Making Both Ends Meet by Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt

S >> Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt >> Making Both Ends Meet

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"With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more
mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially
neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony--to the absence of
spontaneity or joy in work."

_Proceedings of the First International Convention on Industrial
Diseases_, Milan, 1906. Imbecility and Criminality in Relation to
Certain Forms of Labor. Professor Crisafuli.

"When only one brain-centre works, it becomes overfatigued much more
easily than if the functions were alternately performed by the various
centres.

"Here, then, is another factor in overfatigue due to the _monotony_ of
work, interrupted only at long intervals.

"This monotony is the determining cause of local disturbances and
endangers the entire organism."]

CHAPTER V

THE CLOAK MAKERS' STRIKE AND THE PREFERENTIAL UNION SHOP

Forty million dollars are invested in New York in the making of women's
cloaks, skirts, and suits. One hundred and eighty million dollars' worth
of these garments are produced in New York in a year.[23]

Between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city
are employed in these industries. The Union members constitute
ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten
thousand of these members are women.[24]

It seems at first strange to find that the multitudinous fields of the
metropolitan needle trades,--industries traditionally occupied by sewing
women,--are, in fact, far more heavily crowded with sewing men. There is,
however, a division of labor, the men doing practically all the cutting,
machine sewing, and pressing, and in many cases working at
hand-finishing; the women practically never cutting, machine sewing, or
pressing, and in all cases working at hand-finishing.

A general strike involving all these men and women in the cloak making
trade was declared on the 8th of July, 1910. The industry had for years
burdened both its men and women workers with certain grave
difficulties--an unstandardized wage, the subcontracting system,
competition with home work, and long seasonal hours.

The subcontracting system bore most severely on the women in the trade,
as the greater proportion of the finishers were women, and before the
strike nearly every finisher was employed by a subcontractor.

The wages paid to finishers in the same shop, whether they were girls or
men, were the same. But as compared with cutters, basters, and operators
the finishers both before and since the strike had always been paid
relatively below their deserts.

Wages were lowered, not only by the unstandardized rates prevalent
through the sub-subcontracting system, but also by the practice of
sending hand-finishing out of the factories and shops to be done at home.
When inquiry was made of numerous self-supporting girls employed as cloak
finishers, most of them said that at the end of the working day they were
too exhausted to carry any sewing home. But work had been carried away
by various strong girls in the trade, and by old men, and by young men to
their families.

Among the women cloak finishers, Rose Halowitch, a delicate little
Russian girl of seventeen, a helper in a cloak factory, who gave her
account to the Consumers' League, about two years and a half ago received
a wage of from $3.50 to $6 a week. In busy weeks she would work from
eight in the morning till eight at night, with only one stop of an hour
for her insufficient noon lunch, for which she could afford to spend only
6 or 7 cents.

Among the home workers Rhetta Salmonsen, a Russian woman of forty, the
mother of four children, used to finish at night the cloaks brought to
her by her husband, who worked through the day as an operator in a cloak
factory. Between them they would earn $12 and $15 in busy weeks. In these
weeks there were some occasions when Mrs. Salmonsen would do the
housework till her husband came home late at night. After clearing away
his supper and putting the children to bed, she would start felling seams
at midnight; and in order to complete the cloaks he had brought before he
returned to the shop in the morning, she would sew until she saw the
white daylight coming in at the tenement window, and it was time for her
to prepare breakfast again. With all this industry, as her husband had
been ill and there had been three months of either slack work or
idleness, the family had fallen in debt. Rent, food, and shoes alone had
cost them $400. This left less than $100 a year for all the other
clothing and expenses of six people in New York. Against such a standard
of living as this, then, cloak finishers were obliged to compete as long
as they attempted to underbid the hours and prices of home work.

Among the stronger girls who had taken work home, Ermengard Freiburg, a
powerful young Galician woman of twenty-eight, who had been finishing
cloaks ever since she was eleven, had earned $1 in the first week and had
advanced rapidly to $3 a week. In the last years, however, she had not
carried any work home. She had sewed on piece-work from eight in the
morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or
overtime. She had earned from $20 to $25 a week in the busy weeks when
the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $6
and $7. Ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade
fortunes. All her concern and conversation were for the numbers of women
cloak makers who lacked her own wonderful strength. Successful without
education, she was astonishingly destitute of the wearisome fallacy of
complacent self-reference characteristic of many people of uncommon
ability. During the past year she had twice been discharged for
organizing the workers in cloak factories where she was employed. In the
first establishment subcontracting had made conditions too hard for most
of the women; and in the second, wages were too low for a decent
livelihood for most of the workers.

These instances serve to express in the industry and lives of women cloak
workers the subcontracting system, long seasonal hours, home work, and an
unstandardized wage--the features under discussion in the cloak making
trade in the spring of 1910.

The whole cloak making trade of New York presents, for an outside
observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static. The
cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade. In the general
strike of the cloakmakers in 1896 nearly all the manufacturers were
German. In the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were
Galician and Russian.

This aspect of the New York needle trades must be borne in mind in
realizing those occurrences in the last strike which led to the present
joint effort of both manufacturers and workers to standardize the wage
scale, to regulate seasonal hours, to abolish the subcontracting system
and home work, and to establish the preferential Union shop throughout
the metropolitan industry.

Dr. Henry Moskowitz, an effective non-partisan leader in achieving the
settlement of the strike, was an eye-witness and student of all its
crises, and the outline of its history below is mainly drawn from his
chronicle and observation.

Between the cloak makers and the manufacturers of New York a contest
waged in numerous strikes had continued for twenty-five years. The
agreements reached at the close of these strikes had been only temporary,
because the cloak makers were never able to maintain a Union strong
enough to hold the points won at the close of the struggle. The cloak
makers had always proved themselves heroic strikers, but feeble
Unionists, lacking sustained power. Again and again, men and women who
had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their
claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend
Union meetings, fail to pay Union dues; and the organization, strong in
the time of defeat through the members' zeal, would weaken through their
negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success.

The main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one
side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the Cloak and Suit
Manufacturers' Protective Association. The majority of the manufacturers
in the association are men of standing in the trade, controlling large
West Side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the New York
output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses
of New York. These cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and
fourteen hundred, most of them on the East Side and the lower West Side,
manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing. Such smaller houses had
frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary
agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers. Many
small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests.

On this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers'
agreements. On the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of
former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms
which enabled them to undersell their competitors. For this reason the
manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers' agreements. With this
mutual suspicion, the strike of 1910 began in June in two houses, an East
Side and a West Side house. From the first house the workers went out
because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on
account of lockout.

On the 3d of July, a mass meeting of 10,000 cloakmakers gathered in
Madison Square Garden. It was decided that the question of a general
strike should be put to the vote of the 10,000 Union members. Balloting
continued at the three polls of the three Union offices for two
succeeding days. Of these 10,000, all but about 600 voted in favor of the
strike, and of these 600 the majority afterward declared that they, too,
were in sympathy with the action.

The wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the
10,000 workers assembled at Madison Square Garden was evinced by the fact
that within the next week an army of over 40,000 men and women in the New
York garment trade joined the Cloak and Suit Makers' Union.

These crowds poured into the three Union offices, filled the building
entries, the streets before them, reached sometimes around the
block--great processions of Rumanians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans,
Italians, Galicians, and Russians, the last two nationalities in the
greatest numbers, men and women who had been driven out of Europe by
military conscription, by persecution and pillage, literally by fire and
sword, bearded patriarchs, nicely dressed young girls with copies of
Sudermann and Gorky under their arms, shawled, wigged women with children
clinging to their skirts, handsome young Jews who might have stood as
models for clothiers' advertisements--cutters, pressers, operators,
finishers, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors; for these, too, struck
with all the rest. In watching these sewing men and sewing women
streaming through the Union office on Tenth Street--an office hastily
improvised in an old dwelling-house in a large room, evidently formerly a
bedroom, and still papered with a delicate design of white and blue
stripes, and a border of garlands of rosebuds--it seemed to an onlooker
that almost no economic procession could ever before have comprised
elements so very catholic and various. Who could lead such a body? How
could the position of their great opponents, from day to day, be made
known to them? As a matter of fact, no one man can be said to have led
the 60,000 New York cloak makers. In the absence of such control, the
corps of more prominent Union officers and their attorney, Meyer London,
and through these men the multitudes of the Union members, were virtually
guided by an East Side Yiddish paper, the _Vorwaerts_.

In the meantime, while these multitudes were flocking into the Union
early in July, the Cloak Manufacturers' Association, representing
beforehand about seventy-five houses, had by the inclusion of many
smaller firms extended its membership to twelve hundred
establishments.[25]

Soon after the formation of the alliance, it became apparent to the
smaller firms that the larger ones were not in any haste for settlement.
The latter felt that they could beat their opponents by a waiting game;
while the smaller firms, with their lesser capital, scarcely more able
than their workers to exist through a prolonged beleaguering of the cloak
makers, felt that the present stand of the larger manufacturers involved,
not only beating the Unionists, but driving themselves, the weaker
manufacturers, out of the industry.

One by one, they left the association, sought the Union headquarters, and
settled with the cloak makers. The profit reaped by these firms starting
to work induced others to meet the workers' demands. By the end of July
and the first week in August, six hundred smaller firms, employing
altogether 20,000 cloakmakers, had settled.[26] In many instances the
men and women marched back to their work with bands of music playing and
with flying flags and banners.

In July two attempts were made, on behalf of the cloak makers, by the
State Board of Arbitration to induce the manufacturers to meet the Union
members and to arbitrate with them. These attempts failed because the
Union insisted on the question of the closed shop as essential. The
manufacturers refused to arbitrate the question of the closed shop.

At this juncture a public-spirited retailer of Boston, Mr. Lincoln
Filene, entered the controversy. Mr. Filene resolved that, as a large
consumer, he and his class had no right to shirk their responsibility by
passively acquiescing in sweat-shop conditions. As an intermediary
between the wholesaler and the public, the retailer had an important part
in the conflict, not only because he suffered directly from the temporary
paralysis of the industry, but also because his indifference to the
claims of the worker for a just wage, sanitary factory conditions,
abolition of home work, and for a decent working-day was equivalent to an
active complicity in the guilt of the manufacturer. Through Mr. Filene's
intervention, the manufacturers and the Union officials agreed to confer,
and to request Mr. Louis Brandeis of Boston to act as chairman.

Mr. Brandeis had, at the outset, the confidence of both parties. Each
side recognized in him that combination of wide legal learning and a
social economic sense which had made him an effective participant in the
development of the progressive political and industrial policies of the
nation. The employers welcomed Mr. Brandeis because they had faith in his
sense of fairness. The cloak makers welcomed him because of his brilliant
and signal service to the entire trade-union movement and to American
working women in securing from the United States Supreme Court the
decision which declared constitutional the ten-hour law for the women
laundry workers of Oregon.

The conference that was to have determined the industrial fortunes of
more than 40,000 New York workers for the following year opened on
Thursday morning, July 28, in a small room in the Metropolitan Life
Building. Mr. Brandeis was in the chair. On one side of a long table sat
the ten representatives of the cloak makers, including their attorney, a
member of the _Vorwaerts_ staff, and the Secretary of the International
Garment Workers' Union, all these three men of middle age, intellectual
faces, and sociological education, keenly identified with the ideas and
principles of the workers; three or four rather younger representatives
of the cloak makers, alert and thoroughly Americanized; and three older
men, who had fought throughout the quarter-of-a-century contest, men with
the sort of trade education that nothing but a working experience can
give, deeply imbued with the traditions of that struggle, a hostility to
"scabs," a distrust (too often well founded) of employers, and an
unshaken belief in the general panacea of the closed shop--a subject
which was, by agreement, to remain undiscussed in the conference. All
these men, with the exception of their attorney, Mr. London, had cut and
sewed on the benches of the garment trade. On the other side of the table
sat the ten representatives of the manufacturers, some of them men of
wide culture and learning, versed in philosophies, and prominent members
of the Ethical Society, some of them New York financiers who had come
from East Side sweat shops. Perhaps the most eager opponent of the
closed shop in their body was a cosmopolitan young manufacturer, a
linguist and "literary" man, interested in "style" from every point of
view, who had introduced into the New York trade from abroad a
considerable number of the cloak designs now widely worn throughout
America. This man felt the keenest personal pride in his output. He is
said at one time to have remarked, _"Le cloak c'est moi"_ And, bizarre as
it may seem to an outsider, a really sincere reason of his against
accepting workmen on the recommendation of the Union was that the cloak
manufacturer as an artist should adopt toward his workers "the attitude
of Hammerstein to his orchestra." One of the manufacturers had been a
strike leader in 1896. "Your bitterest opponent of fourteen years ago
sits on the same side of the table with you now," said one of the older
cloak makers, in a deep, intense voice, as the men took their places.

Mr. Brandeis opened the conference with these words: "Gentlemen, we have
come together in a matter which we must all recognize is a very serious
and an important business--not only to settle this strike, but to create
a relation which will prevent similar strikes in the future. That work is
one which, it seems to me, is approached in a spirit that makes the
situation a very hopeful one, and I am sure, from my conferences with
counsel of both parties[27] and with individual members whom they
represent, that those who are here are all here with that desire."

Up to a certain point in the conference, which lasted for three days,
this seemed to be true. The manufacturers agreed to abolish home work, to
abolish subcontracting, to give a weekly half-holiday, besides the Jewish
Sabbath, during June, July, and August, and to limit overtime work to two
hours and a half a day during the busy season, with no work permitted
after half past eight at night, or before eight in the morning. Beyond
this, the question of hours was left to arbitration. Also, the question
of wages was left to arbitration.

The last subject to be dealt with at the Brandeis conference was the
general method of enforcing agreements between the Manufacturers'
Association and the Union. It was in this discussion that the question of
the closed shop and the open shop came before the conference.

Though the Union leaders had agreed to eliminate the discussion of the
closed shop before they entered into negotiations, it was almost
impossible for them to refrain from suggesting it as a means of enforcing
agreements. As one of the cloak makers, one of the old leaders of the
labor movement in America, said: "This organization of cloak makers in
the city of New York can only control the situation where Union people
are employed. They have absolutely no control of the situation where
non-union people are employed. They cannot enforce any rules, nor any
discipline of any kind, shape, or description, and if we are to cooeperate
in any way that will be absolutely effective, then the ... Manufacturers'
Association, ... it seems to me, should see that the necessary first step
is that they shall run Union shops."[28]

The Union shop the speaker had in mind, the Union shop advocated by the
_Vorwaerts_ and desired, as it proved, by a majority of the workers, was a
different matter from the closed shop, which constitutes a trade monopoly
by limiting the membership of a trade to a certain comparatively small
number of workers.

The institution of the closed shop is by intention autocratic and
exclusive. The institution of the Union shop is by intention democratic
and inclusive. With the cloak makers' organization, entrance into the
Union was almost a matter of form. There were no prohibitive initiation
fees, or dues, as in other unions. They offered every non-union man and
woman an opportunity to join their ranks.

The manufacturers contended that they had no objection to the voluntary
enlistment of non-union men in Union ranks; but they would not insist
that all their workers belong to the Union.

This deadlock was reached on the third day of the conference. At this
point Mr. Brandeis brought before the meeting the opinion that "an
effective cooeperation between the manufacturers and the Union ... would
involve, ... of necessity, a strong Union." "I realize," he said, ...
"from a consideration of ... general Union questions, that in the
ordinary open shop, where that prevails, there is great difficulty in
building up the Union. I felt, therefore, particularly in view of the
fact that so many of the members of the Garment Workers' Union are recent
members, that to make an effective Union it was necessary that you should
be aided ... by the manufacturers, ... and that aid could be effectively
... given by providing that the manufacturers should, in the employment
of labor hereafter, give preference to Union men, where the Union men
were equal in efficiency to any non-union applicants.... That presented
in the rough what seemed to me a proper basis for coming together.... I
think, if such an arrangement as we have discussed can be accomplished,
it will be the greatest advance, not only that unionism has made in this
country, but it would be one of the greatest advances that has generally
been made in improving the condition of the working-man, for which
unionism is merely an instrument."

This, then, was the first public presentation of the idea of the
preferential shop. Mr. Brandeis, as a result of close study of labor
disputes and a rich experience in settling strikes, had reached the
conclusion that the position of the adherents of the closed as well as
those of the open shop was economically and socially untenable. The
inherent objection to the closed shop, he contends, is that it creates an
uncontrolled and irresponsible monopoly of labor.

On the other hand, the so-called open shop, even if conducted with
fairness and honesty on the part of the employer, is apt to result in a
disintegration of the Union. It has been a frequent experience of
organized labor that, even after a strike has been won, men drop out of
the Union and leave the burden of Union obligation to the loyal minority,
who, weakened in numbers, face not only a loss of what the strike has
gained, but a retrogression of those Union standards that have been the
result of past struggles and sacrifices.

By the preferential Union plan, when an employer obliges himself to
prefer Union to non-union men, a Union man in good standing, that is, a
Union man who has paid his dues and met his Union obligations, is
insured employment to a limited extent, and the dues represent a premium
paid by him for such employment.

It was not an easy task to secure assent to this idea from the
manufacturers, for Mr. Brandeis made it clear that, while the plan did
not oblige the manufacturers to coerce men into joining the Union, it
clearly placed them on record in favor of a trade-union, and obliged them
to do nothing, directly or indirectly, to injure the Union, and
positively to do everything in their power, outside of coercion, to
strengthen the Union.

In Mr. Brandeis' appeal to the Union representatives he referred to the
history of the Cloak Makers' Union as a telling illustration of the
futility of their past policy. He pointed out that the membership of the
Union during a strike was no test of its strength--a Union's solidity
rested upon its membership in time of peace. Were they not justified in
assuming that what had occurred in the past of the Cloak Makers' Union
would occur in the future, and that its membership would dwindle to a
small number of the faithful? How could their organization be permanently
strengthened?

Cloak making, as a seasonal trade, offered a fair field for proving the
efficiency of the preferential plan, for in the slack season the
manufacturers must, by its terms, prefer Union men. The industrial
situation provided a test of this good faith. The Union leaders could
then effectively show the non-union worker the advantage of the union
membership.

The final formation of the preferential union shop as presented to both
sides by Mr. Brandeis, Mr. London, and Mr. Cohen, in the Brandeis
conference, was this: "The manufacturers can and will declare in
appropriate terms their sympathy with the Union, their desire to aid and
strengthen the Union, and their agreement that, as between Union and
non-union men of equal ability to do the job, the Union men shall be
given the preference."

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