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A final form of rascality referred to in a previous chapter is found here, as in every phase of the clothing trade, whether on small or large scale. Girls are advertised for “to learn the trade,” and the usual army of applicants appear, those who are selected being told that the first week or two will be without wages, and only the best workers will be kept. Each girl is thus on her mettle, and works beyond her strength and beyond any fair average, to find herself discharged at the end of the time and replaced by an equally eager and equally credulous substitute. There are other methods of fraud that will find place in a consideration of phases of the same work in the great establishments, some difficulties of the employer being reserved for the same occasion.

CHAPTER SIXTH.
MORE METHODS OF PROSPEROUS FIRMS

To do justice to employer as well as employed is the avowed object of our search, yet as it goes on, and the methods made necessary by competition become more and more clear, it is evident that back of every individual case of wrong and oppression lies a deeper wrong and a more systematized oppression. Master and servant alike are in the same bonds, and the employer is driven as mercilessly as he drives. He may deny it. He may even be quite unconscious of his own subjection, or, if he thinks at all of its extent, may look enviously at the man or the corporation that has had power to enslave him. The monopolist governs not only the market but the bodies and souls of all who provide wares for that market; yet the fascination of such power is so tremendous that to stand side by side with him is the dream of every young merchant, – the goal on which his eyes are set from the beginning. Only in like power is any satisfaction to be found. Any result below this high-water mark can be counted little else than failure.

To this end, then, toils the employer of every grade, bringing every faculty to bear on the lessening of waste, whether in material or time; the conservation of every force working in line with his purpose. Naturally, the same effect is produced as that mentioned in a previous paper. The employees come to represent “so much producing power,” and are driven at full speed or shut off suddenly like the machines of which they are the necessary but still more or less accidental associates. Certain formulas are used, evolved apparently from experience, and carrying with them an assurance of so much grieved but inevitable conviction that it is difficult to penetrate below the surface and realize that, while in degree true, they are in greater degree false. In various establishments, large and small, beginning with one the pay-roll of which carries 1,462 employees, and ending with one having hardly a third this number, the business manager made invariably the same statement: “We make our money from incidentals rather than from any given department. You are asking particularly about suits. I suppose you’ll think it incredible, but in suits we work at a dead loss. It is only an accommodation to our customers that makes us keep that department open. The work should be put out to mean any profit, but we can’t do that with the choicest materials, and so we make it up in other directions. You would have to go into business yourself to understand just how we are driven.”

“Suppose you refused to be driven? A firm of your standing must have matters a good deal in its own hands. Suppose – ”

“Suppose!” The manager threw out his hands in a gesture more full of disclaimer than any words. “There is no room for supposes in business, madam. We do what we must. How are we to compete with a factory turning out suits by steam power? Not that we would compete. There is really no occasion,” he added hastily. “But their methods certainly have an unpleasant influence, and we are obliged to take them into account slightly.”

“Then your statement would be, that no matter how expensive the suit made up, you can make no profit on it?”

“Absolutely none. It is a concession to a customer’s whims. We could buy the same thing and sell to her at half the price, but she prefers to select materials and have them put together in our work-room, and we must humor her. But rents are so enormous that the space for every woman employed by us in these departments may be said to represent simply so many cubic feet in good coin, bringing us no return. Our profits are dwindling with every year.”

“Might not co-operation – ”

Again the manager threw out his hands.

“Simply another form of robbery. We have investigated the history of co-operation, and it does not appear to affiliate with our institutions. The lamentable failure of the Co-operative Dress Association ought to be the answer to that suggestion. No, madam. There is no profit in suits, or in any form of made-up clothing for ladies’ wear, if it is done on the premises. You have to turn it over to the wholesale manufacturer if you want profit.”

Having heard this statement in many forms, and recognizing the fact that increase in rents as well as in systematized competition might well have reduced profits, it still appeared incredible that the rates charged held no surplus for the firm. Little by little it has become possible to supplement each statement by others of a different order. Nothing is more difficult than to obtain trustworthy information regarding the methods of a firm whose standing is such that to have served it is always a passport to other employment; whose payments are regular, and where every detail of work-room is beyond criticism. It is no question of bare-faced robbery as in that of many cited, yet even here the old story tells itself in different form, and with an element which, in many a less pretentious establishment, has not yet been found to exist.

The work done here is piece-work. French cutters and fitters, receiving from thirty to fifty dollars a week, give that guarantee of style and elegance which is inherent in everything bearing the stamp of the firm. Experts run the machines in the sewing-machine room, being paid by the day at the rate of from six to eight dollars per week in the busy season. The buttonholes are made by women who do nothing else, and who are paid by the dozen, earning from five to seven dollars weekly. All stitched seams are done in the machine-room, and the dress passes from there to the sewing-room, into the hands of the sewing-girls, who receive from three to four dollars and a half for each garment. The latter price is seldom reached; four dollars and a half or five dollars paying for a dress loaded with trimming, puffs, flounces, etc.

At this rate there would seem to be a chance for wages a good deal beyond the average, but it is one of the unwritten laws that no sewing-girl shall exceed five dollars per week; whether formulated by superintendent or by firm remains yet to be discovered. The one unquestionable fact is that if the superintendent of the work-room finds that any girl is expert enough to make over this amount the price per garment is docked, to bring her down to the level. They are never driven. On the contrary, they must wait often, two or three hours at times, for the arrival of “Madame,” who must inspect the work, drape a skirt, or give some suggestion as to trimming. No entreaty can induce the superintendent to give out another piece of work which might fill this vacant time, and the girls dare not state their case to the employer. No member of the firm enters the work-rooms. Reports are made by the superintendent of the department, and the firm remains content with knowing that it has provided every comfort for its employees. Complaint would insure discharge, and if a girl hints that she cannot live on five dollars a week the answer has been for the years during which the present superintendent has held the place, always the same: —

“If you haven’t a home so that you have no expense of board, it is your own fault, and I can’t be expected to do anything about it.”

There appears to be no question as to the entire “respectability” of the woman, who would undoubtedly deny the implication contained in her own words. But there is rivalry between the superintendents as to which department shall make largest returns in profits, and wages are kept down to secure that end. There is also no question that a proportion of those employed are “supported,” and merely add this work as a means of securing a little more pin-money. It is true of but a very few, but of those few an undeniable fact. It is equally a fact that, in spite of the managers’ assertions, profit can be made and is made from this department, and that a large percentage of such profit comes directly from the pocket of the sewing-girl, who, even when she adds buttonhole-making in the simpler dresses, can never pass beyond a fixed wage.

In other large establishments on both sides of the city methods are much the same, with merely slight variations as to comfort of quarters, time for lunch, sanitary conditions, etc. But in all alike, the indispensable, but always very helpless, sewing-girl appears to be one of the chief sources of profit, and to have small capacity and no opportunity for improving her condition. Even where the work comes from the manufactory, and steam has taken the place of foot-power, no machine has yet been run so automatically that the human hand can be entirely dispensed with. The “finisher” remains a necessity, and as finisher sometimes passes slightly beyond the rate obtained when merely sewing-girl. Only slightly, however. It is a deeply rooted conviction among these workers that a tacit or even, it may be, formal understanding has been settled upon by employers in general.

“I don’t know how it is,” said one of the most intelligent among the many I have talked with; “there’s never any trouble about getting work. I’ve even had them send after me when I had gone somewhere else in hopes of doing better. I used to earn ten and twelve dollars a week on suits, children’s or ladies’, but now if I earn five or sometimes six I do well. The work goes on with a rush. It’s a whole building except the first floor, – five stories, and suits of every kind. The rooms are all crowded, and they give out piece-work, but they’ve managed it so that we all earn about alike. When the rush of the fall and spring season is over they do white work and flannel skirts and such things, and a great many are discharged in the lull. But go where you will, up-town or down, it doesn’t seem to matter how well you can turn off the work or how long you have been at it. They all say, if we ask for better pay, ‘It can’t be had as long as there is such competition. We’re losing straight ahead.’ I don’t understand. We don’t any of us understand, because here is the great rush of work and it must be done. They can’t do without us, and yet they are grinding us down so that I get half distracted sometimes, wondering where it will end and if things will ever be better.”

“Would not private sewing be better? There is always a demand for good seamstresses.”

“I don’t know anything about private sewing. You have to cut and plan, and I never learned that. I like to work on things that are cut by a cutter and just so, and I can make up my dozen after dozen with not an eighth of an inch difference in my measurements. I’m an expert, you know.”

“But if you learned to do private sewing perfectly you could earn a dollar and a quarter a day and board and have your evening quite free.”

The girl shook her head. “I’ve had that said to me before, but you know it’s more independent as I am. Maybe things will be better by and by.”

There is no obstinacy like the obstinacy of deep-seated prejudice, and this exists to a bewildering degree among these workers, who, for some inscrutable reason, seem filled with the conviction that private employ of any nature whatever is inevitably a despotism filled with unknown horrors. There appears to be also a certain esprit du corps that holds sustaining power. The girl likes to speak of herself as one of such and such a firm’s hands, and to regard this distinction as compensation for over-hours and under-pay and all known wretchedness encompassing her trade. The speaker I have quoted was an American girl of twenty-six, had had three years in public schools, and regarded the city as the only place in which life could be considered endurable.

“I shouldn’t know what to do in the country if I were there,” she said. “I don’t seem to like it somehow. It isn’t the company, for mother and me keep to ourselves a good deal, but somehow we know how to get along in the city, and the country scares me. I like my work if only I could get more pay for it.”

“Do you ever think that if all who work in your line joined together and made common cause you might even things a little; that it might be easier for all of you?”

“We wouldn’t dare,” she answered, aghast. “Why, do you know, there’d be ten for each one of us that was turned off. Women come there by the hundred. That’s what they say to me in our firm: ‘What’s the use of fussing when here are dozens waiting to take your place?’ There isn’t any use. They say now that it is the dull season, and they’ve put our room on flannel skirts; two tucks and a hem, and a muslin yoke that has to be gone round four times with the stitching. One day I made ten, but nine is all one can do without nearly killing themselves, and they pay us one dollar a dozen for making them. It used to be a dollar and a half, and that was fair enough. It’s the kind of work I like. I shouldn’t be content to do any other; but it’s bringing us all down to starvation point, and I think something ought to be done.”

In a case like this, and it is the type of many hundreds of skilled workers, who regard their calling with a certain pride, and could by no possibility be induced to seek other lines of work or other methods of living, there seems little to be accomplished. They are, however, but a small portion of the army who wait for some deliverance, and who, if they had been born to a trifle more common sense, would turn in the one sole direction from which relief is certain, this relief and the reasons for and against it having no place at this stage of the investigation.

CHAPTER SEVENTH.
NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE GOSPEL

From the fig-leaf down, it would seem as if a portion of the original curse accompanying it had passed on to each variation or amplification of first methods, its heaviest weight falling always on the weak shoulders that, if endurance could make strong, should belong to-day to a race of giants. Of the ninety and more trades now open to women, thirty-eight involve some phase of this question of clothing, about which centre some of the worst wrongs of modern civilization. It is work that has legitimate place. It must be done by some one, since the exigencies of this same civilization have abolished old methods and made home manufactures seem a poor and most unsatisfactory substitute for the dainty stitching and ornamentation of the cheaper shop-work. It is work that many women love, and, if living wages could be had, would do contentedly from year to year. Of their ignorance and blindness, and the mysterious possession they call pride, and the many stupidities on which their small lives are founded, there is much to be said, when these papers have done their first and most essential work of showing conditions as they are; – as they are, and not as the disciples of laissez faire would have us to believe they are.

“It is the business of these philanthropists to raise a hue and cry; to exaggerate every evil and underrate every good. They are not to be trusted. Look at our institutions and see what we are doing for the poor. Study statistics and see how comfortable they are!”

This is the word of a recent correspondent of a Podsnapian turn of mind, who proceeded to present facts and figures bearing out his theory. And on a Sunday shortly after, he was confirmed in his faith and greatly strengthened and comforted by words from a popular preacher, long owner of a popular pulpit, who, standing there as the representative of a master whose message was to the poor, and who turned to them from the beginning, as the hearers who alone could know most truly what meaning the message bore, spoke these words: —

“Moreover, all this hue and cry about so much destitution and misery and the unscrupulous greed of employers is groundless. I am convinced that more than one half – yes, fully three quarters – of the pauperism of which you heard so much in the late campaign exists only in the minds of the Georgeites. The picture drawn of New York’s misery is over-colored, and its inspiration is in the distorted imaginations of the George fanatics… The rum-holes are the cause of all the misery… I have been watching for thirty-five years, and in all my investigations among the poor I never yet found a family borne down by poverty that did not owe its fall to rum.”

This most extraordinary statement, from a man who in one year alone could not have listened to even half the appeals for help likely to have come to him in his position, without discovering that death and disaster in many forms played, if not the chief part, certainly that next in order to rum, can be accounted for only on the ground that a hobby ridden too hard has been known to bear off at the same time both the common-sense and power of judgment of the rider. Prohibition appears to him, as to many another, the only solution; the gospel of negation the only gospel for rich or poor. Since the Church first began to misinterpret the words of its Founder, since men who built hospitals first made the poor to fill them, the “thou shalt not” of the priest has stood in the way of a human development that, if allowed free play, had long ago made its own code, and found in natural spiritual law the key to the overcoming of that formulated by men to whom the divine in man was forever unrecognized and unrecognizable.

This is no place for the discussion of what, to many good men and women, seems the only safety for human kind; but to one who studies the question somewhat at least with the eyes of the physician, it becomes certain that no “thou shalt not” will ever give birth to either conscience or love of goodness and purity and decent living, or any other good that man must know; and that till the Church learns this, her hold on men and women will lessen, year by year. Every fresh institution in the miles of asylums and hospitals that cover the islands of the East River, and stretch on farther and farther with every year, is an added disgrace, an added count in the indictment against modern civilization. There are moments when the student of social conditions abhors Philanthropy; when a disaster that would wipe out at one stroke every institution the city treasures would seem a gift straight from God, if only thereby the scales might fall from men’s eyes, and they might learn that hiding foulness in an asylum is not extirpation; that something deeper and stronger than Philanthropy must work, before men can be saved.

It is as student, not as professional philanthropist, that I write; and the years that have brought experience have brought also a conviction, sharpened by every fresh series of facts, that no words, no matter what fire of fervor may lie behind, can make plain the sorrow of the poor. To ears that will hear, to souls that seek forever some way that may help in truth and not in name, even to them it loses power at moments. To souls that sit at ease and leave to “the power that works for righteousness” the evolution of humanity from its prison of poverty and ignorance and pain, it is quite useless to speak. They have their theory, and the present civilization contents them. But for the men and women who are neither Georgeites merely, nor philanthropists merely, nor certain that any sect or creed or ism will help, but who know that the foulest man is still brother, and the wretchedest, weakest woman still sister, whose shame and sorrow not only bear a poison that taints all civilization, but are forever our shame and our sorrow till the world is made clean, – for these men and women I write, not what I fancy, but what I see and know.

Most happily for humanity, they are stronger, more numerous, with every year; but the hardest fact for them remains ever that their battle is a double one, and that, exhausted as they may be with long conflict against lowest forms of evil, they must rally to a sharper one against the army of the Philistines. Strong soul and high endeavor: never since time began has man more needed them; never was there harder work to do.

The story of the working-woman in one great city is, with slight variations in conditions, the story of the working-woman in all; and when we have once settled conclusively what monopoly or competition has done and is doing for New York, we know sufficiently well what Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and all the host of lesser cities could easily tell us in detail. With the mass of poor who work chiefly to obtain money for drink, and who, with their progeny, are filling the institutions in which we delight, we have absolutely nothing to do. It is seldom from their ranks that workers are recruited. A small proportion, rescued by societies or mission schools, may be numbered among them, but the greater part are a grade above, and while perhaps wellnigh as ignorant, have an inheritance of better instincts, and could under any reasonable conditions of living find their fate by no means intolerable.

I have chosen to-day, instead of passing on to another form of the clothing trade, to return to that of underwear, and this because it is the record most crowded with cases in which the subjects could not enter household service and have not been reduced to poverty by intemperance. Nor is the selection made with a view to working up as startling a case as possible. On the contrary, it has been made almost at random from the many recorded, any separate mention of which would be impossible in the space at command. First on the long list comes Catherine E – , an “expert” in underwear, and living on the top floor of a large, old-fashioned house in Clinton Place; the lower part stores and offices, the upper a tenement. She earned three years ago $1.50 a day; at times, $1.75. The same work now brings her eighty-five cents, and now and then but seventy-five. The husband was a “boss painter,” and they were comfortable, even prosperous, till the fate of his calling came upon him, and first the “drop hand,” and later blood-poisoning and heart-disease followed. He is just enough alive to care a little for the children and to oversee the pitiful household affairs; the oldest girl, a child of seven, doing the marketing, boiling the kettle, etc., and this season going to school. They are fair-faced, gentle children, and this is their mother’s story: —

“I can run the machine, and I did with every one of them when they were two weeks old, for I’ve always been strong. Nothing that happens is bad enough to kill me, and it’s lucky it’s so, for it’s two years and over since William there could earn a dollar. He helps me; but you see for yourself he’s half dead and no getting well, because we’ve nothing to buy food with, or medicine, or anything that could help him. We were both brought up here in the city. We don’t know anything about the country, but sometimes I wish we did, and that I could take the children and live somehow. But I don’t know how people live there. I’m certain of work here, and I’d be afraid to go anywhere else. I’m making babies’ slips now; three tucks and a hem and find your own cotton, and it takes eighteen hours to make a dozen, and these are seventy-five cents a dozen. I can buy cotton at eighteen cents a dozen, but we have to take it from the manufacturer at twenty cents – sometimes twenty-five cents. Last week I was on corset-covers; I take whatever they send up, for I’m an old hand, and always sure of work. They were plain corset-covers, and I got forty cents a dozen without the buttonholes. If I did them it would be five cents on every dozen, and sometimes I do. That pile in the corner is extra-size chemises. I get $1.50 a dozen for making them, and if I cord the bands, fifty cents a dozen for them. I can do seven or eight a day; but there are no more just now, they say. I work fourteen hours a day; yes, I’ve often worked sixteen, for you see there are six of us, and we must be clothed and fed. William is handy, but, poor soul! he’s only a man, and he’s sick past cure, and nobody but me for us all. God help us! I wouldn’t mind if wages were steady, but they cut and cut, and always some excuse for making them lower, and here am I, that can do anything, private orders and all, down to eighty-five cents a day. I could earn more by family sewing, but I can’t leave William or the children, for he’s likely to go any minute, the doctors say, if he over-exerts himself; and suppose it came, and I not here, and the baby and Willie and all! I’ve turned all ways. I think and think as I sit here, and there’s no help in God or man. It’s all wrong somehow, but we don’t know why nor how, and the only way I can see is just to die. There’s no place for honesty or hard work. You must lie and cheat if you want standing room. God help us! – if there is a God; but I’ve my doubts. Why don’t he help, if there is one?”

Here the average earnings were twenty-five dollars a month, the rent of the room they occupied seven dollars, leaving eighteen dollars for food, fire, light, and clothing.

Another disabled husband, recovering, but for many months unable to work, was found in a tenement-house in East Eleventh Street. In this case work and earnings were almost identical with the last, but there were but two children, and thus less demand for food, etc. For a year and a half the wife, though also an “expert,” had never exceeded eighty-five cents a day and had sometimes fallen as low as seventy. She had sometimes gone to the factory instead of working at home, and the last firm employing her in this way had charged ten cents on the dollar for the steam used in running the machine which she operated.

“It didn’t pay,” the little woman said, with a laugh that ended as a sob, checked instantly. “I could earn eight dollars a week, but there was the steam, ten cents on the dollar, and my car fares, for there was no time to walk, – sixty cents for them, – $1.40, you see, altogether. I might as well work at home and have the comfort of seeing that the children were all right. There’s plenty of work, it seems. It’s wages that’s the trouble, and do you know how they cut them? If I could work any other way I would, but I like to sew, and I don’t know any other trade. I’m not strong, but somehow I can run the machines, and there’s nothing else. But we’re clean discouraged. It isn’t living, and we don’t know what way to turn.”

In East Sixth Street, near the Bowery, Mrs. W., a widow still young and with a nervously energetic face and manner, gave her experience. She had been forewoman in a factory before her husband’s death, having supported him through his last year of life, working all day and nursing him at night. In this way her own health broke down, and she was at last taken to the hospital, where she remained nearly six months, coming out to find her place filled, but a subordinate one open to her.

“I had to wait for that,” she said, “and I had to learn. I knew a sewing-machine place where often you could get ruffling for skirts to do, and I went up there one morning. It was the three tucks and a hem ruffling, and I did one hundred and forty-two yards from eight in the morning till half-past four, and they paid me twenty-three cents. ‘We could get it done for that by steam power,’ they said, ‘so we can’t give more. It’s a favor anyway to give it out at all.’ That was my first day’s work. The next I went down to my place on Canal Street. They think a good deal of me there, and they put me on drawers right away; thirty-five cents a dozen for making them. I can make two dozen a day sometimes, but fine ones not over a dozen, though they pay fifty cents. You wonder how they make anything. I’ve been forewoman, and I know the prices. Why, even at forty cents a pair they make on them. Twenty-one yards of cloth at five cents makes a dozen; that’s $1.05; and eighteen yards of edge at four and a half cents, that’s eighty-one cents; and the making thirty-five cents; that’s $2.21. Thread and all, they won’t cost over $2.25, and they sell at wholesale at three dollars a dozen and retail at $4.80. There’s profit even when you think a cent couldn’t be made. Take skirts, three yards of cloth in each at six cents. They pay thirty cents a dozen for tucking, twenty-five cents a dozen for ruffling, and thirty cents for seaming, – eighty-five cents a dozen for the entire skirt; and the cloth makes it, at eighteen cents apiece, $3.01 for the dozen. Those skirts retail at sixty cents apiece, and wholesale at fifty cents. There’s profit on them all, no matter what they say, for I’ve figured every penny over and over, down to the tape and thread. But they swear to you they are ruined by competition, and so the wages go down and down and down. Leave the city? I don’t know how to live anywhere else. I’ve never learned. It’s something to be sure of your work, even if it is starvation wages. But there’s distress all around me. I don’t see what it means. There’s a girl in the room next to me, with an invalid mother. She does flannel shirts, but before she got them she nearly starved on underwear. Now she earns a dollar a day, but she works fourteen hours for it, seven cents an hour. That’s nice pay in a Christian land. Christian! Bah! I used to believe there was Christianity, but I’ve given it up, like many another. There’s just one religion left, and that is the worship of money. The Golden Calf is God, and every man sells his soul for a chance to bow to it. I don’t know but what I would myself. So far I’ve kept decent; I came of decent folks; but it’s no fault of many a man that I’ve worked for that I can say so still. I’ve had to leave three places because they wouldn’t let me alone, and I stay where I am now because they’re quiet, respectable people, and no outrageousness. But if you know what it all means I wish you’d tell me, for I’m dazed, and I can’t make out the reason of anything any more.”