Flesh and Blood So Cheap

by Albert Marrin

  Other Things Made in Sweatshops

  Garment sweatshops produced only clothing. Other sweatshops produced a wide range of items, including the following:

  artificial flowers purses

  wallets umbrellas

  collars buttons

  ties feathered hats

  cigars Christmas decorations

  handmade cigarettes mops and brooms

  cardboard boxes envelopes

  fur trimmings costume jewelry

  toys elastic garters

  feather dusters dolls

  shoes and slippers gloves and mittens

  After cutting, the manufacturer might assemble the trousers in his own place, called a “shop.” However, he usually found it easier, and cheaper, to give different tasks to different contractors in their own shops. For example, basters assembled each pair of trousers by hand-sewing its cut pieces with long, loose stitches to prepare them for further work. Next, sewing machine workers, called “operators,” stitched the basted pieces permanently. Finishers added the “finishing touches,” such as linings, decoration, and buttons. Pressers used heavy irons, heated on a stove and weighing up to twenty pounds, to remove wrinkles from completed garments. Finally, the trousers went to the manufacturer for inspection. If they passed, he put on his label and sold them to a retailer, who sold them to the consumer.

  Garments did not get around by themselves. At each stage of production, shleppers, Yiddish for “draggers” or “carriers,” took them from shop to shop. Every day, on the Lower East Side, you saw men and women rushing along the streets, shlepping heavy bundles over their shoulders or balanced on their heads. Boys and girls carried lighter loads.

  The manufacturer set garment prices. Naturally, by paying contractors less, he increased his profits. While this was good for him, it put contractors in a bind. To make a living, they had to “sweat” their employees. Although employees might perspire on the job, sweating as a business method had nothing to do with perspiration. It had everything to do with squeezing as much work out of them as possible while paying them as little as possible. Sweating took place in a “sweatshop.” In his own mind, the sweatshop owner justified his actions, for manufacturers took advantage of him. In time, if he was smart and ruthless enough, he might become a manufacturer himself.

  A female shlepper on Lafayette Street, near Astor Place. (picture credit 3.8)

  A boy shlepper, New York City, 1912. (picture credit 3.9)

  Sweatshop owners, the contractors used by manufacturers, were immigrants themselves. They hired workers who spoke their language and desperately needed a job. Young Jewish women suited them perfectly. Everyone knew that an owner seeking a worker would stand at a certain place in the Hester Street Pig-market. “Need a girl?” a woman would ask. “Girl” was the term for any female worker. In those days, teenagers and married women with children were called, and called themselves, “girls.”

  A Jewish family working on garters in a tenement sweatshop, 1912. (picture credit 3.10)

  Going to work, a woman recalled, was “as inevitable as eating and breathing and finally dying. It was just part of the scheme of life.” She had no choice in the matter. Russian Jews were often too poor to go to America as a family group. At first, like many southern Italians, a husband scraped together enough money to go alone. Months, even years, later, he had saved enough to send for his wife and children. Many Jewish families, however, decided to send a daughter first so the father could care for his family back in the homeland until they could leave. The first daughter to arrive acted as a kind of “human anchor.” She found a job, saved, and bought a steamship ticket for another sister or brother. Eventually, they brought over the entire family.8

  Girls taking a lunchtime break from work, 1915. (picture credit 3.11)

  Young workers in a tenement sweatshop, circa 1910. (picture credit 3.12)

  After the family arrived, daughters still had to help with its expenses. In most families, their earnings were not their own. Daughters gave their unopened pay envelopes to their parents, getting an allowance in return. Despite their longing for an education, they often had to leave school to earn money. “When I had to quit school in the fifth grade,” one recalled, “I felt terribly abused though I accepted it as part of life for a girl of a poor family.” Her earnings not only helped put food on the table and pay the rent, but sent brothers to high school, even to college. Jewish immigrants usually attended the tuition-free City College of New York, run at public expense. It was known as the “Jewish Harvard,” after Harvard College, the oldest and most famous college in the land. Since college graduates earned more than sweatshop workers, they had a better chance of helping their families climb out of poverty.9

  The path to the sweatshop often led from the Pig-market to a tenement apartment. A sweatshop owner usually worked in his own home, employing family members and hired help. If he did well, he might expand his operation by renting an apartment to use only as a shop. Anyhow, as many as fifteen people worked in a tiny home workshop. Nobody knew how many garment sweatshops there were in New York, because its government did not keep count. However, there must have been thousands on the Lower East Side.

  Jacob Riis left a vivid word picture of sweatshop life. He began with a ride on the elevated railroad that ran along Second Avenue.

  Every open window of the big tenements, that stand like a continuous brick wall on both sides of the way, gives you a glimpse of one of these shops as the train speeds by. Men and women bending over their machines, or ironing clothes at the window, half-naked.… The road is like a big gangway through an endless work-room where vast multitudes are forever laboring. Morning, noon, or night, it makes no difference; the scene is always the same.… Let us get off and continue our tour on foot.… [We see] men stagger along the sidewalk groaning under heavy burdens of unsewn garments, or enormous black bags stuffed full of finished coats and trousers.…

  Let us follow one to his home.… Up two flights of dark stairs … whirring sewing machines behind closed door betraying what goes on within, to the door that opens to admit the bundle and the man.… Five men and a woman, two young girls, not fifteen, and a boy … are at the machines sewing knickerbockers [short, loose-fitting trousers gathered in at the knee]. The floor is littered ankle-deep with half-sewn garments. In the alcove, on a couch of many dozens of “pants” ready for the finisher, a bare-legged baby with pinched face is asleep. A fence of piled-up clothing keeps him from rolling off on the floor. The faces, hands, and arms to the elbows of everyone in the room are black with the color of the cloth on which they are working.… Every floor has at least two, sometimes four, such shops.10

  A group of sweatshop workers toil at worktables, 1908. (picture credit 3.13)

  Sweatshop workers did not get a fixed salary or hourly wage. They were paid “by the piece” or “by the dozen”—so much money for so many items produced. For an eighty-four-hour workweek, they earned from $2.50 to $4. To make matters worse, having to work at top speed caused accidents. “Sometimes in my haste I get my finger caught and the needle goes right through it,” said Sadie Frowne, whom we have already met. “I bind the finger tip with a piece of cotton and go on working. We all have accidents like that.” Working in close quarters spread tuberculosis, a disease that destroys the lungs. Known as “the worker’s disease,” tuberculosis raged in the sweatshops. It spread so easily that infected parents dared not hug their children. Infected workers coughed constantly, spewing the disease-causing bacteria onto the garments they were making. In that way, tuberculosis spread from the worker to the consumer.11

  The New-Model Factory

  During the first years of the twentieth century, the number of sweatshops slowly began to fall for two reasons: changing women’s fashions and improvements in garment-making technology.

  For decades, the well-dressed woman had favored long, one-piece dresses that swept the ground. To give her the desired “hourglass” figure, she wore a corset, an undergarment s
tiffened with whalebone and tightly bound with laces to make her waist narrow. By the early 1900s, corsets, rightly called “cloth prisons,” went out of fashion. Women began to wear looser-fitting, more comfortable clothing like the shirtwaist, or “waist” for short. This was a cotton blouse with a high collar and wide sleeves worn with a separate ankle-length skirt. The shirtwaist became a symbol of women’s liberation, suitable for every occasion. Wealthy women wore it to social events. College women wore it to class. Office workers wore it on the job.

  A 1906 advertisement for shirtwaist designs. (picture credit 3.14)

  Two men led in the manufacture of shirtwaists. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had arrived at Ellis Island as poor immigrants. Like others, the partners began their careers in tenement sweatshops. Unlike most, however, they joined forces, becoming contractors and finally striking out on their own as manufacturers. Nicknamed the “Shirtwaist Kings,” they built their Triangle Waist Company into the largest and most modern of its kind in New York, if not the nation. Although called a “shop,” like other factories, it streamlined the manufacturing process, making the entire garment under one roof. By 1910, New York had about six hundred such “new-model factories.”

  The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors of the Asch Building, a ten-story skyscraper at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street, a half block east of Washington Square. Blanck and Harris used the most up-to-date technology that money could buy. Their machinery ran on electricity. To increase output, they replaced the cutter’s handheld knife with a recent invention, the electric knife, which could cut over a hundred layers of cloth at once. Electric sewing machines, each able to sew three thousand stitches a minute, replaced the less expensive but slower foot-powered machines used in home-based sweatshops. The Asch Building’s large rooms allowed the owners to attach rows of sewing machines to a single electric motor. Plate-glass windows flooded workrooms with natural light. Elevators sped people and goods to their destinations in seconds.

  Workers in new-model factories were nearly all Jewish (55 percent) and Italian (35 percent) immigrant women. There were fewer Italian women probably because they married early and stayed home to care for their young children. Jewish women tended to marry after they and their husbands-to-be had saved enough money to set up a household. Whether married or single, workers ranged in age from fourteen to thirty-five; about half were under twenty years old. The rest were American-born women, mostly of German and Irish heritage, and Jewish men. African Americans were all but absent from garment factories, due to racial discrimination.12

  Employees saw factory work as a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing because the environment was healthier than tenement sweatshops. Factories had clothing lockers, toilets, and washing facilities. Electric lights and large windows made it easier on the eyes than gloomy apartments. Hours were long, but regular: work usually began at 7:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 p.m., with a half-hour break for lunch. (Sweatshops might work around the clock to fill special orders.) Lunch was usually a sandwich brought from home. If not, vendors sold a piece of dry cake and a glass of water for two cents. Weekly pay ranged from about six dollars for sewing machine operators, both women and men, to twenty dollars for experienced cutters, all men.13

  Workers disliked factories for several reasons. Time was money, for the more shirtwaists produced in a given time, the more owners had to sell, and the larger their profits. Thus, bosses sped up clocks at lunchtime to steal a few extra work minutes; wristwatches were too expensive for most workers. Toward quitting time, some bosses covered the clocks to gain a few more minutes of work time. If a worker went to the toilet, a forelady, or supervisor, followed, knocking on the door if she stayed more than a minute or two. Workers described some of their grievances:

  The forelady drives you. If you fix a pin in your hair or your collar, before you know it there is a forelady saying to you, “It isn’t six o’clock yet. You have no right to fix your collar.”

  Once I wanted to go home because my mother was very sick. The boss said, “No favors here.” I was afraid to lose my position so I stayed.

  They locked the doors so you’d have to stay for night work.

  You cannot be a free person. A smile from the boss makes you to live. They are dictators, czars, [it] really is not right.

  There are no words to describe that shop. It was terrible. Slavery holds nothing worse.14

  A sewing room in a new-model factory, 1907. (picture credit 3.15)

  Work rules were humiliating. Talking, laughing, or singing wasted time, so anyone caught breaking the rule against “noise” paid a fine. Yet women had to put up with loudmouthed bosses. “The bosses in the shops are not what you would call educated men,” said Clara Lemlich, a future strike leader. “They yell at the girls and they ‘call them down’ even worse than I imagine slaves were in the South.… They swear at us and sometimes they do worse—call us names that are not pretty to hear.” As if insults were not enough, other abuses cost money. Employers charged workers for everything they used: needles, thread, chairs, electricity, lockers to store their hats. Workers said bosses who charged for these things had “one-cent souls.” Some deducted a half day’s pay for coming to work a half hour late. Failure to work fast enough, or to produce enough, brought instant dismissal, as did work that did not meet the owner’s high standards.15

  In the era of the new-model factory, a frail toothpick of a man spoke for fellow workers as few others could. Morris Rosenfeld earned his daily bread as a garment worker, but his true “calling” was writing poetry. Every Yiddish speaker on the Lower East Side, it seemed, knew his poems. “Rosenfeld,” one said, “is in the blood of every one of us.”16

  Rosenfeld had a magical way with words. In a few lines, he could express what others felt deep down, but could not put into words themselves. One of his finest poems, titled “In the Factory,” goes like this:

  Oh, here in the shop the machines roar so wildly,

  That I sink and am lost in the terrible tumult;

  And I am but a machine.

  I work and I work and I work, never ceasing.…

  The clock in the workshop—it rests not a moment;

  It points on, and ticks on: Eternity—Time.…

  The tick of the clock is the Boss in his anger!

  The face of the clock has the eyes of a foe;

  The clock—Oh, I shudder—dost hear how it drives me?

  It calls me “Machine!” and it cries to me “Sew!”17

  What did Rosenfeld’s readers want? To make a decent living and to live decently. Above all, to be treated with dignity, as human beings should, and not as mindless machines governed by clocks. But that would not come easily.

  IV

  It was not … a woman’s fancy that drove them to it, but an eruption of a long-smoldering volcano, an overflow of suffering, abuse and exhaustion.

  —Theresa Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (1910)

  A Gathering Storm

  Any factory owner was always more powerful than any employee. Since owners hired workers and paid their wages, they made the rules, however unfair these might be. By themselves, then, individual workers were helpless. Employers could fire them at any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and the workers could do nothing about it. Thus, only by uniting in trade unions could workers use their combined power to balance the owners’ power. A trade union’s chief aims were (and are) to improve the wages, hours, and working conditions of its members through negotiations, also called “collective bargaining.” In such negotiations, unions and employer representatives meet to work out agreements that each side can accept. If collective bargaining fails, unions may use their most potent weapon, the refusal to work—striking.

  American workers formed their first unions in the late 1860s. Since then, powerful unions arose in industry after industry—steel, coal, and railroads, to name just a few. In 1881, Samuel Gompers, an English immigrant of Dutch descent, helped form the Amer
ican Federation of Labor (AFL), serving as its president until his death in 1924. As its name tells us, the AFL was a federation—that is, an organization whose members control their own affairs. Since the AFL included unions in many trades, it was really a union of unions to help members with advice, publicity, funds, and negotiations with employers. A favorite AFL tactic was to use labels to identify goods manufactured by its member unions. Advertising campaigns urged consumers to “look for the union label”—that is, buy only products made by unionized workers.

  The first step in forming a union was to get workers to join it. But that was easier said than done. While unions in each industry had their own unique history, they shared one thing: manufacturers despised unions, fearing they would limit their control of the workplace and raise production costs. Thus, they fought unionization with all their might. Employers fired workers who tried to organize or join unions, then exchanged blacklists to prevent such “troublemakers” from getting jobs in the industry. During strikes, employers often resorted to violence, hiring thugs and armed guards to break the strike.

  At first, garment unions were impossible to form, thanks to the sweatshop system. There were thousands of these so-called cockroach operations scattered among Lower East Side tenements. With immigrants pouring ashore from Ellis Island every week, an owner could easily fire the entire shop if workers dared speak of unionizing. There was never a shortage of job-hungry greenhorns in the Pig-market to take their places. Besides, the men who led the AFL and its members did not regard women, the backbone of the garment industry, as equals. Female workers, they believed, were hardly worth organizing, because they lacked men’s “drive” and “fighting spirit.” Yet, on the other hand, they were “too emotional.”