Making Both Ends Meet Part 11

These chronicles of the income and outlay of some New York factory workers have described monotony and speeding in machine-work. The annals of the New York factory workers presented below describe monotony and speeding in hand-work.

Yetta Sigurdin, an Austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in New York three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a tobacco factory, a Union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work.

Her hours were eight a day. In a full day, Yetta could roll 2200 cigarettes. So her best wage was about $12 a week. The average was, however, not more than $8, as the factory had been idle four weeks, and very dull for five months, though busy for the remaining six.

Yetta looked very robust and happy. She seemed comfortable in her work and with her income, in spite of the extra labor of washing some of her own clothes and making her own waists. This, no doubt, was due largely to her sane and reasonable working hours, and partly to the fact that her work did not require the intensity of watching and application demanded by rapid machine-work. Indeed in some Union tobacco factories the rollers sometimes make up a sum among themselves to pay a reader by the hour to read aloud to them while they are at work.

Yetta paid $3 a week for room, breakfast, and supper in a tenement. It was in an extremely poor neighborhood, but was fresh, pleasant, and well aired. Her dinners cost about $1.50 a week. She did part of her washing and part was included in the charge for board. Her Union fee was 15 cents a week. The members of the Cigarette Makers' Union pay a weekly due of 5 cents for the support of a sanatorium in Colorado for tubercular tobacco workers. Yetta contributed to this sanatorium and gave a 10-cent monthly fee for Union agitation.

She estimated the cost of her clothing at about $82 for the year. A winter suit cost $14; a spring suit, $15; a summer dress, $5; and a winter dress, $18. Six pairs of shoes cost $15. She could not remember the items of the rest of her expenditure for dress. Part of it was for underwear and part of it for material for waists she had made herself.

In spite of the monotony and speed of Yetta's work, it did not exhaust her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours.

Barbara Cotton, an American woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment.

In the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was split into the thinnest possible sheets. She was paid by the number she succeeded in splitting. The constant repet.i.tion of an act of such accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made her extremely nervous.

For six months of these nine-hour days, she earned $8 or $8.50 a week.

During the other six months there was no work on Sat.u.r.days, and she earned about $7 a week. She had a week's vacation with pay. She had lost during the year she described two months' work from illness, due to her run-down condition. This she said, however, was not caused by her work, but by combining with it, in an emergency, the care of the children of a sister, who had been sick.

Miss Cotton belonged to a benefit society and through her own illness she had received an allowance of $5 a week.

Her income for the year had been about $367, an average of $7.06 a week.

Miss Cotton had tried living in boarding-houses and furnished rooms, and although the expense was about the same, the places were much less attractive in every way than the hotel for working girls where she was staying at the time of the interview.

For half of a room a little larger than an ordinary hall bedroom and for breakfasts and dinners, she paid $4.50 a week. Luncheons in addition cost her $1 a week. As she was within walking distance of work, she had no other expense but 35 cents for part of her washing. The rest she did herself.

She bought very little clothing, as out of the $1.15 a week she had left after paying every necessary expense, she generously helped to support a sick sister and niece. After eighteen years of hard, steady work--nine years of it skilled work--she had saved nothing except in the form of benefit fees, and she had no prospect of saving.

Although she was nervously worn, and her eyesight was strained, she was less exhausted by her industrial experience than Katherine Ryan, an Irish worker of forty-five, who had been cutting and sewing tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs for six years in an applique factory.

Eight and a quarter hours of this work a day exhausted her. She received $7 a week. Her eyes were fast failing her from the close watch she had to keep on her scissors to guard against cutting too far.

She often went to bed at eight or half past eight o'clock, worn out by one day's task and eager to be fresh for the next, for she was hard pressed by the compet.i.tion of young eyes and quick fingers.

Newer workers were given finer and more profitable work to do. In spite of her faithfulness, and straining for speed, she was laid off two months earlier in the last season than in any previous year, and newer helpers were retained. She thought the forewoman was prejudiced against her, and naturally could not understand the truth that from the standpoint of modern industry she was aged at forty-five.

She had been paying $3 a week for board in a philanthropic home, and there she was permitted to stay and to pay for her board and lodging when she had no money by helping with the housework. Miss Ryan, however, had exhausted herself less rapidly than Elena and Gerda Nakov, two young Polish women of thirty-three and twenty-nine, skilled hand-workers on children's dresses.

Elena had come from South Russia to seek her fortunes when she was sixteen years old. Her mother and father were dead. She had been educated by an uncle, with whom her younger sister, Gerda, remained.

According to the testimony of Elena's brother-in-law, the kind-hearted husband of a married sister living in New York, and also according to the testimony of Gerda, Elena at sixteen was a very beautiful girl. She was small, but very strong and well knit, with a fresh, glowing color, deep gray eyes, and heavy reddish gold hair, growing low upon her forehead in a widow's peak.

Elena first found work as a cigarette roller, earning $4 a week. Here she was subjected to constant insolence and scurrilous language from the foreman and the men working with her. Her eyes turned black with contempt when she spoke of this offence--"Oh" she exclaimed, "I thought, 'I am poor, but I will never in my life be so poor as to stand things like that.'"

She left the tobacco factory and found employment as a neckwear worker.

Here, too, she earned $4, but the season grew dull, and she entered a small factory, where she worked on children's dresses, embroidering, b.u.t.tonholing, f.a.ggoting, and feather-st.i.tching. In this craft she proved to have such deftness, nicety of touch, and speed that she could do in an hour twice as much as most of the other girls and women in the factory.

She sewed from eight to six, with half an hour for lunch. She always took work home and sometimes she sewed for half of Sunday, for living expenses consumed all of her $4 a week. Her stomach had failed her in the intensity of her occupation and from the insufficient food she was able to purchase, and she needed all the extra money she could earn for doctor's bills and medicine.

She was thin, spent, worn, and pale, when Gerda came over from Russia, four years after Elena had arrived. Gerda was a strong, attractive girl, with good health, dark curling hair, and a lovely color.

Entering the same factory with Elena, she soon became almost as able as her sister in fine sewing, and almost as ill. She earned $3 a week.

The factory was owned by a young German widow, Mrs. Mendell, an extremely attractive, pretty, and skilful person, appearing in her office an agreeable and well-educated young woman, and able to produce the most engaging little dresses, caps, and undermuslins for children, at a high profit, by paying extremely small wages to skilled immigrant seamstresses. In her workroom, Mrs. Mendell alternately terrorized and flattered the girls. She speeded them constantly. Unless they had done as much work as she wished to accomplish through the day, she refused to speak to them. She made the younger girls put on her boots, and dress her when she changed her office frock for the clothes in which she motored home at night. And in the morning she punished girls who had not finished as much work as she wished over night by giving them the worst paid and hardest sewing in the factory.

One night she sent Elena and Gerda home with two great bundles of infants' bands--shoulder-straps and waistbands--to be made ready to be fastened to long skirts the next morning. They were all to be feather-st.i.tched around the shoulder-bands and upper edges of the waist-bands, three b.u.t.tons sewed on, and three b.u.t.tonholes made in each.

This was to be done for 2-1/2 cents a piece--a quarter a dozen.

In the morning after she had completed this work, Elena felt so nervous and ill when she went to the factory, that as she handed Mrs. Mendell back the bundle and received the quarter, she burst into tears. She told Mrs. Mendell she was sick. She could not live and work as she was working. Gerda's eyes were always strained. Their wages must be raised.

Mrs. Mendell replied with calm and self-approbation, that she herself stayed in the factory all day, but she never complained in any such way.

However, she raised Elena's wages 50 cents.

At this time the two girls lived in a tiny, inner room with one window, on an air-shaft in an East Side tenement. For this they paid $8 a month.

It was scarcely more than a closet, holding one chair, one table, and a bed; and so small that Elena and Gerda could scarcely squeeze in between their meagre furnishings. They did their own washing, cooked their own breakfasts on the landlady's stove, prepared a lunch they took with them to the factory, and paid 20 cents a night apiece for dinner. Almost all the money they had left, after their lodging and board and the barest necessities for clothing were paid for, went for medicines and doctors.

Their clothing was so poor that they were ashamed to go out on Sunday--when everybody else put on "best dresses"--and would sit in their room all day. However, in the evenings they sometimes went to see relatives in the Bronx, and on one of these occasions they had a piece of good fortune of the oddest character. On the elevated road on which they happened to be riding there was an accident--a collision. They were neither of them injured; but they saw the collision, and were summoned as witnesses for the road. They were obliged to spend several mornings away from making children's dresses, waiting to give their testimony in the criminal court, which they found highly pleasant and recreative. However, after all, the road settled with the prosecutors before the girls were ever called on for their testimony, and the case never came to trial. But the railroad gave Elena and Gerda for the time they had spent on its behalf a check for $20.

At this they determined to move to better quarters. The factory, besides, had grown and moved into larger rooms farther up-town (though its workrooms had always been well lighted and ventilated), so that the girls were obliged to spend more than they could afford for carfare. With the $20 they furnished their room in Harlem. They were in a wild, disreputable neighborhood, of which the girls remained quite independent.

But the rooms were airy and attractive. Having now their own furnishings, they paid only $8 a month for all this added s.p.a.ce and comfort, so that they could continue to live in these accommodations, but only with severe effort and industry on Elena's part. For Gerda's optic nerve was now so affected by strain, and she suffered so from indigestion, faintness, and illness, that she was unable to go to the factory. She kept the house, doing some sewing at home.

Elena's wages during the next six years, by struggle after struggle with Mrs. Mendell, were raised to $7 a week after her thirteen years of service. But she was nearly frantic with alarm over her failing health.

She was thin and frail, and eating almost nothing from gastritis.

At last a woman physician she saw told her she must stop work or she would die. Her stomach was almost completely worn out. This doctor sent her to a hospital, and visited Gerda and sent her, too, to a hospital.

This was four years ago. But both the young women are so broken down that no efforts of public or private philanthropic medical care in the state and the city have been able to restore their health. The doctors in whose charge they have been say that these young women's strength is simply worn out from these years of overwork and strain and poor and scanty food, and that they can never again be really well.

They leave the hospitals or sanatoria for a few weeks of wage-earning, six, at the most, to return again ill and unable to do any work at all.

Their life is now indeed a curious modern pilgrimage among the various forms of charitable cure and the great charitable inst.i.tutions of the community which is entirely unable to return to them the strength they have lost in its industries.

It may be pointed out that the exhaustion of these two workers has involved a loss and expense not only to themselves, but to the factory management, which has been obliged to employ in Elena's place two other less skilful embroiderers, and to the taxpayers and the philanthropists of New York who support charity hospitals and vacation homes.

These chronicles express as clearly as possible, in the order followed, monotony and speeding in factory work among younger and older women, operatives and hand-workers.

While one of the strangest results of the introduction of machinery into modern industry is that instead of liberating the human powers and initiative of the workers, it has often tended to devitalize and warp these forces to the functions of machines, yet this result is so strange that it cannot seem inevitable. Speeding for long hours at machines, rather than machine labor itself, appears most widely responsible for the fatigue described by the operatives whose trade histories have been narrated. Further, speeding and long hours were responsible for the most drastic experience of exhaustion related among all the factory workers encountered--the experience of Elena and Gerda Nikov, who were employed not at machines, but in handiwork so delicate it might with more accuracy be called a handicraft.

The exhaustion of these workers was partly attributable to their custom of pursuing their trade not only in factory hours, but outside the factory, at home. Within the last year, the most widely constructive effort to abolish sweated home labor from the needle trades ever undertaken in this country has been initiated by the New York cloak makers, to whom we next turned for an account of their industrial fortunes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: These testimonies are cited from the brief for the Illinois Ten-Hour Law, prepared by Louis D. Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark.

_Investigations into the Conditions of Health of the Swiss Factory Workers._ Dr. Fridlion Schuler, Swiss Factory Inspector, and Dr. A. E.

Burckhardt, Professor of Hygiene.