Making Both Ends Meet Part 10

Tina had the advantage of a knowledge of English. This lack of opportunity to learn the tongue of the country in which she lived was poignantly regretted by another machine operative, f.a.n.n.y Leysher, a white-goods operative of twenty-one who had been in America four years.

She lived in one room of a tenement off the Bowery, where she boarded and lodged for $4 a week. She worked in a factory within walking distance, earning $7 a week in the busy season.

f.a.n.n.y was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile, and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked, however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for four years, first at time work, then at piece-work. She could earn $7 a week by st.i.tching up and down the fronts and st.i.tching on the belts of 108 corset covers--9 dozen a day. This was the most she could possibly complete. The unremitting speeding and close attention this amount of st.i.tching required left her too exhausted at six o'clock to be able to attend night school, or to learn English. She suffered greatly from headache and from backache.

f.a.n.n.y worked in this way for forty-one weeks of the year. For six weeks she worked three days in the week. For two weeks the factory closed. For three weeks she had been ill.

She was a girl of quick nervous intelligence, eager for life and with a nice sense of quality. When she talked of her inability to go to night school because of her frailness and weariness, tears flooded her eyes.

Her room was very nicely kept, and she had on a shelf a novel of Sudermann's and a little book of Rosenthal's sweat shop verses.

Everything she wore was put on carefully and with good taste. Her dress showed the quickest adaptability, and in correctness, and simplicity of line and color might have belonged to a college freshman "with every advantage." It was a little trim delft-blue linen frock with a white pique collar and a loose blue tie. She had tan stockings and low russet shoes. f.a.n.n.y belonged to the Working-man's Circle. She said she went as often as she could possibly afford it to the theatre. And when she was asked what plays she liked, she replied with an unforgettable keenness and eagerness, "Oh, I want nothing but the best. Only what will tell me about real life."

She said she had spent too much money for dress last year; but she had been able to buy clothing of a quality which she thought would last her for a long time. The little plain gold watch in her list she had partly needed and partly had been unable to resist. One of the three summer dresses costing $14 was her blue linen dress, for which she had given $7.

She expected to wear it for two summers with alterations.

Last year's suit cleaned $ 3 Shoes 11 Hat 10 Dresses (1 winter, $10; 3 summer, $14) 24 Coat 9 Every-day hat 4.50 Muslin (for white waists and corset covers made by herself) 5 Umbrella 2 Gloves 2 Pocket-book 1 Watch 11 ______ $82.50

Painful as it was in some ways to see f.a.n.n.y Leysher, who liked "nothing but the best," pouring her life force into st.i.tching 108 corset covers a day, she yet seemed less helpless than some still younger workers.

Minna Waldemar, a girl of sixteen, an operative in an umbrella factory, had been in the United States for six months. For five months of this time she had been st.i.tching the seams and hems of umbrella covers for 35 cents a hundred. Her usual output was about 200 a day. By working very fast, she could in a full day make 300, but when she did, it left her thumb very sore.

Minna paid $3 a month for sleeping s.p.a.ce in a tenement; $1.75 a week for suppers; and for breakfasts and luncheons, from 15 to 30 cents a day.

She wore a black sateen waist, which had cost $1. A suit had cost $8; a hat, $3; and a pair of shoes, $2. Working her hardest and fastest, she had not received enough money to pay for even these meagre belongings, and was obliged to have a.s.sistance from her brother, her only relative in New York.

Every line of Minna's little figure looked overworked. This was true, too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who had come to New York as the advance guard of her family.

In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy weeks she had earned $9 a week.

After the slack season, the factory closed. Hunting desperately for a way to make money, Sadie found employment as an operative on children's dresses, running a foot-power machine in a tenement work-room for $2.50 a week. In the second week her wage was advanced to $3 and continued at this for the next three or four months.

After this, the demand for neckwear had increased again. She had returned to the neckwear factory, and was earning $6 a week. Her busiest days were eleven hours long, and her others nine.

She spent nothing for pleasure. She could send nothing to her family. In the course of two years and a half she had bought one hat for $3 and a suit for $12. She went to night school, but was generally so weary that she could learn really nothing. She did her own washing, and for $3 a month she rented a sleeping s.p.a.ce in the kitchen of a squalid, crowded East Side tenement. It was the living-room of her poverty-stricken landlady's family; and she had to wait until they all left it, sometimes late at night, before she dragged her bed out of an obscure corner and flung it on the floor for her long-desired sleep. Supper with the landlady cost her 20 cents a night. Sadie's breakfasts and dinners depended absolutely upon her income and her other expenses. As in the weeks when she was earning $3 she had only 90 cents for fourteen meals a week and her clothing, and in the weeks when she earned $2.50, only 40 cents a week for fourteen meals and her clothing, her depleted health is easily understood.

Sadie's custom of paying rent and yet dragging a pallet out of the corner and finding or waiting for a place to throw it in, like a little vagrant, is very characteristic of East Side tenements. She paid $36 a year for lodging, and yet can scarcely be said to have received for this sum any definite s.p.a.ce at all under a roof-tree, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply the chance of getting such a place when she could.

If she had attempted to find a better and less expensive place for sleeping, in a less congested quarter of the city, she would have been obliged to pay, besides her rent, a sum at least half as large, for transportation. In the same way, for this really very large sum of $15 or $20 paid yearly to the city railroads, she would not have received in their cars any definite place at all, honestly provided for her as her own, but simply a chance of getting a foothold when she could on a cross-town car or the Bronx elevated during the rush hours. The yearly sums paid to the car companies by factory workers too exhausted to walk home are very striking in these budgets. Tina Levin had paid nearly $30--more than she had spent for her clothing during the year. This expense of carfare and the wretched conditions in transportation which most of the car companies supply to the workers compelled to use their lines in rush hours is a difficulty scarcely less than that of New York rents and congestion, and inseparably connected with them.

Anna Flodin, a girl of eighteen, forced by illness to leave the congested quarters of New York for the Bronx, did not attempt to return to work until she was able to live again within walking distance of the factory.

Anna Flodin was a pale, quiet girl with smooth black hair and a serious, almost poignant expression. All her life had been one of poverty, a sheer struggle to keep the wolf from the door. She spoke no English, though she could understand a little.

She st.i.tched regularly in the busy season 1568 yards of machine sewing daily in fastening belts to cheap corset covers. The forewoman gave her in the course of the day 28 bundles, each containing 28 corset covers with the belts basted to the waist lines and the loose ends of the belts basted ready to finish.

The instant Anna failed to complete this amount, or seemed to drop behind in the course of the day, the forewoman blamed her, and threatened to reduce her wage.

Anna worked in this manner ten hours a day, for $6 a week. If she were five minutes late, she was docked for half an hour. She was docked for every needle she broke in the rapid pace she was obliged to keep, and in the first year she was obliged to pay out of her wage, which had then been only $5 a week, for all the many hundred yards of thread she st.i.tched into the white-goods company's output.

In order to complete 784 yards of belting a day--over 1600 yards of st.i.tching, for she fastened both edges of the belt--she was forced, of course, to work as fast as she could feed and guide belts under the needle. She had strong eyes. But her back ached from the stooping to guide the material, and she suffered cruelly from pain in her shoulders.

There had been seventeen weeks of this work. Then there had been ten weeks of two or three days' work a week, when it seemed impossible to earn enough to live on. Then, ten weeks when the factory closed. Then she had an illness lasting over two months, which began a few weeks after the factory closed.

She said the doctor had told her that her illness was consumption and that he had cured it. It must have been, of course, not consumption or not arrested in that s.p.a.ce of time. But, during it, she had paid him $28.50 and given $22.50 for her board and lodging, with an uncle in the Bronx, and for milk and eggs.

Almost as soon as she was declared able to return to st.i.tching seven hundred belts a day, she hurried back to work. But within a few days the girls struck against the company's practice of making them buy thread, and were out for five weeks. At the end of this time they won their point.

Altogether her income for the year had been about $150; and the severity and amount of labor she had given in earning it had left her cruelly spent.

She could not possibly live on this amount, as board and lodging alone had cost her $3 a week--$126 for the year. She had been obliged to borrow $50 for her treatment in her illness; and she had not yet paid back this sum. Besides, her landlady had trusted her for some board bills she had not yet paid. For clothing she had spent $26.59,--one dress for $7; one hat for $2; one jacket for $6; two pairs of shoes at $2; a pair for $4; 36 pairs of stockings at 10 cents a pair for $3.60; three waists at 98 cents each for $2.94; and three suits of winter underwear for $1.05. But she said winter underwear of this quality failed to keep her really warm.

In the evening she was too tired to leave the tenement for night school or for anything else. She did her own washing. In the course of a year her only pleasure had been a trip to the theatre for 35 cents.

Anna Flodin lived in a very poor tenement off the Bowery; and she told her experiences in her work, in spite of her muteness and struggle to express herself, with a sort of public spirit, and an almost amba.s.sadorial dignity, which was inexpressibly touching.

That spirit--a fine freedom from personal self-consciousness and clear interest in testifying to the truth about women's work, and wages, and expenditure of strength--was evinced by countless girls. None, indeed, were pressed for any facts they did not wish to give, nor sought, unless they wished to help in the inquiry. But perhaps because it arose from such an immured depth of youth spent in foreboding poverty, the voice of Anna Flodin's chronicle was distinctively thrilling.

She told her experience in her work with great clearness, sitting in a little dark, clean room in a tenement, looking out on a filthy, ill-smelling inner court. The only brightening of her grave, young face throughout her story and our questions was her smile when she spoke of her one visit to the theatre, and another change of expression when she spoke of the other girls in the shop, in connection with the strike about thread. She was a member of the Union. In the shop there were girls not members who were willing to continue to buy the management's thread indefinitely. Anna Flodin said quietly, with a look of quick scorn, that she would never have anything to do with such girls.

Her mute life and mechanical days could make one understand in her with every sympathy all kinds of unreasoning prejudices and aversions.

She was very young; and it was partly her youth which deepened all the sense of dumb oppression and exhaustion her still presence and appealing eyes imparted. There is a great deal of talk about the danger and sadness of dissipation in youth. Too little is said of the fact that such an enclosing monotony and stark poverty of existence as Anna Flodin's is in youth sadness itself, as cruel to the pulses in its numb pa.s.sage as the painful sense of wreck. All tragedies are not those of violence, but of depletion, too, and of starvation.

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 st.i.tched belts for eleven years, though not in the same factory.

Leather belt st.i.tching is at once heavy and skilled work. The row of st.i.tching is placed at the very edge of the belt. The slightest deviation from a straight line in the st.i.tch spoils the entire piece of work.

Running the needle-point through the leather is hard, and requires so much strength that the st.i.tching 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 st.i.tches 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 pet.i.tion, 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 s.e.m.e.nova, 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.

She lived in a small hall bedroom with an admired girl friend. Each paid $4.25 a month rent. Her food amounted to $2.90 a week. Sat.u.r.day evening she spent in doing her washing. She lived near enough to the factory to walk to work in five or ten minutes. She paid 25 cents a month for Union dues.

Alta was working for "counts" toward entering college or Cooper Union. In spare moments she read the modern Russians. During her year in New York she has mastered sufficient English to read Shakespeare in the original.

In a few years she will be a teacher. Alta was an eager Russian revolutionist. She had the student's pa.s.sion, and her head was full of plans for a life of intellectual work.