effectiveness of the act. To begin with, the statute included only first and second class cities, causing some illfeeling because of its lack of universality. And in Syracuse and Rochester it was not enforced because the question of its constitutionality arose. Class legislation was alleged in 1918 on the ground that the act applied to restaurants and not to hotels. It was declared constitutional, however, and, in March of 1924, the issue was cleared finally by the Federal Supreme Court, in the Radice case, as we have seen, in the affirmance of the prohibition for restaurants regardless of the regulation in hotels.

One difficulty obstructing enforcement has been the failure of the act to require the posting of hours of labor, a provision of the mercantile law which was not early extended to apply to restaurants. And, apparently, inadvertance was not the cause of the omission, for a remedial act proposed in 1919 failed to pass, and was not adopted until sometime later. Another difficulty of enforcement, as explained verbally by the director of inspection, Mr. John L. Gernon, arises because of the intermittent hours of restaurant employment together with the fact that many of the women themselves are not in sympathy with being deprived of work at night when tips are higher.

INDUSTRIAL HOMEWORK

While there is double reason for enforcing the regulations of "homework," there is also double difficulty. The practice of giving out work to be done by women at home, where close surveillance of length of hours and conditions of work is far less possible than in factories, diminishes the force of the factory law and jeopardizes not only the health of the public but the health of the workers. Nevertheless there seems no end to the possibilities of evasion of the tenement house law. When one avenue of escape is closed, another opens wide for the offender. The reports of the commis

sioners of labor reflect the multiplying difficulties. One year, perhaps after a new regulative measure has been enacted or a few new inspectors added, the heartening report will testify that the result has been "quite marvelous," while the following year will bring forth the discouraging statement that the law is "ridiculous," that "the nomads of the tenements cannot be controlled with three times the existing force.

One great difficulty in the regulation of homework lies in its seasonal character, so that the number of home workers fluctuates from month to month. And perhaps even greater trouble lies in the fact that only tenement houses (i. e. buildings accomodating three families or more) are regulated by law, and in these houses is included in the law only work on specified articles likely to communicate disease.

Homework has been a licensed occupation in New York since 1899, when the office of the superintendent of licenses was created. Licenses first issued to the workers proved to be mere scraps of paper" however, for the lessees, moving from one house to another, held them for the protection of their employers as well as themselves, in case of detection. Or, if so disposed, they sold their licenses to their tenement successors! In 1904, licenses began to be issued only to owners of entire buildings instead of to individual tenants, with the purpose of throwing the responsibility for a sanitary house directly upon the owner, and with the result of reducing the number of lessees from 30,000 to 3,000. (This provision of the legislature prohibited the giving out of twenty-four specified articles of manufacture to any occupants of an unlicensed building). The plan was not considered wholly desirable, however, for it added 10,000 tenement buildings to the inspection list, bringing in "hundreds" of better-class buildings and apartment houses which required little inspecting, the owners of which would not apply for licenses.

There were but twenty factory inspectors in 1906, whose duty it was to keep 25,000 factories operating within the law, and about 12,000 tenement houses! The duties in connection with tenement house inspection were twofold. Both licensed and unlicensed buildings had to be inspected. The task was to discover the houses in which work was being done, compel the owners to apply for licenses, make a thorough inspection upon such application, compel the securing and posting of the license if granted, and make reinspections twice yearly; and furthermore, to prevent all manufacturing of the prohibited articles specified by law in unlicensed houses. The labor commissioner wrote gloomily in 1906 that the department had accumulated no statistics. of any value as to the quantity of work done or the number of homeworkers in the state; the work was "intermittent and irregular" and, while the lists of outside workers furnished by employers offered some clue, frequently there was no distinction recorded between these and contractors or shop workers, and the duplication of inexact records was great. A constant insufficiency of employees was the chief cause of this plight, and now the commissioner explained that there was no clerical force to check up what data were available. "Therefore we have nothing on our records to serve even as a basis for rough calculation." 1

A more cheerful aspect of homework inspection was shown by Commissioner Williams in 1909, when he reported that in the 9,646 houses inspected, only one person in every ten apartments was found working in violation of the law, and in only nine cases was it necessary to resort to the drastic course of revoking the license for sanitary reasons.

In striking contrast to this testimony came that of 1912

1 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1906, p. 50. 2 Op. cit., 1909, p. 24.

showing that in New York City, in which 95 per cent of the homework of the state is done, "the burden laid upon us [inspectors] is so out of proportion to the resources at our command for regulative purposes, as to make the pretense of supervision on the part of the State seem ridiculous." 1 During the year, ten inspectors only could be assigned to this work and they had visited approximately 13,000 tenement houses and 145,000 apartments. At the time of inspection they found work being done in 13,000 apartments, but this of course was not at all a trustworthy index to the actual conditions of work throughout the year. Commissioner Williams estimated that five times as many inspectors would be required to ensure proper enforcement. He confessed that at present they were only "able to skim the surfaceto relieve the strain upon the public mind incident to occasional disclosures. . . . We must go farther and deeper before the dangers are eradicated." 2

The Factory Investigating Commission declared that there had never been a serious effort to enforce the regulations for homework in the spirit in which they were enacted, that licenses had been issued as a matter of form, and prosecutions for violations had rarely been instituted. The commission emphasized the ruinous effect of this condition upon all legislation which applies to trades that employ homeworkers, and recommended more drastic regulation for a trial period of two or three years, followed by complete abolition, if unsuccessful. This decision was made despite the fact that some of the major witnesses before the com mission urged prompt abolition of tenement house labor, because of the impossibility of regulating it. Florence Kelley in her plea for abolition asserted that proper enforce1 Op. cit., 1912, p. 17.

* Op. cit., pp. 18-19.

ment would require that there be one inspector by day and another inspector by night for each one of the 13,000 licensed tenement houses, making 26,000 inspectors; that there would have to be other inspectors investigating unlicensed houses to see whether any should be licensed, and others to supervise those houses whose licenses had been revoked! "It is a fatuous undertaking to burden [factory inspectors] with that duty," she concluded.1 Lillian Wald, director of the Henry Street Settlement of New York City and Rose Schneiderman, organizer for the Women's Trade Union League, also expressed the belief that homework cannot be regulated by law and therefore should be abolished.

The second report of the Factory Investigating Commission reënforced the first in expressing concern in regard to the problem of homework regulation. It was discovered that the number of articles manufactured for which a license was not required greatly exceeded in number the forty-one articles for which a license was required, and also that the number of persons at work on goods not requiring a license appeared to be vastly greater than the 100,000 workers on the lists of manufacturers. Statistics of employment could not be secured because of the nomadic habits of the workers. The commission explained that "When the homeworker's address is listed in the bulletin, the work is given to her, she is registered in the employer's book by number, and never again is an inquiry made as to her place of abode, although she may have moved a dozen times since the first entry, or, as is frequently the case, a friend or even a friend's friend may now be taking out work under the original number entered." *

2

1 Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Commission, 1912, vol. viii, p. 1593.

A monthly bulletin first issued in 1908 for the publication of the lists of licensed houses for the use of employers and employees.

Op. cit., 1913, vol. ii, p. 729.