Working With the Working Woman Part 12

I ate my lunch at home.

When the next Sunday morning came, again the future looked bright. I red-penciled eleven "ads"-jobs in three different dress factories, sewing b.u.t.tons on shoes. You see, I have to pick only such "ads" as allow for no previous experience-it is only unskilled workers I am eligible to be among as yet; girls to pack tea and coffee, to work for an envelope company, in tobacco, on sample cards; girls to pack hair nets, learners on fancy feathers, and learners to operate book-sewing machines.

The rest of the newspaper told much of trouble in the garment trades.

I decided to try the likeliest dress factory first. I was hopeful, but not enough so to take my lunch and ap.r.o.n.

At the first dress factory address before eight o'clock there were about nine girls ahead of me. We waited downstairs by the elevator, as the boss had not yet arrived. The "ad" I was answering read: "WANTED-Bright girls to make themselves useful around dress factory."

Some of us looked brighter than others of us.

Upstairs in the hall we a.s.sembled to wait upon the pleasure of the boss. The woodwork was white, the floor pale blue-it was all very impressive.

Finally, second try, the boss glued his eye on me.

"Come in here." A white door closed behind us, and we stood in a little room which looked as if a small boy of twelve had knocked it together out of old sc.r.a.ps and odds and ends, unpainted.

"What experience you have had?"

He was a nice-looking, fairly young Jew, who spoke with a considerable German accent.

"None in a dress factory, but ..." and I regaled him with the vast amount of experience in other lines that was mine, adding that I had done a good deal of "private dressmaking" off and on, and also a.s.suring him, almost tremblingly, I did so want to land a job-that I was the most willing of workers.

"What you expect to get?"

"What will you pay me?"

"No, I'm asking you. What do you expect to get?"

"Fourteen dollars."

"All right, go on in."

If the room where the boss had received me could have been the work of a twelve-year-old, the rest of the factory must have been designed and executed by a boy of eight, or a lame, halt, and blind carpenter just tottering to his grave. There was not a straight shelf. There was not a straight part.i.tion. Boards of various woods and sizes had been used and nothing had ever been painted. Such doors as existed had odd ways of opening and closing. The whole place looked as if it had cost about seven dollars and twenty-nine cents to throw together. But, ah! the white and pale blue of the show rooms!

The dress factory job was like another world compared with candy, bra.s.s, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. Of what went on in the processes before and after the work we did, I knew and saw nothing. We packed finished chocolates; we punched slots in already-made lamp cones; we ironed already washed, starched, and dampened clothes. Such work as we did took no particular skill, though a certain improvement in speed and quality of work came with practice.

One's eyes could wander now and then, one's thoughts could wander often, and conversation with one's neighbors was always possible.

Behold the dress factory, a little complete world of its own on one small floor where every process of manufacture, and all of it skilled work, could be viewed from any spot. Not quite every process-the designer had a room of her own up front nearer where the woodwork was white.

"Ready-made clothing!" It sounds so simple-just like that. Mrs. Fine Lady saunters into a shop, puts up her lorgnette, and lisps, "I'd like to see something in a satin afternoon dress." A plump blonde in tight-fitting black with a marcel wave trips over to mirrored doors, slides one back, takes a dress off its hanger-and there you are! "So much simpler than bothering with a dressmaker."

But whatever happened to get that dress to the place where the blonde could sell it? "Ready-made," indeed! There has to be a start some place before there is any "made" to it. It was at that point in our dress factory when the French designer first got a notion into her head-she who waved her arms and gesticulated and flew into French-English rages just the way they do on the stage. "_Mon Dieu!

Mon Dieu!_"-gray-haired Madame would gasp at our staid and portly Mr.

Rogers. Ada could say "My Gawd!" through her Russian nose to him and it had nothing like the same wilting effect.

Ready-made-yes, ready-made. But first Madame got her notion, and then she and her helpers concocted the dress itself. A finished article, it hung inside the wire inclosure where the nice young cutter kept himself and his long high table. The cutter took a look at the finished garment hanging on the side of his cage, measured a bit with his yardstick, and then proceeded to cut the pattern out of paper.

Whereupon he laid flat yards and yards of silks and satins on his table and with an electric cutter sliced out his parts. One mistake-one slice off the line-_Mon Dieu!_ it's too terrible to think of! All these pieces had to be sorted according to sizes and colors, and tied and labeled. (Wanted-bright and useful girl right here.)

Next came the sewing machine operators (electric power)-a long narrow table, nine machines at a side, but not more than fourteen operators were employed-thirteen girls and one lone young man. They said that on former piece rates this man used to make from ninety dollars to one hundred dollars a week. The operators were all well paid, especially by candy, bra.s.s, and laundry standards, but they were a skilled lot. A very fine-looking lot too-some of the nicest-looking girls I've seen in New York. Everyone had a certain style and a.s.surance. It was good for the eyes to look on them after the laundry thirteen-dollar-a-week type.

When the first operators had done their part the dresses were handed over to the drapers. There were two drapers; they were getting around fifty dollars a week before the hard times. One of the drapers was as attractive a girl as I ever saw any place-bobbed hair, deep-set eyes, a Russian Jewess with features which made her look more like an Italian. She spoke English with hardly any accent. She dressed very quietly and in excellent taste. All day long the two draped dresses on forms-ever pinning and pinning. The drapers turned the dresses over to certain operators, who finished all machine sewing. The next work fell to the finishers.

In that same end of the factory sat the four finishers, getting "about twenty dollars a week," but again no one seemed sure. Two were Italians who could talk little English. One was Gertie, four weeks married-"to a Socialist." Gertie was another of the well-dressed ones. If you could know these dress factory girls you would realize how, unless gifted with the approach of a newspaper reporter-and I lack that approach-it was next to impossible to ask a girl herself what she was earning. No more than you could ask a lawyer what his fees amounted to. The girls themselves who had been working long together in the same shop did not seem to know what one another's wages were. It was a new state of affairs in my factory experience.

The finishers, after sewing on all hooks and eyes and fasteners and doing all the remaining handwork on the dresses, turned them over to the two pressers, sedate, a.s.sured Italians, who ironed all day long and looked prosperous and were very polite.

They brought the dresses back to Jean and her helper-two girls who put the last finis.h.i.+ng touches on a garment before it went into the showroom-snipping here and there, rough edges all smoothed off. It was to Jean the boss called my second morning, very loud so all could hear: "If you find anything wrong mit a dress, don't _look_ at it, don't _bodder wid_ it-jus' t'row it in dere faces and made dem do it over again! It's not like de old days no more!" (Whatever he meant by that.) So-there was your dress, "ready-made."

Such used to be the entire factory, adding the two office girls; the model, who was wont to run around our part of the world now and then in a superior fas.h.i.+on, clad in a scanty pale-pink-satin petticoat which came just below her knees and an old gray-and-green sweater; plus various male personages, full of business and dressed in their best. Goodness knows what all they did do to keep the wheels of industry running-perhaps they were salesmen. They had the general appearance of earning at least ten to twenty thousand dollars a year.

It may possibly have risen as high as two thousand.

And Peters-who was small though grown, and black, and who cleaned up with a fearful dust and snitched lead pencils if you left them around.

At present, in addition, there were the sixteen crochet beaders, because crochet beading is stylish in certain quarters-this "department" newly added just prior to my arrival. But before the beaders could begin work the goods had to be stamped, and before they could be stamped Mr. Rogers (he was middle-aged and a dear and an Italian and his name wasn't "Rogers," but some unp.r.o.nounceable thing the Germans couldn't get, so it just naturally evolved into something that began with the same letter which they could p.r.o.nounce) had to concoct a design. He worked in the cage at a raised end of the cutting table. He p.r.i.c.ked the pattern through paper with a machine, at a small table outside by the beaders, that was always piled high with a mess of everything from spools to dresses, which Mr. Rogers patiently removed each time to some spot where some one else found them on top of something she wanted, and less patiently removed them to some other spot, where still less patiently they were found in the way and dumped some place else. Such was life in one factory. And Ada would call out still later: "Mr. Rogers, did you see a pile of dresses on this table when you went to work?"

Whereat in abject politeness and dismay Mr. Rogers would dash from "inside" to "outside" and explain in very broken English that there had been some things on the table, but "vaire carefully" he had placed them-here. And to Mr. Rogers's startled gaze the pile had disappeared.

If a dress had to be beaded, Mr. Rogers took the goods after the cutter finished his job, and he and his helpers stamped the patterns on sleeves, front and back, skirt, by rubbing chalk over the paper.

Upon the scene at this psychological moment enters the bright girl to make herself useful. The bright girl "framed-up" the goods for the beaders to work on. (In fact, you noted she entered even earlier, by helping the cutter tie the bundles according to size and color.)

"Frame-up" means taking boards the proper length with broad tape tacked along one edge. First you pin the goods lengthwise, pins close together. Then you find side boards the desired length and pin the goods along the sides. Then with four iron clamps you fasten the corners together, making the goods as tight as a drum. There is a real knack to it, let me tell you-especially when it comes to queerly shaped pieces-odd backs or fronts or sleeves. Or where you have a skirt some six or eight feet long and three broad. But I can frame!

Ada said so.

When I got a piece framed (Now I write those six words and grin) ...

"_when_" ... Two little skinny horses I had to rest the frames upon.

The s.p.a.ce I had in which to make myself useful was literally about three by four feet just in front of the shelves where the thread and beads were kept. That is, I had it if no one wanted to get anything in the line of thread or beads, which they always did want to get.

Whereupon I moved out-which meant my work might be knocked on the floor, or if it was bigger I had to move the work out with me. Or I crawled under it and got the thread or beads myself. If it were a skirt I was framing up I earned the curses, though friendly, of the a.s.semblage. No one could pa.s.s in any direction. The beaders were shut in their quarters till I got through, or they crawled under. Or I poked people in the back with the frames while I was clamping them. I fought and bled and died over every large frame I managed to get together, for the frame was larger than the s.p.a.ce I had to work in.

Until in compa.s.sion they finally moved me around the corner into the dressmaking quarters, which tried Joe's soul. Joe was the Italian foreman of that end of things. He was nice. But he saw no reason why I should be moved up into his already crowded s.p.a.ce. Indeed, I was only a little better off. The fact of the matter was that the more useful I became the more in everybody's way I got. Indeed, it can be taken as a tribute to human nature that everyone in that factory was not a crabbed nervous wreck from having to work on top of everyone else. It was almost like attempting dressmaking in the Subway. The boss at times would gaze upon my own frantic efforts, and he claimed: "Every time I look at you the tears come in my eis." And I would tell him, "Every time I think about myself the tears come in mine." About every other day he appeared with a hammer and some nails and would pound something some place, with the a.s.surance that his every effort spelled industrial progress and especial help to me.

"All I think on is your comfort, yes?"

"Don't get gray over it!"

Nor will I forget that exhibition of the boss's ideas of scientific management. Nothing in the factory was ever where anyone could find it. It almost drove me crazy. What was my joy then when one day the boss told me to put the spools in order. There was a mess of every-colored spool, mixed with every other color, tangled ends, dust, b.u.t.tons, loose snappers, more dust, beads, more spools, more dust. A certain color was wanted by a st.i.tcher. There was nothing to do but paw. The spool, like as not, would be so dusty it would take blowings and wipings on your skirt before it could be discovered whether the color was blue or black. I tied my head in tissue paper and sat down to the dusty job of sorting those spools. Laboriously I got all the blacks together and in one box. Laboriously all the whites. That exhausted all the boxes I could lay hands on. I hunted up the boss. "I can't do that spool job decent if I ain't got no boxes to put the different colors in."

"Boxes, boxes! What for you want boxes?"

"For the spools."

"'Ain't you got no boxes?"

"'Ain't got another one."

He hustled around to the spool shelves where I was working.

"_Ach_, boxes! Here are two boxes. What more you want?"