twelve years since the Steam Laundry Workers’ Union was first formed at about thirty per cent. With the exception of the head marker, and the head washer at the one end, each at twenty-two dollars and fifty cents per week, and the little shaker girl on the mangle at seven dollars per week at the other, wages range from eighteen dollars down to eight dollars, more than the scale, however, being paid, it is said, to every worker with some skill and experience. Apprentices are allowed for in the union agreement.
The union does not permit its members to work at unguarded machinery, hence accidents are rare, and for such as do happen, usually slight ones, like burns, the union officials are inclined to hold the workers themselves responsible.
All of the steam laundries in San Francisco, now thirty-two in number, are unionized, including the laundries operated in one of the largest hotels. The union regards with just pride and satisfaction the fine conditions, short hours and comparatively high wages which its trade enjoys, as well as the improved social standards and the spirit of independence and cooeperation which are the fruit of these many years of union activity.
But outside the labor organization, and at once a sad contrast and a possible menace, lie two groups of businesses, the French laundries and the Japanese laundries. The former are mostly conducted on the old, out-of-date lines of a passing domestic industry, housed in made-over washrooms and ironing rooms, equipped with little modern machinery, most of the work being done by hand, and the employes being often the family or at least the relatives of the proprietor. In their present stage it is quite difficult to unionize these establishments and they do cut prices for the proprietors of the steam laundries.
But both steam laundries and French laundries, both employers and workers, both unionists and non-unionists are at least found in agreement in their united opposition to the Japanese laundries, from whose competition all parties suffer, and in this they are backed by the whole of organized labor. The possibility of unionizing the Japanese laundries is not even considered.
The story of the Steam Laundry Workers’ Union of San Francisco is an encouraging lesson to those toilers in any craft who go on strike. But it also holds for them a warning. A successful strike is a good thing, for the most part, but its gains can be made permanent only if, when the excitement of the strike is over, the workers act up to their principles and keep their union together. The leaders must remember that numbers alone do not make strength, that most of the rank and file, and not unfrequently the leaders too, need the apprenticeship of long experience before any union can be a strong organization. The union’s choicest gift to its membership lies in the opportunity thus offered to the whole of the members to grow into the spirit of fellowship.
A few words should be said here of another strike among laundry-workers, this time almost entirely women, which although as bravely contested, ended in complete failure. This was the strike of the starchers in the Troy, New York, shirt and collar trade. In the Federal Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners, Mr. W.P.D. Bliss gives a brief account of it. In 1905 the starchers had their wages cut, and at the same time some heavy machinery was introduced. The starchers went out, and organized a union, which over one thousand women joined. They kept up the struggle from June, 1905, throughout a whole summer, autumn and winter till March, 1906. It was up till that time, probably the largest women’s strike that had ever taken place in this country and was conducted with uncommon persistence and steadiness of purpose. They were backed by the international union, and appointing a committee visited various cities, and obtained, it is said, about twenty-five thousand dollars in this way for the support of their members. Many meetings and street demonstrations were held in Troy, and much bitter feeling existed between the strikers and the non-union help brought in. The strike at length collapsed; the firms continued to introduce more machinery, and the girls had to submit. Mr. Bliss concludes: “The Troy union was broken up and since then has had little more than a nominal existence.”
During the nineties there were a number of efforts made to organize working-women in Chicago. Some unions were organized at Hull House, where Mrs. Alzina P. Stevens and Mrs. Florence Kelley were then residents. Mrs. George Rodgers (K. of L.), Mrs. Robert Howe, Dr. Fannie Dickenson, Mrs. Corinne Brown, Mrs. T.J. Morgan, Mrs. Frank J. Pearson, Mrs. Fannie Kavanagh and Miss Lizzie Ford were active workers. Miss Mary E. Kenney (Mrs. O’Sullivan), afterwards the first woman organizer under the American Federation of Labor, was another. She was successful in reaching the girls in her own trade (book-binding), besides those in the garment trades and in the shoe factories, also in bringing the need for collective bargaining strongly before social and settlement workers.
Chicago has long been the largest and the most important among the centers of the meat-packing industry. None of the food trades have received more investigation and publicity, and the need for yet more publicity, and for stricter and yet stricter supervision is perpetually being emphasized. But most of the efforts that have been made to awake and keep alive a sense of public rights and responsibility in the conducting of huge institutions like the Chicago packing-plants, have centered on the danger to the health of the consumer through eating diseased or decomposed meat. The public cares little, and has not troubled to learn much about the conditions of the workers, without whom there could be no stockyards and no meat-packing industry. Not that some of the investigators have not tried to bring this point forward. It was the chief aim of Upton Sinclair, when he wrote “The Jungle,” and yet even he discovered to his dismay that, as he bitterly phrased it, he had hoped to strike at the heart of the American people, and he had only hit them in their stomach.
But that is a story by itself. Let us go back to the brave struggle begun by the women in the packing-plants in the year 1902 to improve their conditions by organizing.
For a great many years prior to this, women had been employed in certain branches of the work, such as painting cans and pasting on labels. But towards the close of the nineties the packers began to put women into departments that had always been staffed by men. So it was when girls began to wield the knife that the men workers first began to fear the competition of the “petticoat butchers.” The idea of organizing the girls, were they painters or butchers, as a way of meeting this new menace, did not occur to them.
At this time, in the fall of 1902, the oldest and best workers were Irish girls, with all the wit and quickness of their race. Especially was Maggie Condon a favorite and a leader. She was an extremely quick worker. With the temperament of an idealist, she took a pride in her work, liked to do it well, and was especially successful in turning out a great amount of work. Quicker and quicker she became till, on the basis of the good wages she was making, she built up dreams of comfort for herself and her family. One of her choicest ambitions was to be able to afford a room of her own. But just so surely as she reached the point where such a luxury would be possible, just so surely would come the cut in wages, and she had to begin this driving of herself all over again. Three times this happened. When her well and hardly earned twenty-two dollars was cut the third time Maggie realized that this was no way to mend matters. The harder she worked, the worse she was paid! And not only was she paid worse, she who as one of the best workers could stand a reduction better than most, but the cut went all down the line, and affected the poorest paid and the slowest workers as well.
Hannah O’Day was not one of the quick ones. Her strength had been too early sapped. There was no child-labor law in Illinois when she should have been at school, and at eleven she was already a wage-earner. Along with the rest she also had suffered from the repeated cuts that the pace-making of the ones at the top had brought about. It was evident that something must be done. Maggie Condon, Hannah O’Day and some of the others, began, first to think, and then to talk over the matter with one another. They knew about the Haymarket trouble. There were rumors of a strike the men had once had. They had heard of the Knights of Labor, and wrote to someone, but nothing came of it. So one day, when there was more than usual cause for irritation and discouragement, what did Hannah O’Day do but tie a red silk handkerchief to the end of a stick. With this for their banner and the two leaders at their head, a whole troop of girls marched out into Packingtown.
The strike ended as most such strikes of the unorganized, unprepared for, and unfinanced sort, must end, in failure, in the return to work on no better terms of the rank and file, and in the black-listing of the leaders. But the idea of organization had taken root, and this group of Irish girls still clung together. “We can’t have a union,” said one, “but we must have something. Let us have a club, and we’ll call it the Maud Gonne Club.” This is touching remembrance of the Irish woman patriot.
Time passed on, and one evening during the winter of 1903 Miss Mary McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, was talking at a Union Label League meeting, and she brought out some facts from what she knew of the condition of the women workers in the packing-houses, showing what a menace to the whole of the working world was the underpaid woman. This got into the papers, and Maggie Condon and her sister read it, and felt that here was a woman who understood. And she was in their own district, too.
So it came about that the Maud Gonne Club became slowly transformed into a real union. This took quite a while. The girls interested used to come over once a week to the Settlement, where Michael Donnelly was their tutor and helper. Miss McDowell carefully absented herself, feeling that she wanted the girls to manage their own affairs, until it transpired that they wished her to be there, and thought it strange that she should be so punctilious. After that she attended almost every meeting. When they felt ready, they obtained the charter with eight charter members and were known as Local 183 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. Little by little the local grew in numbers. One July night the meeting was particularly well attended and particularly lively, none the less so that the discussion was carried on to the accompaniment of a violent thunderstorm, the remarks of the excitable speakers being punctuated by flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. The matter under consideration was to parade or not to parade on the coming Labor Day. The anxious question to decide was whether they could by their numbers make an impression great enough to balance the dangers of the individual and risky publicity.
The vote was cast in favor of parading. When the day came the affair was an entire success. Two wagons gaily trimmed were filled with girls in white dresses, carrying banners and singing labor songs. The happy results were seen at subsequent meetings of the union, for after that other girls from other than the Irish group came in fast, peasant girls, wearing their shawls, and colored girls, till, when the union was six months old, it had five hundred members. The initiation of the first colored girl was a touching occasion. Hannah O’Day had been present at one of the men’s meetings, on an evening when it had been a colored man who at the ceremony of initiation had presented white candidates for membership, and the sense of universal brotherhood had then come over her as a sort of revelation. And there were others who felt with her. One night, Hannah being doorkeeper at her own union meeting, a colored girl applied to be admitted. Hannah called out: “A colored sister is at the door; what’ll I do with her.” It was the young president herself, Mollie Daley, though she had been brought up to think of colored folks as “trash,” who, with a disregard of strict parliamentary law, but with a beautiful cordiality, broke in with: “I say, admit her at once, and let yez give her a hearty welcome.” The girl who was very dark, but extremely handsome, had been not a little nervous over the reception that might await her. She was quite overcome when she found herself greeted with hearty applause.
On another occasion, on the question being asked from the ritual: “Any grievances?” a sensitive colored girl arose, and said a Polish girl had called her names. The Polish girl defended herself by saying: “Well, she called me Polak, and I won’t stand for that.” The president summoned them both to the front. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves?” She proceeded: “Now shake and make up, and don’t bring your grievances here, unless they’re from the whole shop.”
The girls had good training in union principles from the first, so that if their phrases were sometimes a trifle crude, they were none the less the expression of genuine good sense. For instance, some complaint would be brought forward, and in the early days the question would come: “Is this your own kick, or is it all of our kick?” A sound distinction to make, quite as sound as when later on, the officers having learned the formal phrases, they would put it in another way, and say: “Is this a private grievance or is it a collective grievance?”
Instead of the old hysterical getting mad, and laying down their tools and walking out, when things did not go right, grievances were now taken to the union, and discussed, and if supported by the body, taken to the foreman and managers by the business agent, Maud Sutter.
From the beginning the women delegates from Local 183 to the Packing Trades Council of Chicago were on an equality with the men, and girl delegates attended the convention of the National Association at Cincinnati and also at St. Louis.
It is sad to record that through no fault of their own, the girls’ organization met an early downfall. It passed out of existence after the stockyards’ strike of 1904, being inevitably involved in the defeat of the men, and going down with them to disaster.
The Irish leadership that produced such splendid results, is now, in any case, not there to be called upon, as the girls now employed in the packing-plants of Chicago are practically all immigrant girls from eastern Europe. When the present system of unorganized labor in the trade is abolished, as some day it must be, it will only be through a fresh beginning among an altogether different group, that it will be possible to reach the women.
But the spirit that permeated Local 183 has never wholly died in the hearts of those who belonged to it, and it springs up now and then in quarters little expected, calling to remembrance Maggie Condon’s reason for pushing the union of which she was a charter member and the first vice-president. “Girls, we ought to organize for them that comes after us.”
IV
THE WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE
One of the least encouraging features of trade unionism among women in the United States has been the small need of success which has attended efforts after organization in the past, especially the lack of permanence in such organizations as have been formed. In the brief historical review it has been shown how fitful were women’s first attempts in this direction, how limited the success, and how temporary the organizations themselves.
It is true there is an essential difference between the loose and momentary cooeperation of unorganized workers aiming at the remedying of special grievances, and disbanding their association whenever that particular struggle is over, and a permanent organization representing the workers’ side all the time and holding them in a bond of mutual helpfulness. Most of the strikes of women during the first half of the last century, like many today, sprang from impatience with intolerable burdens, and the “temporary union,” often led by some men’s organization, merely dissolved away with the ending of the strike, whether successful or not. But altogether apart from such sporadic risings as these, there were, as we have seen, from a very early period, genuine trade unions composed of working-women.
The Women’s Trade Union League is the first organization which has attempted to deal with the whole of the problems of the woman in industry on a national scale. As we have seen, there have been, besides the many women’s unions, and the men’s unions to which women have been and are admitted, the large body, the Women’s National Union Label League, and a number of women’s auxiliaries in connection with such unions as the Switchmen, the Machinists, and the Typographical Union. The Women’s Union Label League has, however, devoted most of its energies to encouraging the purchase and use of union-made products. The women’s auxiliaries have been formed from the wives of men from that particular union. They have often maintained a fund for sick and out-of-work members and their families, and have besides furnished a social environment in which all could become better acquainted, and they would besides take an active part in the entertainment of a national convention, whenever it came to their city. But except indirectly, none of these associations have aided in the organization of women wage-earners, still less have taken it for their allotted task. Perhaps earlier, the formation of such a body as the National Women’s Trade would have been impracticable. But it certainly responds to the urgent needs of today, and is, after all, but a natural development of the trade-union movement, with especial reference to the crying needs of women and children in the highly specialized industries.
The individual worker, restless under the miseries of her lot, and awakening also, it may be, to a sense of the meaning of our industrial system, learns to see the need of the union of her trade. When she does so, she has taken a distinct step forward. If an extensive trade, the local is affiliated with the international, but neither local nor international, as we shall see, as yet grant to the woman worker the same attention as they give to the man, because to men trade unionists the men’s problems are the chief and most absorbing. So what more natural than that women belonging to various unions should come together to discuss the problems that are common to them all as women workers, whatever their trade, and aid one another in their difficulties, cooeperate in their various activities, and thus, also, be able to present to their brothers the collective expression of their needs? Upon this simple basis is the local Women’s Trade Union League formed. Linking together the organized women of the same city, it brings them, through the National League, into touch and communication with the trade-union women in other cities.
While it is true that organization can neither be imposed nor forced upon any group, it is no less true that when girls are ready such a compact body, founded upon so broad a basis, can bring about results both in the line of education and organization which no other branch of the labor movement is equipped or fitted to do. And many labor leaders, who have sadly enough acknowledged that the labor movement that did not embrace women was like a giant carrying one arm in a sling, have already gratefully admitted that such a league of women’s unions can produce results under circumstances where men, unaided, would have been helpless.
For the origin of the Women’s Trade Union League, we must go back to 1874, when Mrs. Emma Patterson, the wife of an English trade unionist and herself deeply impressed with the deplorable condition of women wage-earners everywhere, was on a visit to the United States. The importance of combination as a remedy was freshly brought home to her through what she saw of the women’s organizations then most prominent and flourishing in New York, the Parasol and Umbrella Makers’ Union, the Women’s Typographical Union, and the Women’s Protective Union. She returned to England with a plan for helping women workers to help themselves. Shortly afterwards she and others whom she interested formed the Women’s Protective and Provident League, the title later on being changed to the bolder and more radical British Women’s Trade Union League, a federation of women’s unions, with an individual membership as well. It is known to the public on this side of the water through the visits of Mary Macarthur, its very able secretary.
This body had been in existence nearly thirty years before the corresponding organization was formed in this country. About 1902 Mr. William English Walling had his attention drawn to what the British Women’s Trade Union League was accomplishing among some of the poorest working-women in England.
He mentioned what he had learned to others. Among the earliest to welcome the idea of forming such a league was Mrs. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, a bindery-worker of Boston, long in touch with the labor movement. In the fall of 1903 the American Federation of Labor was holding its annual convention in that city. The presence of so many labor leaders seemed to make the moment a favorable one. A meeting of those interested was called in Faneuil Hall on November 14. Mr. John O’Brien, president of the Retail Clerks’ International Protective Union, presided. Among the trades represented were the Ladies’ Garment Workers, the United Garment Workers, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, Clerks, Shoe Workers and Textile Workers. The National Women’s Trade Union League was organized and the following officers elected: president, Mrs. Mary Morton Kehew, Boston; vice-president, Miss Jane Addams, Chicago; secretary, Mrs. Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, Boston; treasurer, Miss Mary Donovan, Boot and Shoe Workers; board members, Miss Mary McDowell, Chicago; Miss Lillian D. Wald, New York; Miss Ellen Lindstrom, United Garment Workers; Miss Mary Trites, Textile Workers; Miss Leonora O’Reilly, Ladies’ Garment Workers.
The one main purpose of the new league, as of its British prototype, was from the first the organization of women into trade unions, to be affiliated with the regular labor movement, in this case with the American Federation of Labor, and the strengthening of all such organizations as already existed. While, as in England, the backbone of the League was to consist of a federation of women’s unions, provision was made for taking into individual membership not only trade unionists, but those women, and men too, who, although not wage-earners themselves, believed that the workers should be organized and were unwilling that those who toil should suffer from unjust conditions.
A branch of the National Women’s Trade Union League was formed in Chicago in January, 1904; another in New York in March of the same year, and a third in Boston in June of the same year. With these three industrial centers in line, the new campaign was fairly begun.
The first three years were occupied mainly with preparatory work, becoming known to the unions and the workers, and developing activities both through the office and in the field.
Early in 1907 Mrs. Raymond Robins, of Chicago, became National President, a position which she has held ever since. To the tremendous task of aiding the young organization till it was at least out of its swaddling clothes she brought boundless energy and a single-minded devotion which admitted of attention to no rival cause. Being a woman of independent means, she was able to give her time entirely to the work of the League. She would be on the road for weeks at a time, speaking, interviewing working-women, manufacturers or legislators, all the while holding the threads, organization here, legislation there.
But the first opportunity for the Women’s Trade Union League to do work on a large scale, work truly national in its results, came with the huge strikes in the sewing trades of 1909-1911. To these a separate chapter is devoted. It is sufficient here to say that the backing given by the National League and its branches in New York, in Philadelphia and in Chicago was in great part responsible for the very considerable measure of success which has been the outcome of these fierce industrial struggles. On the whole, the strikers gained much better terms than they could possibly have done unassisted. Almost entirely foreigners, they had no adequate means of reaching with their story the English-speaking and reading public of their city. The Leagues made it their particular business to see that the strikers’ side of the dispute was brought out in the press and in meetings and gatherings of different groups. It is related of one manufacturer, whose house was strike-bound, that he was heard one day expressing to a friend in their club his bewilderment over the never-ending publicity given to this strike in the daily newspapers, adding that it was a pity; these affairs were always better settled quietly.
To win even from failure success, to win for success permanence, was the next aim of the League, and nowhere has this constructive policy of theirs brought about more significant results than in the aid which they were able to give to the workers in the sewing trades. In New York it was the League which made possible the large organizations which exist today among the cloak-makers, the waist-makers and other white-goods-workers. The League support during the great strikes, and its continued quiet work after the strikes were over, first showed the public that there was power and meaning in this new development, this new spirit among the most oppressed women workers. The attitude of the League also convinced labor men that this was no dilettante welfare society, but absolutely fair and square with the labor movement. The Chicago League, after helping in the same way in the garment-workers’ strike which is now in its fifth year, contributed towards bringing about the agreement between the firm of Hart, Schaffner and Marx, Chicago, and their employes, an agreement controlling the wages and the working conditions of between 7,000 and 10,000 men and women, the number varying with the season and the state of trade. The plan of preference to unionists, which gives to this form of contract the name of the “Preferential Shop,” had its origin in Australia, where it is embodied in arbitration acts, but in no single trade there had it been applied on such a huge scale. The Protocol of Peace, which is a trade agreement similar to that of the Hart, Schaffner and Marx employes, and which came into force first in the cloak and suit industry in New York after the strike of 1913, affects, it is stated, the enormous number of 300,000 workers.[A]
[Footnote A: In May, 1915, the Protocol was set aside by the cloak and suit manufacturers. A strike impended. Mayor Mitchel called a Council of Conciliation, Dr. Felix Adler as chairman. Their report was accepted by the union and finally by the employers, and industrial peace was restored.]
Just as sound and important work is being done all the time with many smaller groups. For instance, the straw-and panama-hat-makers of New York tried to organize and were met by a number of the manufacturers with a black list. A general strike was declared on February 14, 1913. The League members were able to give very valuable aid to the strikers by assisting in picketing and by attending the courts when the pickets were arrested. This strike had to be called off, and was apparently lost, but the union remains and is far stronger than before the strike took place.
But better results even than this were gained in the strike in the potteries in Trenton, New Jersey. The Central Labor Union of Trenton and all the trade-union men in the city gave splendid cooeperation to the strikers. They handed over the girls to the care of Miss Melinda Scott, the League organizer, and under her directions the inexperienced unionists did fine work and helped to bring about a satisfactory settlement. This success gave heart of grace to the girls in certain woolen and silk mills of Trenton. Wages there were appalling. They varied from two dollars and fifty cents to eleven dollars. Many children, nominally fourteen, but looking very young, were employed. The owner of the factory at length consented to meet the workers with the League organizer in conference at the New York headquarters, and after several weeks the strike was settled on the workers’ terms.
The New York organizer also helped the Boston League in the strike of the paper factories of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The cause of the strike here was an arrangement under which eight girls could be got to do the work of twelve. Here the workers actually stood up for a share of the profits under the new arrangement, or else that the discharged girls should be reinstated. The manufacturers chose the latter alternative.
The Candy Workers’ Union in Boston was also formed through the Women’s Trade Union League. The girls had walked all over Boston for two days asking policemen, carmen and anyone else who would listen to them how to form a union. They had no umbrellas, and their shoes were dripping with the wet. They were Jewish, Italian and American girls. As a result of the organization formed they obtained a very material raise in wages, the better allotment of work in the slack season and the taking up of all disputed questions between the manufacturers and the union.
From experience gained during these gigantic industrial wars, the National League has laid down definite conditions under which its locals may cooeperate with unions in time of strike. These take part only in strikes in which women are involved, and then only after having been formally invited to assist, and on the understanding that two League representatives may attend all executive meetings of the strikers’ union. It has been found that the lines in which the aid of the Women’s Trade Union League is of most value to any exploited group are these: (1) organization and direction of public opinion; (2) patrolling the streets; (3) fair play in the courts; (4) help in the raising of funds through unions and allies; (5) where workers are unorganized, help in the formation of trade-union organization.
The League workers thus make it their business to open up channels of publicity, at least giving the papers something to talk about, and reaching with the strikers’ side of the story, churches, clubs, and other associations of well-meaning citizens, who are not at all in touch with organized labor. Allies, in particular, can do much to preserve traditions of fair play, in regard to the use of the streets for peaceful picketing. By providing bonds for girls arrested, lawfully or unlawfully, and by attending in person such cases when these come up in court, they are standing for the principles of democracy.
In addition, the local leagues are willing to take charge of the arrangements under which girls are sent to other unions, asking for moral and financial aid. Men trade unionists long ago discovered how irresistible a pleader the young girl can be, but they are not always equally impressed with the need of safeguarding the girls, often little more than children, chosen for these trying expeditions, and sent off alone, or at best, two together, to distant industrial centers. The working-girl needs no chaperon, but equally with her wealthier sister, she does require and ought to receive motherly care and oversight. She is perhaps leaving home for the first time, and there should be someone to see to it that when she arrives in a strange city a comfortable and convenient lodging-place has been found for her. She should be shown how to conserve her strength in finding her way from one locality to another in following up the evening meetings of unions, and she should have some woman to turn to if she should become sick. Points, all of these, the busy secretaries of central labor bodies may very easily overlook, accustomed as they are to deal with mature men, in the habit of traveling about the country, who may surely be left to take care of themselves.
The activities of the local leagues vary in detail in the different cities. In all there are monthly business meetings, the business run by the girls, with perhaps a speaker to follow, and sometimes a program of entertainment. Lectures on week evenings, classes and amusements are provided as far as workers and funds permit. The first important work among newly arrived women immigrants in the Middle West was done by the Chicago League, and this laid the groundwork for the present Immigrants’ Protective League. Headquarters are a center for organizing, open all the time to receive word of struggling unions, helping out in difficulties, counseling the impulsive, and encouraging the timid. When a group of workers see for themselves the need of organization, a body of experienced women standing ready to mother a new little union, the hospitable room standing open, literally night and day, can afford the most powerful aid in extending organization among timid girls. If courage and daring are needed in this work, courage to stand by the weak, daring to go out and picket in freezing weather with unfriendly policemen around, patience is if possible more essential in the organizer’s make-up. It often takes months of gentle persistence before the girls, be they human-hair-workers or cracker-packers, or domestic workers or stenographers, see how greatly it is to their own interest to join or to form a labor organization. Many locals formed with so much thought and after so much pains, drop to pieces after a few months or a year or two. That is a universal experience in the labor movement everywhere. But it does not therefore follow that nothing has been gained. Even a group so loosely held together that it melts away after the first impulse of indignation has died out is often successful in procuring shorter hours or better wages or improved conditions for the trade or shops of their city. Besides each individual girl has had a little bit of education in what cooeperation means, and what collective bargaining can do. The League itself is a reminder, too, that all working-girls have many interests in common, whatever their trade.
But besides aiding in the forming of new locals, the Women’s Trade Union League can be a force strengthening the unions already established. Each of the leagues has an organization committee, whose meetings are attended by delegates from the different women’s trades. These begin mostly as experience meetings, but end generally in either massing the effort of all on one particular union’s struggle, or in planning legislative action by which all women workers can be benefited.
In New York and Boston, Chicago and St. Louis and Kansas City the local leagues have in every case had a marked effect upon industrial legislation for women. They have been prime movers in the campaigns for better fire protection in the factories in both New York and Chicago, and for the limitation of hours of working-women in the states of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and Missouri, and for minimum-wage legislation in Massachusetts and Illinois.
In every one of these states the Women’s Trade Union League has first of all provided an opportunity for the organized women of different trades to come together and decide upon a common policy; next, to cooeperate with other bodies, such as the State Federation of Labor, and the city centrals, the Consumers’ League, the American Association for Labor Legislation, and the women’s clubs, in support of such humane legislation. Much of the actual lobbying necessary has been done by the girls themselves, and they have exercised a power out of all proportion to their numbers or the tiny treasury at their disposal. No arguments of sociologists were half so convincing to legislators or so enlightening to the public as those of the girls who had themselves been through the mill. “Every hour I carry my trays I walk a mile,” said Elizabeth Maloney of the Waitresses’ Union. “Don’t you think that eight hours a day is enough for any girl to walk?”
When we turn to the National League itself, if there is less to record of actual achievement, there are possibilities untold. Never before have all the work of this country had an organization, open to all, with which to express themselves on a national scale.
Early in 1905 the Executive Board of the League appointed a committee with Mary McDowell chairman to secure the cooeperation of all organizations interested in the welfare of woman in demanding a federal investigation and report upon the conditions of working-women and girls in all the principal industrial centers. Miss McDowell called to her aid all the forces of organized labor, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and other women’s associations, the social settlements and church workers. So strengthened and supported, the committee then went to Washington, and consulted with President Roosevelt and the then Commissioner of Labor, Dr. Charles P. Neill.
Miss McDowell, more than any other one person, was responsible for the passing in 1907 of the measure which authorized and the appropriation which made possible the investigation which during the next four years the Department of Commerce and Labor made. The result of that investigation is contained in the nineteen volumes of the report.
The first gatherings of any size at which League members met and conferred together were the interstate conferences, held simultaneously in Boston, New York and Chicago, the first in the summer of 1907 and the second in 1908. The former was the first interstate conference of women unionists ever held in the United States, and it was therefore a most notable event. Especially was it interesting because of the number of women delegates who came from other states, and from quite distant points, Boston drawing them from the New England states, New York from its own extensive industrial territory, and Chicago from the Middle West. Inspired by what she heard in Chicago, Hannah Hennessy went back to found the St. Louis Women’s Trade Union League. It was at the first interstate conference, also, that a committee was appointed to wait upon the American Federation of Labor Executive Board, during the Norfolk Convention in November, 1907. The Illinois State Committee of the Women’s Trade Union League, whose fine legislative work helped to secure the passage of the present ten-hour law for women, also grew out of the discussion which came up in the Chicago conference.
The lines on which the League is developing can be observed through the work done and reported upon at the biennial conventions of which five have been held. The first, at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1907, was an informal gathering of but seven delegates, women who had been attending the convention of the American Federation of Labor of that year. Subsequent conventions have taken place every two years since then. These have been held in Chicago, Boston and St. Louis and New York respectively. On each occasion about seventy delegates have reported. They are certainly a picked lot of girls. They are trained, trained not in fancy debate, but in practical discussion. They have met with employers in trade conferences where an error in statement or a hasty word might mean a cut in wages or an increase in hours for two years to come. They have met with their fellow-workers in union meetings, where, if a girl aspires to lead her sisters or brothers, she has to show both readiness of wit and good-humored patience in differing from the others.
These women are growing too, as all must grow who live on life’s firing line, and shrink not from meeting the very hardest problems of today. The working-woman, in her daily struggle comes up against every one of them, and not one can be evaded.
Industrial legislation, judicial decisions, the right to organize, the power to vote, are to the awakened working-woman not just academic questions, but something that affects her wages, her hours. They may mean enough to eat, time to rest, and beyond these home happiness and social freedom.
In two directions especially can the growing importance of the women’s trade-union movement be observed: on the one hand in the incessant appeals, coming from all over the continent, to the National League, for advice and assistance in organizing women into the local unions of their trade; on the other in the degree in which it is gradually coming to be recognized by public men, by politicians, by business men, as well as by students and thinkers, that it is to organized women they must turn, whenever they want an authoritative expression as to the working-women’s needs and desires.
Two sets of resolutions discussed and passed by the fourth biennial convention of the National Women’s Trade Union League, held in 1913, were afterwards published broadcast over the country, and have been of marked educational value. The one pleaded for the speedy enfranchisement of women for these reasons: because the most costly production and the most valuable asset of any nation is its output of men and women; because the industrial conditions under which more than six million girls and women are forced to work is an individual and social menace; and because working-women as an unenfranchised class are continually used to lower the standards of men. The League in particular protested against the ill-judged activities of the anti-suffrage women, “a group of women of leisure, who by accident of birth have led sheltered and protected lives, and who never through experience have had to face the misery that low wages and long hours produce.”
This stirring, appeal made a profound impression on suffragists and anti-suffragists alike, in the labor world, and amid the general public. It was of course hotly resented by that small group of women of privilege, who think they know better than working-women what are the needs of working-women. Its deep significance lay in that it was a voice from the voiceless millions. It gave many pause to think and catch, as they had never caught before, the vital meaning underlying the demand for the vote.
The other series of resolutions expressed no less forcefully the women’s consciousness of the intimate connection between education and labor, and pressed home the fact that organized laboring-women are watchful of the work being done in our public schools, and are anxious that it should be brought and kept up to the level of present-day needs. As is mentioned elsewhere, these resolutions laid special stress upon the necessity of making all courses of industrial training coeducational, of including in them the history of the evolution of industry, and the philosophy of collective bargaining, and of insuring that all boys and girls, before they leave school to go to work, have a knowledge of the state and federal laws that exist for their protection. These resolutions were sent to 1,075 boards of education in the United States. Replies have been received from twenty-six boards in fifteen states. Of these fourteen already have vocational training in their schools, two are planning such training, and six referred the resolutions to committees. Of those having training in the schools, thirteen have courses open to both boys and girls, and one has courses for girls exclusively, but is planning to open a school for boys.
The National League for four years published its own magazine, _Life and Labor_, with a double function; on the one hand as the organ of the League activities, and the expression of the members’ views; on the other as a running diary of what was happening in the world of working-women, for the information of students and of all interested in sociological matters.
In the chapter on The Woman Organizer allusion is made to the efforts of the League to train women as trade-union organizers. Miss Louisa Mittelstadt, of Kansas City, and Miss Myrtle Whitehead, of Baltimore, belonging to different branches of the Brewery Workers, came to Chicago to be trained in office and field work, and are now making good use of their experience. One was sent by the central labor body, and the other by the local league. Miss Fannie Colin was a third pupil, a member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, from New York City.
A word in conclusion regarding some of the typical leaders who are largely responsible for the policy of the League, and are to be credited in no small measure with its successes.
After Mrs. Raymond Robins, the national president, already spoken of, and standing beside her as a national figure comes Agnes Nestor, of Irish descent, and a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, upon whose slight shoulders rest alike burdens and honors. Both she bears calmly. She is a glove-worker, and the only woman president of an international union. She is both a member of the National Executive Board of the Women’s Trade Union League, and the president of the Chicago League, and she has served as one of the two women members of the Federal Commission on Industrial Education. She has done fine work as a leader in her own city of Chicago, but neither Chicago, nor even Illinois, can claim her when the nation calls.
Melinda Scott is English by birth, belongs to New York, and has achieved remarkable results in her own union of the hat-trimmers. It is not during the exciting stage of a perhaps spectacular strike that Miss Scott shines; it is during the weary time when only patience and endurance can hold the girls together, and afterwards, when, whether the strike is lost or won, enthusiasm is apt to flag, and when disputes bid fair to break down the hardly won agreement.
Initiated at sixteen into the Knights of Labor, Leonora O’Reilly took the vows that she has ever since kept in the spirit and in the letter. After many years spent as a garment-worker, she became a teacher in the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. She was one of the charter members of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and has always been one of its most effective speakers. Leonora and her Celtic idealism have made many converts.
Russia in America is embodied in Rose Schneidermann. She is the living representative of the gifts that the Slavic races, and especially the Russian Jew, have contributed to American life. Coming here in childhood, her life has been spent in New York.
As an example of her achievements, for four years she worked untiringly among the white-goods-workers of New York, until they were strong enough to call a general strike, a strike which was so successful that they won a great part of their demands, and ever since have held their union together, seven thousand strong. Penetrated with the profound sadness of her people, and passionately alive to the workers’ wrongs, Rose Schneidermann can stir immense audiences, and move them to tears as readily as to indignation. For her all the hope of the world’s future is embodied in two movements, trade unionism on the one hand and socialism on the other.
[Illustration: IN A BASEMENT SWEATSHOP
Women picking rags collected from households. These rags have neither been cleaned nor disinfected and give off dust at every handling.]
[Illustration: GIRL GAS BLOWERS. KANSAS CITY]
The New York League owes much of its success to Mary Dreier, the sister of Mrs. Raymond Robins. She was its president for several years, and by her perseverance and devotion, did much to build up the organization in its early days.
The rest of the League leaders must be summed up even more briefly. Mary Anderson, a member of the Boot and Shoe Workers’ International Board, is of Scandinavian origin, and has all the steadfastness of the Swedes. Another very excellent organizer and much-loved trade unionist is Emma Steghagen, also of the Boot and Shoe Workers, and for seven years secretary of the Chicago League. She may be called the League veteran, for her association with trade unionism began with the Knights of Labor. Others are Mary McEnerney, Mary Haney, Hilda Svenson.
Elizabeth Maloney, she of the snapping eyes and fervent heart, marshals her waitresses through strike after strike against grinding employers, or she eloquently pleads their cause, whether in the state legislature, or with her own International, at the convention of the Hotel and Restaurant Employes, if the men show themselves a bit forgetful, as they sometimes do, of the girls’ interest.
Nelle Quick, bindery woman, has been transferred from her trade-union activities in St. Louis to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the state of Missouri.
From among clerical workers came into the League women who have left their mark, Helen Marot and Alice Bean, of New York, and Mabel Gillespie, of Boston, while Stella Franklin, the Australian, for long held the reins of the national office in Chicago.
Gertrude Barnum, who graduated into trade unionism from settlement work, and Josephine Casey, of the Elevated Railroad Clerks, are two who were long actively associated with the Woman’s Trade Union League, but of late years both have been organizers under the International of the Ladies’ Garment Workers.
Among the allies, the non-wage-earners, are Mary Dreier, president of the New York League, who was also the only woman member of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission; Mrs. Glendower Evans, notable for her service in advancing legislation for the minimum wage; Mary McDowell, of the University of Chicago Settlement, mother of the stockyards folk, beloved of the Poles and the Bohemians and the Ruthenians, who cross the ocean to settle on the desolate banks of Bubbly Creek. Mrs. D.W. Knefler, of St. Louis, did pioneering work for girlish trade unionism in that conservative city.
Miss Gillespie, the Secretary of the Boston Women’s Trade Union League, has been for years its main standby. Working in cooeperation with the young president, Miss Julia O’Connor, of the Telephone Operators, her influence in the labor movement is an important factor in the Massachusetts situation. She is a member of the State Minimum Wage Commission.
Young as is the League, some most heroic members have already passed into the unseen. Adelaide Samuels was a teacher in the public schools who, in the day of very small things for the New York League, acted as treasurer and chairman of the label committee. In her scant leisure she worked patiently towards the end that girls in the poorest trades should win for themselves the power of making the collective bargain. She died before she could have seen any tangible results from her efforts.
Hannah Hennessy, who carried away from the first interstate conference in Chicago a vision in her heart of a Women’s Trade Union League in every large city, a few years later laid down her life as the result of the hardships endured while picketing on behalf of the Marx and Haas strikers. Her youth had slipped away, and her strength had been sapped by weary years as an ill-paid garment-worker, so that exposure to cold and wet found her power of resistance gone, and a few weeks later she was no more.
At the other end of the social scale, but thrilled with the same unselfish desire to better the conditions of the girl toilers, stood Carola Woerishofer, the rich college girl, who, once she was committed to the cause, never spared herself, picketing today, giving bonds tomorrow for the latest prisoner of the strike, spending a whole hot summer in a laundry, that she might know first-hand what the toiler pays that we may wear clean clothes. And so on, until the last sad scene of all, when on duty as inspector of the New York State Immigration Bureau, her car capsized, and Carola Woerishofer’s brief, strenuous service to humanity was ended.
From yet another group came Frances Squire Potter, formerly professor of English Literature in the University of Minnesota, who a few years ago became profoundly impressed with the unfair and oppressive conditions under which working-women live and toil. Thus was she led far away from academic fields, first into suffrage work, and later into the National Women’s Trade Union League. Until her health gave way, about a year before her death, she acted as official lecturer for the League. Through her unique gifts as a speaker, and her beautiful personality, she interpreted the cause of the working-woman to many thousands of hearers. She was also departmental editor of _Life and Labor_, the League’s magazine.
Great have been the vicissitudes of the labor movement among men, but for many years now, the tendency towards national cohesion has been growing. This tendency has been greatly strengthened by the rapid development, and at the same time, the cheapening of the means of transport and communication between distant regions of the country.
In the advantages arising from this general growth of the labor movement, both in its local activities and on its national side, women workers have indeed shared. This is true, both on account of the direct benefits accruing to them through joining mixed organizations, or being aided by men to form separate organizations of their own, and also through the vast assistance rendered by organized labor in obtaining protective legislation for the most utterly helpless and exploited toilers, for example, the child-labor laws which state after state has placed upon the statute book, sanitary regulations, and laws for the safeguarding of machinery dangerous to workers.
Still, compared with the extensive movement among men, in which the women have been more or less a side issue, feminine trade unionism has been but fitful in its manifestations, and far indeed from keeping pace with the rate at which women have poured into the industrial field. The youth of a large number of the girl workers, and the fact that, as they grow up, so many of them pass out of the wage-earning occupations, marriage, and the expectation of marriage, the main obstacles that stand in the way today in getting women to organize and to hold their unions together, furnish also the underlying causes of the want of continuity of the trade-union movement among women since it first began in the United States in the early part of the last century. The too frequent change in the personnel of the members, and therefore in the composition of the union itself, means an absence of the permanence of spirit which is an essential condition for the handing on in unbroken succession of standards of loyalty and esprit de corps.
It is continuity that has rendered possible all human progress, through the passing on from all of us to our successors, of each small acquirement, of each elevation of standard. Where, but for such continuity would be the college spirit, that descends upon and baptizes the newcomer as he enters the college gates? Where, but for continuity would be the constantly rising standards of morality and social responsibility? Where, but for continuity would be national life and all that makes patriotism worthy? Where, indeed, would be humanity itself?
The average man is a wage-earner, and as such a fit subject for organization. If extensive groups of men remain unorganized, the responsibility lies partly on the trade unions, and is partly conditioned by our social and political environment. But either way, a man is a trade unionist or he is not. The line is clear cut, and trade unions therefore admit no one not actually a worker in their own trade.
But it is not so with women. Outside the wage-earning groups there is the great bulk of married women, and a still considerable, though ever-lessening number of single women, who, although productive laborers, are yet, owing to the primitive and antiquated status of home industry, not acknowledged as such in the labor market. Not being remunerated in money, they are not considered as wage-earners. (Witness the census report, which, in omitting those performing unpaid domestic duties from the statistics of gainful occupations, does but reflect the tragic fact that woman’s home work has no money value and confirms the popular impression that “mother doesn’t work.”)
Yet another force to be reckoned with in estimating the difficulties which stand in the way of unionizing women is the widespread hostility to trade unionism, as expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, and through public speakers, both religious and secular. The average girl, even more than the average man, is sensitive to public opinion, as expressed through such accepted channels of authority. The standards of public opinion have been her safeguard in the past, and she still looks to them for guidance, not realizing how often such commonly accepted views are misinterpretations of the problems she herself has to face today. In the middle of the last century, a period that was most critical for men’s unions in England, a number of leaders of public thought, men of influence and standing in the community, such as Charles Kingsley, Frederick Denison Maurice and others, came to the help of the men by maintaining their right to organize. In the United States, during the corresponding stage of extreme unpopularity, Horace Greeley, Charles A. Dana and Wendell Phillips extended similar support to workingmen. We today are apt to forget that women’s unions with us are just now in the very same immature stage of development, as men’s unions passed through half a century ago. The labor men of that day had their position immensely strengthened by just such help afforded from outside their immediate circle. It is therefore not strange that women’s unions, at their present stage of growth, should be in need of just such help.
To sum up, in addition to all the difficulties which have to be met by men in the labor movement, women are at a disadvantage through the comparative youth and inexperience of many female workers, through their want of trade training, through the assumption, almost universal among young girls, that they will one day marry and leave the trade, and through their unconscious response to the public opinion which disapproves of women joining trade unions.
It is then the lack of permanence, of continuity in spirit and in concerted action, produced by all these causes, working together, and the difficulties in the way of remedying this lack of permanence, which this young organization, the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, has fully and fairly recognized, and which, with a courage matched to its high purpose, it is facing and trying to conquer.
The Women’s Trade Union League, while essentially a part of the labor movement, has yet its own definite role to play, and at this point it is well to note the response made by organized labor in supporting the League’s efforts. It works under the endorsement of both the American Federation of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, and has received in its undertakings the practical support, besides, of many of the most influential of the international unions, in occupations as different as those of the shoe-workers, the carpenters and the miners. The rank and file of the local organizations, in city after city, have given the same hearty and unqualified approval to the League’s pioneering work, in bringing the unorganized women and girls into the unions, and in carrying on a constant educative work among those already organized. As an instance of this openly expressed approval, take the cordial cooeperation which the Chicago League has ever received from the Chicago Federation of Labor and its allied locals. But, owing to the complexity of women’s lives, the varied and inconsistent demands that are made upon their energies, the organization of the League has to be somewhat different from that of any body which labor men would have formed for themselves.
Locally the relationship varies. In St. Louis the League has never been represented in the central body by its own delegates, but by members representing primarily their own organizations, such as Bindery Women and Boot and Shoe Workers. In Boston, New York and Chicago each League is represented by its own delegates. In Kansas City, Missouri, again, not only are the delegates of the League seated in the central body, but every union of men in it pays a per capita tax into the funds of the Kansas City Women’s Trade Union League.
The National League receives a certain amount of financial support from the American Federation of Labor, and from a number of the international unions, several of the latter being affiliated with the League. State federations, city central bodies, and local unions in different parts of the country give similar cooeperation and money support.
As the labor movement is organized, it collects into suitable groups the different classes of wage-earners. But the average housekeeping, married woman, although both worker and producer, is not a wage-earner, although more and more, as the home industries become specialized is she becoming a wage-earner for at least part of her time. But, as our lives are arranged at present the largest proportion of married women and a considerable number of single women are ineligible for admission as members of any trade union. Are they therefore to be shut out from the labor movement, and from participation in its activities, no matter how closely their own interests are bound up with it, no matter how intensely they are in sympathy with its aims, no matter though as single girls they may have been members of a union?
We have noted already how much stronger the labor movement would be if the women and girls engaged in the trades were brought in through organization. Still further would organized men be advantaged if their movement were reinforced by this great body of home-keeping women, vast in numbers, and with their untouched reserves of energy and experience.
Again, it is only by making room for such women within the labor movement that women can be represented in sufficient numbers in the councils of labor. As long as there was no recognized way of admitting the home woman to even a tiny corner of the labor field, as long as entry was restricted solely to the wage-earning woman, there seemed no chance of women being ever in anything but a hopeless minority in either local or international union, and that minority, too, composed so largely of young and inexperienced girls. Is it any wonder, then, that the interests of the working-girls have suffered, and that, as a ready consequence, workingmen’s interests have suffered, too.
The Women’s Trade Union League is also bringing into touch with the labor movement other women’s organizations, and especially winning their increased cooeperation in the campaigns for legislation. It is largely through the ally[A] membership that the Women’s Trade Union League has been able to reach the public ear as well as to attract assistance and cooeperation, especially from the suffragists and the women’s clubs. The suffragists have always been more or less in sympathy with labor organizations, while outside labor circles, the largest body to second the efforts of organized labor in the direction of humanity has been the women’s clubs, whether expressing themselves through the General Federation, or through local activity in their home towns. An immense group of women thus early became committed to an active opposition to the employment of children either in factories, or under the even more dangerous and demoralizing conditions which await mere babies in the street or in tenement homes.
[Footnote A: An ally is a man or a woman of any class not a worker in any organized trade who believes in the organization of women and subscribes to the following League platform.
1. Organization of all workers into trade unions. 2. Equal pay for equal work.
3. Eight-hour day.
4. A living wage.
5. Full citizenship for women.]
There is a similar movement going on within the National Young Women’s Christian Association. The reason for this stand being taken by women’s organizations was characteristic. The impelling force that urged those women on was something far deeper than mere philanthropy. It was the acceptance by a whole group of women of the old responsibilities of motherhood, in the new form that these must take on if new conditions are to be met. It was as if the motherhood of the country had said in so many words: “Social conditions are changing, but we are still the mothers of the new generation. Society is threatened with this calamity, that they will pass beyond our care before the needs and claims of childhood have been satisfied. As individuals we are now powerless. Let us see what cooeperation will do to right conditions that are fast slipping beyond our control.”
But how unconscious the vast number of women of this type were, either of the true nature of the force they were obeying or the point whither they were tending, was graphically illustrated at the Biennial Federation of Women’s Clubs in St. Paul, in 1906, when a woman protested from the floor against the appointment of a committee to deal with industrial conditions. She added that she was all in favor of the Federation working against child labor, but they had no call to interfere in industrial questions.
This is an illustration of how the rank and file of the clubwomen became committed to industrial reform as part of their program, and incidentally, although there were those among their leaders who well knew whither the movement was tending. The Women’s Trade Union League represents one of the forces that is leading on the most conservative among them to stand forth for industrial justice consciously and deliberately, while the League’s special aims are brought the nearer to accomplishment by the support of this other group of women.
The Women’s Trade Union League is, and as long as it fulfills its present function, will surely remain, a federation of trade unions with women members, but it finds a niche and provides an honorable and useful function for the wives of workingmen, for ex-trade-union women, and for others who endorse trade unionism and gladly give their support to a constructive work, aiming at strengthening the weakest wing of labor, the unorganized, down-driven, underpaid working-girls.
If the League is to be an organization open to, and aiming at including eventually the great majority of working-women, it must be so flexible as to admit the woman who works in the home without formal wages, as well as the woman who works for an employer for wages. Both are in many respects upon the same footing in relation to society. Both are earners and producers. Both require the help of organization. Both should be an integral part of the labor movement. Both therefore may be consistently received as dues-paying members into Women’s Trade Union Leagues, even although we are still too confused and puzzled to permit of housewives forming their own unions, and therefore such members have to be received as allies.
In thus leaving open a door, however, through which all working-women may enter the League, the founders were mindful of the fact, and have it embodied in the constitution, that the main strength must lie in the increasing number of wage-earning girls and women who are socially developed up to the point of being themselves organized into trade unions. The League has so far grown, and can in the future grow normally, only so far as it is the highest organized expression of the ideals, the wishes and the needs of the wage-earning girl.
As for the woman of wealth, I should be the last to question her right to opportunities for self-development, or to deny her the joy of assisting her sorely driven sisters to rise out of the industrial mire, and stand erect in self-reliant independence. But if the League is to grow until it becomes the universal expression of the woman’s part in organized labor, then the privilege of assisting with financial help the ordinary activities of the League can be hers only during the infancy of the body. No organization can draw its nurture permanently from sources outside of itself, although many a movement has been nursed through its early stages of uncertainty and struggle by the aid of the sympathetic and understanding outsider.
V
THE HUGE STRIKES
In September, 1909, the name of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company, which has since become a word of such ill omen, was known to few outside the trade. The factory had not then been wrapped in the flames and smoke of the Asch fire, that was to cut short the lives of one hundred and forty-three workers, and to blight the existence and mar the happiness of many more.
But by a not altogether inexplicable coincidence, it had been among the employes of this very firm that the smoldering flames of human discontent broke out, that were to grow into the “Strike of the Forty Thousand,” a strike that proved to be but the first of a long series of revolts among the foreign garment-workers of the largest cities in the East and the Middle West.
It is true that in such an extensive trade as that of making ready-made clothes, with its low wages and its speeding-up, its sweating and its uncertainty of employment, there is always a strike on somewhere. At that very time, there were in progress two strikes of quite respectable size: one in Boston, under the Ladies’ Tailors’ and Dressmakers’ Union, and the other in St. Louis, where the long-drawn-out Marx and Haas strike involving the makers of men’s ready-made clothing, was in its first stage.
But outside of labor circles, these strikes were attracting no particular attention. The public were not even aware of what was happening, and would have been entirely indifferent if they had known.
The turning out of ladies’ ready-made waists is an immense business in New York. The trade, like other branches of garment-making, is largely in the hands of Jewish employers. The workers are principally recently arrived foreigners, Russian and other Slavic Jews, Italians and other immigrants from eastern Europe. They are in an overwhelming majority women, or, to be more accurate, girls.
During all the earlier part of the year 1909 the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union No. 25 had been showing quite undue activity and unwelcome persistence in preaching unionism and its advantages among all and sundry of these foreign girls, and with quite unusual success. The managers of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company awoke one morning to a sense of what was happening. To quote from a writer in _The Outlook_:
One of the firm appeared before the girls and told them in kind phrases that the company was friendly to the union, and that they desired to encourage it, and that they might better give assistance, they would like to know what girls belonged to it. The girls, taken in by this speech, acknowledged their membership; only, instead of a few that the company had thought to discover and weed out, it developed that one hundred and fifty girls were members. That evening they were told, in the same kind way, that, because of a lull in the trade, due to an uncertainty as to fashions in sleeves, there was for the time being no more work. The girls took their discharge without suspicion; but the next morning they saw in the newspaper advertisements of the company asking for shirt-waist operators at once. Their eyes opened by this, the girls picketed the shop, and told the girls who answered the advertisement that the shop was on strike. The company retaliated by hiring thugs to intimidate the girls, and for several weeks the picketing girls were being constantly attacked and beaten. These melees were followed by wholesale arrests of strikers, from a dozen to twenty girls being arrested daily.
Out of ninety-eight arrested all but nineteen were fined in sums of from one to ten dollars.
With the aid of the police and a complaisant bench the Triangle Company had been successful in its attempt to empty the young union’s treasury, and had likewise intimidated the workers till their courage and spirit were failing them. The manufacturers had accomplished their object.
At this stage the New York Women’s Trade Union League took up the battle of the girls. Every morning they stationed allies in front of the factory, to act as witnesses against illegal arrest, and to prevent interference with lawful picketing. The wrath of the police was then turned upon the League. First one and then another ally was arrested, this performance culminating in the unlawful arrest of Mary Dreier, president of the League. The police were sadly fooled upon this occasion, and their position was not in any degree strengthened, when they angrily, and just as unreasonably freed their prisoner, as soon as they discovered her identity. “Why didn’t you tell me you was a rich lady? I’d never have arrested you in the world.”
This was good copy for the newspapers, and the whole story of wrongful discharge, unlawful arrest and insulting treatment of the strikers by the police began to filter into the public mind through the columns of the daily press. It was shown that what had happened in the case of the Triangle employes had been repeated, with variations, in the case of many other shops. Respectable and conservative citizens began to wonder if there might not be two sides to the story. They learned, for instance, of the unjust “bundle” system, under which the employer gives out a bundle of work to a girl, and when she returns the completed work, gives her a ticket which she can convert into cash on pay day. If the ticket, a tiny scrap of paper, should be lost, the girl had no claim on the firm for the work she had actually done. Again, some employers had insisted that they paid good wages, showing books revealing the astonishing fact that girls were receiving thirty dollars, thirty-five dollars, and even forty dollars per week. Small reason to strike here, said the credulous reader, as he or she perused the morning paper. But the protest of the libelled manufacturer lost much of its force, when it was explained that these large sums were not the wage of one individual girl, but were group earnings, paid to one girl, and receipted for by her, but having to be shared with two, three or four others, who had worked with and under the girl whose name appeared on the payroll.
Monday, November 22, was a memorable day. A mass meeting had been called in Cooper Union to consider the situation. Mr. Gompers was one of the speakers. At the far end of the hall rose a little Jewish girl, and asked to be heard. Once on the platform, she began speaking in Yiddish, fast and earnestly. She concluded by saying she was tired of talking, and so would put the motion for a general strike of the whole trade. One who was present, describing the tense dramatic moment that followed, writes: “The audience unanimously endorsed it. ‘Do you mean faith?’ said the chairman. ‘Will you take the old Jewish oath,’ And up came 2,000 Jewish hands with the prayer, ‘If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off at the wrist from this arm I now raise.'” The girl was Clara Lemlich, from the Leiserson factory. She did not complain for herself, for she was a fairly well-paid worker, making up to fifteen dollars in the rush season, but for her much poorer sisters.
The response within that hall typified the response next day outside. I quote the words of an onlooker:
From every waist-making factory in New York and Brooklyn, the girls poured forth, filling the narrow streets of the East Side, crowding the headquarters at Clinton Hall, and overflowing into twenty-four smaller halls in the vicinity. It was like a mighty army, rising in the night, and demanding to be heard. But it was an undisciplined army. Without previous knowledge of organization, without means of expression, these young workers, mostly under twenty, poured into the Union. For the first two weeks from 1,000 to 1,500 joined each day. The clerical work alone, involved in, registering and placing recruits was almost overwhelming. Then halls had to be rented and managed, and speakers to be procured. And not for one nationality alone. Each hall, and there were twenty-four, had to have speakers in Yiddish, Italian and English. Every member of the League was pressed into service. Still small halls were not enough. Lipzin’s Theatre was offered to the strikers, and mass meetings were held there five afternoons a week.
Meanwhile committees were appointed from each shop to settle upon a price list. As the quality of work differed in different shops, a uniform wage was impossible and had to be settled by each shop individually. When the hundreds of price lists were at last complete, meetings were arranged for each shop committee and their employers. Again the price list was discussed, and a compromise usually effected. In almost every shop, however, an increase of from 15 to 20 per cent. was granted.
Apart from wages, the contract insured significant improvements. Besides calling for recognition of the union it demanded full pay for legal holidays, limited night work during the rush season to eight P.M., abolished all Sunday work, did away with the inside contracting system, under which one girl took out work for several, and provided for a fair allotment of work in slack seasons.
After one hundred and ninety firms had signed up, and the majority of the strikers had returned to their shops, an attempt was made to settle with the still obdurate employers through arbitration, at the suggestion of the National Civic Federation.
Meanwhile picketing was going on; the pickets were being punished, not only with heavy fines, thus depleting the union’s treasury, but with terms in the workhouse. Some of these criminals for principle were little girls in short skirts, and no attempt was made to separate them when in confinement from disorderly characters. But what was the result? The leaders saw to it that a photograph was taken of such a group, with “Workhouse Prisoners” pinned across the breast of each, and worn as a badge of honor, a diploma of achievement, and the newspapers were but too glad to print the picture. When that spirit of irrepressible energy and revolt once possesses men or women, punishment is converted into reward, disgrace transmuted into honor.
This it was, more even than the story of the wrongs endured, which had its effect on the public. In the rebound of feeling the illegality of the police behavior was admitted. The difficulties put in the way of the courageous little pickets led to the forming of parades, and the holding of meetings even in a class of society where no one had counted on receiving sympathy. The ladies of the rich and exclusive Colony Club learned from the girls themselves of the many disadvantages connected with waist-making. For instance that in the off season there was little regular work at all; and that all the time there were the fines and breakages. One girl told how she had been docked for a tucking foot, which, as she said, just wore out on her, “It wasn’t really my fault,” she concluded, “and I think the boss should look out for his own foots.”
Said another: “When a girl comes five minutes late at my shop, she is compelled to go home. She may live outside of the city, it does not matter, she must go home and lose a day.
“We work eight days in the week. This may seem strange to you who know that there are only seven days in the week. But we work from seven in the morning till very late at night, when there’s a rush, and sometimes we work a week and a half in one week.”
The socialist women did yeoman service, protecting the pickets, attending the trials, speaking at meetings and taking a full share of the hard work. The organized suffragists and clubwomen were drawn into the thick of the fight. They spread the girls’ story far and wide, raised money, helped to find bonds, and were rewarded by increased inspiration for their own propaganda.
The enormous extent of the strike, being, as it was, by far the largest uprising of women that has ever taken place upon this continent, while adding proportionately to the difficulties of conducting it to a successful issue, yet in the end deepened and intensified the lesson it conveyed.
In the end about three hundred shops signed up, but of these at least a hundred were lost during the first year. This was due, the workers say, partly to the terrible dullness in the trade following the strike, and partly to the fact that they were not entirely closed shops.
Since then, however, the organization has grown in strength. It was one of these coming under the protocol, covering the Ladies’ Garment Workers, in so many branches, which was agreed to after the strikes in the needle trades of the winter of 1913. The name was changed from Ladies’ Waist Makers, to Ladies’ Waist and Dress Makers.
But the waist-makers’ strike was not confined to New York. With the opening of their busy season, the New York manufacturers found themselves hard pressed to fill their orders, and they were making efforts to have the work done in other cities, not strike-bound. One of the cities in which they placed their orders was Philadelphia. It was with small success, however, for the spirit of unrest was spreading, and before many weeks were over, most of the Philadelphia waist-makers had followed the example of their New York sisters.
The girls were in many respects worse off in Philadelphia than in New York itself. Unions in the sewing trades were largely down and out there, and public opinion was opposed to organized labor.
When the disturbance did come, it was not so much the result of any clever policy deliberately thought out, as it was the sudden uprising and revolt of exasperated girls against a system of persistent cutting down extending over about four years. A cent would be taken off here, and a half-cent there, or two operations would be run into one, and the combined piece of work under one, and that a new, name would bring a lower rate of pay. The practice of paying for oil needles, cotton and silk had been introduced, a practice most irritating with its paltry deduction from a girl’s weekly wage. Next there was a system of fines for what was called “mussing” work. Every one of these so-called improvements in discipline was deftly utilized as an excuse for taking so much off the girls’ pay.
Patience became exhausted and the girls just walked out. Two-thirds of the waist-makers in the city walked out. Of these about eighty-five per cent., it is believed, were Jewish girls, the rest made up of Italians with a few Poles. The girls who did not go out were mostly Americans. One observer estimated at the time that about forty per cent. of those in the trade were under twenty years of age, running down to children of twelve.
When the workers, with no sort of warning or explanation, or making any regular preliminary demands, just quit, it upset matters considerably. A little girl waist-maker may appear to be a very insignificant member of the community, but if you multiply her by four thousand, her absence makes an appreciable gap in the industrial machine, and its cogs fail to catch as accurately as heretofore. So that even the decent manufacturers felt pretty badly, not so much about the strike itself, as its, to them, inexplicable suddenness. Such men were suffering, of course, largely for the deeds of their more unscrupulous fellow-employers.
One manufacturer, for instance, had gained quite a reputation for his donations to certain orphanages. These were to him a profitable investment, seeing that the institutions served to provide him with a supply of cheap labor. He had in his shop many orphans, who for two reasons could hardly leave his employ. They had no friends to whom to go, and they were also supposed to be under obligations of gratitude to their benefactor-employer. One of his girl employes, to whom he paid seven dollars a week, turned out for that wage twelve dollars’ worth of work. This fact the employer admitted, justifying himself by saying that he was supporting her brother in an orphanage.
It was a hard winter, and the first week of the strike wore away without a sign of hope. Public opinion was slow to rouse, and the newspapers were definitely adverse. The general view seemed to be that such a strike was an intolerable nuisance, if not something worse. At length the conservative _Ledger_ came out with a two-column editorial, outlining the situation, and from then on news of the various happenings, as they occurred, could be found in all the papers. But the girls were unorganized. There was no money, and they faced the first days of the new year in a mood of utter discouragement. Organizers from the International of the Ladies’ Garment Workers had, however, come on from New York to take charge. The strikers were supported by the Central Labor Union of Philadelphia, under the leadership of the capable John J. Murphy, and representatives of the National Women’s Trade Union League, in the persons of Mrs. Raymond Robins and Miss Agnes Nestor, were already on the scene.
In the struggle itself, the New York experiences were repeated. The fight went on slowly and stubbornly. Arrests occurred daily and still more arrests. Money was the pressing need, not only for food and rent, but to pay fines and to arrange for the constantly needed bonds to bail out arrested pickets. At length a group of prominent Philadelphia women headed by Mrs. George Biddle, enlisted the help of some leading lawyers, and an advisory council was formed for the protection of legal rights, and even for directing a backfire on lawbreaking employers by filing suits for damages. With such interest and such help money, too, was obtained. The residents of the College Settlement, especially Miss Anna Davies, the head resident, and Miss Anne Young, the members of the Consumers’ League, the suffragists and the clubwomen all gave their help.
These women were moved to action by stories such as those of the little girl, whom her late employer had been begging to return to his deserted factory. “The boss, he say to me, ‘You can’t live if you not work.’ And I say to the boss, ‘I live not much on forty-nine cents a day.'”
As in New York, the police here overreached themselves in their zeal, and arrested a well-known society girl, whom they caught walking arm-in-arm with a striking waist-maker. Result, the utter discomfiture of the Director of Public Safety, and triumph for the fortunate reporters who got the good story.
An investigation into the price of food, made just then by one of the evening newspapers came in quite opportunely, forcing the public to wonder whether, after all, the girls were asking for any really higher wage, or whether they were not merely struggling to hold on to such a wage as would keep pace with the increasing prices of all sorts of food, fuel, lighting, the commonest clothing and the humblest shelter.
The strike had gone on for some weeks, when an effort was made to obtain an injunction forbidding the picketing of the Haber factory. This was finally to crush the strike and down the strikers. But in pressing for an injunction the manufacturers came up against a difficulty of their own making. The plea that had all along been urged upon the union had been the futility of trying to continue a strike that was not injuring the employers. “For,” they had many times said, “we have plenty of workers, our factories are going full blast.” Whereas the Haber witnesses in the injunction suit were bringing proof of how seriously the business was being injured through the success of the girl pickets in maintaining the strike, and, the money loss, they assured the court was to be reckoned up in thousands of dollars. This inconsistency impressed the judge, and the strikers had the chance of telling their story in open court. “Strikers’ Day” was a public hearing of the whole story of the strike.
That night both sides got together, and began to discuss a working agreement. After twenty-five hours of conference between representatives of the Shirt Waist Makers’ Union and of the Manufacturers’ Association, an agreement was arrived at, giving the workers substantial gains; employment of all union workers in the shops without discrimination; a fifty-two-and-a-half-hour week and no work on Saturday afternoon; no charges for water, oil, needles or ordinary wear and tear on machinery; wages to be decided with the union for each particular shop, and all future grievances to be settled by a permanent Board of Arbitration; the agreement to run till May 1, 1911.
The workers’ success was, unfortunately, not lasting. Owing to the want of efficient local leadership, the organization soon dropped to pieces. That gone, there was nothing left to stand between the toilers and the old relentless pressure of the competitive struggle, ever driving the employers to ask more, and ever compelling the wage-earners to yield more. The Philadelphia shirt-waist strike of 1910 furnishes a sad and convincing proof of how little is gained by the mere winning of a strike, however bravely fought, unless the strikers are able to keep a live organization together, the members cooeperating patiently and steadily, so as to handle the fresh shop difficulties which every week brings, in the spirit of mutual help as well as self-help.
These first Eastern strikes in the garment trades, although local in their incidence, were national in their effects. There had been so much that was dramatic and unusual in the rebellion of the workers, and it had been so effectively played up in the press of the entire country that by the time spring arrived and the strikes were really ended, and ended in both cities with very tangible benefits for the workers, there was hardly anyone who had not heard something about the great strikes, and who had not had their most deeply rooted opinions modified. It was an educational lesson on the grand scale. But the effects did not stop here. The impression upon the workers themselves everywhere was wholly unexpected. They had been encouraged and heartened to combine and thus help one another to obtain some measure of control over workshop and wages.
The echoes of the shirt-waist strikes had hardly died away, when there arose from another group of dissatisfied workers, the self-same cry for industrial justice.
There is no doubt that the Chicago strike which began among the makers of ready-made men’s clothing in September, 1910, was the direct outcome of the strikes in New York and Philadelphia. While the Western uprising had many features in common with these, yet it presented difficulties all its own, and in its outcome won a unique success. Not only was the number of workers taking part greater than in the previous struggles, but, owing to the fact of a large number of the strikers being men, and a big proportion of these heads of families, the poverty and intense suffering resulting from months of unemployment extended over a far larger area. Also the variety of nationalities among the strikers added to the difficulties of conducting negotiations. Every bit of literature put out had to be printed in nine languages. And lastly, the want of harmony between certain of the national leaders of the union involved, and the deep distrust felt by some of the local workers and the strikers for a section of them provided a situation which for complexity it would be hard to match. That the long-continued struggle ended with so large a measure of success for the workers was in part owing to the extraordinary skill and unwearied patience displayed in its handling, and in part to the close and intimate cooeperation between the local strike leaders, both men and women, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League. Much also had been learned from recent experience in the strikes immediately preceding.
The immediate cause of the first striker going out was a cut in the price of making pockets, of a quarter of a cent. That was on September 22 in Shop 21, in the Hart, Schaffner and Marx factories. Three weeks later the strike had assumed such proportions that the officers of the United Garment Workers’ District Council No. 6 were asking the Women’s Trade Union League for speakers. The League organized its own Strike Committee to collect money, assist the pickets and secure publicity. At the instance of the League also an independent Citizens’ Committee was formed.
In time of sorest need was found efficient leadership. The garment-workers of Chicago, in their earlier struggles with the manufacturers, had had no such powerful combination to assist them as came to their aid now, when a Joint Strike Conference controlled the situation, with representatives upon it from the United Garment Workers of America International Executive Board, from the Chicago District Council of the same organization, from the Special Order Garment Workers, the Ready Made Garment Workers, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Women’s Trade Union League. The American Federation of Labor sent their organizer, Emmett Flood, the untiringly courageous and the ever hopeful.
The first step to be taken was to place before the public in clear and simple form the heterogeneous mass of grievances complained of. The Women’s Trade Union League invited about a dozen of the girls to tell their story over a simple little breakfast. Within a week the story told to a handful was printed and distributed broadcast, prefaced, as it was, by an admirable introduction by the late Miss Katharine Coman, of Wellesley College, who happened to be in Chicago, and who was acting as chairman of the grievance committee. The Citizens’ Committee, headed by Professor George Mead, followed with a statement, admitting the grievances and justifying the strike.
From then on the story lived on the front page of all the newspapers, and speakers to address unions, meetings of strikers, women’s clubs and churches were in constant demand. Here again, the suffragist and the socialist women showed where their sympathies lay and of what mettle they were made. Visiting speakers, such as Miss Margaret Bondfield and Mrs. Philip Snowden, took their turn also. The socialist women of Chicago issued a special strike edition of the _Daily Socialist_. With the help of the striking girls as “newsies” they gathered in the city on one Saturday the handsome sum of $3,345. Another group of very poor Poles sent in regularly about two hundred dollars per week, sometimes the bulk of it in nickels and dimes. A sewing gathering composed of old ladies in one of the suburbs sewed industriously for weeks on quilts and coverings for the strikers. Some small children in a Wisconsin village were to have had a goose for their Christmas dinner, but hearing of little children who might have no dinner, sent the price of the bird, one dollar and sixty-five cents, into the strikers’ treasury.
At first strike pay was handed out every Friday from out of the funds of the United Garment Workers. But on Friday, November 11, the number of applicants for strike pay was far beyond what it was possible to handle in the cramped office quarters. Through some misunderstanding, which has to this day never been explained, the crowd, many thousands of men, women and children, were denied admittance to the large wheat pit of the Open Board of Trade, which, it was understood, had been reserved for their use. It was a heart-rending sight, as from early morning till late afternoon they waited in the halls and corridors and outside in the streets. At first in dumb patience and afterwards in bewilderment, but all along with unexampled gentleness and quietness.
At this point, Mr. John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, took hold of a situation already difficult, and which might soon have become dangerous. He explained to the crowd that everyone would be attended to in their various district halls, and that all vouchers already out would be redeemed. This relieved the tension, but the Joint Strike Committee were driven to take over at once the question of relief, so that none should be reduced to accept that hunger bargain, which, as Mrs. Robins put it, meant the surrender of civilization.
With such an immense number of strike-bound families to support, the utmost economy of resources was necessary, and it was resolved hereafter to give out as little cash as possible, but to follow the example of the United Mine Workers and others and open commissary stations. This plan was carried out, and more than any other one plan, saved the day. Benefits were handed over, in the form of groceries on a fixed ration scale. As far as we know, such a plan had never before been adapted to the needs of women and children, nor carried out by organized labor for the benefit of a large unorganized group. Of the economy of the system there is no question, seeing that a well-organized committee can always purchase supplies in quantities at wholesale price, sometimes at cost price, and frequently can, as was done in this instance, draw upon the good feeling of merchants and dealers, and receive large contributions of bread, flour, coal and other commodities. Commissary stations were established in different localities. Here is a sample ration as furnished at one of the stores, although, thanks to the kindness of friends, the allowance actually supplied was of a much more varied character:
Bread 18 loaves
Coffee 1 lb.
Sugar 5 lbs.
Beans 5 lbs.
Oatmeal 2 pkgs. (large)
Ham 10 lbs.
For Italians, oatmeal was replaced by spaghetti, and Kosher food for those of the orthodox Jewish faith was arranged for through orders upon local grocery stores and kosher butchers in the Jewish quarter. The tickets entitling to supplies were issued through the shop chairman at the local halls to those strikers known to be in greatest need.
The commissary plan, however, still left untouched such matters as rent, fuel, gas, and likewise the necessities of the single young men and girls. Also the little babies and the nursing mothers, who needed fresh milk, had to be thought of and provided for. There were certain strictly brought up, self-respecting little foreign girls who explained with tears that they could not take an order on a restaurant where there were strange people about, because “it would not be decent,” a terrible criticism on so many of our public eating places. So a small separate fund was collected which gave two dollars a week per head, to tide over the time of trouble for some of these sorely pressed ones. There was a committee on milk for babies, and another on rent, and the League handled the question of coal.
With these necessities provided for, the strikers settled down to a test of slow endurance. Picketing went on as before, and although arrests were numerous, and fines followed in the train of arrests, the police and the court situation was at no time so acute as it had been in either New York or Philadelphia.
The heroism shown by many of the strikers and their families it would be hard to overestimate. Small inconveniences were made light of. Families on strike themselves, or the friends of strikers would crush into yet tighter quarters so that a couple of boys or two or three girls out of work might crowd into the vacated room, and so have a shelter over their heads “till the strike was over.” A League member found her way one bitter afternoon in December to one home where lay an Italian woman in bed with a new-born baby and three other children, aged three, four and five years respectively, surrounding her. There was neither food nor fuel in the house. On the bed were three letters from the husband’s employer, offering to raise his old pay from fifteen to thirty dollars per week, if he would go back to work and so help to break the strike. The wife spoke with pride of the husband’s refusal to be a traitor. “It is not only bread we give the children. We live not by bread alone. We live by freedom, and I will fight for it though I die to give it to my children.” And this woman’s baby was one of 1,250 babies born into strikers’ homes that winter.
To me those long months were like nothing so much as like living in a besieged city. There was the same planning for the obtaining of food, and making it last as long as possible, the same pinched, wan faces, the same hunger illnesses, the same laying of little ones into baby graves. And again, besides the home problems, there was the same difficulty of getting at the real news, knowing the meaning of what was going on, the same heart-wearing alternations of hope and dread.
Through it all, moreover, persisted the sense that this was something more than an industrial rising, although it was mainly so. It was likewise the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised. It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and prosperity in the new land blighted, finding himself in America, but not of America.
By the end of November the manufacturers were beginning to tire of watching their idle machinery, and the tale of unfilled orders grew monotonous. There began to be grumbles from the public against the disastrous effects upon business of the long-continued struggle. Alderman Merriam succeeded in having the City Council bring about a conference of the parties to the strike “to the end that a just and lasting settlement of the points in controversy may be made.”
Messrs Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a firm employing in forty-eight shops between eight and nine thousand workers, agreed to meet with the committee and the labor leaders. After long hours of conferring a tentative agreement was at length arrived at, signed by the representatives of all parties, approved by the Chicago Federation of Labor, and, when referred to the army of strikers for their confirmation, was by them _rejected_. Indeed the great majority refused even to vote upon it at all. This was indeed a body blow to the hopes of peace. For the unfavorable attitude of the strikers there were, however, several reasons. The agreement, such as it was, did not affect quite a fourth of the whole number of workers who were out, and a regular stampede back to work of the rest, with no guarantee at all, was greatly to be dreaded. Again, a clause discriminating against all who it should be decided had been guilty of violence during the strike, gave deep offense. It was felt to be adding insult to injury, to allude to violence during a struggle conducted so quietly and with such dignity and self-restraint. But a further explanation lay in the attitude of mind of the strikers themselves. The idea of compromise was new to them, and the acceptance of any compromise was a way out of the difficulty, that was not for one moment to be considered. Thus it came about that a settlement that many an old experienced organization would have accepted was ruled quite out of court by these new and ardent converts to trade unionism, who were prepared to go on, facing destitution, rather than yield a jot of what seemed to them an essential principle.
Organized labor, indeed, realized fully the seriousness of the situation. The leaders had used their utmost influence to have the agreement accepted, and their advice had been set aside.
What view, then, was taken of this development of these central bodies and by the affiliated trades of the city, who were all taxing themselves severely both in time and money for the support of the strike?
The democracy of labor was on this occasion indeed justified of its children, and the supreme right of the strikers to make the final decision on their own affairs and abide by the consequences was maintained. Plans were laid for continuing the commissary stores, and just at this stage there was received from the United Garment Workers the sum of $4,000 for the support of the stores. The strikers were also encouraged to hold out when on January 9 the firm of Sturm-Mayer signed up and took back about five hundred workers. Also, a committee of the state Senate began an inquiry into the strike, thus further educating the public into an understanding of the causes lying back of all the discontent, and accounting for much of the determination not to give in.
All the same, the prospects seemed very dark, and the strikers and their leaders had settled down to a steady, dogged resistance. It was like nothing in the world so much as holding a besieged city, and the outcome was as uncertain, and depended upon the possibility of obtaining for the beleaguered ones supplies of the primitive necessaries of life, food and fuel. And the fort was held until about the middle of January came the news that Hart, Schaffner and Marx had opened up negotiations, and presently an agreement was signed, and their thousands of employes were back at work.
They were back at work under an agreement, which, while it did not, strictly speaking, recognize the union, did not discriminate against members of the union. Nay, as the workers had to have representation and representatives, it was soon found that in practice it was only through their organization that the workers could express themselves at all.
This is not the place in which to enlarge upon the remarkable success which has attended the working out of this memorable agreement. It is enough to say that ever since all dealings between the firm and their employes have been conducted upon the principle of collective bargaining.
The agreement with Messrs. Hart, Schaffner and Marx was signed on January 14, 1911, and the Joint Conference Board then bent all its efforts towards some settlement with houses of the Wholesale Clothiers’ Association and the National Tailors’ Association for the twenty or thirty thousand strikers still out.
Suddenly, without any warning the strike was terminated. How and why it has never been explained, even to those most interested in its support. All that is known is that on February 3 the strike was called off at a meeting of the Strikers’ Executive Committee, at which Mr. T.A. Rickert, president of the United Garment Workers of America, and his organizers, were present. This was done, without consulting the Joint Conference Board, which for fourteen weeks had had charge of the strike, and which was composed of representatives from the United Garment Workers of America, the Garment Workers’ local District Council, the strikers’ own Executive Committee, the Chicago Federation of Labor, and the Women’s Trade Union League.
This meant the close of the struggle. Three out of the four commissary stations were closed the following day, and the fourth a week later.
As regards the great mass of strikers then left, it was but a hunger bargain. They had to return to work without any guarantee for fair treatment, without any agency through which grievances could be dealt with, or even brought before the employers. And hundreds of the workers had not even the poor comfort that they could go back. Business was disorganized, work was slack, and the Association houses would not even try to make room for their rebellious employes. The refusal of work would be made more bitter by the manner of its refusal. Several were met with the gibe, “You’re a good speaker, go down to your halls, they want you there.” One employer actually invited a returned striker into his private office, shook hands with him as if in welcome, and then told him it was his last visit, he might go!
The beginning of the present stage of the industrial rebellion among working-women in the United States may be said to have been made with the immense garment-workers’ strikes. All have been strikes of the unorganized, the common theory that strikes must have their origin in the mischief-breeding activities of the walking delegate finding no confirmation here. They were strikes of people who knew not what a union was, making protest in the only way known to them against intolerable conditions, and the strikers were mostly very young women. One most significant fact was that they had the support of a national body of trade-union women, banded together in a federation, working on the one hand with organized labor, and on the other bringing in as helpers large groups of outside women. Such measure of success as came to the strikers, and the indirect strengthening of the woman’s cause, which has since borne such fruit, was in great part due to the splendid reinforcement of organized labor, through the efforts of this league of women’s unions.
I need touch but lightly on the strikes in other branches of the sewing trades, where the history of the uprising was very similar.
In July, 1910, 70,000 cloak-makers of New York were out on strike for nine weeks asking shorter hours, increase of wages; and sanitary conditions in their workshops. All these and some minor demands were in the end granted by the Manufacturers’ Association, who controlled the trade, but the settlement nearly went to pieces on the rock of union recognition. An arrangement was eventually arrived at, on the suggestion of Mr. Louis Brandeis, that the principle of preference to unionists, first enforced in Australia, should be embodied in the agreement. Under this plan, union standards as to hours of labor, rates of wages and working conditions prevail, and, when hiring help, union men of the necessary qualifications and degree of skill must have precedence over non-union men. With the signing of the agreement the strike ended.
January, 1913, saw another group of garment-workers on strike in New York. This time there were included men and women in the men’s garment trades, also the white-goods-workers, the wrapper and kimono-makers, and the ladies’ waist-and dress-makers. There is no means of knowing how many workers were out at any one time, but the number was estimated at over 100,000. The white-goods-workers embraced the very youngest girls, raw immigrants from Italy and Russia, whom the manufacturers set to work as soon as they were able to put plain seams through the machine, and this was all the skill they ever attained. These children from their extreme youth and inexperience were peculiarly exposed to danger from the approaches of cadets of the underworld, and an appeal went out for a large number of women to patrol the streets, and see that the girls at least had the protection of their presence.
The employers belonging to the Dress and Waist Manufacturers’ Association made terms with their people, after a struggle, under an agreement very similar to that described above in connection with the cloak-makers.
One of the most satisfactory results of the strikes among the garment-workers has been the standardizing of the trade wherever an agreement has been procured and steadily adhered to. It is not only that hours are shorter and wages improved, and the health and safety of the worker guarded, and work spread more evenly over the entire year, but the harassing dread of the cut without notice, and of wholesale, uncalled-for dismissals is removed. Thus is an element of certainty and a sense of method and order introduced. Above all, home-work is abolished.
In an unstandardized trade there can be no certainty as to wages and hours, while there is a constant tendency to level down under the pressure of unchecked competition from both above and below. There is too frequent breaking of factory laws and ignoring of the city’s fire and health ordinances, because the unorganized workers dare not, on peril of losing their jobs, insist that laws and ordinances were made to be kept and not broken. Also, in any trade where a profit can be made by giving out work, as in the sewing trades, we find, unless this is prevented by organization or legislation, an enormous amount of home-work, ill-paid and injurious to all, cutting down the wages of the factory hands, and involving the wholesale exploitation of children.
Home-work the unions will have none of, and therefore, wherever the collective bargain has been struck and kept, there we find the giving out of work from the factory absolutely forbidden, the home guarded from the entrance of the contractor, motherhood respected, babyhood defended from the outrage of child labor, and a higher standard of living secured for the family by the higher and securer earnings of the normal breadwinners.
Everywhere on the continent the results of these strikes have been felt, women’s strikes as they have been for the most part. The trade unionists of this generation have been encouraged in realizing how much fight there was in these young girls. All labor has been inspired. In trade after trade unorganized workers have learned the meaning of the words “the solidarity of labor,” and it has become to them an article of faith. Whether it has been button-workers in Muscatine, or corset-workers in Kalamazoo, shoe-workers in St. Louis, or textile-workers in Lawrence, whether the struggle has been crowned with success or crushed into the dust of failure, the workers have been heartened to fight the more bravely because of the thrilling example set them by the garment-workers, and have thus brought the day of deliverance for all a little nearer hand.
Again, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the public has been taught many lessons. The immense newspaper publicity, which could never have been obtained except for a struggle on a stupendous scale, has proved a campaign of education for young and old, for business man and farmer, for lawyer and politician, for housewife and for student. It has left the manufacturer less cocksure of the soundness of his individualist philosophy. More often is he found explaining and even apologizing for industrial conditions, which of yore he would have ignored as non-existent. He can no longer claim from the public his aforetime undisputed privilege of running his own business as he pleases, without concern for either the wishes or the welfare of employes and community.
The results are also seen in the fact that it is now so much easier to get the workers’ story across the footlights in smaller local struggles, such as those of the porcelain-workers in Trenton and! the waitresses in Chicago; in the increasing success in putting through legislation for the limitation of hours and the regulation of wages for the poorest paid in state after state. By state or by nation one body after another is set the task of doing something towards accounting for the unceasing industrial unrest, towards solving the general industrial problem. Even if to some of us the remedial plans outlined seem to fall far short of the mark, they still are a beginning and are a foretaste of better things ahead.
The conferences and discussions on unemployment are an admission, however belated, that a society which has, in the interests of the privileged classes, permitted the exploitation of the worker, must