When we begin! to survey the vast field of industry covered by different occupations we get the same sense of confusion that comes to us when we look at an ant-heap. The workers are going hither and thither, with apparently no ordered plan, with no unity or community of purpose that we can discover. But those who have given time and patience to the task have been able to read order even in the chaos of the ant-hill. And so may we, with our far more complex human ant-hill, if we will set to work. The material for such a study lies ready to our hand in bewildering abundance; but to make any practical studies which shall aid the workers and the thinking public to follow the line of least resistance in raising standards of wages and of status as well will be the work of many years and of many minds. Even today there are some general indications of how the workers are going to settle their own problems.
Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in these criticisms there is a large element of truth. Yet there is one difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics do not take into consideration. That is the primal one of the immense size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties involved in this first one. There has never been any other country even attempting a task so stupendous as ours—to organize, to make one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles. And with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with no common history and often no common language, this particular task has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth. Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are perpetually being undermined. Capitalism is nationally fairly well organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another's preserves. But it is not so with the workers. Even in trades where there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of their trade. And thus members of every trade organization live in dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment. Why, if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one state, we should have organized a whole country.
But the big country is ours, and the big task must be shouldered.
It is only natural that trade-union organization should have progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the most highly developed. The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions become specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided up into a hundred processes. These are the conditions, and this the environment under which the workers most frequently organize. The operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the operatives are more readily grouped and classified. Also, even amid all the noise and clatter of the factory, they have opportunity for becoming acquainted, sometimes while working together, or at the noon hour, or when going to or coming from work. There are still few enough women engaged in factory work who have come into trade unions, but the path has at least been cleared, both by the numbers of men who have shown the way, and by the increasing independence of women themselves. Similar reasoning applies to the workers in the culinary trades. These also are the modern, specialized forms of the old domestic arts of cooking and otherwise preparing and serving food. The workers, the cooks and the waitresses, have their separate, allotted tasks; they also have opportunities of even closer association than the factory operatives. These opportunities, which may be used among the young folks to exchange views on the latest nickel show, to compare the last boss with the present one, may also, among the older ones, mean talking over better wages and hours and how to get them, and here may spring up the beginnings of organization.
The number of women organized into trade unions is still insignificant, compared with those unreached by even a glimmering of knowledge as to what trade unionism means. The movement will not only have to become stronger numerically in the trades it already includes. It must extend in other directions, taking in the huge army of the unskilled and the semi-skilled, outside of those trades, so as to cover the fruit-pickers in the fields and the packers in the canneries, the paper-box-makers, the sorters of nuts and the knotters of feathers, those who pick the cotton from the plant, as well as those who make the cotten into cloth. Another group yet to be enrolled are the hundreds of thousands of girls in stores, engaged in selling what the girls in factories have made, and still other large groups of girls in mercantile offices who are indirectly helping on the same business of exchange of goods for cash, and cash for goods, and who are just as truly part of the industrial world and of commercial life. But the pity is that the girl serving at the counter and the girl operating the typewriter do not know this.
Take two other great classes of women, who have to be considered and reckoned with in any wide view of the wage-earning woman. These are nurses and teachers. The product of their toil is nothing that can be seen or handled, nothing that can be readily estimated in dollars and cents. But it must none the less be counted to their credit in any estimate of the national wealth, for it is to be read in terms of sound bodies and alert minds.
Large numbers of women and girls are musicians, actresses and other theatrical employés. The labor movement needs them all, and, although few of them realize it, they need the labor movement. These are professions with great prizes, but the average worker makes no big wage, has no assurance of steadiness of employment, of sick pay when out of work, or of such freedom while working as shall bring out the very best that is in her.
In almost all of these occupations are to be found the beginnings of organization on trade-union lines. The American Federation of Musicians is a large and powerful body, of such standing in the profession that the entire membership of the Symphony Orchestras in all the large cities of the United States and Canada (with the single exception of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) belongs to it. Women, so far, although admitted to the Federation, have had no prominent part in its activities.
Nurses and attendants in several of the state institutions of Illinois have during the last two years formed unions. Already they have had hours shortened from the old irregular schedule of twelve, fourteen and even sixteen hours a day to an eight-hour workday for all, as far as practicable. The State Board is also entirely favorable to concede higher wages, one day off in seven, and an annual vacation of two weeks on pay, but cannot carry these recommendations out without an increased appropriation from the legislature.
There are now eight small associations of stenographers and bookkeepers and other office employés, one as far west as San Francisco, while there is at least one court reporters' union.
The various federations of school-teachers have worked to raise school and teaching standards as well as their own financial position. They have besides, owing to the preponderance of women in the teaching profession, made a strong point of the justice of equal pay for equal work. Women teachers are perhaps in a better position to make this fight for all their sex than any other women.
The fact that so many bodies of teachers have one after another affiliated with the labor movement has had a secondary result in bringing home to teachers the needs of the children, the disadvantages under which so many of them grow up, and still more the handicap under which most children enter industry. So it has come about that the teaching body in several cities has been roused to plead the cause of the workers' children, and therefore of the workers, and has brought much practical knowledge and first-hand information before health departments, educational authorities, and legislators.
Yet another angle from which the organization of teachers has to be considered is that they are actually, if not always technically, public employés. Every objection that can be raised against the organization of public employés, if valid at all, is valid here. Every reason that can be urged why public employés should be able to give collective expression to their ideas and their wishes has force here.
The domestic servant, as we know her, is but a survival in culture from an earlier time, and more primitive environment. As a personal attendant, with no limitation of hours, without defined and standardized duties, and taking out part of her wages in the form of board and lodging, also at no standardized valuation, she will have to be improved out of existence altogether.
On the other hand as a skilled worker, she fills an important function in the community, satisfying permanent human needs, preparing food to support our bodies, and making clean and beautiful the homes wherein we dwell. Surely humanity is not so stupid that arrangements cannot be planned by which domestic workers can have their own homes, like other people, hours of leisure, like other workers, and organizations through which they may express themselves. The main difficulty in the immediate future is that the very reason why organization is so urgently needed by domestic workers is the reason why it is so difficult to form organizations, the individual isolation in which the girls live and work. The desire for common action assuredly is there; one little group after another are meeting and talking over their difficulties, and planning how they can overcome them. The obstacles in the way of forming unions of domestic workers are tremendous. What such groups need, above all, is a union headquarters, with comfortable and convenient rooms, in which girls could meet their friends during their times off, or in which they could just rest, if they wanted to, for many have no friend's house to go to during their precious free days. Such a headquarters should conduct an employment agency. Other activities would probably grow out of such a center, and the workers co?perating would help towards the solving of that domestic problem which is their concern even more intimately than it is that of those whom, as things are, they so unwillingly serve. That the finest type of women are already awake, and nearing the stage when they themselves recognize the need of organization, is evident from the fact that in Chicago, Buffalo and Seattle, there lately sprang up almost simultaneously, small associations of household workers formed to secure regular hours and better living conditions.
There is no class of women or girls more urgently in need of a radical change in their economic condition than department-store clerks. To this need even the public has of late become somewhat awakened, thanks mainly to a troop of investigators and to the writers in the magazines, who on the one hand have roused nation-wide horror by means of revelations regarding the white-slave traffic, and on the other have brought to that same national audience painful enlightenment as to the chronic starvation of both soul and body endured by so many brave and patient young creatures, who on four, five or six dollars a week just manage to exist, but who in so doing, are cheated of all that makes life worth living in the present, and are disinherited of any prospect of home, health and happiness in the future.
This story has been told again and again. Yet the public has not yet learned to relate it to any effectual remedy. Undoubtedly organization has done a great deal for this class in other countries, notably in England and in Germany, and in this country also, in the few cities where it has been brought about. But meanwhile their numbers are increasing, and it hardly seems human for us to wait while all these young lives are being ruined in the hope that a few years hence the department-store clerks succeeding them may be able to save themselves through organization, when there is another remedy at hand. That remedy is legislation to cover thoroughly hours, wages and conditions of work. No one suggests depending exclusively on laws. One reason, probably, why the freeing of the negro slave has been so often merely a nominal freeing is because he was able to play so small a part himself in the gaining of his freedom. It was a gift, truly, from the master race. But no one, surely, would use that argument in reference to children, and an immense proportion of the department-store employés are but children, children between fourteen and eighteen, and in some states much younger. One hears of occasional instances in which even children have banded together and gone on strike. School-children have done it. The little button-sewers of Muscatine, Iowa, formed a juvenile union during the long strike of 1911. But these are such exceptional instances that they can hardly count in normal times. And that such a large body of children and very young girls are included among department-store employés adds immensely to the difficulty of gaining over the grown-up women to organization.
[Illustration: A BINDERY
Hand folders on platform. Machine folder and hand gatherers below.]
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF ONE OF THE LARGEST AND BEST EQUIPPED WAIST
AND CLOAK FACTORIES IN NEW YORK CITY]
Perhaps at some future time children may mature mentally earlier. If along with this, education is more efficient, and the civic duty of a common responsibility for the good of all is taught universally in our schools, even the child at fourteen may become class-conscious, and willing to fight and struggle for a common aim. But if that day ever comes, it will be in the far future, and let us hope that then childish energies may be free to find other channels of expression and childish co?peration be exerted for happier aims. The child of today is often temporarily willful and disobedient, but on the whole he (and more often she) is pathetically patient and long-suffering under all sorts of hardships and injustices, and has no idea of anything like an industrial rebellion. Indeed overwork and ill-usage have upon children the markedly demoralizing effect of cowing them permanently, so that in oppressing a child you do more than deprive him of his childhood, you weaken what ought to be the backbone of his maturity. But improve conditions, whether by law or otherwise, and you will have a more independent "spunky" child, a better prospect of having him, when grown up, a more wholesomely natural rebel. Indeed more or less, this applies to human beings of any age.
As regards the minimum wage, the objection raised by certain among the conservative labor leaders has been that it will retard organization and check independence of spirit. This reasoning seems quite academic, in view of the fact that it is the most oppressed workers who are usually the least able and willing to assert themselves. Give them shorter hours or better wages, and they will soon be pleading for still shorter hours and yet higher wages. Wherever the regulation of wages, through that most democratic method, that of wages boards composed of representatives of workers and employers, has been attempted, organization has been encouraged, and this plan of legalized collective bargaining has been applied to trade after trade. In Victoria, Australia, the birthplace of the system, and the state where it has been longest in force, and more fully developed than anywhere else, the number of trades covered has grown in less than twenty years from the four experimental trades of shoemaking, baking, various departments of the clothing trades and furniture-making to 141 occupations, including such varied employments as engravers, plumbers, miners and clerical workers.
It is hardly necessary to say that minimum wages boards in Australia control the wages of men as well as of women. This question, however, does not enter into practical labor statesmanship in the United States today, but the minimum wage for women is a very live issue, and its introduction in state after state is supported by the working-women, both speaking as individuals and through their organizations.
The objections of employers to any regulation of wages is partly economic, as they fear injury to trade, a fear not sustained by Australian experience, or by the experience of employers in trades in this country, in which wages have been raised and are largely controlled by strong labor organizations. In especial, employers object to an unequal burden imposed upon the state or states first experimenting with wages boards. This has no more validity than a similar objection raised against any and all interference between employer and employé, whether it be limitation of hours, workmen's compensation acts or any other industrial legislation. It is only that another adjustment has to be made, one of the many that any trade and any employer has always to be making to suit slightly changing circumstances. And often the adjustment is much less, and the advantage to the employer arising from having more efficient and contented employ............