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know the result of this movement,-the classic nineteenvolume report on The Condition of Woman and Child WageEarners in the United States published in 1910.

Volume XII of this remarkable report is devoted entirely to the employment of women in laundries,-the hours of labor, the general working conditions, the character and the effect of work. The investigators are here shown to have found frequent and very long working days and much consequent ill health among these women, which revelations doubtless increased the pressure of the demand in New York State in the following year for the law to be extended to hotel laundries. But the statute even as it stood was poorly enforced as was witnessed by the participants in an extensive laundry strike in the same year, 1911. "Endless hours" of labor were bitterly complained of on the part of both male and female employees-as many as eighteen to twenty-three in one day! 2

Mercantile and Other Establishments

Attention to the labor hours of women in mercantile establishments came considerably later than that for factories; the first regulative law came fourteen years later. This has been explained on the ground that conditions in factories were so much worse than elsewhere that, until they were improved, conditions in mercantile establishments, better by contrast, had been overlooked. The movement for improvement in mercantile establishments seems to have been initiated by working women themselves, promptly assisted by philanthropic groups.

In 1890, a group of women employed in shops met to consider the causes of their oppressions and to seek relief through

1129 out of 404 who were examined complained of ill health directly attributable to their occupation, p. 38.

'See further reference to this strike in the chapter on Enforcement.

trade unions. They called themselves the Working Women's Society. According to the report of the New York City Consumers' League,' these women discovered the widespread. character of wrongs done them at their work and determined that an organization among shoppers was necessary to aid them. A joint committee was appointed by the society which, together with Mr. Everett P. Wheeler who acted as chairman of an organized mass meeting, started "The Consumers' League." The principles upon which the league was founded were akin to those of a London association.

The object of the league as stated in its constitution was "To ameliorate the conditions of the women and children employed in the Retail Mercantile Houses of this City by patronizing as far as practicable only such houses as approach in their conditions to the 'Standards of a Fair House' as adopted by the League, and by other methods." The annual publication of a "White List" was begun, with twenty-four houses reaching the required standard.

The general attitude of the league toward its beneficiaries was expressed by Mrs. Charles Russell Lowell, the first president, in concluding her report for the year's work in 1893. It ran as follows:

Besides our gratitude, however, for the services they [the working women] render, they deserve our pity, because of their helplessness and the peculiar hardships to which they are exposed. They are helpless because they are women, and they are helpless also because they are young, and they are moreover exposed to peculiar temptations from the fact that when wages fall below the living point, the "wages of sin " are always ready for them.2

1 Report of the Consumers' League of the City of New York, 1894, p. 3 et seq.

'Ibid., 1893, p. 8.

Continuing, the report of the following year reads that "this particular class of workers being as a rule, too young and too unskilled to make the formation of trade unions among them either practicable or useful," the league had undertaken to be their official friend.

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That statutory regulations be enacted to control the hours of labor and a factory inspector be provided for mercantile establishments as well as for factories was the sense of the bill drafted by the Working Women's Society in 1891 and introduced into the legislature that year-the so-called Ainsworth Bill." Though the bill was not passed then nor for many years to come, the senate had heard the demands of the women enough by 1895 to appoint the Reinhardt Investigating Committee, before mentioned, "to investigate the conditions of female labor in New York City."

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The report of the committee was made in 1895 and 1896 and appears in part in the annual report of the New York City Consumers' League for 1895. Among other criticisms of delinquencies the committee declared that the requirements passed in 1881 for seats in stores had been constantly evaded in spite of the fact that "the importance of providing proper seats and of permitting their use at reasonable times cannot be overestimated; " that the basements of "the mercantile stores were not properly ventilated and lighted," and that the hours of work were excessive. In the same report of the league (p. 13), a unique estimate, showing an inventiveness born of the necessity of other women, showed the extent of extra work which New York City mercantile establishments had filched, in 1895, from shop employees during the holiday season. The number of employees of each of 16 firms times the number of days at holiday season during which, according to advertisements, their shops would be open in the evening, times four (the number of hours

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from 6 p. m. to 10 p. m.)=600,200 hours of free labor. 600,200 hours-60,020 working days of 10 hours each= 191 years and some months.1

The Reinhardt Committee held hearings on the Ainsworth bill which an association of retail dealers is said to have opposed successfully until that time and which they continued successfully to oppose until 1896, when with substantially fewer restrictions a measure was drafted by the committee and enacted into law by the legislature. The modifications had been demanded by the New York City merchants who succeeded in annulling the force of the statute even in its modified form. For, while the friends of the new act had been able to secure the instalment of salaried inspectors toward the enforcement of the act, the tenure of office of these agents was brought to an early close and with it the life of this first mercantile law. More of the unsuccessful attempts to give the young workers the benefit of this provision will be mentioned in the following chapter.

At this time appeared Florence Kelley's Ethical Gains Through Legislation which was widely read by those who were concerned with the lot of wage earners, women wage earners in particular. The book aroused an interest in the legislative method of protecting workers, probably stronger than had ever been felt by philanthropic groups. The Consumers' League became converted anew to this method of protection and subscribed for the service of the legislative bureau of the City Club which furnished the texts of bills and their daily status in the legislature.

In spite of this increased interest in the direction of regulating hours of women's labor, the progress of this regulation in mercantile establishments was slow. Early agitation

1 Op. cit., 1895, p. 13.

'F. R. Fairchild, The Factory Legislation of the State of New York, p. 65. See also page 115, supra.

for a mercantile law had been limited in the main to children and young people, while the hours of women, it will be recalled, were not regulated until as late as 1913 under the direct pressure of the Factory Investigating Commission. New York thus lagged thirteen years behind Massachusetts in this respect, the State Consumers' League having been more successful there.

Another act restricting the hours of young women and children in mercantile establishments was passed in New York in 1903. This was the Hill bill which called for a compulsory nine-hour day and 54-hour week. The bill was opposed by Senator Brackett who offered a counter amendment requiring the maximum number of hours to be ten a day and sixty a week. Senator Elsberg, the republican party leader, interjected the reminder, however, that the state had already placed itself on record for eight hours for men in public service which made a proposal for ten hours for women and children seem rather ridiculous, whereupon Senator Brackett concluded, "I bow to the will of the party chief. I withdraw the amendment." And the 54hour day for sub-adult women was won.1

The commissioner of labor in his reports for 1907 entered an urgent plea for protective legislation for adult women in mercantile establishments. He asked, "Why for instance should women packers be allowed to work 78 and 84 hours a week in ill-ventilated and crowded spaces in department stores if it be a necessary health regulation to prohibit their working more than 60 hours a week in well ventilated and properly appointed workrooms in factories?" He continued that there were few factories in which women's work was as hard, and ventilation as poor, "in short in which the hygienic working conditions are as bad as they are in the

1 New York Tribune, April 15, 1903.

'Department of Labor Bulletin for June, 1907, p. 199.

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