Chapter III · THE RIGHT TO LEISURE

The effort to establish the right to leisure was a distinctive movement of the nineteenth century, accompanying the development of machinery. It assumed Protean forms, among others that of Sunday rest, the Saturday half-holiday, Decoration Day, Labor Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Good Friday, and Easter. The early closing of the stores, wherever accomplished, is one result of this effort. The prohibition of the work of women and minors at night was an important aspect of the movement, and the effort on behalf of child labor legislation is largely directed towards securing fourteen free years for school and wholesome growth before children enter upon the life of steady work. In its most virile form, the effort to establish the right to leisure was known as the ten hours movement, and later as the eight hours movement.

America having produced no great philanthropic leader devoted to securing leisure for the young and defenseless workers, no Lord Shaftesbury, the task of establishing their right went by default to the trade unions, to whom is due the credit for all child labor legislation prior to the year 1889. Now, however, the effort has become national in its scope, enlisting the most diverse advocates. Mr. Grover Cleveland and other members of the National Child Labor Committee, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, in striving to stop the work of children at night in manufacture and commerce, are as truly enlisted in behalf of the right to leisure as are the miners in Colorado, the butchers in Chicago, and the garment workers in New York. The National Educational Association, working to prolong the period of compulsory attendance at school, and the National Congress of Mothers, with its standing committee on child labor, are pledged to the same endeavor. To educate the purchasing public to act in considerate recognition of the right of the clerks to leisure is one of the reasons for being of the Consumers’ League. However different the methods of these diverse organizations, their goal is the same,—the establishment of reasonable daily leisure in the lives of working people.

The Supreme Court of the United States has made plain the way by sustaining the constitutionality of statutes establishing the working day of eight hours for persons in the employ of the federal government, in the employ of states or municipalities under contract, and in the employ of corporations where the nature of the occupation may be injurious to health.

The establishment of universal leisure is increasingly recognized as a social aim, an effort to be participated in by all those who care for the social welfare, and as a national effort, since, under the pressure of competition, the conditions prevailing in any industry must be as nearly uniform as possible, and one part of the country cannot long maintain itself far in advance of a different part having identical industries, a truth which finds conspicuous illustration in the experience of New England suffering under the pressure of competition of the textile mills of Georgia.

The struggle for the shorter working day is commonly described as the effort of the laborer to give as little exertion as possible in return for the pay which he receives and many workingmen passively accept this statement of the animus of their movement. It is, however, susceptible of interpretation as the effort of wage-earning people to obtain, in the form of leisure, a part of their share of the universal gain arising from the increased productivity of every occupation, and due to the incessant improvement of machinery.

Obviously the characteristic feature of the industrial life of the nineteenth century was the unprecedented increase in the output of all branches of production. Human needs were satisfied as never before; famine was restricted before the close of the century to portions of Russia and India, where misgovernment and imperfect means of transportation together prevented the adequate production and circulation of foodstuffs. Clothing and fuel of new and abundant kinds removed the fear of destruction by cold. Shelter for people of all sorts and conditions underwent transformations undreamed of in previous centuries. The fundamental ethical question of the century was, in essence, the equitable distribution of these newly acquired possessions of the human race.

More precious, perhaps, than any of those enumerated is the immaterial, imponderable human by-product,—leisure. Once the heritage and distinctive privilege of a small class in any civilized community, leisure was produced during the nineteenth century in such abundance as to become the accepted right of a large proportion of the people. Yet, by reason of its inequitable distribution, it remained, in the crude and unsocial form of unemployed time, the bane and sorrow of large sections of the working-class, who were constrained to devote generations of organized effort to regulating, equalizing, and redistributing their working-time and their free time, endeavoring to transmute accidental, unsocial idleness into regulated and beneficent daily leisure.

Assured daily leisure is an essential element of healthy living. Without it childhood is blighted, perverted, deformed; manhood becomes ignoble and unworthy of citizenship in the Republic. Self-help and self-education among the wage-earners are as dependent upon daily leisure as upon daily work. Excessive fatigue precludes the possibility of well-conducted meetings of classes, lodges, coöperative societies and all other forms of organized effort for self-improvement. No experience of residents in settlements in the congested districts of the great cities is sadder than the disorganization which befalls their evening clubs and classes when Christmas approaches and the ablest young people are detained for overtime work, the study and effort of the other members is disorganized, and failure of the whole undertaking often follows.

As machinery becomes increasingly automatic, and the work of the machine-tender reduces itself more completely to watching intently the wholly monotonous performance of the one part confided to his care, leisure becomes indispensable for him in order to counteract the deadening effect upon his mind exercised by his daily work. Instead of educating the worker, the breadwinning task of to-day too often stupefies and deforms the mind; and leisure is required to undo the damage wrought in the working-hours, if the worker is to remain fit for citizenship in the Republic. Without regular, organized leisure, there can be no sustained intelligence in the voting constituency.

In those occupations in which long hours of work prevail, the employees are obliged to live near their place of work, and that congestion is thus intensified which is one of the more unfortunate features of life in large manufacturing cities. Shortening the hours of labor gives to working people a wider range of selection in the location of their homes, thus benefiting wives and children as well as the operatives themselves.

Daily assured leisure serves a purpose of the highest social value by enabling the wage-earner to husband that resource of nervous energy which is required to continue active working-life after the passing of youth. In the garment-trades, men are old at forty and women are superannuated at thirty, largely by reason of the alternations of overwork and enforced idleness, and the absence of that regularly recurring sufficient period of rest between the close of one day’s work and the beginning of the next, which alone permits body and mind to bear years of continuous work without wearing out. Premature old age is induced by overwork as effectively as by dissipation; and old age in the wage-earning class means dependence, if not pauperism. To assure a regular period of fifteen hours between one day’s work and the next for young women and girls engaged in manufacturing and commerce would undoubtedly do as much to prolong their years of self-support and diminish their period of enforced dependence upon others as any measure avowedly in the interest of hygiene and public well-being which could be enacted.

The philanthropic world is all astir on behalf of the crusade against tuberculosis. Funds are readily forthcoming for the foundation of sanatoria for the use of working people, especially for young girls and children. But tuberculosis is promoted by overwork as much as by any other single cause. To shorten the hours of daily labor, to afford daily leisure for rest and recreation to young employees during the years of life in which the susceptibility to infection is greatest, years which coincide with the term of employment of girls and women in largest numbers, is quite as clearly a life saving service as to build and maintain sanatoria. Moreover, the loss of time involved in recovery from tuberculosis is accompanied by expenses to the patient, her family and the community which might well all be spared, were the young worker permitted to escape this enforced idleness by enjoying in due time a rational measure of daily rest and freedom.

Vice flourishes wherever self-support for honest working-women is unusually difficult, and the sweating-system is breaking down to an alarming degree, in New York City, that domestic righteousness which, for thousands of years, has distinguished the people of Jewish faith. To establish effective restrictions upon the hours of labor in the needle-trades would equalize the burden borne by these workers, spreading work over more days and weeks, granting more daily leisure, and thus making righteous living easier for tens of thousands of young working people whose traditions are entirely honorable, but who are now subjected to a pressure to which all too many victims succumb.

It may be fairly claimed, then, that the establishment of regular daily leisure contributes to the health, intelligence, morality, lengthened trade life, freer choice of home surroundings, thrift, self-help and family life of working people. Granted that not all workers make equally valuable use of free time, just as members of the leisure class vary in the uses to which they apply their leisure, it remains true that, without free time, these benefits are impossible. To be deprived of leisure is to be deprived of those things which make life worth living.

Leisure seems to have come to different groups of people in different ways;—to some automatically without exertion on their part; to others as the result of long, painful struggle; to many not at all. The portion of society to which leisure has not come consists, on the one hand, of the great body of children and young girls in the textile and other industries in states in which no laws yet define the limit of their working day and working week; and, on the other hand, of the mass of unskilled workingwomen as unorganized and defenseless as the children themselves.

The Unsought Leisure of Prosperous Women.—The people to whom leisure has come unsought, a free gift of the new industrial order, are the women in prosperous circumstances. Never before in the history of civilization have women enjoyed leisure comparable to that which now falls to the lot of those in comfortable circumstances in America. The modern conveniences of the city or suburban home reduce to a minimum the unavoidable exertion (except such as is demanded by aseptic cleanliness enforced by the fear of disease germs in dust and all that harbors dust!). For the prosperous housekeeper flowing water, gaslight and electricity, modern facilities for heating and cooking, foods prepared outside the home, garments bought, whether ready-made or made to order,—all these contrivances, together with the exodus of the home-industries, yield to women a leisure which they accept as an unqualified right. The wives of tens of thousands of business men and well-paid employees enjoy unquestioningly, and as a matter of course, a degree of leisure such as formed the exclusive privilege of a small aristocracy in earlier centuries. The beneficent social and philanthropic activities of public spirited women and the baneful epidemic of gambling at cards which has run riot for several years and shows no tendency to diminish, are twin offspring of this unearned leisure.

As employers of labor in the home, women have been called upon to share with their domestic employees some of the new-found leisure, and they have not always discerned the importance of recognized and regulated free time at the disposal of the employee as an element in determining the quality of the “help” available in the labor market which they frequent. Sunday rest, the Saturday half-holiday, early closing, and the prohibition or restriction of evening work, have contributed to make work in manufacture or commerce more attractive to large classes of young girls in highly developed industrial communities, than household labor with its indeterminate hours. And where women as employers have discerned the intimate relation between the industrial life about them and the domestic life under their own roof, they have naturally viewed with a critical eye that tendency towards work in other forms of industry in preference to housework, which presses with ever increasing effectiveness upon their personal arrangements.

Women in their homes, in the full enjoyment of leisure as a human right which no one disputes, see from afar and often unsympathetically the effort of the wage-earners to secure for themselves similar leisure, either by means of statutory provisions or by trade-agreements. It requires cultivation of the imagination to enable women thus fortuitously endowed with leisure to perceive an organic relation between their own possession of it and the productive activity of other women, and of children, in the manufacture and distribution of many things which were formerly prepared within the home; to make the connection between this free gift of the new industrial order to themselves and the struggle of the garment-workers, for instance, to secure by organization and trade agreements, and by statutes, the assurance that the needle-workers need not work more than eight hours in one day. The conductor of a railway train has regular “runs” upon which he can count in advance, and in accordance with which he arranges his seasons for sleeping, eating and recreation. His wife enjoys the leisure which has come to her unsought. He can understand the effort of the garment-workers to maintain their organization in its most militant form, because he assures the permanence of his own leisure by helping to sustain his own organization with its trade agreements. But his wife cannot so readily understand or sympathize with the motive of the garment-workers, because the leisure which distinguishes her from her great-grandmother has come to her through no effort of her own, but automatically by the introduction of mechanical improvements and by the exodus of the industries from the home. It may be urged that the leisure of prosperous women is only apparent; that each improvement has entailed fresh duties of administration; that the standard of living has been so raised that their time is as fully occupied as it ever was. From the economic point of view, however, the new occupations are distinctly of the leisure type,—not of any recognized productive or distributive type.

To the credit of women of the prosperous class it must be said that, within recent years, many of them have been making active and intelligent efforts to establish legal claims to leisure for children and for women industrially employed. The Saturday half-holiday, the summer vacation for clerks, the child labor laws, and the prohibition of work at night for women and children have had no more faithful advocates among the wage-earners themselves than among members of the Consumers’ League, the Church Association for Improving the Condition of Labor and the women’s clubs. Just in proportion as women who enjoy leisure in their homes come to see how far they owe that enjoyment to the work of other people, and to recognize the just claims of those others to a share of leisure, may we reasonably expect that the number and effectiveness of such organizations will multiply. And it will appear in the course of the present discussion that the need for such organizations is an abiding need, aside from the maintenance of the organizations of the workers themselves.

The share of credit due to these participants in the effort to establish the right to leisure is the greater because, in their capacity as housekeepers, they come into contact with precisely that portion of the working-class whose method of establishing leisure for themselves appears to be most trying. Gas-fitters, plumbers, carpenters, upholsterers, paper-hangers, plasterers, painters, and glaziers have not, on the whole, distinguished themselves, in recent years, by that sweet reasonableness which might have ingratiated them and their cause with families whose homes have needed alterations and repairs. And the ability of thousands of house-mothers to rise above their personal grievances and advocate a reform the attendant disadvantages of which they have been made to feel in no gentle manner, speaks well for the intelligence and the principle of modern women.

Enforced Idleness is not Leisure.—In some occupations the nature of the work to be done involves interruptions which force the workers to await the resumption of activity; and these interruptions may be welcome and beneficent, or they may be veritable paths to destruction, their effect depending upon the circumstances under which the working people are able to meet them.

Thus the sailor spends weeks on land in enforced idleness through no choice of his own but because the vessel must load and unload, or must await the regular day of sailing. Jack ashore affords the classic example of the workingman harmed by unorganized and, therefore, unprofitable, if not actively injurious, idle time as contrasted with regular, organized, beneficent leisure. No stronger argument need be found for the statutory establishment of daily leisure for employees in all trades in which that is possible, than the evils entailed upon sailors by the impossibility of distributing their idle time in ways wholesome for themselves.

The long leisure of the northern farmer’s winter, recurring and regularly prepared for, has, without doubt, contributed much to the general high level of intelligence and character among the native population of New England and the Northwest. The picture of the boy Lincoln studying by the light of the fire on the hearth gripped the imagination of the American people because it appealed to the personal experience of a multitude to whom the leisure of the hearthstone was the earliest recollection. The sharpest possible line of demarcation divides citizens whose experience includes the long country winter from those city-bred, to whom the seasons mean little more than the change from the exhaustion of summer heat to a more bracing atmosphere, the round of their work having no relation to the visible order of nature, and their leisure being assured them by circumstances unrelated to the time of year. The farmer’s family, accustomed to work without ceasing at the harvest, as they rest at length during the winter (both experiences being dictated by the nature of the work to be done and the season of the year, over which they have no control), cannot readily understand why thousands of tailors should strike for months together, at the height of the season, in the hope of working an hour a day less throughout the following year.

Yet it is by no means accidental that, in the garment-trades, strikes habitually have to do with the maintenance of a trade organization, or with the hours of labor, because the garment-workers, more than any other wage-earners, suffer the disadvantages both of overwork and of unemployment. The garment-workers endure the “dull season” because garments vary with the season and orders are “slack” or “rush” without reference to the preference of the needle-workers. One part of their year brings with it overwork such as occurs in no other occupation, while another entails idleness on the hardest terms known to modern industry. The tailors’ long struggle to distribute their work over the longest possible series of weeks, by shortening each working day to ten, nine, or eight hours is, in essence, a struggle to attain reasonable leisure in place of deadly haste followed by weeks or months of corroding idleness.

While the winter leisure of the farmer is made safe by the assured supplies of food, fuel and shelter prepared in advance for the season’s need, the annually recurring dull season in the garment-trades is a period of anxiety and suffering, when the grocer’s bill grows as large as his good will ventures to permit, and eviction from their tenement-dwelling is a calamity to be expected and endured by the garment-workers’ families as the fortune of war. In this there is no element of wholesome leisure. The words “dull season,” originally referring to the state of the trade from the employers’ point of view, describe but faintly the black despair which that season, under the sweating-system, involves for the workers in the garment-trades.

In the needle-trades half the employees are women, young, non-voting, temporary members of the body of wage-earners pending marriage or disability. No part of the industrial army grows so rapidly as the contingent of young girls between fourteen and twenty years of age; and no part is so void of initiative for its own welfare, so unfit to assert or maintain any right. Beginning work at the age of folly, they readily accept as the regular working day ten hours in twenty-four, increasing this to any length allowed by the statutes, and working frequently without extra pay merely under the threat of dismissal in case of their refusal. Of their own initiative, these young needle-workers would never secure the half-holiday, a summer vacation with or without pay, or even the enforcement of the legal restriction upon their regular working time. They are a perpetual hindrance to the efforts of the men who work with them to secure stable employment and reasonable leisure. Overwork seems to come to these girls as blindly as leisure has befallen the women in the well-to-do households.

In the needle-trades, the effectual establishment of the legal working day and working week serves, wherever this has been accomplished, as for instance, in Massachusetts, to mitigate both the enforced overwork and the enforced idleness which characterizes those trades when left to the free play of industrial forces. Where the working time is effectively limited, preparations are made systematically, in advance of the height of the season, for meeting the coming pressure. Space and machinery are provided, and extra hands are trained, by preparing stockwork, for the finer work to be demanded of them later. Thus some of the unemployed are temporarily absorbed into the regular industrial army, and the contrast between the extremes of the seasons is mitigated.

It is evident upon close acquaintance that in the garment-trades the injurious differences of season are only in part due to the conditions inherent in the trades themselves. They are not like the midwinter cold and midsummer harvest heat in the experience of the farmer. They are far more subject to control than the managers of the industry have ever been willing to admit. Moreover, the general purchasing public has vastly more power of initiative, control and restraint than it has ever been aware of, by means of the placing of “rush” orders, on the one hand, and of voluntarily regulating the times of its buying on the other. This has already been indicated in the matter of Christmas shopping and its bearing upon the cruel overwork of children at that season. The garment workers are not so obviously present as the children in the stores, and it requires, therefore, more sympathetic imagination to enable the shopping public to make the connection between the excessive exertion which alternates with ruinous idleness of the machine workers, and its own heedless crowding of the shopping season into a few weeks in the spring and fall.

Increased Speed Calls for Leisure.—In the capacity of inspector for the National Consumers’ League it has been the fortune of the writer to visit and inspect a large number of factories in the stitched muslin underwear trade during the past five years. In the course of that time there has occurred a development of machinery so significant in its consequences as to seem worth describing somewhat at length as a concrete illustration of the process which is discussed more abstractly throughout the present chapter. In all the best factories within this trade the speed of the sewing-machines has been increased so that they set, in 1905, twice as many stitches in a minute as in 1899. Machines which formerly carried one needle now carry from two to ten, sewing parallel seams (for bones in waists, or for tucks, or merely for decorative stitching). Thus a girl using one of these machines is now responsible for twice as many stitches at the least and for twenty times as many stitches at most, as in 1899. Some girls are not capable of the sustained speed involved in this improvement, and are no longer eligible for this occupation. Those who continue in the trade are required to feed twice as many garments to the machine as were required five years ago. The strain upon their eyes is, however, far more than twice what it was before the improvement. In the case of machines carrying multiple needles this is obvious; but it is true of the single-needle machines also. It is the duty of the operator to watch the needle so intently as to discern the irregularity caused by a broken thread or broken needle, and to stop the machinery by pressing an electric button before any threads are cut by the broken needle, or any stitches of the seam are omitted because of the broken thread. Now, when the needle set twenty-two hundred stitches a minute, as was the case in 1899, the writer; whose eyes are unusually keen, could see the needle when the machine was in motion. At the present speed, the writer, whose eyes have remained unimpaired, is wholly unable to see the needle, discerning merely the steady gleam of light where it is in motion. To meet this difficulty, which occurs regularly in the case of the operatives, it is now the custom to suspend an electric light directly above the machine, so that a ray strikes the needle. The strain upon the eyes of the operators is almost intolerable, and a further winnowing-out of the women eligible for this occupation follows the introduction of the present method of lighting.

It is reasonable to inquire what benefit accrues to a machine operator who completes twice as much work in 1905 as in 1899, and the writer has made this inquiry whenever opportunity has offered. On the whole, it appears that there has been no proportionate gain for the operator. If all the gain that is made by the improvement in the machines went to the operators in the form of increased wages, it is doubtful whether it would be compensation for the additional strain upon their eyes and nerves. But no such share of gain falls to them. Their wages are calculated upon the same basis as in 1899, namely, that employees of the required speed and skill can be obtained in the required number for six dollars a week, irrespective of their output of work. In conversation with employers the writer is assured, from time to time, that piecework prices are regularly calculated to afford a total of six dollars a week for skilled workers, the stock phrase being: “If a girl cannot earn six dollars a week at machine work after she has been doing it from six weeks to three months, she is not adapted to the work, and it is better to put another girl at her machine.” On the part of the girls the statement is very generally made that, in places in which the supply of help is abundant, the proportion of girls receiving less than six dollars is kept large by constantly changing hands, dismissing those whose wages are growing higher with increasing skill, and taking on beginners. Combined with this constant changing goes a frequent rearrangement of piecework prices, such that only a small minority of the girls in a factory ever rise above the dead level of six dollars a week, the same sum that was paid in 1899 for half the work now done.

One skilled worker who left a factory for four years and returned to the same machine which she had left, found it speeded up to double its former capacity. Her work was doubled, but her wages increased only from six dollars a week to seven, though she was one of the most skilled persons in her trade, an experienced, strong, willing operator. This girl was asked who, in her opinion, profited by the doubling of the output of her machine. In reply she said: “I get a dollar a week more. The company makes something out of the improvement, or they would not have made it. But there have been so many cuts in prices that the company don’t get as much as you’d think for doubling the speed of the machines. I guess the people that buy the garments must get most of the difference; they can get so many more garments for the same money.”

There is no doubt that this sewing girl was entirely correct in her estimate of the effects of doubling her work. The purchaser, in the long run, profits by every improvement in machinery and in the speed of the workers. But the girls who stitch underwear are not only working the same number of hours as in 1899; they are wearing themselves out at a rate of speed such that the term of their whole working-life must inevitably be greatly shortened. The nervous energy required from day to day is more than can be supplied by the free time between one day’s work and the next. A phrase in which they commonly describe the experience of girls who have dropped out of the trade tells the whole story: “She got too slow,—she couldn’t keep up with her machine any longer.”

There is no immediate prospect of any material improvement in the money wages paid to operators in this trade; for the employers have at command, not only tenement-house workers and institutions maintained out of the public funds and, therefore, willing to do sewing for merely nominal compensation; they have also the pupils of the many charitable and reformatory schools which persist in preparing every available girl for this most undesirable of all skilled occupations. Since the wages of the sewing machine operators are determined, not primarily by the amount of their output, but by many other considerations (the pressure of the tenement-house workers, the institution workers, and the recruits in the trade sent out from the institutions, etc.), there seems to be no need to fear that they would lose in wages if their hours of labor were reduced by the enactment of a statute restricting their working time to eight hours in one day and forty-eight in one week. In the interest of their health this change appears to be indispensably necessary. It has been, however, impossible for them to make any permanent improvement in the conditions of their employment by unaided effort of their own. There is no inclination visible on the part of employers to reduce the hours of work. On the contrary, the manufacture of stitched white muslin underwear has become as completely a season trade as the preparation of Christmas tree decorations or Easter bonnets. Meanwhile, the number of years during which a girl can continue to earn a living at a sewing machine diminishes with every improvement in her machine.

Methods of Establishing the Right to Leisure.—By the education of public opinion something has been accomplished towards establishing leisure in certain occupations. Thus an appeal has of late been made, with promise of increasing success, to the more kind-hearted and conscientious among the stockholders of Southern cotton-mills to vote their stock in ways calculated to obtain more humane hours of labor for the women and children employed in those mills. The hours of labor of the clerks and cash children in the stores of many cities have been improved in consequence of the efforts of the Consumers’ Leagues in some places, and of the Retail Clerks’ Protective Associations in others, to induce the shopping public to exercise consideration of the employees in arranging the hours of shopping.

The cigar-trade has long enjoyed the benefits of the short working day by reason of the relatively successful effort of the cigarmakers to apply in practical form the principle which all trade unionists acknowledge, and upon which thousands of them conscientiously act. Millions of dollars have been spent in advertising their label; cigars bearing it are made only in shops in which the working day is limited to eight hours; and working men of all trades have taken the trouble to give the preference in buying the cigars thus recommended. Here, therefore, the establishment of leisure for the workers has been accomplished by the effort of the workers themselves. The limitations inherent in this method appear, however, when certain large employers, selling cigars to customers not interested in the subject, employ young girls who are not part of any organization, and can be induced to work as long as the law allows. It is an interesting and significant fact that the organizations mentioned as using this method are among the most persistent advocates of legislation restricting the hours of labor, acting on the principle that not one but all methods of protecting the workers in their right to leisure must be followed, and taught by experience how far more effective is their effort when directed towards the enforcement of statutes than when confined to persuasion alone.