Part 11 (1/2)

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 was.h.i.+ng 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 was.h.i.+ng. 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.