Part 12 (1/2)
”Instead of becoming wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, that fatigues the worker.”
_Dangerous Trades._ Thomas Oliver, M.A., M.D., F.R.C.P. London. 1902.
”The introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... While machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has not diminished fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its relentless course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious, especially towards the end of the day, that the compet.i.tion is unequal, for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. Present-day factory labor is too much a compet.i.tion of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive iron.”
_Fourteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography_, Berlin, September, 1907. Fatigue Resulting from Occupation. Dr. Emil Roth, Regierungsrat, Potsdam.
”With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony--to the absence of spontaneity or joy in work.”
_Proceedings of the First International Convention on Industrial Diseases_, Milan, 1906. Imbecility and Criminality in Relation to Certain Forms of Labor. Professor Crisafuli.
”When only one brain-centre works, it becomes overfatigued much more easily than if the functions were alternately performed by the various centres.
”Here, then, is another factor in overfatigue due to the _monotony_ of work, interrupted only at long intervals.
”This monotony is the determining cause of local disturbances and endangers the entire organism.”]
CHAPTER V
THE CLOAK MAKERS' STRIKE AND THE PREFERENTIAL UNION SHOP
Forty million dollars are invested in New York in the making of women's cloaks, skirts, and suits. One hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of these garments are produced in New York in a year.[23]
Between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city are employed in these industries. The Union members const.i.tute ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten thousand of these members are women.[24]
It seems at first strange to find that the mult.i.tudinous fields of the metropolitan needle trades,--industries traditionally occupied by sewing women,--are, in fact, far more heavily crowded with sewing men. There is, however, a division of labor, the men doing practically all the cutting, machine sewing, and pressing, and in many cases working at hand-finis.h.i.+ng; the women practically never cutting, machine sewing, or pressing, and in all cases working at hand-finis.h.i.+ng.
A general strike involving all these men and women in the cloak making trade was declared on the 8th of July, 1910. The industry had for years burdened both its men and women workers with certain grave difficulties--an unstandardized wage, the subcontracting system, compet.i.tion with home work, and long seasonal hours.
The subcontracting system bore most severely on the women in the trade, as the greater proportion of the finishers were women, and before the strike nearly every finisher was employed by a subcontractor.
The wages paid to finishers in the same shop, whether they were girls or men, were the same. But as compared with cutters, basters, and operators the finishers both before and since the strike had always been paid relatively below their deserts.
Wages were lowered, not only by the unstandardized rates prevalent through the sub-subcontracting system, but also by the practice of sending hand-finis.h.i.+ng out of the factories and shops to be done at home.
When inquiry was made of numerous self-supporting girls employed as cloak finishers, most of them said that at the end of the working day they were too exhausted to carry any sewing home. But work had been carried away by various strong girls in the trade, and by old men, and by young men to their families.
Among the women cloak finishers, Rose Halowitch, a delicate little Russian girl of seventeen, a helper in a cloak factory, who gave her account to the Consumers' League, about two years and a half ago received a wage of from $3.50 to $6 a week. In busy weeks she would work from eight in the morning till eight at night, with only one stop of an hour for her insufficient noon lunch, for which she could afford to spend only 6 or 7 cents.
Among the home workers Rhetta Salmonsen, a Russian woman of forty, the mother of four children, used to finish at night the cloaks brought to her by her husband, who worked through the day as an operator in a cloak factory. Between them they would earn $12 and $15 in busy weeks. In these weeks there were some occasions when Mrs. Salmonsen would do the housework till her husband came home late at night. After clearing away his supper and putting the children to bed, she would start felling seams at midnight; and in order to complete the cloaks he had brought before he returned to the shop in the morning, she would sew until she saw the white daylight coming in at the tenement window, and it was time for her to prepare breakfast again. With all this industry, as her husband had been ill and there had been three months of either slack work or idleness, the family had fallen in debt. Rent, food, and shoes alone had cost them $400. This left less than $100 a year for all the other clothing and expenses of six people in New York. Against such a standard of living as this, then, cloak finishers were obliged to compete as long as they attempted to underbid the hours and prices of home work.
Among the stronger girls who had taken work home, Ermengard Freiburg, a powerful young Galician woman of twenty-eight, who had been finis.h.i.+ng cloaks ever since she was eleven, had earned $1 in the first week and had advanced rapidly to $3 a week. In the last years, however, she had not carried any work home. She had sewed on piece-work from eight in the morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or overtime. She had earned from $20 to $25 a week in the busy weeks when the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $6 and $7. Ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade fortunes. All her concern and conversation were for the numbers of women cloak makers who lacked her own wonderful strength. Successful without education, she was astonis.h.i.+ngly dest.i.tute of the wearisome fallacy of complacent self-reference characteristic of many people of uncommon ability. During the past year she had twice been discharged for organizing the workers in cloak factories where she was employed. In the first establishment subcontracting had made conditions too hard for most of the women; and in the second, wages were too low for a decent livelihood for most of the workers.
These instances serve to express in the industry and lives of women cloak workers the subcontracting system, long seasonal hours, home work, and an unstandardized wage--the features under discussion in the cloak making trade in the spring of 1910.
The whole cloak making trade of New York presents, for an outside observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static. The cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade. In the general strike of the cloakmakers in 1896 nearly all the manufacturers were German. In the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were Galician and Russian.
This aspect of the New York needle trades must be borne in mind in realizing those occurrences in the last strike which led to the present joint effort of both manufacturers and workers to standardize the wage scale, to regulate seasonal hours, to abolish the subcontracting system and home work, and to establish the preferential Union shop throughout the metropolitan industry.
Dr. Henry Moskowitz, an effective non-partisan leader in achieving the settlement of the strike, was an eye-witness and student of all its crises, and the outline of its history below is mainly drawn from his chronicle and observation.