Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-Workers, Their Trades and Their Lives. Campbell Helen
where they buy their thread, that they charge us five cents a dozen more than it costs them, though they make a great point of giving it to us at cost and cheaper than we could buy it ourselves.”
“Why don’t you club together and buy, then?” the little widow asked, to hear again the formula, “And get your walking-ticket next day? We know a little better than that.”
A few weeks later a new system of payment forced each worker to sacrifice from half an hour to an hour of precious time, her only capital. Hitherto payments had been made at the desk when work was brought in, but now checks were given on a Bowery bank, and the women must walk over in heat and storm alike, and wait their turn in the long line on the benches. If paid by the week this would make little difference, as any loss of time would be the employers’, but this form of payment is practically abolished, piece-work done at home meaning the utmost amount of profit to the employer, every loss in time being paid by the workers themselves. When questioned as to why the check system of payment had been adopted by this and various other firms, the reply was simply: —
“It saves trouble. The bank has more time to count out money than we have.”
“But the women? Does it seem quite fair that they should be the losers?”
“Fair? Anything’s fair in business. You’d find that out if you undertook to do it.”
As the case then at present stands, for this firm, and for many which have adopted the same methods, the working-woman not only pays the rent that would be required for a factory, but gives them a profit on expressage, thread, time lost in going to bank, and often the price on a dozen of garments, payment for the dozen being deducted by many foremen if there is a flaw in one. This foreman becomes the scapegoat if unpleasant questions are asked by any whose investigation might bring discredit on the firm. In some cases they refuse positively to give any information, but in most, questions are answered with suspicious glibness, and if reference is made to any difficulties encountered by the women in their employ, they take instant refuge in the statement: —
“Oh, that was before the last foreman left. We discharged him as soon as we found out how he had served the women.”
“Do you see those goods?” another asked, pointing to a counter filled with piles of chemises. “How do you suppose we make a cent when you can buy a chemise like that for fifty cents? We don’t. The competition is ruining us, and we’re talking of giving up the business.”
“That’s so. It’s really more in charity to the women than anything else that we go on,” his partner remarked, with a look toward him which seemed to hold a million condensed winks. “That price is just ruin; that’s what it is.”
Undoubtedly, but not for the firm, as the following figures will show, – figures given by a competent forewoman in a large establishment where she had had eleven years’ experience: twenty-seven yards and three-quarters are required for one dozen chemises, the price paid for such cotton as is used in one selling at fifty cents being five cents per yard, or $1.40 for the whole amount; thirty yards of edging at 4½ cents a yard furnishes trimming for the dozen, at $1.35; and four two-hundred-yard spools of cotton are required, at twenty-five cents per dozen, or eight cents per dozen garments. The seamer who sews up and hems the bodies of the garments receives thirty cents a dozen, and the “maker” – this being the technical term for the more experienced worker who puts on band and sleeves – receives from ninety cents to one dollar a dozen, though at present the rates run from seventy-five to ninety cents. Our table, then, stands as follows: —
The chemise which sells at seven dollars per dozen has the additional value in quality of cloth and edging, the same price being paid the work-women, this price varying only in very slight degree till the excessively elaborate work demanded by special orders. One class of women in New York, whose trade has been a prosperous one since ever time began, pay often one hundred dollars a dozen for the garments, which are simply a mass of lace and cobweb cambric, tucked and puffed, and demanding the highest skill of the machine operator, who even in such case counts herself happy if she can make eight or nine dollars a week. And if any youth and comeliness remain to her, why need there be wonder if the question frame itself: “Why am I the maker of this thing, earning barest living, when, if I choose, I, too, can be buyer and wearer and live at ease?”
Wonder rather that one remains honest when the only thing that pays is vice.
For the garments of lowest grade to be found in the cheapest quarters of the city the price ranges from twenty-five to thirty cents, the maker receiving only thirty cents a dozen, and cloth, trimming, and thread being of the lowest quality. The profit in such case is wellnigh imperceptible; but for the class of employer who secures it, content to grovel in foul streets, and know no joy of living save the one delight of seeing the sordid gains roll up into hundreds of thousands, it is still profit, and he is content. As I write, an evening paper containing the advertisement of a leading dry-goods firm is placed before me, and I read: “Chemises, from 12½ cents up.” Here imagination stops. No list of cost prices within my reach tells me how this is practicable. But one thing is certain. Even here it is not the employer who loses; and if it is a question of but a third of a cent profit, be sure that that profit is on his side, never on the side of the worker.
CHAPTER FOURTH.
THE BARGAIN COUNTER
The problem of the last chapter is, if not plain, at least far plainer than when it left the pen, and it has become possible to understand how the garment sold at twelve and a half cents may still afford its margin of profit. It has also been made plain that that profit is, as there stated, “never on the side of the worker,” but that it is wrung from her by the sharpest and most pitiless of all the methods known to unscrupulous men and the women who have chosen to emulate them. For it has been my evil fortune in this quest to find women not only as filled with greed and as tricky and uncertain in their methods as the worst class of male employers, but even more ingenious in specific modes of imposition. Without exception, so far as I can discover, they have been workers themselves, released for a time it may be by marriage, but taking up the trade again, either from choice or necessity. They have learned every possibility of cheating. They know also far better than men every possibility of nagging, and as they usually own a few machines they employ women on their own premises and keep a watchful eye lest the smallest advantage be gained. The majority prefer to act as “sweaters,” this releasing them from the uncertainties attending the wholesale manufacturer, and as the work is given to them at prices at or even below the “life limit,” it is not surprising that those to whom they in turn pass it on find their percentage to mean something much nearer death than life.
“Only blind eyes could have failed to see all this before,” some reader is certain to say. “How is it possible that any one dealing directly with the question could doubt for a moment the existence of this and a thousand-fold worse fraud?”
Only possible from the same fact that makes these papers a necessity. They hold only new phases of the old story. The grain has had not one threshing alone, but many, and yet for the most patient and persistent of searchers after truth is ever fresh surprise at its nature and extent. Given one or a dozen exposures of a fraud, and we settle instinctively into the conviction that its power has ended. It is barely conceivable to the honest mind that cheating has wonderful staying power, and that not one nor a thousand exposures will turn into straight paths feet used to crooked ones. And when a business man, born to all good things and owning a name known as the synonyme of the best the Republic offers to-day, states calmly, “There is no such thing as business without lying,” what room remains for honor or justice or humanity among men whose theory is the same, and who can gild it with no advantage of birth or training? It is a wonderful century, and we are civilizing with a speed that takes away the breath and dims the vision, but there are dark corners still, and in the shadow Greed and Corruption and Shame hold high carnival, with nameless shapes, before which even civilization cowers. Their trace is found at every turn, but we deal with only one to-day, helpless, even when face to face, to say what method will most surely mean destruction.
We settle so easily into the certainty that nothing can be as bad as it seems,