66 DON'T care to see it! I don't want anything to do with it!" A meeting of the Pittsburgh Board of Education was in progress. The President of the Board was speaking. "But," interposed a member, "the Child Labor Association has merely requested that we read this proposed child labor bill and suggest improvements. "GREASY But "Greasy Olivers'' is not the story of those who sympathize with this point of view. It is the story of men who have used their powerful influence to continue in slavery the young and the weak. It is a story that should put all Pennsylvania to shame. But even Pennsylvania has been aroused by these conditions. A law recently put into operation in that State makes possible more scientific and honest oversight of factory conditions. It is not, in essence, a child labor act, but an act which creates a department of labor and industry. Little opposition was offered to the measure, probably because hostile manufacturers did not realize its import.-Editor's Note. By Willard and measures for the abatement of truancy concern us particularly. Would it not be advisable at least to have the bill read?" "I don't think we should even consider it," answered President David B. Oliver. A few streets away, under the black smoke of a dozen huge stacks, hundreds of young. girls were helping turn the "wheels of industry" in the immense plant of the Oliver "GREASY OLIVERS" more children in the schools and fewer in the mills was new and startling even to a city as sophisticated and disillusioned as Pittsburgh. "I am satisfied with conditions as they exist now," President Oliver had said. Let us walk a few blocks south from the meeting rooms of the Board of Education and follow the bridge across the sluggish, iron-colored waters of the Monongahela. Just at the south end of the bridge we find a long, lowlying, stack-sprouting mill, sprawling along the bank of the river for a quarter of a mile. It is the Oliver Iron and Steel Plant, controlled jointly by various members of the wealthy Oliver family of Pittsburgh. Let us suppose that we have made our way through the general offices and have opened 11 ponderous machines. But there the analogy ceases. Our brawny, picturesque giants are not in evidence-unless we count the few men who are running the trucks. Instead, the great machines. which shake the air with their angry thunder, are controlled and operated by greasy, grime-covered young girls! To be sure, men formerly did this work -men of the type we had pictured. But they were too expensive. They cost anywhere from a dollar to a dollar and a half a day! So, they were gradually supplanted by women who worked more rapidly and demanded less money. That suggested a still further saving. The women were displaced by girls who would sell their energies for even less. This has proved by far the most profitable arrangement for the firm. And so long as profits continue to increase, "why should we worry," they say, over the tragic social consequences of a very profitable plan! The girls are nimble-fingered, ambitious, and endowed with a growing, resilient strength which springs up fresh every morning; until, like an over-stretched elastic, it is broken down permanently at the end of three, or four, years in the Plant. Then other girls, newly arrived from the Old World, ambitious and eager to get a "start", and with no one to tell them of the hard, hopeless, blind alley before them with physical collapse, or moral disaster, at its end, can readily be obtained to take their places. SLAVIC CHURCH IN MILL DISTRICT the door that admits to the bolt threading department. A frantic din is our first greeting. It comes from a hundred bolt-threading machines, arranged in two long rows down either side of the corridor-like room. The machines are great, cumbersome, stiffly moving, sullen creatures, all arms and shafts. It takes strong muscles and alert brains to make them do their work. Probably, we have had a preconceived mental picture of the interior of a steel mill. We have, perhaps, had in mind a sombre view in drabs and browns-halfgloom, flickering lights, shifting shadows, air thick with iron dust, heavy machines ponderously cutting bars of metal into usable shapes, giant half-bare Slavs and Hungarians with hairy breasts and swarthy, swollen muscles giving life to the picture, and contesting their splendid stolid animal strength with the strength of steel and iron. We find our mental picture true in the main. Here are the half-light, the mov "How much can you make on that machine?" we ask a strong Polish girl. Her clothing is soaked with grease so that one instinctively stands at a safe distance. distance. Her face is drawn and old. Her shoulders are sagging. Evidently she is an "experienced hand"-before long to be displaced by a set of younger THE "GREASY OLIVERS" "I take care of three machines," she replies, and points to them. Now we notice that every girl in the room is tending at least two, and often three, of the big machines. Such is the drive of the piecework system. "I made eighty-four cents yesterday." There is a note of pride in her voice. "How long do you work?" "Ten and a half hours. That's our day -ten and a half hours every day -except Saturday-nine hours "About how much do you make in a week?" "I run about four dollars and fifty cents a week." "You are living with your parents?" "No. I am alone; only I have a little brother. I am sending him to school. Rent? One dollar and fifty cents. Yes, that leaves only three dollars for our food, clothes, everything else. It's hard but I'm going to get married soon!" She stops long enough to smile wistfully through a heavy visor of grease and dirt. "That's what I call luck. My kid brother isn't ever going to work in a mill like this-not if I know it. It's hell! Look at me. Six They sneak clear of us on the street. Call us 'greasy Olivers', and I don't blame them! forty-five in the morning to six at night! On your feet all day-jumping back and forth like mad-fingers bleeding-arms aching as if they'd drop off-and this oil pouring over you all the time! It's no place for a girl. I cry about it at night-but what can you do? If you only didn't have to take their curses and vile words and shoves and kicks. The foremen-" But one of them is coming down the room at the moment. We move away. This story, the actual and ordinary story of a girl in the Oliver Plant, jars upon you. You hardly know whether to resent it as, an exaggeration, and contemn |