You never hear of men working in a factory ten hours and then going home
and making their clothes and doing their laundry and cooking
themselves a cup of tea to drink with a couple of rolls,
but that is what women do.
-Rose Schneidermen
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Wednesday March 24, 1915
Chicago, Illinois - Amalgamate Clothing Workers Intends to Organize 50,000 Tailors
Rose Schneiderman
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The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America is making its presence known in the city of Chicago with the announced intention of organizing 50,000 tailors. A large mass meeting was held on Monday evening presided over by Sidney Hillman, international president. Rose Schneiderman and Jacob Panken, organizers from New York City, were featured speakers.
Miss Rose Schneiderman spoke to the desperate situation of the women in the industry, stating in part:
We send our girl into the work and we have grown used to the fact that she shall be paid $3 and $5 and $6.
You are only a girl, a weak, delicate thing, and therefore you must work for $5 or $6, and then if you don't have enough to live on some man can help you out. That is what we say to her just because we take the employer's word for it and do not think ourselves.
In an interview later with Jane Whitaker, Miss Schneiderman noted:
You never hear of men working in a factory ten hours and then going home and making their clothes and doing their laundry and cooking themselves a cup of tea to drink with a couple of rolls, but that is what women do.
Sidney Hillman declared:
Chicago has become the scab market of the country. We have started this campaign to change conditions and will stay here until conditions change. We will not leave the city until the city is organized.
From the Chicago Day Book of March 20, 1915:
CLOTHING WORKERS AFTER MORE MEMBERS
Sidney Hillman
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The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America have started a campaign to organize the 50,000 tailors of Chicago. Organizers of the union in other cities have come to Chicago, where they will work under the joint board of the garment workers.
The first of a series of mass meetings has been called for Monday evening, March 22, at 8 o'clock, in Hod Carriers' hall, Halsted and Harrison.
The meeting will be addressed by Jacob Paken, att'y for the Brotherhood of Tailors; Sidney Hillman, international president of the clothing workers, and Rose Schneiderman, general organizer of the International Ladies' Garment Workers.
Two hundred thousand circulars have been distributed, printed in all languages, calling on the tailors to unite. 10,000 handbills announcing the meeting have been distributed and the big hall is expected to be filled.
"Propaganda work has been going on quietly for some time," said Frank Rosenblum, general executive board member. "The tailors are enthusiastic and I expect to see Chicago as well organized at New York, or any other of the large eastern cities, within a few months."
"At present our union has nine locals with 10,000 members. There are nearly 50,000 unorganized tailors in Chicago. The conditions in this trade in this city are the worst in the country. Our aim is to improve them and we intend to do so."
[Photograph added.]
From The Day Book of March 23, 1915:
WELFARE WORK IN PLACE OF INCREASED WAGES
DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD
Welfare work, supplied by the bosses in place of increased wages, shorter hours and better working conditions, is destroying the manhood and womanhood of the workers, Sidney Hillman, international president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, told nearly two thousand tailors in Hod Carriers' hall last night.
The audience that crowded the hall to the gallery even to standing room had listened to an address by Jacob Panken, idol of the lower East Side of New York, in which he told them that the efficiency system of the manufacturers had split a tailor into more than fifty parts and he would have to be put together again before he would be a man.
[Hillman said:]
The employers have not only split you into fifty parts...they have taken away your manhood and womanhood by the welfare work with which they silence your demand for better wages, shorter hours and better working conditions. They give you a cheap place in which to dance and you haven't 10 cents to pay admission to the dance hall. They have a couple of nurses to let you know when you are sick after you have worked yourself into sickness.
I know of no industry in no city where conditions have become as intolerable as in the clothing industry in the city of Chicago. If conditions are permitted to go along as they are we shall become slaves. In 1913 we started a movement to organize, and after four months of agitation the employers reduced 2 hours and increased 4 per cent and gave many individual increases and the tailors said: "Why do we need a union?" But where is that 4 per cent today? That and more has been taken away from you and is being taken away.
Charity the employers give you, the employers who have a blackball system in Medinah Temple and paid spies in this hall to report back to the employers.
There may be help for reductions and long hours, but what the employers are attempting to do by their charity is to kill the spirit of the men and women in the industry. They are not satisfied that they have made from men and women tailors, they want to make from the tailors beggars.
Chicago has become the scab market of the country. We have started this campaign to change conditions and will stay here until conditions change. We will not leave the city until the city is organized. This campaign is country-wide. We will organize the industry from New York to San Francisco, and if it is necessary to call a strike it will be a country-wide strike.
Panken declared that, the ten or more different nationalities in the industry do not divide it because they have a common brotherhood as workers.
[He said:]
Twenty-five years ago...in order to become a tailor you were apprenticed to a tailor, but after you served your apprenticeship you made the garment from the cutting to the pressing. Commercial development changed this. It takes about 50 men to make one suit of clothes now. They have taken the tailor and broken him up into small pieces and have taken from him the protection of skill. But they cannot make him a machine, for he has a mind.
Miss Rose Schneiderman, who organized women in the craft in New York, commented on the fact that in every language the three words that can be always understood are "capitalism," "organization" and "strike " She stated the reason capital has the power it has is because the workers do not know their business.
We send our girl into the work and we have grown used to the fact that she shall be paid $3 and $5 and $6.
You are only a girl, a weak, delicate thing, and therefore you must work for $5 or $6, and then if you don't have enough to live on some man can help you out. That is what we say to her just because we take the employer's word for it and do not think ourselves.
H. Schneid, Socialist candidate for alderman in the 19th ward, addressed the audience in Hebrew, and other speakers in Lithuanian, Bohemian and Italian.
[Photograph added.]
From The Day Book of March 24, 1915:
WOMEN TRY TO LIVE ON LOW WAGES INSTEAD
OF ASKING MORE, SAYS ORGANIZER
By Jane Whitaker
Rose Schneiderman, Capmaker
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Is the reason women are paid wages so much lower than men in all grades of industry because they are willing to economize and slave to live within those wages, willing to work ten hours in a factory or store and then go home and sew and do laundry work and cook a meager meal on a one-jet stove instead of insisting on a sufficient wage to enable them to have those night tasks done by others, as men do?
Rose Schneiderman, who is here from New York to organize girls in the waist, dress and white goods industries, believes that is the reason, and Rose Schneiderman ought to know because she helped organize 25,000 waist makers and 8,000 white goods workers in New York City and helped them lift their industries above the starvation basis to one of fair comfort.
Like so many of the women who are doing big work in helping emancipate their sisters from economic slavery, Rose Schneiderman is a very tiny woman. She doesn't come up to my shoulder. She is so very small she seems like a child, but how much of a fighter she is you may judge for yourselves.
[She said:]
We are going to organize the workers in these industries in Chicago...Conditions here are worse than they were in New York in some respects. The factories are located in alleys, you might say. The wages are terrible.
A strong Polish girl told me and she had such a tired look in her eyes that no matter how hard she worked she had never been able to make more than $9 a week, and she has been three years in the same factory.
That $9 is a maximum wage. You can imagine what the minimum is, and these workers have only about thirty-five weeks' work out of the entire year.
"How do they live the rest of the time?" I asked. "The maximum you have named would not more than pay a girl's expenses during the time she was working."
Miss Schneiderman shrugged her shoulders. "They have to live," she said, tersely. "Some of them live off their parents, some of them go in debt, some of them save a little by the economies women are forever practicing."
Her voice grew a little strained.
You never hear of men working in a factory ten hours and then going home and making their clothes and doing their laundry and cooking themselves a cup of tea to drink with a couple of rolls, but that is what women do.
Men demand enough money to hire these things done and that is why men get enough money to have them done. Instead of demanding more money the woman practices more economies.
Yet if she would demand she could get. When we had the big strike in New York in 1910 the girls stayed out thirteen weeks until they had to return to work because so many were actually starving, and the strike was called a lost one.
But it wasn't lost. In 1913, when we were in a position to stay out until we won, the employers did not dare take a chance on a strike. It had cost them too many millions before, it had shown them the endurance of "weak, delicate women," and the public itself, the public that sits in its luxurious drawingrooms, had had its eyes opened to what other women were enduring and the lesson was not forgotten, so the employers signed a contract with us, giving shorter hours, a week, a half holiday the year around, legal holidays, time and a half for overtime, a minimum wage, a price commission so that when a new garment is introduced they base the price of the garment on so much per hour, a grievance committee, a sanitary board.
Chicago needs all of these things. Even the welfare work here, the sop that employers throw the workers to keep them quiet, is indifferent because the employers feel the women are not organized and dare not rebel at anything. They will cut five per cent off a girl's wages, and if she resents it they will give her back one-fifth and the girl feels that she has gotten something and doesn't realize that it was all part of the scheme of capital to keep her quiet.
We have got to organize Chicago because the workers here will be forced to scab on those in New York if they are not organized, as the manufacturers will be able to buy cheaper here than they can manufacture in New York, and we are going to stay in Chicago until we succeed.
She is just a tiny bit of a woman, but she certainly is a good fighter. More power to her!
[Photograph added.]
SOURCE
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Mar 20, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
-Mar 23, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
-Mar 24, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
See also:
Tag: Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
http://www.dailykos.com/...
IMAGES
Rose Schneiderman
http://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/...
Sidney Hillman
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/...
ACWA membership book and constitution
https://archive.org/...
Rose Schneiderman at her sewing machine
http://bofarrell.net/...
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The Union Maid-Barb Heller
Oh, you cant' scare me, I'm stickin' to the Union,
I'm stickien' to the Union, I'm sickin' to the Union
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm stickin' to the Union
I'm stickin' to the Union, 'till the day I die.
-Woody Guthrie
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