Part 14 (1/2)

The weekly hours of labor shall consist of 50 hours in 6 working days, to wit, nine hours on all days except the sixth day, which shall consist of five hours only.

No overtime work shall be permitted between the fifteenth day of November and the fifteenth day of January, or during the months of June and July, except upon samples.

No overtime work shall be permitted on Sat.u.r.days, except to workers not working on Sat.u.r.days, nor on any day or more than two and one-half hours, nor before 8 A.M., nor after 8.30 P.M.

For overtime work all week workers shall receive double the usual pay.]

[Footnote 31: There has been practically no complaint on the part of the workers or the public concerning the sanitary conditions of the larger houses. At present the strike settlement has established a joint board of sanitary control, composed of three representatives of the public, Dr.

W.J. Scheffelin, chairman, Miss Wald of the Nurses' Settlement, and Dr.

Henry Moskowitz of the Down-town Ethical Society; two representatives of the workers, Dr. George Price, Medical Sanitary Inspector of the New York Department of Health, 1895-1904, and Mr. Schlesinger, Business Manager of the _Vorwarts_; and two representatives of the manufacturers, Mr. Max Meier and Mr. Silver. The work of this committee will be the enforcement of uniform sanitary conditions in all shops, including the more obscure and smaller establishments.]

[Footnote 32: This statement is written in the last week of September, 1910.]

CHAPTER VI

WOMEN LAUNDRY WORKERS IN NEW YORK

(This article is composed of the reports of Miss Carola Woerishofer, Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood, and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins, supplemented with an account of the Federal Supreme Court's decision on the const.i.tutionality of the Oregon Ten-Hour Law for laundry workers.)

What do self-supporting women away from home in New York give in their work, and what do they get from it, when their industry involves a considerable outlay of muscular strength? For a reply to this question the National Consumers' League turned to the reports of women's work as machine ironers and hand ironers, workers at mangles, folders, and shakers of sheets and napkins from wringers in the steam laundries of New York.

For, although the labor at the machines in the laundry wash-rooms is done by men, and all work in laundries consists largely of machine tending, still women's part in the industry can be performed only by unusually strong women.[33]

In the winter of 1907-1908 the National Consumers' League had received from different parts of New York a series of letters filled with various complaints against specified laundries in this city--complaints stating that hours were long and irregular, wages unfair, the laundries dirty, and the girls seldom allowed to sit down, and containing urgent pleas to the women of the Consumers' League to help the women laundry workers.

After consulting some of the laundry women, the League determined to secure through a special inquiry a well-ascertained statement of conditions as a basis for State factory legislation for uniform improvements. A few months before, the const.i.tutionality of the present New York legislation, as well as of almost all of the State legislation concerning the hours of work of adult women in this country, had been virtually determined by the decision of the Federal Supreme Court in regard to the ten-hour law for women laundry workers in Oregon. The opinion of the National Supreme Court, which practically confirmed the pa.s.sed New York laundry laws and made future laws for fair regulation for the women workers seem practicable, will be given after the account of women's work in laundries in New York.

Miss Carola Woerishofer conducted the inquiry, which was confined to steam laundries, as hand laundries were more favorably described by many reliable authorities. Among these, the large laundries were commercial laundries, such as we all patronize, and hotel and hospital laundries.

The features chiefly observed in all these establishments were sanitation, the danger of injury, and wages and hours of labor. For the account of the hospital and hotel laundries the Consumers' League of the city of New York obtained the services of Miss Elizabeth Howard Westwood of Smith College and Miss Mary Alden Hopkins of Wellesley College. As a means of investigating commercial laundries, Miss Woerishofer, answering advertis.e.m.e.nts as they came, worked in laundries in trade employed in nearly every branch of the industry in which women are engaged throughout the borough of Manhattan. Her report follows.

I

”Naturally, the first question which faced me was that of finding a job.

For this I turned to the laundry want 'ads' in the newspapers. To my surprise, as my investigation was made in the summer, which is, curiously enough, by far the slackest season in New York commercial laundries, I was never without work for more than a day at a time, although I changed continually, for the sake of experience, averaging about a week in a place.

”The first establishment to which I went was known as a model laundry. It was large and well ventilated and had a dry floor. These sanitary conditions may be said to be fairly typical. In only one laundry did I find a girl who was compelled to stand in a wet place, though water overflowed sometimes into the girls' quarters from the wash-rooms, where the men worked. In some of these wash-rooms the water is at times ankle-deep, a condition due only to bad drainage, as other wash-rooms are absolutely dry. Whatever the condition of the work-rooms, the women's dressing-rooms frequently had insanitary plumbing, and were verminous and unhealthful. In one laundry the water supply was contaminated, smelling and tasting offensively when it came from the faucet, and worse after it had pa.s.sed through the cooler. The women here at first kept bottles of soda-water. Some old women had beer. But on a series of hot days, with hours from half past seven to twelve, and from one till any time up to ten at night, 10 cents' worth of beer or soda-water a day did not go far to alleviate thirst, and soon drank a big hole in a wage of $5 a week. A complaint was sent to the Board of Health. After nearly three weeks, the Board of Health replied that the complaint must be sent to the Water Department. From the Water Department no reply could possibly come for several weeks more. And in the meantime, all the women workers in the laundry, impelled by intolerable thirst, drank the contaminated water.

”The work-room where I was employed had, on the whole, plenty of windows.

These were left open. But when a room is large and full of machinery, artificial light is needed all day, and the outside air does not come in very far to drive away the heat and the dampness. On going out at noon from a laundry where I had dipped s.h.i.+rts in hot starch all the morning at a breakneck pace, I was struck by the coolness of the day. That night I discovered that the thermometer had been registering 96 in the shade. A few fans should be put in each laundry. They could be run by the power that runs the machines.

”In the 'model laundry,' I worked at first at a mangle, running spreads and sheets and towels between two revolving cylinders. Here I found there was danger of slipping my fingers too far under the cylinders in the process of feeding. The mangle had a guard, to be sure,--a flexible metal bar about three-quarters of an inch above the feeding-ap.r.o.n in front of the cylinder. But I learned that this acted as a warning rather than a protection. 'Once you get your fingers in, you never get them out,'

Jenny, the Italian girl beside me, said repeatedly. The Italian girls Anglicized their names, and Jenny had probably been Giovanna at home.

”At the collar machine, at which I was stationed after lunch, there was an adequate guard where the collars were slipped in. Where they came out, however, they had to be pushed in rapid succession under the farther side of a burning hot cylinder with no guard at all. To avoid touching the cylinder with my arm in this process, I was obliged either to raise it unnaturally high, or to stand on tiptoe. 'You didn't get burned to-day or yesterday,' said Jenny, 'but you sure will sometime. Everybody does on that machine.'

”In the ironing of collars and cuffs by machinery, there is continual risk of burns on hands and arms. At a sleeve-ironing machine, in another place I received some slight burn every day. And when I asked the girls if this were because I was 'green,' they replied that every one got burned at that machine all the time. Each burn is due to 'carelessness,'