Making Both Ends Meet Part 5

Ida received the same wage as Natalya--$6 a week. She worked fifty-six hours a week--eight more than the law allows for minors. She paid $4 a week for board and a room shared with the anxious older sister, who told about her experience. Ida needed all the rest of her $2 for her clothing.

She did her own washing. As the inquirer came away, leaving the worn little girl sleeping in her utter fatigue, she wondered with what strength Ida could enter upon her possible marriage and motherhood--whether, indeed, she would struggle through to maturity.

Katia Halperian, a shirt-waist worker of fifteen, had been in New York only six months. During twenty-one weeks of this time she was employed in a Wooster Street factory, earning for a week of nine-and-a-half-hour days only $3.50. Katia, like Natalya, was a "trimmer."

After paying $3 a week board to an aunt, she had a surplus of 50 cents for all clothing, recreation, doctor's bills, and incidentals.

To save carfare she walked to her work--about forty minutes' distance.

Her aunt lived on the fourth floor of a tenement. After working nine and a half hours and walking an hour and twenty minutes daily, Katia climbed four flights of stairs and then helped with the housework.

Sonia Lavretsky, a girl of twenty, had been self-supporting for four years. She lived in a most wretched, ill-kept tenement, with a family who made artificial flowers. She had been totally unable to find work for the last five months, but this family, though very poor, had kept her with them without payment through all this time.

She had been three months an operative, putting cuffs on waists. Working on a time basis, she earned $3 the first week and $4 the second. She was then put on piece-work, and in fifty-four hours and a half could earn only $3. Laid off, she found employment at felling cloaks, earning from $3 to $6 a week. But after twelve weeks, trade in this place also had grown dull.

During her idle time she became "run down" and was ill three weeks.

Fortunately, a brother was able to pay her doctor's bills, until he also was laid off during part of her idle time.

When Sonia had any money she gave her landlady, for part of a room in the poor tenement with the flower-makers, $3.50 a month, and about $2.50 a week for food. Before her dull season and slack work began, she had paid 20 cents a week dues to a self-education society and social club.

Her brother had given her all the clothing she had. The burden of her support evidently fell heavily upon him and upon the poverty-stricken family of her hostess. And Sonia was in deep discouragement. She was about to go away from New York in hopes of finding work in Syracuse.

Getta Bursova, an attractive Russian girl of twenty, had worked for eight years--ever since she was twelve. She had been employed as a waist operative for six years in London and for two in New York.

Here she worked nine and a half hours daily in a factory on Nineteenth Street, earning $5 to $6 a week. Of this wage she paid her sister $4 a week for food and lodging in an inside tenement room in very poor East Side quarters, so far from her work that she was obliged to spend 60 cents a week for carfare. In her busy weeks she had never more than $1.40 a week left, and often only 60 cents, for her clothing and every other expense.

Getta had been idle, moreover, for nearly six months. During this time she had been supported by her sister's family.

In spite of this defeat in her fortunes, her presence had a lovely brightness and initiative, and her inexpensive dress had a certain daintiness. She was eager for knowledge, and through all her busy weeks had paid 10 cents dues to a self-education society.

Nevertheless, her long dull season was a hara.s.sing burden and disappointment both for herself and her sister's struggling family.

Betty Lukin, a shirt-waist maker of twenty, had been making sleeves for two years. For nine months of the year she earned from $6 to $10 a week; for the remaining three months only $2 a week. Her average weekly wage for the year would be about $6. Of this she spent $3 a week for suppers and a place in a tenement to sleep, and about 50 cents a week for breakfast and luncheon--a roll and a bit of fruit or candy from a push cart. Her father was in New York, doing little to support himself, so that many weeks she deprived herself to give him $3 or $4.

She spent 50 cents a week to go to the theatre and 10 cents for club dues. She had, of course, very little left for dress. She looked ill clad, and she was, naturally, improperly nourished and very delicate.

Two points in Betty's little account are suggestive: one is that she could always help her father. In listening to the account of an organizer of the Shirt-waist Makers' Union, a man who had known some 40,000 garment workers, I exclaimed on the hardships of the trade for the number of married men it contained, and was about to make a note of this item when he eagerly stopped me. "Wait, wait, please," he cried generously. "When you put it down, then put this down, too. It is just the same for the girls. The most of them are married to a family. They, too, take care of others."

To this truth, Betty's expense of $3 to $4 for her father from her average wage of $6, and little Molly's item of nine weeks' board and lodging for her sister, bear eloquent testimony. On the girls' part they were mentioned merely as "all in the day's work," and with the tacit simplicity of that common mortal responsibility which is heroic.

The other fact to be remarked in Betty's account is that she spent 60 cents a week for club dues and the theatre, and only 50 cents for all her casual sidewalk breakfasts and luncheons from the push carts. Such an eager hunger for complete change of scene and thought, such a desire for beauty and romance as these two comparative items show, appear in themselves a true romance. Nearly all the Russian shirt-waist makers visit the theatre and attend clubs and night cla.s.ses, whatever their wage or their hours of labor. Most of them contribute to the support of a family.

These shirt-waist makers, all self-supporting, whose income and outlay are described above, were all--with the exception of Irena Kovalova, who supported a family of four--living away from home. Natalya lived with her mother and father.

She did not do her own washing, though she made her own waists and those of her sister and mother. But her story is given because in other ways--in casual employment, long hours, unfair and undignified treatment from her employers, and in the conditions of her peaceable effort to obtain juster and better terms of living--her experience has seemed characteristic of the trade fortunes of many of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers employed in New York for the last two years.

In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it,"

said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters'

out on the street, then?"

Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their trade.

The factories had continued work with strike breakers. Some of the companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling their work on unfair terms. Some had employed special police protection and thugs against the pickets.

There is, of course, no law against picketing. Every one in the United States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his belief in the tariff. But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each. The chairman of the strikers from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for weeks.

A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in the side and broke one of her ribs. She was in bed for four weeks, and will always be somewhat disabled by her injury. These and other illegal oppressions visited on the strikers roused a number of members of the Woman's Trade-Union League to a.s.sist the girls in peaceful picketing.

Early in November, a policeman arrested Miss Mary E. Dreier, the President of the Woman's Trade-Union League, because she entered into a quiet conversation with one of the strike breakers. Miss Dreier is a woman of large independent means, socially well known throughout New York and Brooklyn. When the sergeant recognized her as she came into the station, he at once discharged her case, reprimanded the officer, and a.s.sured Miss Dreier that she would never have been arrested if they had known who she was.

This flat instance of discrimination inspired the officers of the Woman's Trade-Union League to protest to Police Commissioner Baker against the arbitrary oppression of the strikers by the policemen. He was asked to investigate the action of the police. He replied that the pickets would in future receive as much consideration as other people. The att.i.tude of the police did not, however, change.

It was to these events, as Natalya Urusova found, that the foreman of the Bruch factory had referred when he asked the girls, with a sneer, why they didn't join their "sisters." Going to the Union headquarters on Clinton Street, she learned all she could about the Union. Afterward, in the Bruch factory, whenever any complaints arose, she would say casually, in pretended helplessness, "But what can we do? Is there any way to change this?" Vague suggestions of the Union headquarters would arise, and she would inquire into this eagerly and would pretend to allow herself to be led to Clinton Street. So, little by little, as the long hours and low wages and impudence from the foreman continued, she induced about sixty girls to understand about organization and to consider it favorably.

On the evening of the 22d of November, Natalya, and how many others from the factory she could not tell, attended a ma.s.s meeting at Cooper Union, of which they had been informed by hand-bills. It was called for the purpose of discussing a general strike of shirt-waist workers in New York City. The hall was packed. Overflow meetings were held at Beethoven Hall, Manhattan Lyceum, and Astoria Hall. In the Cooper Union addresses were delivered by Samuel Gompers, by Miss Dreier, and by many others.

Finally, a girl of eighteen asked the chairman for the privilege of the floor. She said: "I have listened to all the speeches. I am one who thinks and feels from the things they describe. I, too, have worked and suffered. I am tired of the talking. I move that we go on a general strike."

The meeting broke into wild applause. The motion was unanimously indorsed. The chairman, Mr. Feigenbaum, a Union officer, rapped on the table. "Do you mean faith?" he called to the workers. "Will you take the old Jewish oath?" Thousands of right hands were held up and the whole audience repeated in Yiddish:[14] "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise."

This was the beginning of the general shirt-waist strike. A committee of fifteen girls and one boy was appointed at the Cooper Union meeting, and went from one to the other of the overflow meetings, where the same motion was offered and unanimously indorsed.

II

"But I did not know how many workers in my shop had taken that oath at that meeting. I could not tell how many would go on strike in our factory the next day," said Natalya, afterward. "When we came back the next morning to the factory, though, no one went to the dressing-room. We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave.

The foreman had no work for us when we got there. But, just as always, he did not tell when there would be any, or if there would be any at all that day. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines: 'Shall we wait like this?' 'There is a general strike,' 'Who will get up first?' 'It would be better to be the last to get up, and then the company might remember it of you afterward, and do well for you,' But I told them," observed Natalya, with a little shrug, "'What difference does it make which one is first and which one is last?'

Well, so we stayed whispering, and no one knowing what the other would do, not making up our minds, for two hours. Then I started to get up."

Her lips trembled. "And at just the same minute all--we all got up together, in one second. No one after the other; no one before. And when I saw it--that time--oh, it excites me so yet, I can hardly talk about it. So we all stood up, and all walked out together. And already out on the sidewalk in front the policemen stood with the clubs. One of them said, 'If you don't behave, you'll get this on your head.' And he shook his club at me.

"We hardly knew where to go--what to do next. But one of the American girls, who knew how to telephone, called up the Woman's Trade-Union League, and they told us all to come to a big hall a few blocks away.

After we were there, we wrote out on paper what terms we wanted: not any night work, except as it would be arranged for in some special need for it for the trade; and shorter hours; and to have wages arranged by a committee to arbitrate the price for every one fairly; and to have better treatment from the bosses.

"Then a leader spoke to us and told us about picketing quietly, and the law.[15]

"Our factory had begun to work with a few Italian strike breakers.[16]

The next day we went back to the factory, and saw five Italian girls taken in to work, and then taken away afterward in an automobile. I was with an older girl from our shop, Anna Lunska. The next morning in front of the factory, Anna Lunska and I met a tall Italian man going into the factory with some girls. So I said to her: 'These girls fear us in some way. They do not understand, and I will speak to them, and ask them why they work, and tell them we are not going to harm them at all--only to speak about our work.'

"I moved toward them to say this to them. Then the tall man struck Anna Lunska in the breast so hard, he nearly knocked her down. She couldn't get her breath. And I went to a policeman standing right there and said, 'Why do you not arrest this man for striking my friend? Why do you let him do it? Look at her. She cannot speak; she is crying. She did nothing at all,' Then he arrested the man; and he said, 'But you must come, too, to make a charge against him.' The tall Italian called a man out of the factory, and went with me and Anna Lunska and the three girls to the court."

But when Natalya and Anna reached the court, and had made their charge against the tall Italian, to their bewilderment not only he, but they, too, were conducted downstairs to the cells. He had charged them with attacking the girls he was escorting into the factory.

"They made me go into a cell," said Natalya, "and suddenly they locked us in. Then I was frightened, and I said to the policeman there, 'Why do you do this? I have done nothing at all. The man struck my friend. I must send for somebody.'

"He said, 'You cannot send for any one at all. You are a prisoner.'

"We cried then. We were frightened. We did not know what to do.

"After about an hour and a half he came and said some one was asking for us. We looked out. It was Miss Violet Pike. A boy I knew had seen us go into the prison with the Italian, and not come out, and so he thought something was wrong and he had gone to the League and told them.

"So Miss Pike had come from the League; and she bailed us out; and she came back with us on the next day for our trial."