THE SHIRTWAIST MAKERS' STRIKE

Constance D. Leupp

This article from The Survey, a reform magazine dedicated to popular education and investigative journalism, was published in the midst of the 1909 shirtwaist strike. Providing a general survey of the shirtwaist industry--including information about wages and hours and how the system of subcontracting operated--the article also describes the incidents leading up to the strike and the strikers' demands.

"We'd rather starve quick than starve slow." Such is the battle cry of the 30,000 striking shirtwaist makers (mostly girls) who since November 22 have made Clinton hall the busiest and most interesting spot in New York city.

Since the union movement began among women, nothing so significant as this general strike has happened, and for generalship, obedience and good conduct under circumstances which would break a less determined and courageos host, these Jewish, Italian and American girls from the East Side can give points to trades practiced in striking.

The members of the trade in New York are estimated at 40,000; between 30,000 and 35,000 have joined the Ladies'Shirtwaist Makers' Union. Already i8,000 girls are again at their machines on their own terms, 236 firms having taken them back into closed shops. It is the smaIler shops that have settled. The bitterest part of the fight is still ahead.

The history of the trouble has not been fairly given to the public. A few facts about the wholesale trade of machine shirtwaist making will make the whole story more comprehensible.

A Manhattan Trade School secretary who has had much experience in placing girls in different trades, says that she likes to have her girls go into shirtwaist making because it has great possibilities–many of them as yet unfulfilled– as any other industry open to women in New York. A fast operator at piecework, or even working by the day in a good shop, can earn $16 or more a week. The minimum peice-wage for strip tucking, for instance, is ten cents a hundred yards. Twelve cents is paid in many shops, and fifteen cents is probably what the strikers claim in most cases. A good operator can average 2,000 yards a day. A girl who averaged this at the Triangle Waist Company's shop where the strike began,–says that her wages were $7 a week in the busy season and $6 in slack time, while a sub-contractor admits that he averaged $28 to $30 a week and paid $4 to $10 to his girls.

Sub-contracting is a system whereby the firm never makes any dealing directly with the operators. The sub-contractor undertakes to produce a definate amount of work for a definite price, and makes what bargains he sees fit with his girls. He can slave-drive and underpay as he pleases, and even if his intentions are of the best, he represents an extra profit; the burden of which falls on the operator rather than the consumer.

Curiously enough, it was a sub-contractor who started the strike. Some eighteen months ago at the Triangle shop on Washington place (Harris and Blank's) this man because he “was sick of slave-driving” protested to the manager, saying he wanted to go and take his girls with him. He was not allowed to speak to the girls after he had expressed himself, but was told to report to the cashier for his pay. Fearful of a slugging on the way up in the elevator, he asked to have someone go with him, and was not only refused, but set upon and dragged out of the shop–the original “assault.” As he was dragged along he shouted, “Will you stay at your machines and see a fellow worker treated this way?” And impulsively 400 operators dropped their work and walked out.

The union at that time numbered only about 500 members and the trade was in no way organized; so when secretary Schindler suggested conciliatory methods, and the firm seemed willing to treat, it was not difficult to fill the shop again. The managers formed a society of the more intellegent workers, and with its members in council, terms were hit upon. “The society and a job or the union and no job” was the demand of the firm. The society having a membership limited to one hundred, there were five non-members to one member. By degrees it was discovered that the members got most of its benefits, and in frightened twos and threes the girls began to drift down to union headquarters and ask for help in organizing. Discontent frew even among the members, so that when last September a meeting was held at Clinton hall to discuss the situation, all but seven members of the society were asking for help from the union. Someone reported the meeting to the firm, and the next day, Friday, September 24, the employers called the girls together and expostulated them more in sorrow than in anger. Terms were once more arranged between a delegation of operators and the firm, and the next day everyone went back to work as usual. On Monday; however, when the girls reported for work the shop was found closed, and that night the East Side paper reported that the Triangle waist company had shut down for an indefinite time. The next day, however, came the notice that at “the earnest solicitation of the members of the society,” it was once more open. No union girls were taken back, so within thirty-six hours, through the agency of the society whose dwindling membership then numbered exactly seven–all of them sisters, cousins and aunts of the members of the firm–the strike became a lockout.

This was the situation with the Triangle company on the first of October. Meanwhile there was a local strike at Leiserson's, and the trade at large, seething with discontent, needed no further encouragement to go out en masse. Probably the only consideration that had held them in check before was the fear on the part of the Jewish girls–the larger part of the trade–that the Italians would “scab.” Employers had made clever use of race and religious antagonism to keep the girls from uniting.

The resolution for a general strike was taken at mass meetings held November 22. At Cooper Union Mr. Gompers spoke, and a procession of speakers, modtly Yiddish, for two hours implored their attentive audience to go about the thing soberly and with due consideration; but, if they decided to strike, to stand by their colors and be loyal to the union. The dramatic climax of the evening was reached when Clara Lemlich, a striker from Leiserson's who had been assaulted when picketing, made her way to the platform, begged a moment from the chairman and after an impromptu Philippic in Yiddish, eloquent even to American ears, put the motion for a general strike and was unanimously endoresed. The chairman then cried, "Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?” And up came 2,000 right hands with the prayer: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither and drop off at the wrist from the arm I now raise."

Several weeks before this eventful night, the arresting of pickets had begun, and members of the Women's Trade Union League had begun to take a hand. Picketing as practiced by these strikers consists in sentry duty performed by union members before the doors at a shop at opening and closing hours, telling the scabs that a strike is on,–among the newly arrived foreignersthere are many who do not know this–and asking them to come to union headquarters and learn about it.

When peaceably practiced, Picketing has for years been upheld by the New York courts as legal. The girls; however, have been arrested literally by the dozen, taken to court and fined sometimes as high as $10 each, without even a hearing.

There has been considerable difference in the way various members of the bench have handled the cases. Detective and neighborhood thugs have threatened the pickets steadily, by profanity and even by blows which the police have somehow failed to see, while no smallest gesticulation of a picket has escaped their notice or failed to be construed as an assault. For weeks the girls have endured what they believe to be injustice at the hands of officers of law and order, and if at times recently they have become aggressive, it is hardly to be wondered at. One member of the women's Trade Union League who with three other witnesses saw a scab assault a picket, applied to a magistrate for a warrant for the girl's arrest. She reports receiving this astonishing response from the bench: “You have no right to picket; you have no right to be on Washingto Place. Every time you go down there you will get what is coming to you and I shall not interfere. No, I'll give you no warrent.”

The girls are showing an unusual pluck and unity of spirit. It is a unique spectacle anywhere to see Jews, Italians and Americans working shoulder to shoulder for a common cause. The managment at headquarters is excellent. Mr. Baroff with an office and clerical force adapted to a membership of 500 has handled the affairs of 30,000.

Headquarters have been opened for the Italians, and the Americans gather at the Women's Trade Union League. Strike benefits are paid only to those who ask for them. A few of the strikers are married women; a small number are men, but the overwhelming majority are girls under twenty-five. On the evening of December 4 alone, these amounted to $137, representing twenty-six arrests for technical assaults and twenty-three fines.

The most spectacular features of the whole event have been the visit of several thousand workers to the mayor to ask for fair play from the police, and Mrs. Belmont's woman suffrage meeting on December 5. When called upon by the delegation the mayor promised fair play but when invited by Mrs. Belmont two days later to attend her meeting, he stated his inability to be present and his lack of interest.

These are the demands in which the mayor has no interest:

(1) A fifty-two hour week and not more than two hours' overtime on any one day. (The law allows sixty hours a week, and not more than three day's a week overtime.)

(2) The closed shop (i.e. no non-union labor employed).

(3) Notice of slack work in advance, if possible, or at least promptly on arrival in the morning.

(4) In a slack season to keep all hands on part time rather than a few operators on full time, so far as possible.

(5) All wages to be paid directly by the firm (i.e., the abolition of the sub-contractor system).

(6) A wage scale to be adjusted individually for each shop, but the terms to be determined definitely in advance for all forms of work.

The strikers' demands throw much light on conditions that have previously prevailed in the shops. At the Triangle shop, for instance, in rush seasons the girls worked until eight or nine o' clock at night with no time off for supper; while in slack season not infrequently a girl reported for work at the usual time and sat idle all the morning, to be told at noon that she was not needed.

It is impossible to say how much longer the strike will last and on just what terms it will end. Already the New England cotton mills are feeling the dearth of orders from the city in whose shops and factoriesone half the ready-made clothing in the country is made. So rapidly are the manufacturers giving in, however, that it is difficult to believe the girls will not win the majority odds in the end. It is safe to prophesy that if they arbitrate they may compromise on every other point, but not on the main most vital issue of the whole struggle–the closed shops.

It is easy to say that the closed shop demand is an unjust one, but in a sweated industry where a union exists it is the best defense of the manufacturer as well as of the worker. If our shirtwaists are going to be made on fair terms, either the profit to the manufacturer must be reduced, or the prices must go up. So long as there are manufacturers in the trade who employ sweated labor, they can always underbid union shops. On the other hand, employers with the best intentions, who use both scab and union labor, will in a rush season will make demands to which union members cannot accede and thus by degrees they are driven out of the mixed shop.

But through and about all this discussion of union and scab labor, looms a larger even more importaareont problem–that of the constitutional right of free speech. The conduct of the police officers and magistrates in their seeming conspiracy of curtailing the liberty of American citizens, is one that must attract the attention of even those who are not interested in industrial diputes.

There should be at least some small degree of unanimity between the judiciary and the Police Department. If the police commissioner states that the opportunity is given the pickets to do there work in a legal and oerderly way at the same time that a magistrate says they have no “right” to picket, it is impossible for the strikers or for their supporters to know what is expected of them.

Probably public sympathy has been more stirred by the unfair treatment of women pickets than the cause of the strikers could ever have aroused, so that the martyrdom of the girls who have been abused, thumped and thrown into the gutter has not been in vain.

RULES FOR PICKETS

Don't walk in groups of more than two or three.

Don't stand in front of the shop; walk up and down the block.

Don't stop the person you wish to talk to; walk alongside of him.

Don't get excited and shout when you are talking.

Don't put your hand on the person you are speaking to. Don't touch his sleeve or button. This may be construed as a “technical assault.”

Don't call anyone “scab” or use abusive language of any kind.

Plead, persuade; appeal, but do not threaten.

If a policeman arrest you and you are sure that you have committed no offence, take down his number and give it to your union officers.

From a circular issued by the Ladies' Shirtwaist Makers Union.

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