paid the work-women, this price varying only in very slight degree till the excessively elaborate work demanded by special orders. One class of women in New York, whose trade has been a prosperous one since ever time began, pay often one hundred dollars a dozen for the garments, which are simply a mass of lace and cobweb cambric, tucked and puffed, and demanding the highest skill of the machine operator, who even in such case counts herself happy if she can make eight or nine dollars a week. And if any youth and comeliness remain to her, why need there be wonder if the question frame itself: “Why am I the maker of this thing, earning barest living, when, if I choose, I, too, can be buyer and wearer and live at ease?”
Wonder rather that one remains honest when the only thing that pays is vice.
For the garments of lowest grade to be found in the cheapest quarters of the city the price ranges from twenty-five to thirty cents, the maker receiving only thirty cents a dozen, and cloth, trimming, and thread being of the lowest quality. The profit in such case is wellnigh imperceptible; but for the class of employer who secures it, content to grovel in foul streets, and know no joy of living save the one delight of seeing the sordid gains roll up into hundreds of thousands, it is still profit, and he is content. As I write, an evening paper containing the advertisement of a leading dry-goods firm is placed before me, and I read: “Chemises, from 12½ cents up.” Here imagination stops. No list of cost prices within my reach tells me how this is practicable. But one thing is certain. Even here it is not the employer who loses; and if it is a question of but a third of a cent profit, be sure that that profit is on his side, never on the side of the worker.
Theproblem of the last chapter is, if not plain, at least far plainer than when it left the pen, and it has become possible to understand how the garment sold at twelve and a half cents may still afford its margin of profit. It has also been made plain that that profit is, as there stated, “never on the side of the worker,” but that it is wrung from her by the sharpest and most pitiless of all the methods known to unscrupulous men and the women who have chosen to emulate them. For it has been my evil fortune in this quest to find women not only as filled with greed and as tricky and uncertain in their methods as the worst class of male employers, but even more ingenious in specific modes of imposition. Without exception, so far as I can discover, they have been workers themselves, released for a time it may be by marriage, but taking up the trade again, either from choice or necessity. They have learned every possibility of cheating. They know also far better than men every possibility of nagging, and as they usually own a few machines theyemploy women on their own premises and keep a watchful eye lest the smallest advantage be gained. The majority prefer to act as “sweaters,” this releasing them from the uncertainties attending the wholesale manufacturer, and as the work is given to them at prices at or even below the “life limit,” it is not surprising that those to whom they in turn pass it on find their percentage to mean something much nearer death than life.
“Only blind eyes could have failed to see all this before,” some reader is certain to say. “How is it possible that any one dealing directly with the question could doubt for a moment the existence of this and a thousand-fold worse fraud?”
Only possible from the same fact that makes these papers a necessity. They hold only new phases of the old story. The grain has had not one threshing alone, but many, and yet for the most patient and persistent of searchers after truth is ever fresh surprise at its nature and extent. Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the Republic offers to-day, states calmly, “There is no such thing asbusiness without lying,” what room remains for honor or justice or humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision, but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what method will most surely mean destruction.
We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it seems, that moments of despair come to all who would rouse men to action. Not one generation nor many can answer the call sounding forever in the ears of every son of man; but he who has heeded has at least made heeding more possible for those that follow; and the time comes at last when the way must be plain for all. To make it plainer many a popular conviction must be laid aside, and among them the one that follows.
It is a deeply rooted belief that the poor understand and feel for the poor beyond any possibility in those who have never known cold and hunger and rags save as uncomfortable terms used too freely by injudicious agitators. Like many another popular belief the groundwork is in the believer’s own mind, and has its most tangible existence in story-books.There are isolated cases always of self-sacrifice and compassion and all gentle virtues, but long experience goes to show that if too great comfort is deadening, too little is brutalizing, and that pity dies in the soul of man or woman to whom no pity has been shown. It is easy to see, then, how the woman who has found injustice and oppression the law of life, deals in the same fashion when her own time comes, and tyrannizes with the comfortable conviction that she is by this means getting even with the world. She knows every sore spot, and how best to make the galled jade wince, and lightens her own task by the methods practised in the past upon herself. This is one species to be dealt with, and a far less dangerous one than the craftier and less outspokenly brutal order, just above her in grade. It is by these last that some of the chief frauds on women are perpetrated, and here we find one source of the supplies that furnish the bargain counters.
We read periodically of firms detected in imposing upon women, and are likely to feel that such exposure has ended their career as firms once for all. In every trade will be found one or more of these, whose methods of obtaining hands are fraudulent, and who advertise for “girls to learn the trade,” with no intention of retaining them beyond the time in which they remain content to work without pay. There are a thousand methods of evasion, even when the law faces them and the victim has made formalcomplaint. As a rule she is too ignorant and too timid for complaint or anything but abject submission, and this fact is relied upon as certain foundation for success. But, if determined enough, the woman has some redress in her power. Within a few years, after long and often defeated attempts, the Woman’s Protective Union has brought about legislation against such fraud, and any employer deliberately withholding wages is liable to fifteen days’ imprisonment and the costs of the suit brought against him, a fact of which most of them seem to be still quite unaware. This law, so far as imprisonment is concerned, has no application to women, and they have learned how to evade the points which might be made to bear upon them, by hiring rooms, machines, etc., and swearing that they have no personal property that can be levied upon. Or, if they have any, they transfer it to some friend or relative, as in the case of Madame M——, a fashionable dressmaker notorious for escaping from payment seven times out of ten. She has accumulated money enough to become the owner of a large farm on Long Island, but so ingeniously have all her arrangements been made that it is impossible to make her responsible, and her case is used at the Union as a standing illustration of the difficulty of circumventing a woman bent upon cheating.
A firm, a large proportion of whose goods are manufactured in this manner, can well afford to stock thebargain counters of popular stores. They can afford also to lose slightly by work imperfectly done, though, even with learners, this is in smaller proportion than might be supposed. The girl who comes in answer to their advertisement is anxious to learn the trade at once, and gives her best intelligence to mastering every detail. Her first week is likely to hold an energy of effort that could hardly last, and she can often be beguiled by small payments and large promises to continue weeks and even months, always expecting the always delayed payment. Firms dealing in such fashion change their quarters often, unless in league with police captains who have been given sufficient reasons for obliviousness of their methods, and who have also been known to silence timid complaints with the threat of a charge of theft. But there is always a multitude ready to be duped, and no exposure seems sufficient to prevent this, and women who have once established a business on this system seem absolutely reckless as to any possible consequences.
There is at present on Third Avenue a Mrs. F——, who for eleven years has conducted a successful business built upon continuous fraud. She is a manufacturer of underwear, and the singular fact is that she has certain regular employees who have been with her from the beginning, and who, while apparently unconscious of her methods, are practically partners in the fraud. She is a woman of goodpresence and address, and one to whom girls submit unquestioningly, contending, even in court, that she never meant to cheat them; and it is still an open question with those who know her best how far she herself recognizes the fraud in her system. The old hands deny that it is her custom to cheat, and though innumerable complaints stand against her, she has usually paid on compulsion, and insisted that she always meant to. Her machines never lack operators, and the grade of work turned out is of the best quality. Her advertisement appears at irregular intervals, is answered by swarms of applicants, and there are always numbers waiting their turn. On a side street a few blocks distant is a deep basement, crowded with machines and presided over by a woman with many of her personal characteristics. It is the lowest order of slop work that is done here, but it helps to fill the bargain counters of the poorer stores, and the workers are an always shifting quantity. It is certain that both places are practically the property of Mrs. F——, but no man has yet been cunning enough to determine once for all her responsibility, and no law yet framed covers any ground that she has chosen as her own. Her prototypes are to be found in every trade open to women, and their numbers grow with the growth of the great city and strengthen in like proportion. The story of one is practically the story of all. Popularly supposed to be a method of trickery confined chiefly to Jews,investigation shows that Americans must share the odium in almost as great degree, and that the long list includes every nationality known to trade.
We have dealt thus far with fraud as the first and chief procurer for bargain counters. Another method results from a fact that thus far must sum up as mainly Jewish. Till within very little more than a year, a large dry-goods firm on the west side employed many women in its underwear department. The work was piece-work, and done by the class of women who own their own machines and work at home. Prices were never high, but the work was steady and the pay prompt. The firm for a time made a specialty of “Mother Hubbard” night-gowns, for which they paid one dollar a dozen for “making,” this word covering the making and putting in of yoke and sleeves, the “seamer” having in some cases made the bodies at thirty cents a dozen. Many of the women, however, made the entire garment at $1.30 per dozen, ten being the utmost number practicable in a day of fourteen hours. Suddenly the women were informed that their services would not be required longer. An east-side firm bearing a Jewish name had contracted to do the same work at eighty cents a dozen, and all other underwear in the same proportions. Steam had taken the place of foot-power, and the women must find employment with firms who were willing to keep to slower methods. Necessarily these are an always lessening minority. Competition in this race forwealth crushes out every possibility of thought for the worker save as so much producing power, and what hand and foot cannot do steam must. In several cases in this special manufacture the factories have been transferred to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where rent is a mere song, and where girls flock in from the adjacent country, eager for the work that represents something higher than either ordinary mill work or the household service they despise.
“What can we do?” said one manufacturer lately, when asked how he thought the thing would end. “If there were any power quicker than steam, or any way of managing so that women could feed five or six machines, that would have to come next, else every one of us would go to the wall together, the pressure is so tremendous. Of course there’s no chance for the women, but then you must remember there’s precious little chance for the employer either. This competition is a sort of insanity. It gluts the market with cheap goods, and gives a sense of prosperity, but it is the death of all legitimate, reasonable business. It won’t surprise me if this whole trade of manufacturing underwear becomes a monopoly, and one man—like O’H——, for instance—swallows up the whole thing. Lord help the women then, for there’ll be no help in man!”
“Suppose co-operation were tried? What would be the effect?”
“No effect, because there isn’t confidence enough anywhere to make men dare a co-operative scheme. Even the workers would distrust it, and a sharp business man laughs in your face if you mention the word. It doesn’t suit American notions. It might be a good thing if there were any old-fashioned business men left,—men content with slow profits and honest dealing,—as my father was, for instance. But he wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance to-day. The whole system of business is rotten, and there will have to be a reconstruction clean from the bottom, though it’s the men that need it first. We’re the maddest nation for money on the face of the earth, and the race is a more killing one every year. I’m half inclined to think sometimes that mankind will soon be pretty much a superfluity, the machines are getting so intelligent; and it may be these conditions that seem to upset you so are simply means of killing off those that are not wanted, and giving place to a less sensitive order of beings. Lord help them, I say again, for there’s no help in man.”
The speaker nodded, as if this rather unexpected flight of imagination was an inspiration in which might lie the real solution of all difficulties, and hurried away to his waiting niche in the great competitive system. And as he went, there came to me words spoken by one of the workers, in whose life hope was dead, and who also had her theory of any future under to-day’s conditions:—
“I’ve worked eleven years. I’ve tried five trades with my needle and machine. My shortest day has been fourteen hours, for I had the children and they had to be fed. There’s not one of these trades that I don’t know well. It isn’t work that I’ve any trouble in getting. It’s wages. Five years ago I could earn $1.50 a day, and we were comfortable. Then it began to go down,—$1.25, then $1.00. There it stopped awhile, and I got used to that, and could even get some remains of comfort out of it. I had to plan to the last half cent. We went cold often, but we were never hungry. But then it fell again,—to ninety cents, to eighty-five. For a year the best that I can do I have earned not over eighty cents a day,—sometimes only seventy-five. I’m sixty-two years old. I can’t learn new ways. I am strong. I always was strong. I run the machine fourteen hours a day, with just the stoppings that have to be to get the work ready. I’ve never asked a man alive for a penny beyond what my own hands can earn, and I don’t want it. I suppose the Lord knows what it all means. It’s His world and His children in it, and I’ve kept myself from going crazy many a time by saying it was His world and that somehow it must all come right in the end. But I don’t believe it any more. He’s forgotten. There’s nothing left but men that live to grind the face of the poor; that chuckle when they find a new way of making a cent or two more a week out of starving women and children. I neverthought I should feel so; I don’t know myself; but I tell you I’m ready for murder when I think of these men. If there’s no justice above, it isn’t quite dead below; and if men with money will not heed, the men and the women without money will rise some day. How? I don’t know. We’ve no time to plan, and we’re too tired to think, but it’s coming somehow, and I’m not ashamed to say I’ll join in if I live to see it come. It’s seas of tears that these men sail on. It’s our life-blood they drink and our flesh that they eat. God help them if the storm comes, for there’ll be no help in man.”
Employer and employed had ended in wellnigh the same words; but the gulf between no words have spanned, and it widens day by day.
“Comenow, be reasonable, won’t you? You’ve got to move on, you know, and why don’t you do it?”
“I’m that reasonable that a bench of judges couldn’t be more so; and I’ll not move on for anything less than dynamite, and I ain’t sure I would for that. It’s only a choice between starvation and going into the next world in little bits, and I don’t suppose it makes much difference which way it’s done.”
The small, pale, dogged-looking little woman who announced this conviction did not even rise from the steps where she sat looking up to the big policeman, who faced her uneasily, half turning as if he would escape the consequences of rash action if he knew how. Nothing could be more mysterious. For it was within sight of Broadway, on one of the best-known side streets near Union Square, where business signs were few and of the most decorous order, and where before one door, bearing the name of one of the best-known fashionable dressmakers, a line of carriages stood each day during the busy season. Aname hardly less known was on the door-plate of the great house before which she sat, and which still bore every mark of prosperous ownership, while from one of the windows looked the elaborately dressed head of Madame herself, the anxiety in her eyes contradicting the scornful smile on her thin lips. The door just beyond No. — opened, and a stout gentleman descended one step and stood eying the policeman belligerently. That official looked up the street as if wishing for cry of “murder” or “stop thief” around the corner, but hearing neither, concentrated again on the antagonist whose irregular methods defied precedent and gave him a painful sense of insecurity. If two could listen, why not three?—and I paused near the steps, eyed considerately by the stout gentleman, who was evidently on the outlook for allies. A look of intelligence passed between Madame and the policeman, and her head disappeared from the window, a blind on the second story moving slightly and announcing a moment later that she had taken a less conspicuous post of observation.
“Move on now, I tell you!” began the policeman again, but paused, for as he spoke a slender, bright-eyed girl came swiftly toward them, and paused on the first step with a glance of curiosity at the little group.
“Have you come to answer Madame M——’s advertisement?” the little woman said, as she rose from the steps and laid her hand detainingly on the hurrying figure.
“Yes,” the girl answered hesitatingly, pulling away from the hand that held.
“Then, unless you’ve got anything else to do and like to give your time and strength for naught, keep away. You’ll get no wages, no matter what’s promised. I’ve been there six months, kept on by fair promises, and I know. I’ll let no girl go in there without warning.”
“It’s a good-looking place,” the girl said doubtfully.
“It’s a den of thieves all the same. If you don’t believe me, come down to the Woman’s Protective Union on Clinton Place, and you’ll see my case on the book there, and judgment against this woman, that’s no more mercy than a Hottentot and lies that smoothly that she’d humbug an angel of light. Ah! that’s good!” she added, for the girl had shaken off her hand and sped away as swiftly as she had come. “That’s seven since yesterday, and I wish it were seven hundred. It’s time somebody turned watchdog.”
“That ain’t your business. That’s a matter for the law,” said the big policeman, who had glanced anxiously up to the second-story window and then looked reassured and serene, as the stout gentleman made a significant movement, which indicated that bribery was as possible for one sex as for the other. “The law’ll straighten out anything that you’ve a mind to have it.”
“The law! Lord help them that think the law is going to see them through,” the small woman said, with a fierceness that made the big policeman start and lay his hand on his club. “What’s the law worth when it can’t give to you one dollar of two hundred and eight that’s owed; and she that earned them gasping her life out with consumption? If it was my account alone do you suppose I’d care? Mine’s eighty-five, and I went to law for it, to find she’d as long a head as she has smooth tongue, and had fixed things so that there wasn’t a stick of furniture nor a dollar of property that could be levied on. If she’d been a man the new law that gives a cheating employer fifteen days’ imprisonment might have worked with her as it’s worked with many a rascal that never knew he could be brought up with a round turn. But she’s a woman and she slides through, and a judgment against her isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. So as I can’t take it out in money I take it out in being even with her. There are the papers that show I don’t lie, and here I sit the time I’ve fixed to sit, and if she gets the three new hands she’s after, it won’t be because I haven’t done what came to me to do to hinder it.”
The policeman had moved away before the words ended, the stout gentleman having descended the steps for a moment, and stood in a position which rendered his little transaction feasible and almost invisible. He beckoned to me as the small womansat down again on the steps, and I followed him into the vestibule.
“You’re interested, my dear madam,” he said. “You’re interested, and you ought to be. I’ve stayed home from business to make sure she wasn’t interfered with, and I’d do it again with the greatest pleasure. I’d like to post one like her before every establishment in New York where cheating goes on, and I’m going to see this thing through!”
There was no time for questions. My appointment must be kept, and with one pause to take the name and number of the small Nemesis I went my way. Three days later she sat there still, and on the following one, as the warm spring rain fell steadily, she kept her post, sheathed in a rubber cloak, and protected by an umbrella which, from its size and quality, I felt must be the stout gentleman’s. With Saturday night her self-imposed siege ended, and she marched away, leaving the enemy badly discomfited and much more disposed to consider the rights of the individual, if not of the worker in general. As Madame’s prices were never less than fifty dollars for the making of a suit, ranging from this to a hundred or more, and as her three children were still small and her husband an undiscoverable factor, it became an interesting question to know where she placed the profits which, even when lessened by non-paying customers, could never be anything but great. Madame, however, had beentoo keen even for the sharp-witted lawyer of the Protective Union, whose utmost efforts only disclosed the fact that she was the probable backer of a manufacturer whose factory and farm were on Long Island, and whose business capacity had till within a few years never insured him more than a bare living.
It is an old story, yet an always new one, and in this case Madame had quieted her conscience by providing a comfortable lunch for the workers and allowing them more space than is generally the portion in a busy establishment. Well housed and well fed through the day and paid at intervals enough to meet the demands of rent or board bill, it was easy to satisfy her hands by the promise of full and speedy settlement, and when this failed, to tell a pitiful tale of unpaid bills and conscienceless customers, who could not be forced. When these resources were exhausted discharge solved any further difficulties, and a new set came in, to undergo the same experience. In an establishment where honesty has any place, the wages are rather beyond the average, skirt-hands receiving from seven to nine dollars a week and waist-hands from ten to fifteen. In the case of stores this latter class make from eighteen to forty dollars per week, and often accumulate enough capital to start in business for themselves. But a skirt-hand like Mary M—— seldom passes on to anything higher, and counts herself well paid ifher week of sixty hours brings her nine dollars, not daring to grumble seriously if it falls to seven or even six. On the east side the same work must be done for from four to six dollars a week, the latter sum being considered high pay. But the work is an advance upon factory work and has a better sound, the dressmaker’s assistant looking down upon the factory hand or even the seamstress as of an inferior order.
In time I learned the full story of the little woman, ordinarily reticent and shrinking, but brought by trouble and indignation to the fiercest protest against oppression. Born in a New-England village she had learned a milliner’s trade, to which she presently added dressmaking, and succeeded in making a fair living, till bitten by the desire to see larger life and share all the good that the city seems to offer the shut-in country life, she came to New York with her small savings, expecting to find work easily, and did so, going at once into a store where a friend was at work. Sanitary conditions were all bad. Her hall bedroom on a fourth floor and the close confinement all did their work, and a long illness wasted strength and savings. When recovery came her place had been filled; and she wandered from store to store seeking employment, doing such odd jobs as were found at intervals, and powerless to recover the lost ground.
“It was like heaven to me,” she said, “when myfriend came back to the city and got me that place as skirt-hand at Madame M——’s. I was so far gone I had even thought of the river, and said to myself it might be the easiest way out. You can’t help but like Madame, for she’s smooth-tongued and easy, and praises your work, and she made me think I’d soon be advanced and get the place I ought to have. She paid regularly at first, and I began to pick up courage. It was over-hours always. Madame would come in smiling and say: ‘Ah, dear girls! What trouble! It is an order that must be finished so soon. Who will be kind and stay so leetle longer?’ Then we all stayed, and she’d have tea made and send it in, and sandwiches or something good, and they all said, ‘She’s an angel. You won’t find anybody like Madame.’ She was so plausible, too, that even when there was longer and longer time between the payments the girls didn’t blame her, but borrowed of one another and put off their landladies and managed all ways to save her feelings. Jenny G—— had been here longer than any of them, and she worshipped Madame and wouldn’t hear a word even when one or another complained. But Jenny’s feet were on the ground and she hadn’t a stitch of warm underclothes, and she took a cold in December, and by January it had tight hold of her. I went to Madame myself then, and begged her to pay Jenny if it wasn’t but a little, and she cried and said if she could only raise the money she would.She didn’t; and by and by I went again, and then she turned ugly. I looked at her dumfounded when she spoke her real mind and said if we didn’t like it we could leave; there were plenty of others. I wouldn’t believe my ears even, and said to myself she was worn out with trouble and couldn’t mean a word of it. I wanted money for myself, but I wouldn’t ask even for anybody but Jenny.
“Next day Madame brought her ten dollars of the two hundred and twenty she owed her, and Jenny got shoes; but it was too late. I knew it well, for I’d seen my sister go the same way. Quick consumption ain’t to be stopped with new shoes or anything but new lungs, and there’s no patent for them yet that ever I’ve heard of. She was going last night when I went round, and sure as you live I’m going to put her death in the paper myself. I’ve been saving my money off lunches to do it, and I’ll write it: ‘Murdered by a fashionable dressmaker on —— Street, in January, 1886, Jenny G——, age nineteen years and six months.’ Maybe they won’t put it in, but here it is, ready for any paper that’s got feeling enough to care whether sewing-girls are cheated and starved and killed, or whether they get what they’ve earned. I’ve got work at home now. It don’t matter so much to me; but I’m a committee to attend to this thing, and I’ll find out every fraud in New York that I can. I’ve got nine names now,—three of ’em regular fashionables on the west side, and six of ’emfollowing their example hard as they can on the east; and a friend of mine has printed, in large letters, ‘Beware of’ at the head of a slip, and I add names as fast as I get them, and every girl that comes in my way I warn against them. Do much good? No. They’ll get all the girls they want, and more; but it’s some satisfaction to be able to say they are cheats, making a living out of the flesh and blood of their dupes, and I’ll say it till I die.”
Here stands the experience of one woman with fearlessness enough to protest and energy enough to have at last secured a tolerable living. The report, for such it may be considered, might be made of many more names than those upon her black list, or found on the books of the Union. Happily for the worker, they form but a small proportion of the long list of dressmakers who deal fairly. But the life of the ordinary hand who has not ability enough to rise is, like that of the great majority who depend on the needle, whether machine or hand, filled with hardship, uncertainty, overwork, under-pay. The large establishments have next to no dull season, but we deal in the present chapter only with private workers; and often, on the east side especially, where prices and wages are always at the lowest ebb, the girls who have used all their strength in overwork during the busy season of spring and fall must seek employment in cigar factories or in anything that offers in the intermediate time, the wages giving no margin for savings which might aidin tiding over such periods. The dressmaker herself is often a sufferer, conscienceless customers abounding, who pay for the work of one season only when anxious for that of the next. Often it is mere carelessness,—the recklessness which seems to make up the method of many women where money obligations are concerned; but often also they pass deliberately from one dressmaker to another, knowing that New York holds enough to provide for the lifetime of the most exacting customer. There is small redress for these cases, and the dressmaker probably argues the matter for herself and decides that she has every right, being cheated, to balance the scale by a little of the same order on her own account.
A final form of rascality referred to in a previous chapter is found here, as in every phase of the clothing trade, whether on small or large scale. Girls are advertised for “to learn the trade,” and the usual army of applicants appear, those who are selected being told that the first week or two will be without wages, and only the best workers will be kept. Each girl is thus on her mettle, and works beyond her strength and beyond any fair average, to find herself discharged at the end of the time and replaced by an equally eager and equally credulous substitute. There are other methods of fraud that will find place in a consideration of phases of the same work in the great establishments, some difficulties of the employer being reserved for the same occasion.
Todo justice to employer as well as employed is the avowed object of our search, yet as it goes on, and the methods made necessary by competition become more and more clear, it is evident that back of every individual case of wrong and oppression lies a deeper wrong and a more systematized oppression. Master and servant alike are in the same bonds, and the employer is driven as mercilessly as he drives. He may deny it. He may even be quite unconscious of his own subjection, or, if he thinks at all of its extent, may look enviously at the man or the corporation that has had power to enslave him. The monopolist governs not only the market but the bodies and souls of all who provide wares for that market; yet the fascination of such power is so tremendous that to stand side by side with him is the dream of every young merchant,—the goal on which his eyes are set from the beginning. Only in like power is any satisfaction to be found. Any result below this high-water mark can be counted little else than failure.
To this end, then, toils the employer of every grade, bringing every faculty to bear on the lessening of waste, whether in material or time; the conservation of every force working in line with his purpose. Naturally, the same effect is produced as that mentioned in a previous paper. The employees come to represent “so much producing power,” and are driven at full speed or shut off suddenly like the machines of which they are the necessary but still more or less accidental associates. Certain formulas are used, evolved apparently from experience, and carrying with them an assurance of so much grieved but inevitable conviction that it is difficult to penetrate below the surface and realize that, while in degree true, they are in greater degree false. In various establishments, large and small, beginning with one the pay-roll of which carries 1,462 employees, and ending with one having hardly a third this number, the business manager made invariably the same statement: “We make our money from incidentals rather than from any given department. You are asking particularly about suits. I suppose you’ll think it incredible, but in suits we work at a dead loss. It is only an accommodation to our customers that makes us keep that department open. The work should be put out to mean any profit, but we can’t do that with the choicest materials, and so we make it up in other directions. You would have to go into business yourself to understand just how we are driven.”
“Suppose you refused to be driven? A firm of your standing must have matters a good deal in its own hands. Suppose—”
“Suppose!” The manager threw out his hands in a gesture more full of disclaimer than any words. “There is no room for supposes in business, madam. We do what we must. How are we to compete with a factory turning out suits by steam power? Not that we would compete. There is really no occasion,” he added hastily. “But their methods certainly have an unpleasant influence, and we are obliged to take them into account slightly.”
“Then your statement would be, that no matter how expensive the suit made up, you can make no profit on it?”
“Absolutely none. It is a concession to a customer’s whims. We could buy the same thing and sell to her at half the price, but she prefers to select materials and have them put together in our work-room, and we must humor her. But rents are so enormous that the space for every woman employed by us in these departments may be said to represent simply so many cubic feet in good coin, bringing us no return. Our profits are dwindling with every year.”
“Might not co-operation—”
Again the manager threw out his hands.
“Simply another form of robbery. We have investigated the history of co-operation, and it does not appear to affiliate with our institutions. Thelamentable failure of the Co-operative Dress Association ought to be the answer to that suggestion. No, madam. There is no profit in suits, or in any form of made-up clothing for ladies’ wear, if it is done on the premises. You have to turn it over to the wholesale manufacturer if you want profit.”
Having heard this statement in many forms, and recognizing the fact that increase in rents as well as in systematized competition might well have reduced profits, it still appeared incredible that the rates charged held no surplus for the firm. Little by little it has become possible to supplement each statement by others of a different order. Nothing is more difficult than to obtain trustworthy information regarding the methods of a firm whose standing is such that to have served it is always a passport to other employment; whose payments are regular, and where every detail of work-room is beyond criticism. It is no question of bare-faced robbery as in that of many cited, yet even here the old story tells itself in different form, and with an element which, in many a less pretentious establishment, has not yet been found to exist.
The work done here is piece-work. French cutters and fitters, receiving from thirty to fifty dollars a week, give that guarantee of style and elegance which is inherent in everything bearing the stamp of the firm. Experts run the machines in the sewing-machine room, being paid by the day at the rate offrom six to eight dollars per week in the busy season. The buttonholes are made by women who do nothing else, and who are paid by the dozen, earning from five to seven dollars weekly. All stitched seams are done in the machine-room, and the dress passes from there to the sewing-room, into the hands of the sewing-girls, who receive from three to four dollars and a half for each garment. The latter price is seldom reached; four dollars and a half or five dollars paying for a dress loaded with trimming, puffs, flounces, etc.
At this rate there would seem to be a chance for wages a good deal beyond the average, but it is one of the unwritten laws that no sewing-girl shall exceed five dollars per week; whether formulated by superintendent or by firm remains yet to be discovered. The one unquestionable fact is that if the superintendent of the work-room finds that any girl is expert enough to make over this amount the price per garment is docked, to bring her down to the level. They are never driven. On the contrary, they must wait often, two or three hours at times, for the arrival of “Madame,” who must inspect the work, drape a skirt, or give some suggestion as to trimming. No entreaty can induce the superintendent to give out another piece of work which might fill this vacant time, and the girls dare not state their case to the employer. No member of the firm enters the work-rooms. Reports are made by the superintendent of the department, and the firm remains content withknowing that it has provided every comfort for its employees. Complaint would insure discharge, and if a girl hints that she cannot live on five dollars a week the answer has been for the years during which the present superintendent has held the place, always the same:—
“If you haven’t a home so that you have no expense of board, it is your own fault, and I can’t be expected to do anything about it.”
There appears to be no question as to the entire “respectability” of the woman, who would undoubtedly deny the implication contained in her own words. But there is rivalry between the superintendents as to which department shall make largest returns in profits, and wages are kept down to secure that end. There is also no question that a proportion of those employed are “supported,” and merely add this work as a means of securing a little more pin-money. It is true of but a very few, but of those few an undeniable fact. It is equally a fact that, in spite of the managers’ assertions, profit can be made and is made from this department, and that a large percentage of such profit comes directly from the pocket of the sewing-girl, who, even when she adds buttonhole-making in the simpler dresses, can never pass beyond a fixed wage.
In other large establishments on both sides of the city methods are much the same, with merely slight variations as to comfort of quarters, time for lunch,sanitary conditions, etc. But in all alike, the indispensable, but always very helpless, sewing-girl appears to be one of the chief sources of profit, and to have small capacity and no opportunity for improving her condition. Even where the work comes from the manufactory, and steam has taken the place of foot-power, no machine has yet been run so automatically that the human hand can be entirely dispensed with. The “finisher” remains a necessity, and as finisher sometimes passes slightly beyond the rate obtained when merely sewing-girl. Only slightly, however. It is a deeply rooted conviction among these workers that a tacit or even, it may be, formal understanding has been settled upon by employers in general.
“I don’t know how it is,” said one of the most intelligent among the many I have talked with; “there’s never any trouble about getting work. I’ve even had them send after me when I had gone somewhere else in hopes of doing better. I used to earn ten and twelve dollars a week on suits, children’s or ladies’, but now if I earn five or sometimes six I do well. The work goes on with a rush. It’s a whole building except the first floor,—five stories, and suits of every kind. The rooms are all crowded, and they give out piece-work, but they’ve managed it so that we all earn about alike. When the rush of the fall and spring season is over they do white work and flannel skirts and such things, and a great manyare discharged in the lull. But go where you will, up-town or down, it doesn’t seem to matter how well you can turn off the work or how long you have been at it. They all say, if we ask for better pay, ‘It can’t be had as long as there is such competition. We’re losing straight ahead.’ I don’t understand. We don’t any of us understand, because here is the great rush of work and it must be done. They can’t do without us, and yet they are grinding us down so that I get half distracted sometimes, wondering where it will end and if things will ever be better.”
“Would not private sewing be better? There is always a demand for good seamstresses.”
“I don’t know anything about private sewing. You have to cut and plan, and I never learned that. I like to work on things that are cut by a cutter and just so, and I can make up my dozen after dozen with not an eighth of an inch difference in my measurements. I’m an expert, you know.”
“But if you learned to do private sewing perfectly you could earn a dollar and a quarter a day and board and have your evening quite free.”
The girl shook her head. “I’ve had that said to me before, but you know it’s more independent as I am. Maybe things will be better by and by.”
There is no obstinacy like the obstinacy of deep-seated prejudice, and this exists to a bewildering degree among these workers, who, for some inscrutable reason, seem filled with the conviction thatprivate employ of any nature whatever is inevitably a despotism filled with unknown horrors. There appears to be also a certainesprit du corpsthat holds sustaining power. The girl likes to speak of herself as one of such and such a firm’s hands, and to regard this distinction as compensation for over-hours and under-pay and all known wretchedness encompassing her trade. The speaker I have quoted was an American girl of twenty-six, had had three years in public schools, and regarded the city as the only place in which life could be considered endurable.
“I shouldn’t know what to do in the country if I were there,” she said. “I don’t seem to like it somehow. It isn’t the company, for mother and me keep to ourselves a good deal, but somehow we know how to get along in the city, and the country scares me. I like my work if only I could get more pay for it.”
“Do you ever think that if all who work in your line joined together and made common cause you might even things a little; that it might be easier for all of you?”
“We wouldn’t dare,” she answered, aghast. “Why, do you know, there’d be ten for each one of us that was turned off. Women come there by the hundred. That’s what they say to me in our firm: ‘What’s the use of fussing when here are dozens waiting to take your place?’ There isn’t any use.They say now that it is the dull season, and they’ve put our room on flannel skirts; two tucks and a hem, and a muslin yoke that has to be gone round four times with the stitching. One day I made ten, but nine is all one can do without nearly killing themselves, and they pay us one dollar a dozen for making them. It used to be a dollar and a half, and that was fair enough. It’s the kind of work I like. I shouldn’t be content to do any other; but it’s bringing us all down to starvation point, and I think something ought to be done.”
In a case like this, and it is the type of many hundreds of skilled workers, who regard their calling with a certain pride, and could by no possibility be induced to seek other lines of work or other methods of living, there seems little to be accomplished. They are, however, but a small portion of the army who wait for some deliverance, and who, if they had been born to a trifle more common sense, would turn in the one sole direction from which relief is certain, this relief and the reasons for and against it having no place at this stage of the investigation.