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 employés 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 employés. 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 employés 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 face the consequences, bear some of the burden, and do its share towards preventing the continuance of the evil. We do not cure smallpox by punishing the patient, nor do we thus prevent its recurrence among others. We handle the disease both by treating the sick person himself, and by finding the causes that lead to its spread, and arresting these. Industrial eruptive diseases have to be dealt with in like fashion, the cause sought for, and the social remedy applied fearlessly.
V
THE IMMIGRANT WOMAN AND ORGANIZATION
The melting-pot of the races is also the melting-pot of nationalities. The drama that we are witnessing in America is a drama on a more tremendous scale than can ever have been staged in the world before.
By the unawakened and so-called pure American the incoming Italian or Jew is regarded as an outsider, who may be graciously permitted to hew wood and draw water, to forge steel in a rolling-mill or to sew in a factory, to cut ice or make roads for the rest of us, and who may, on the other hand, be given the cold shoulder more or less politely, generally less, when it comes to acquaintanceship, to the simple democratic social intercourse which we share with those whom we admit as our equals.
I, too, am an immigrant, although an English-speaking and Anglo-Saxon immigrant. Therefore I am accepted among Americans as one of themselves. But there comes to me often a bitter sense of separation from my fellow-immigrants, a separation by not one wall, but many. First, the wall we none of us can help, the wall raised by difference of language. Next, the wall raised by different manners and customs. This we might try to scale oftener than we do. Again, there are separating walls, harder than these either to surmount or to lay low, walls of provincial arrogance and crass self-satisfaction, and the racial pride that is mostly another name for primitive ignorance.
An ordinary city-dwelling American or an English-speaking foreigner earning a living in business or in one of the professions or even in some of the skilled trades might live a lifetime in the United States and never meet non-Americanized foreigners socially at all. In church or club or on the footing of private entertainment these first-comers and their friends keep themselves to themselves. And although among us such race-defined limits are less hard and fast than, say, the lines of class in old European countries, still there they are. The less enlightened do not even think about the immigrant within our shores at all. Those somewhat more advanced will talk glibly about the Americanization of the foreigner that is going on all the time. So is it. That is true, but the point here to be noted is that the desirable and inevitable process of the Americanization of the foreigner, and his assimilation by and into the American nation takes place outside the charmed circles wherein these good respectable folks dwell; takes place in spite of their indifference; takes place without their active assistance, without their coöperation, save and except so far as that coöperation is unconscious and unavoidable.
The Americanizing process takes place in the street, in the cars, in the stores, in the workshop, at the theater, and the nickel show, in the wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach and draw into its fold. Carried out for the most part in crude and haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of cases it is far slower than it need be.
Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in their homes. Their lot is so often a tragedy. They have lost their own country and yet have not gained another. Even this is not the worst. The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and women. And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity. These little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into Americans. Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now growing up, of which they will form a part. We want that contribution to be as fine as possible. They cannot give more than they themselves are. And what they are to be in very large part we are making them. Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of life?
The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by democracy. Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations hamper us the longest. Here we are still far behind the fine, free and admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street and the marketplace. Here between strangers is the closest physical nearness. Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served, of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means of transportation. And that basic democracy of the street and the marketplace is all between strangers.
It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right adjustments being made, and made early. But to the observer whose eyes are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation for the harmony to be.
Upon careful consideration it would appear that the immigrant problem is only a slightly varied expression of the general social and economic problem. It focuses public attention because the case of the immigrant is so extreme. For instance, whatever conditions, industrial or civic, press hardly upon the American worker, these conditions press with yet greater hardship upon the alien. The alien and his difficulties form therefore a first point of contact, the point where the social reformer begins with his suggestions for improvement. The very same thought unconsciously forms the basis of many of the proposed methods of dealing with the immigrant, however startlingly these may differ from one another in expression. On the one hand we have such suggestions as that of Mr. Paul Kellogg, which he called "A Labor Tariff, A Minimum Wage for the Immigrant." It does not take very acute reasoning to perceive that if such a proposal were ever to become law, it would not be very long before there would have to be a universal minimum wage for everyone.
On the other hand, Mr. Edward B. Whitney in his Memorandum appended to the Report of the Commission of the State of New York argues thus in discussing the claim made by the majority of the Commission that certain special help and protection is needed by the alien. He asks "whether, if a further extension of this kind of state charity is to be made, it would not be better to take up something for the benefit of our own citizens or for the benefit of citizen and alien alike." Mr. Whitney is entirely logical. Only progress rarely takes place for logical reasons, or on lines dictated by logic, but it does in almost all cases follow the line of least resistance, and the wise progressive accepts gratefully whatever he can get, without being too anxious as to whether it seems to be logically the next step or not.
The immigrant has hitherto been used as an excuse to permit the dehumanizing of our cities; he has been used industrially as an instrument to make life harder for the hardly pressed classes of workers whom he joined on his arrival here. That such has been his sorry function has been his misfortune as well as theirs. Would it not be equally natural and far more fair to utilize his presence among us to raise our civic and economic and industrial standards? It is no new story, this. Out of every social problem we can construct a stepping-stone to something better and higher than was before. The most that we know of health has been learned through a study of the misadjustments that bring about disease. What has been done educationally to assist the defective, the handicapped and the dependent has thrown a flood of light upon the training of the normal child. Through work undertaken in the first instance for the benefit of the exceptions, the minority, the whole community has benefited.
In this connection no one will deny that immigrants, both men and women, have their handicaps. In the great majority of instances they are handicapped by an upbringing among primitive conditions, by their unavoidable ignorance of our language and our customs, and by a quite natural mental confusion as to our standards of conduct, to them so curiously exacting in some respects as, for instance, where the schooling of their children is concerned, so incomprehensibly lax in others, say, in the unusual freedom accorded to those same children when grown but a little older.
We shall find that whatever we do for the immigrant will be, in the end, so much accomplished for the good of all. Let us lessen this unfair pressure upon him, as far as we can, and we shall surely find that in helping him to help himself, we have, at the same time, benefited all workers.
It is easy to see that the great strikes in the sewing and textile trades of the last few years have proved a searchlight especially into women's industrial conditions, educating the whole public by informing them of the terrible price paid for our comfort by the makers of the commonest articles of household purchase and use, the sacrifice of youth, health, happiness, and life itself demanded by any industry which exacts of the employés cruelly long hours of work at an exhausting speed, and which for such overwork pays them wretchedly.
These uprisings have besides stimulated to an encouraging degree the forming of an intelligent public opinion upon the problem of the immigrant, and a wholesomely increased sense of responsibility towards the immigrant. And indeed it was time. Miss Grace Abbott, director of the Chicago League for the Protection of Immigrants, tells a story, illustrating how very unintelligent an educated professional man can be in relation to immigrant problems.
"Not long ago," she says, "I listened to a paper by a sanitary engineer, on the relation between the immigrant and public health. It was based on a study of typhoid fever in a certain city in the United States. He showed that most typhoid epidemics started among our foreign colonies, and spread to other sections. This, he explained, is because the foreigner has been accustomed to a pure water supply, and is therefore much more susceptible to typhoid than the American who has struggled since birth against the diseases which come from polluted water.
"Instead, then, of urging this as an additional reason for giving us all decent water, he drew the remarkable conclusion that in the interests of the public health, some new basis for the exclusion of immigrants must be adopted. In this way," Miss Abbott adds, "most discussions on the immigrant are diverted, and leave the fundamental problems quite untouched. For whether we adopt a literary and physique test, increase the head-tax, and do all the other things suggested by the restrictionists, thousands of immigrants will continue to come to us every year."
Apart from general considerations, these gigantic industrial upheavals have afforded to the public-spirited citizen an unsurpassed opportunity of understanding and appreciating the industrial problem as it affects and is affected by the immigrant girl and young woman. A few of us, here and there, from personal and trade experience knew the facts years ago as well as they are generally known today. But not all the Government reports, not an army of investigators could have imparted this knowledge to the public, and impressed upon them the sordid suffering of the working and living conditions of the foreign woman in the sewing trades in any great American city.
For in strikes of such magnitude, where whole groups of the participators themselves lived for months in a white heat of idealism and enthusiasm, life-stories are no longer dragged out of shy retiring girls, but are poured out in a burning flood by those very same girls, now quite transformed by the revolution through which they have passed, and by the new ideas of liberty and sisterhood with which they are possessed.
I speak of the woman worker here, because it is she who is my concern at present, and in all the now historic strikes she has played a very large part. Indeed in the first of these risings, in the shirtwaist strikes of 1909-1910 in New York and Philadelphia, very few men workers were involved, and in the huge Chicago strike, 1910-1911, among the makers of men's ready-made clothing, although there the girl strikers numbered only about one-fourth of the whole, even that fourth made up the very respectable total of, it is believed, somewhere around 10,000 individuals, the population of a small city. Indeed it would give most Americans pause to be told that in this same Chicago strike the whole of the workers, men and women together, numbered more than the troops that Washington was able to place in the field at any one time during the War of Independence.
Most of these strikes have been strikes of unorganized workers, who did not know even of the existence of a union till after they had gone out, and therefore with no idea of appealing to an organization for even moral support. In Chicago the strikers belonged to nine different nationalities, speaking as many different languages, so it is clear that the pressure must have been indeed irresistible that forced so many thousands with apparently no common meeting-ground or even common means of communication out of the shops into the street. When the organized strike, they know why. When the unorganized of one nationality and one tongue strike, they can tell one another why. Yet these people struck in spots all over the city almost simultaneously, although in most cases without any knowledge by one group that other groups were also resisting oppression and making a last stand against any further degradation of their poor standards of living. Amid every variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one another by the accidents of birth and speech.
So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of living.
All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new arrivals are but experiments in an untried field. We have no tests but rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one another. For instance, for a good many years now the immigration inspectors have taken such precautions as they could against the admission of the insane, but it is only recently that modified Binet tests have been used to check the entry of a socially far more injurious class, the congenitally feebleminded.
Those who have worked extensively among newly arrived foreign girls find that they arrive here with, as a rule, much less idea of what awaits them, what will be expected of them, and the difficulties and even dangers they may encounter, than the men. When the Chicago Women's Trade Union League began its immigration department a few years ago, it was found that three dollars was about the average sum which a girl had in her pocket when she reached the city of her destination. Ten dollars was felt to be a fortune, while I have since heard of young girls landing alone in a great city, and without a single cent with which to leave the depot. It is often said, why do their mothers let them go away (sixteen and eighteen are common ages) so young, so inexperienced? It must be remembered that many of the Polish and Lithuanian girls, for example, come from small villages. The mothers themselves have never seen a big city, and have not the remotest conception of any place of more than five hundred inhabitants, where the distances are short, and where everyone knows everyone else. They have no idea of the value of money, when it comes to earning and spending it in America. Three dollars a week is to mother, as to daughter, an ample sum for the young traveler.
It often happens that many of the young immigrants have had letters from those who had preceded them. But we know what human nature is. The person who succeeds proudly writes home the good news. The still more successful person is able to take a trip home and display the visible signs of his or her wealth. The unsuccessful, as a rule, either does not write at all, or writing, does not admit the humiliating truth.
In the ignorance and inexperience of the young foreign girl the white slaver finds his easiest prey, and the betrayer is too often the man speaking her own tongue. On this terrible subject the nation, like other nations, is beginning to wake up to its responsibilities in relation to the immigrant girl as in relation to other girls. This special danger to young womanhood is so linked with other social questions that I merely allude to it here, because of the certainty I entertain that much even of this danger would lessen if the trade-union movement among women were so strong and so extensive that any woman, young or old, could travel from place to place as a member of a truly world-wide organization. Then she would have a better chance of arriving well posted as to ways of earning her living, and of finding friends in every city and every town and village.
It may be urged that there exist already organizations world-wide in their scope, such as the religious associations, for the very purpose of safeguarding wandering girlhood. There are, and they accomplish a notable amount of good. But their appeal is not universal; they never have money or workers enough to cope adequately with a task like this, and they are not built upon the sound economic basis of the trade union.
The immigrant problem was not encountered by the first factory workers here, who were American-born. So we find the earliest leaders in the trade organization of women were wholly drawn from the daughters of the native settlers. They felt and spoke always as free-women, "the daughters of freemen." When this class of girls withdrew from the factories, they gave place to the Irish immigrant, in some respects a less advanced type than themselves. I have briefly traced some of the economic reasons which affected the rise, growth and eventual passing away of the various phases of trade unionism among women in this country. The progress of these was radically modified by the influx into the trades of workers from one nation after another; by the passing from a trade or a group of trades of body after body of the old workers, starved out or giving way before the recent arrivals, whose pitiful power to seize the jobs of the others and earn some sort of a living, has lain in their very weakness and helplessness.
So the first Irish girls who came into the factory life of New England were peasants, with no knowledge of city life, but quick and ready to learn. They went into the new occupations, and picked up the new ways of doing things. And by the time they had grasped the meaning of this strange industrial world in which they found themselves, they were in the relentless grasp of machine-controlled industry. Under untold handicaps they had to begin at the very beginning, and start rebellions on their own account. From the sixties on we can detect the preponderance of Irish names in the annals of early trade unionism. When they had adapted themselves to their conditions, for they quickly became Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country. The important rôle which Irish and Irish-American men have played in the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power today remains very great. So as regards the women, by glancing over the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were. It was Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers' Association in 1868. It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the women of the Knights of Labor.
Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front among working-women until recently. We read of German women and Bohemian women as faithful unionists. But Germans, Bohemians and Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others. By this time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races was less accentuated after a few years' residence. On the part of the Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and through.
With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation is somewhat different. Certain general principles are common to the course of all these migrations. They originate, on the one hand, in economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times in a new country. They meet the demands of a new country, asking for labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents. Under our haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to lower yet further wages for themselves and others.
Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what is the underlying reason of the trouble. Milder forms of antagonism consist in sending the immigrant workers "to Coventry," using contemptuous language of or to them, as we hear every day in "dago" or "sheeny," and in objections by the elders to the young people associating together, while the shameful use that is continually made of the immigrants as strike-breakers may rouse such mutual indignation that there are riots and pitched battles as a consequence.
The first indignant efforts to exclude the intruders are vain. More and more do experienced trade unionists admit this, and plead for the acceptance of the inevitable, and turn all their energies towards the organization of the unwelcome rivals. Scabs they must be, if left alone. Better take them in where they can be influenced and controlled, and can therefore do less damage. Here is where the help of the foreign organizer is so essential to overcome the indifference and quell the misgivings of the strangers in a situation where the influence of the employer is almost always adverse.
At length the immigrant gains a footing; he is left in possession, either wholly or partly, and amalgamation to a great degree takes place. A generation grows up that knew not the sad rivalry of their fathers, for fresh industrial rivalries on different grounds have replaced the old, as sharply cut, but not on race lines.
Every one of these stages can be seen today in all the industrial centers and in many rural ones, with one people or another.
While the tendency of the organized labor movement, both in the United States and in Canada, is towards restriction, whether exercised directly through immigration laws, or indirectly through laws against the importation of contract labor, there exist wide differences of opinion among trade unionists, and in the younger groups are many who recognize that there are limits beyond which no legislation can affect the issue, and that even more important than the conditions of admission to this new world is the treatment which the worker receives after he passes the entrance gate. If it is necessary in the interests of those already in this country to guard the portals carefully, it is equally necessary for the welfare of all, that the community through their legislators, both state and national, should accept the responsibility of preventing the ruthless exploitation of immigrants in the interest of private profit. Exploited and injured themselves, these become the unconscious instruments of hardly less ruthless exploitation and injury to their fellows in the competitive struggle for a bare subsistence.
Such exploitation could be in some degree checked through the authorities assuming control, and especially by furnishing to the new arrivals abundant information and advice, acquainting them with the state of the labor market in different localities and at different times. It is for the authorities also to see that the transportation of newly arrived foreigners from place to place is rendered secure; to encourage their early instruction in the language and laws of the country and the ordinances of the city, along with enlightenment as to the resources in time of trouble, which lie open to the poorest, if they but know where to turn.
In the first number of the Immigrants in America Review, the editor, Frances A. Kellor, points out what an unusual opportunity has been granted to America to formulate a definite program with reference to alien residents. Now is the time, she insists, to perfect laws, establish systems and improve conditions, when, owing to the European War, but few immigrants are arriving, and therefore, when no great rush of people demand expedients. "Now is the time to build, to repair, to initiate, so we may obviate the necessity for expedients."
The writer shows that efforts ought to be directed along seven lines, and the work on these seven lines should be closely coördinated.
1. Transportation. The safe transportation of admitted aliens to their destination.
2. Employment. Security of employment, and adequate coördinated, regulated labor-market organization.
3. Standards of living. Making it possible for the immigrant to adopt and maintain better standards of living, by removal of discriminations in localities, housing and sanitation, and by preventing overcrowding.
4. Savings. Information regarding savings banks, loan funds, agricultural colonies, and legislation regarding the same.
5. Education. Reduction of illiteracy, the teaching of civics, and extension of opportunity of education and industrial training.
6. Citizenship. Higher and simpler naturalization requirements, and processes, and placing the legal status of the alien upon a just and consistent foundation.
7. Public Charges. National and state coöperation in the care of any who may become public charges.
No one can suppose that every Greek boy desires to become a shoeblack, or that every Scandinavian girl is fitted for domestic service and for nothing else; that every Slavic Jewess should become a garment-worker; that every Italian man should work on the roads; that the Lithuanian and Hungarian, no matter what their training or their ability, should be compelled to go into the steel-rolling mills. All this because they land speaking no English, and not knowing how to place themselves in occupations better adapted to their inclinations and qualifications. No one knows how many educated and trained men and women are thus turned into hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the ruin of their own lives and the loss of the community.
The unregulated private employment office, the padrone and the sweat-shop are the agencies who direct the newcomers to jobs, whether it be in the city or out in the country camp.
Many of the new arrivals would gladly take up agriculture, if they knew where to go, and were safeguarded against imposition—having a fee taken, for instance, and then landed several hundred miles away, penniless, to find all the jobs gone.
The immigrant on landing is very much like the child leaving school to go to work, and requires vocational guidance just as sorely.
The needs of the alien are closely related to the general question of unemployment. He suffers in an acute degree from the want of system in the regularization of industry, and the fact that we have failed to recognize unemployment, and all irregularity of employment as a condition to be met and provided against by industry and the community.
Americans take credit to themselves that so many immigrants do well, succeed, become prosperous citizens and members of society, but wish to shoulder none of the blame when the alien falls down by the way, or lives under such home conditions that his babies die, and his older children fall out of their grades, drift into the street trades or find their way into the juvenile court. Americans forget how many of all these evil results are due to the want of social machinery to enable the alien to fit into his new surroundings, or the neglect to set such social machinery agoing where it already exists. In the small towns it is not unusual for health ordinances to be strictly enforced in the English-speaking localities, and allowed to remain a dead letter in the immigrant districts. In Chicago it was in the stockyards district that garbage was dumped for many years; garbage, the product of other wards, that the residents of those other wards insisted be removed from their back-doors. How much of the high infant death-rate among stockyards families has been due to the garbage exposed and decaying, so carefully brought there, from the fine residential districts?
Legally the alien suffers under a burden of disabilities of which he is usually wholly unaware, until he has broken some law or regulation devised, it would appear, often for his discomfiture, rather than for anyone's else benefit. These laws and regulations, in themselves sometimes just and sometimes unjust, make up a mass of the most inconsistent legislation. State laws, varying from state to state, and city ordinances equally individual limit the employment of aliens on public work. Peddlers' and fishers' licenses come under similar restrictions; so with the owning of property, the right to leave property by will, say, to a wife and children in Europe, and the right even to protection of life, in violation of treaty rights. "The state courts have never punished a single outrage of this kind" [violence at the hands of a mob]. The federal government, Miss Kellor states, makes a payment to a victim's heirs out of a secret service fund "if the ambassador is persistent, and threatens to withdraw from Washington if the murder of his countrymen is not to be punished."
These are all most serious handicaps, and certainly the need for investigation of all laws, the codifying of many, and the abolition of some is urgent.
If some of these handicaps were lifted from the immigrant, complaint against under-cutting competition of cheap foreign labor would largely cease, and the task of organizers among the foreign workers would be much simplified, even while we are waiting for the day when it will be possible for all to obtain work without turning others out of their jobs, which can only come about when we produce intelligently for the use of all, instead of for the profit of the exceptional few.
Here and there work on the lines sketched out is beginning, even though much of it is as yet unrelated to the rest. The community is making headway, in the acknowledgment by various states, headed by New York, of the just claim of the immigrant, once he is admitted within our borders, to the protection of the government. For long after the Federal authorities took over the control of immigration, their concern was limited to some degree of restriction over the entry of foreigners, and the enforcement of deportation, when such was considered necessary. Quite a fresh departure, however, was made in the year 1910, when the state of New York, following the recommendations of its State Commission on Immigration (1909), established its Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which really grew out of the activities of a private society. Other communities are also realizing their responsibility. California established a permanent Commission on Immigration and Housing in 1913, and the Investigating Commissions of Massachusetts and New Jersey recommended similar agencies in their reports to the legislatures in 1914.
New York has already accomplished excellent results, and more important still, has shown the direction, in which other states may both follow and coöperate. A few years more may see us with interstate legislation insuring the better care and protection of immigrants all over the country, interstate legislation being the curiously indirect method which the United States has hit upon to overcome the imperfections and deficiencies of its national instrument of government. One of these days may even find the Federal House at Washington taking over, in other lines besides that of foreign workers, the functions outlined for it in the first instance by the daughter states.
The United States Government has recently entered a new field in the passage of a law, authorizing the protection of immigrants in transit to their destination, and providing for the establishment of a station in Chicago, where the immigrants will go on their arrival, and will thus be protected from the gross frauds from which they have so long suffered. The present administration also promises an experiment in the development of the Bureau of Information in the Immigration Department.
It is not so easy for any of us to give the same dispassionate consideration to the problem that is with us as to that which has long been settled, and has passed away into the calm atmosphere of history. And truly, there are complications in the present situation which our fathers had not to face. And first, the much greater dissimilarity in training, mental outlook, social customs, and in the case of the men and women from eastern Europe, not to speak of Asia, the utter unlikeness in language, makes mutual knowledge and understanding much more difficult, and the growth of mutual confidence, therefore, much slower.
No one has yet analyzed the effects upon the nervous system of the migrating worker, of the unsettlement of habits, and the change of surroundings and social environment, working in connection with the changed climatic conditions, and the often total change in food. This is one phase of the immigrant problem which deserves the most careful study. And when, as too often in the case of the Russian Jew, this complete alteration of life is piled on top of the persecutions so many of them have endured, and the shocks so many have sustained before leaving their native land, the normal, usual effects of the transition are emphasized and exaggerated, and it may take a generation or longer before complete Americanization and amalgamation is brought about.
The longer such a change is in being consummated, the more is the new generation likely to retain some of their most characteristic qualities permanently; to retain and therefore to impress these upon the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely prepotent power as among the Jews.
In reference to trade-union organization among women, while each nationality presents its own inherent problem, there is equally no doubt but that each will in the future make its own special contribution towards the progress and increased scope of the movement among the women workers.
As matters are developing today, the fulfillment of this promise of the future has already begun most markedly among the Slavic Jewesses, especially those from Russia. These young women have already brought, and are every day bringing into the dreary sweatshop and the speeded-up factory a spirit of fearlessness and independence both in thought and action, which is having an amazing effect upon the conditions of factory industry in the trades where they work. So also, supporting and supported by the men of their own race, these Russian Jewish girls, many of them extremely young, are inspiring their fellow-workers and interpenetrating the somewhat matter-of-fact atmosphere of American trade unionism with their own militant determination and enthusiasm. With most, the strike has been their initiation into trade unionism, often the general strike in their own trade, the strike on a scale hitherto unparalleled in trades where either the whole or a very considerable proportion of the workers are women. Some again, especially among the leaders, approach unionism through the ever open door of socialism. If I speak here of the women of the Slavic Jewish race, it is not that I wish to ignore the men. I have to leave them on one side, that is all.
These girls add to courage and enthusiasm, such remarkable gifts of intellect and powers of expression as to make them a power wherever they have become awakened to the new problems that face them here and now, and to their own responsibilities in relation thereto. They are essentially individualists. They do not readily or naturally either lean upon others or coöperate with others, nor yet confide in others. They come here with a history generations long of ill-treatment and persecution. Many thousands of them have witnessed their dearest tortured, outraged and killed with the narrowest possible escape from some similar fate themselves. To most any return to their native country is completely barred, and they do not therefore nurse the hope, so inveterately cherished by the Italians, for instance, that they may some day be able to go back.
When the Russian Jewish girl first hears of a trade union, she has usually been some years in one of our cities, working in a factory or a sweatshop, let us say as a garment-worker. The religious and social liberty which she has here learnt to consider her due has stimulated her desire for further freedom, while the tremendous industrial pressure under which she earns her daily bread stirs the keenest resentment. One day patience, Jewish girlish patience, reaches its limit. A cut in wages, exhausting overtime, or the insults of an overbearing foreman, and an unpremeditated strike results. It may be small, poorly managed, and unsuccessful. The next time things may go better, and the girls come in touch with a union, and take their first lessons in the meaning of collective bargaining. (What is passing in the minds of the rank and file at this stage I am not certain. The obscurities of their psychology are more difficult to fathom.) But I am sure that to the leaders of the young protestants it is not so much in the light of a tower of refuge that the trade union presents itself, but rather as an instrument by means of which they believe that they can control a situation which has become unbearable. As happens to many endowed with the gift of leadership, they travel much farther than they had any idea of when they set out. As time goes on, if they are real leaders, they learn to understand human nature in its varied aspects, the human nature of bosses, as well as the human nature of their fellow-wage-earners. After a year or two as presidents or secretaries of their local, you will hear these fiery-tongued little orators preaching endurance, in order to gain an end not obtainable today, aye, even advising compromise, they to whom the very word compromise had erstwhile been impossible. This implies no loss of principle, no paltering with loyalty, but merely putting in practice the wisdom of the experienced statesman. Nearly all, sooner or later, embrace the socialist philosophy, and many are party members. In that philosophy they find a religious sanction in their most determined struggles after victory, and unfailing support and consolation in the hour of defeat.
As for the rank and file, with them, too, something of the same mental processes probably goes on in a minor degree; but they are much longer in learning their lesson, and meanwhile are often exceedingly hard to direct. They are impulsive beyond belief. It used once to be remarked that Jewish girls were the easiest of all to organize during a strike, and the hardest of all to hold in the union afterwards. This is fortunately not so true today, now that there are a few trained leaders of their own race, whom they trust, and who understand their moods, and know, better than most Americans, how to handle them.
The alien is forever being resented as an obstacle, even if an unconscious one, in the way of organization. Yet as far as women are concerned, it is to this group of aliens in particular that is due the recent tremendous impulse towards organization among the most poorly paid women. In the sewing trades, and in some other trades, such as candy-making, it is the American girls who have accepted conditions, and allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. It is the foreign girl, and especially the Slavic Jewess who has been making the fight for higher wages, shorter hours, better shop management, and above all, for the right to organize; and she has kept it up, year after year, and in city after city, in spite of all expectations to the contrary.
One of the indirect benefits of the colossal strikes in the sewing trades in which these Jewish girls have played so conspicuous a part has been the increasing degree in which those of differing nationalities have come to understand one another, as men and women having common difficulties and common rights, as all alike members of the great working people. Through sore trial many have learnt the meaning of "class consciousness," who never heard of the word.
The new spirit is beginning to touch the Italian girl, and as time goes on, she, too, will be brought into the fold of unionism. To meet with large success, we need as leaders and organizers, Italians, both men and women, of the type of Arthur Carotti, as capable and devoted. The Italian girl is guarded in her home as is the girl of no other race, and this works both for good and for evil. The freedom of the streets, accorded so unquestioningly to their girls by the parents of other nationalities, is conscientiously denied to the Italian girl. No respectable family would permit their daughters to go to any sort of an evening gathering, to attend church or dance or union meeting, unless accompanied by father, mother or brother. While no one can help deeply respecting the principles of family affection and responsibility which dictate this code of manners, there is equally no blinking the fact that it raises a most serious barrier in the way of organizing girls of Italian parentage. Nor on the other hand is it of the least avail to protect the girl against the evils of the industrial system of which the whole family form a part. In especial it does not serve to shield her from the injurious effects of cruel overwork. In no class of our city population do we find more of this atrocious evil, misnamed homework than among Italian families, and whether it is sewing, artificial-flower-or feather-making or nut-picking, neither grown daughters nor little children are spared here. Along with the mother and under her eye, the whole group work day after day, and often far into the night at occupations in themselves harmless enough under proper conditions, but ruinous to health and happiness when permitted to intrude under the family roof. For the wrong of home-work is not to be measured even by the injury suffered by the workers themselves. All parasitic trades, such as these, lower wages in the open market. The manufacturer is continually impelled to cut down wages in his shops to keep pace with the competition of the ill-remunerated home-worker.
As I have said above, I believe that every race that has settled down here in this America has some special contribution to bestow, which will work for good to the whole labor movement. I have instanced the case of the Slavic Jewess as one who has certainly arrived. From others the gift has still to come. From the Italian girl it will come in good time, for they are beginning to enter the unions now, and from the lips of their own fellow-countrywomen even Italian mothers will learn to accept for their daughters the gospel they will not listen to from foreigners like ourselves. The most severely handicapped of all the nationalities so far, to my thinking, is the Polish. They are what is called pure Slavs, that is, with no Jewish blood. They are peasant girls and cannot be better described than they are in a pamphlet on "The Girl Employed in Hotels and Restaurants," published by the Juvenile Protective League to Chicago.
In these places Polish girls are chosen for the following reasons:
1. Because they come of strong peasant stock, and accomplish a large amount of work.
2. They are very thorough in what they do.
3. They are willing to take low wages.
4. They are very submissive, that is, they never protest.
5. They are ignorant of the laws of this country, and are easily imposed upon.
6. They never betray their superiors, no matter what they see.
What a scathing indictment of the American people is set forth in this brief summing up!
The trades that swallow up these strong, patient, long-enduring creatures are work in the meat-canning plants, and dish-washing and scrubbing in restaurants and hotels. These really valuable qualities of physical strength and teachableness, unbalanced by any sense of what is due to themselves, let alone their fellow-workers, prove their industrial ruin.
It is only when they are fortunate enough to get into a better class of work, and when they chance upon some well-organized establishment and are drawn into the union as a matter of course that we find Polish girls in unions at all. Intellectually they are not in the running with the Russian Jewess and the peasant surroundings of their childhood have offered them few advantages. One evening, for instance, there were initiated into a glove-workers' local seventeen new Polish members. Of these two only were able to read and write English, and of the remainder not more than half were able to read and write Polish. As to what is to be the later standing and the ultimate contribution of the Polish girl, I cannot hazard a guess. I only know that she possesses fine qualities which we are not utilizing and which we may be obliterating by the cruel treatment so many thousands of Polish girls are receiving at our hands.
I cannot see any prospect of organizing them in any reasonable numbers at present. The one thing we can do to alleviate their hard lot is to secure legislation—legislation for shorter hours and for the minimum wage.
Their suspiciousness is perhaps the chief barrier in the way of social elevation of the Poles. That Poles can be organized is shown by the remarkable success of the Polish National Alliance and kindred societies. Their capacity for coöperation is seen in their establishment of their own coöperative stores.
VII
THE WOMAN ORGANIZER
The problems that face the woman organizer are many and complex. They are the harder to handle, inasmuch as there is very little assistance to be had from any body of tradition on the subject among women workers. The movement for organization among women is still so inchoate. The woman organizer turns to the more experienced men leaders, and finds that often, even with the best will in the world, they cannot help her. The difficulties she meets with are, in detail, so different from theirs that she has to work out her own solutions for herself.
It is indeed a blind alley in which she has so often to move. The workers are young and ignorant, therefore, by all odds, they require the protection of both legislation and organization. Again, the workers are young and ignorant, and therefore they have not learnt the necessity for such protection. Their wages are in most cases low, too low for decent self-support. But just because their wages are so inadequate for bare needs it is in many cases all the more difficult to induce them to deduct from such scanty pay the fifty cents a month which is the smallest sum upon which any organization can pay its way and produce tangible benefits for its members.
Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not resisted. To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room, to spend a few cents a day less for food—these are the near-hand economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind. This is on the economizing side. When it comes to trying to earn more, to work longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents of the weekly pay envelope. The younger and inexperienced the worker, the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn, not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.
To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics, the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign. To some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are urged to. To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not to try and earn as big a wage as possible. But the organizer comes in and she approaches the question from the other end. She does not talk about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time. It is her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing about this result by herself, to show them that they must band together with the determination to make their wage square with their ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their mode of living with their wage.
In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete revolution.
It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer has her special work cut out for her. And here she necessarily contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to deal with girls, because she understands the girl's work and the girl's problems better, and the girl knows that she does.
I have taken wages as the prime subject of the organizer's activities only because wages form the crux of the whole question. There, without any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the employé and the community, the standard of living that is possible, as measured by the employé's share of the product of labor. But in practice, money wages form only one element of the standard of living problem, although the one around which least confusion gathers.
Whatever form the demands of labor organizations may take, the essence of the demand is the same: better terms for the worker always, however temporary circumstances or technical details may obscure the issue.
That this holds of reductions in hours of work has become a truism among trade unionists, who recognize that any reduction of hours of work eventually, though not perhaps immediately, results in a readjustment of wages, whether week-workers or piece-workers or both be involved, till the original money wage at any rate is reached, supposing, of course, that no other influence enters in as an element to lessen rates of pay.
The question of equal pay for equal work involves indeed much more complicated issues, as regards both the individual worker and the whole body of women workers in the trade or branch of the trade affected. But even here, the underlying purpose is the same, the assuring, to the total number of workers whose labor has gone into the production, of a certain amount of finished marketable work, of an increased, or at the least, not a lessened share of the product of their toil. It is not to be questioned that if women are permitted to work at the same operations as men for a lesser remuneration, the man's wage must go down. In addition, he may, even at the lowered rate, lose his job, as the employer may cherish the not altogether groundless hope that he may cut down the women's wage yet further and employ yet more women, and yet fewer men.
In the same way the provision of better sanitary conditions, the fencing off of dangerous machinery, the prohibition usually of dangerous processes or of the use of dangerous materials, such as lead or white phosphorus, all involve an addition small or large, to the cost of manufacture. If, however, there be in all these instances an increase in the cost of manufacture there are also results to the well-being of the workers, which, if they could be measured in money, would be out of all proportion to the money cost to the employer or to the purchasing community. But again, it is the maintenance of the workers' ideal standard of living which causes the trade union to demand that their share of the product of their toil shall not be lessened by needless or avoidable risks to life or limb or health.
I have taken these demands in the order, in which, generally speaking, the organizer can induce the young girl worker to consider them in her own case. Better pay makes by far the easiest appeal, whether it be to the very young girl with her eager desire for a good time or to her older sister upon whom, quite surely, years have laid some of life's increasing burdens.
Next in order of attractiveness came shorter hours, especially if the wage-earners can be assured that wages will stay where they are.
But nothing short of both years and trade experience, apparently, will impress upon the worker all that is implied in those words that we write so easily and pronounce so glibly—sanitary conditions.
The young girls have all the blessed, happy-go-lucky care-free-ness of children, the children they are in years. They start out on their wage-earning career with the abounding high spirits and the stores of vitality of extreme youth. They are proud of their new capacity to earn, to begin to keep themselves and to help the mother and the others, and at first it does not seem to them as if anything could break them down or kill them. They do not at first associate bad air with headaches or sore throats, nor long standing with backaches, nor following the many needles of a power sewing-machine with eye trouble. The dangerous knife-edge on the revolving wheel, or the belting that may catch hair or clothing is to them only an item in the shop-furnishings, that they hope may not catch them napping.
All along the progress of labor organization has been exceedingly slow among women as compared with men, and has been far indeed from keeping pace with the rate at which increasing numbers of women have poured into the industrial field. So that it was not strange that well-meaning labor men, judging from personal experiences or arguing from analogy, came to the conclusion, paralyzing indeed to their own strivings after an all-inclusive, nation-wide organization of the workers, that women could not be organized. Or if such a labor man did not like to put it quite so bluntly, even to himself, he would shake his head, and regretfully remark that women did not make good trade unionists. If someone less experienced or more hopeful came along with plans for including or for helping women, the veteran trade unionist had too often a number of facts to bring forward, the bald accuracy of which was not to be disputed, of how in his own trade the women were scabbing on the men by working for a lower wage, or that they were so indifferent about the meetings, or worse still, how that women's local did so fine during the strike, and then just went to pieces, and now there wasn't any local at all.
"Facts are not to be explained away," he would conclude. No, they are not to be explained away, but some facts may be explained, and not unfrequently the explanation is based upon some other fact, which has been overlooked. With the present question, the one important fact which explains a good deal is the youth of so many women workers. This by no means disposes of each particular situation with its special difficulties, but it does help to explain the general tendency among the women to be neglectful of meetings and to let their local go to pieces, which so distracts our friend.
This new competitor with men, whom we think of and speak of as a woman, is in many cases not a woman at all, but only a girl, very often only a child. From this one fact arises a whole class, of conditions, with resulting problems and difficulties totally different from any the man trade unionist has to deal with among men.
The first and most palpable difficulty is that the majority of workers are yet at the play age. They are still at the stage when play is one of the rightful conditions under which they carry on their main business of growing up. Many of them are not ready to be in the factory at all. Certainly not for eight, ten or twelve hours a day. And so those young things, after an unthankful and exhausting day's toil, are not going to attend meetings unless these can be made attractive to them. And the meeting that may appear entirely right and even attractive to the man of thirty or forty will be tiresome and boring past endurance to the girl of sixteen or eighteen.
Then there are other huge difficulties to encounter. The very first principles of coöperative action and mutual responsibility are unknown to the great majority of the young workers. Too rarely does it happen, that in her own home the girl has learnt anything about trade unionism, at least trade unionism for women. The greater number of girls are not the daughters of factory mothers. The mother, whether American or foreign-born, grew up herself in simpler conditions, and does not begin to comprehend the utterly changed environment in which her little daughter has to work when she enters a modern factory. If American, she may; have married just out of her father's home, and if foreign-born she may have been tending silkworms or picking grapes in Italy, or at field-work in Poland or Hungary. Very different occupations these from turning raw silk into ribbon or velvet in an Eastern mill, or labelling fruit-jars in an Illinois cannery.
Again, neither in the public nor in the parochial school are the workers-to-be taught anything concerning the labor movement or the meaning of collective bargaining. Even if they should have attained the eighth grade with its dizzy heights of learning, the little teaching they have received in civics has not touched upon either of the most vital problems of our day, the labor movement or the woman movement.
The mere youth, however, of the girl workers is not in itself the chief or the most, insuperable difficulty. If these girls were boys we might look forward to their growing up in the trade, gaining experience and becoming ever more valuable elements in the union membership. But after a few years the larger percentage of the girls marry and are lost to the union and to unionism for good. Nay, a girl is often such a temporary hand that she does not even remain out her term of working years in one trade, but drifts into and out of half-a-dozen unskilled or semi-skilled occupations, and works for twenty different employers in the course of a few years. The head of a public-school social center made it her business to inquire of fifty girls, all over sixteen, and probably none over eighteen how long each had held her present job. Two only had been over a year at the one place. The rest accounted for such short periods as four months, six weeks, two weeks, at paper-box-making, candy-packing or book-binding with, of course, dull seasons and periods of unemployment between.
In the organized trades conditions are not quite so exasperating, but even in these the short working term of the girl employé means an utter lack of continuity in the membership of the trade and therefore of the union. The element of permanence in men's organizations is in great measure the result of the fact that men, whether they remain in one particular trade or shift to another, are at least in industry for life as wage-earners, unless indeed they pass on into the employing or wage-paying class.
But instead of seeing in the temporary employment of so many girls only another reason why they need the protection and the educational advantages of organization, we have been too contented to let ill alone, and all alike, the girl, the workingman, and the community are suffering for this inertia.
In this connection the first and most important matter to take up is that of women organizers, for women workers will never be enrolled in the labor movement of America in adequate numbers except through women organizers. And where are these today?
A most emphatic presentation of the practical reasons why the man organizer can rarely handle effectively young women workers, and why therefore women are absolutely necessary if the organization on any large scale is to be successful, was made before the Convention of the American Federation of Labor in Toronto in 1909.
The speaker was Mr. Thomas Rumsey of Toledo. He described his own helplessness before the problem. He told, how, to begin with, it was not possible for a man to have that readiness of access to the girl workers when in their own homes and in their leisure hours which the woman organizer readily obtained.
"If a girl is living at home," he said, "it is not quite, so awkward, but if she is in lodgings I can't possibly ask to see her in her own room. If I talk to her at all it will be out on the street, which is not pleasant, especially if it is snowing or freezing or blowing a gale. It is not under these conditions that a girl is likely to see the use of an organization or be attracted by its happier and more social side." Then he went on to say that he himself often did not know what best to say to his girl when he had caught her. He was ignorant, perhaps almost as ignorant as an outsider, of the conditions under which she did her work. He might know or be able to find out her wages and hours; he might guess that there was fining and speeding up, but he would know nothing of the details, and on any sanitary question or any moral question he would be utterly at sea. He could neither put the questions nor get the answers, nor in any way win the girl's confidence. Therefore, Mr. Rumsey concluded, if the American Federation of Labor is going to acknowledge its responsibilities in the great field of labor propaganda among women it must seriously take up the question of organizing women by women.