This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness.And yet many of the girls are receiving, not $4.50, but $2.75, $3, and $3.50per week.They must have clothes and recreation, and-Man to Man so oft injust, Is always so to Woman.
At the Trades Union Congress now being held in London, the Gasworkers' Union moved that instructions be given the Parliamentary Committee to introduce a bill to prohibit the employment of children under fifteen years of age.Mr.Shackleton, Member of Parliament and a representative of the Northern Counties' Weavers, opposed the resolution on behalf of the textile workers, who, he said, could not dispense with the earnings of their children and live on the scale of wages which obtained.The representatives of 514,000 workers voted against the resolution, while the representatives of 535,000workers voted in favor of it.When 514,000 workers oppose a resolution prohibiting child-labor under fifteen, it is evident that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of the adult workers of the country.
I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less than 25 cents for a twelve-hour day in the coat-making sweat shops;and with women trousers finishers who receive an average princely and weekly wage of 75 cents to $1.
A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy business house, receiving their board and $1.50 per week for six working days of sixteen hours each.The sandwich men get 27 cents per day and find themselves.The average weekly earnings of the hawkers and costermongers are not more than $2.50 to $3.The average all common laborers, outside the dockers, is less than $4 per week, while the dockers average from $2 to $2.25.These figures are taken from a royal commission report and are authentic.
Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and four children, and paying 75 cents per week rent, by making match boxes at 4 1/2 cents per gross.Twelve dozen boxes for 4 1/2 cents, and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread! She never knew a day off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation.Each day and every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours.Her day's stint was seven gross, for which she received 31 1/2 cents.In the week of ninety-eight hours' work, she made 7066 match boxes, and earned $2.201/2, less her paste and thread.
Last year, Mr.Thomas Holmes, a police court missionary of note, after writing about the condition of the women workers, received the following letter, dated April 18, 1901:
SIR, Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said about Poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per week, I beg to state my case.I am a tie-maker, who, after working all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn't earned a penny for more than ten years.
Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible, grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on 5 shillings ($1.25) per week! Mr.Holmes visited her.He had to squeeze to get into the room.There lay her sick husband; there she worked all day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her husband and she performed all the functions of living and dying.There was no space for the missionary to sit down, save on the bed, which was partially covered with ties and silk.The sick man's lungs were in the last stages of decay.He coughed and expectorated constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist him in his paroxysms.The silken fluff from the ties was not good for his sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers and wearers of the ties yet to come.
Another case Mr.Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food.He found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child.Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker.She paid $1.25 a week rent.Here are the last items in her housekeeping account: Tea, 1 cent; sugar, 1 cent; bread, 1/2 cent; margarine, 2cents; oil, 3 cents; and firewood, 1 cent.Good housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-yawn for you.
