As a former meat cutter in a grocery store and steward with the UFCW for years, I appreciate this article. Berneice Griswold was an investigative reporter of workers’ conditions, here writing for the National Women’s Trade Union League on the fight for the minimum wage and organization of retail workers in New York City.

‘And What of the Retail Clerks?’ by Berneice Griswold from Life and Labor. Vol. 10 No. 8. October, 1920.

WE ARE dependent upon the retail clerks for our food, our clothes, our shoes, our hats; in fact, for everything which we purchase or barter for in retail stores throughout the forty-eight states of the Union.

Yet, frequently the retail clerk is regarded as some sort of a mechanical automaton placed behind counter or showcase to serve our needs, to serve them pleasantly, efficiently and with sufficient haste to satisfy our ever-hurrying selves in our moments of greatest impatience. When we are not too much in a hurry, too tired, too preoccupied with our own problems, we establish friendly relationships with these same automata and discover them to be very human persons, and frequently very tired, discouraged persons, particularly if it be late in the afternoon, after eight or nine hours of constant standing and attempts to please temperamental customers, whether with hardware, overcoats, Paris hats or vegetables.

We must all plead guilty if we are to be honest with ourselves and with the retail clerks. Having confessed our sins, let us champion the cause of the retail clerk. Let us boom it and push it. For the automaton is refusing to run mechanically for an unlimited number of hours. Eight hours is the demand.

There have been previous efforts to organize retail clerks. The plan which the New York Women’s Trade Union League is pushing now is by far the most comprehensive scheme which has been launched. When it is finished, more than the present 50 per cent of the clerks will be organized. They will have an 8-hour day, better pay, and better conditions.

Witness the retail grocery clerks. There are perhaps 18,000 of them in New York City alone. A small percentage are organized. Those who are went out on strike recently, a general strike, which lasted three days. In that time they won all of their demands, which were for a 9-hour day and an increase in pay. Salaries now range between $15 and $45 a week. So, too, the Retail Ladies’ Garment Sales Union, 25 per cent of whose members are women, won for themselves better hours and better wages, with improved conditions in general, all because of their strong organization.

This is just a beginning, for little has been done so far in this line. The real movement began on June 6, with the conference of retail clerks’ unions called in the offices of the Women’s Trade Union League. Each union was to send three delegates. They arrived. They discussed methods for bringing about a closer relationship and cooperation between unions; plans for a publicity campaign for earlier closing hours and plans for a permanent organization.

The conference resolved itself into an executive committee, which called a general meeting, also in the offices of the Women’s Trade Union League, for June 30. when a permanent committee was appointed to extend the organization throughout the city, to take up the active campaign for the 8-hour day in all retail stores and to gain the cooperation of all labor groups in securing these improved conditions. These two dates in June are memorable in the history of retail clerks.

There is work ahead of this group. New York City, as all other cities, towns and hamlets, is sprinkled throughout with small stores of all kinds. Each employs from one to a large number of clerks. A personal relationship exists between employer and employe which is in many cases delightful while in others it jeopardizes the cause. It frequently means that the clerk is expected to work from twelve to fourteen hours daily.

SMALL STORES GREATEST OFFENDERS

This little store is a convenience. Women who have forgotten to purchase bread for the morning, a spool of darning cotton with which to attack the family mending, a much needed new pair of supporters which will withstand the strain of young Johnnie’s violent gymnastic efforts and keep his stockings in place, rely on it. They are friendly with the proprietor and with the clerks. But with a little thought they could have done this purchasing before 6 o’clock instead of at 6:45. They manage it somehow with the big department stores, where shorter work hours are maintained by force of public opinion and an understanding of efficiency on the part of the employers.

It is the clerk in this small store who suffers. He spends all of the time in the store. He has no time for recreation, for leading his own life. He is a slave to the store and to the half dozen or so shoppers who have forgotten something earlier in the day.

Realizing that conditions must be improved in their trade, the clerks in delicatessen stores, establishments which the average individual feels should be open at all times for his or her particular convenience, have organized. This was a task difficult of accomplishment as the stores are scattered in all parts of the city. Yet they have managed it very well. The next step should be taken by the delicatessen trading public–a course of lessons in memory training in regard to provisioning the larder at the proper hours of the day.

As is evident, the thread from which this tale of the retail clerks is spun comes from the Golden Rule. This simple solution of labor, social, industrial, economic and other troubles has been misplaced by the woman who insists upon seeing every piece of cloth on the shelf and then leaves the store without making a purchase, having spent a pleasant morning shopping. It is forgotten also by the clerk who exhibits two coats and says, “That’s all we have, madam,” with a full rack of coats in plain sight. Both cases are rare, fortunately. They receive an unwarranted amount of publicity. Yet the fact remains that given fair wages and hours by the employer, some adjustment must be made between consumer and retail clerk if the whole of the problem is to be solved.

Large New York department stores have of their own accord established an 8 or 9 hour day. Some of them have a minimum wage. Improved, decent conditions have been necessary in order to attract girls to this form of wage-earning. Yet things are far from right even there.

EMPLOYES RECRUITED FROM AMONG HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

How attractive the store is to young girls may be gaged by an article which appeared recently in the New York Globe which stated that, “Leading department stores and other retail establishments in this city have united in a movement to recruit employes from among high school graduates. The stores now employ a considerable number of cooperative high school students who are paired, working and studying alternate. weeks. They employ over a thousand other high school pupils as part time workers when the schools are not in session.”

So these young girls go into the stores and sell candy, flowers, shoes, hats, groceries or whatever it may be. They may work 10 hours a day, possibly more the hardest kind of work, for it means that they must be on their feet all day long, and be pleasant to all customers. They go home too tired to do anything but go to bed and try to forget their aching limbs, to sleep and get up for another day. In return they receive from $12 to $15 a week, provided they are working in a fairly large, reputable concern. There are shops of all kinds which pay more as well as plenty of shops that pay less. The average strikes between $12 and $15 which, when analyzed in a weekly budget, leaves no margin for recreation.

A girl who has been selling candy in one store, one of a chain in New York, for three years receives $14. She pays $4 for her room, a small hall bedroom with a gas jet which serves in turn as stove for her breakfast of coffee and toast and as a light. She gets her luncheon at the store, where a certain discount is allowed which enables her to procure it for 34 cents: 3 cents for coffee, 12 cents each for sandwiches, and 7 cents for a doughnut, a piece of pastry or cake for dessert. Dinners cannot be found under 75 cents, a dinner which includes the meat and vegetables necessary to the maintenance of efficiency and health. This budget amounts to $11.45 without any allowance for street car fare, laundry, clothes or recreation. Yet this girl is only one of numbers of others and counts herself mighty lucky not to be responsible for the support of anyone but herself. She allows herself the cheapest seat in a cheap motion picture house once in a fortnight for recreation.

She is a fortunate person when compared, for instance, to her retail clerk sister in Albany, three hours up the Hudson. All winter, during the legislative session, assemblymen and senators looked askance when those of us who were urging the passage of the Minimum Wage bill mentioned low wages for women. Surely it could not be possible that girls were earning so low as $7 a week any place in the state! No, you can scarcely expect us to believe that! Wages are high everywhere. Within one block of the State house and lining State street, stretching out in all directions from the foot of the marble steps leading up to the State Capitol, were retail shops where girls were employed for just such salaries. Of the 3,600 organized retail clerks in Albany, 3.000 are women. The majority of them receive between $7 and $9 a week. Carfare in Albany is 7 cents; room and board according to the lowest estimates $8 a week. Food in cheap restaurants where the girls must buy their luncheons, unless they can carry them, is quite as expensive as in similar places in New York. The girls ordinarily work between 9 and 10 hours a day. They have little time for recreation. Certainly they have no money for it.

They keep on going day after day, so long as they keep their health, because they must earn their own living. They dare not object for fear of losing that meager $7 or$8. Yet the Minimum Wage bill failed because “the danger of a minimum wage is that the minimum becomes the maximum.” Should a living wage of $16.50 be set, as in the District of Columbia, there is the danger that these girls would all be doomed to receive a maximum of $16.50 a week in place of their present munificent sum of $8. Pride in the Empire State saved the politicians from any humiliating admission that conditions here might be as bad as in other states which had adopted a minimum wage law as a remedy against underpayment by employers. So we are complacent. The cost of living mounts and the retail clerks in Albany and countless other towns in the state are worth less than $10 a week to their employers. Their services are cheap. Under-nourishment is fostering inefficiency. It goes rather hard with a retail clerk who loses a day or two from illness. Organization proceeds, though.

ARGUMENT AGAINST MINIMUM WAGE A FUTILE ONE

A prominent woman in Albany argued in public meetings against the Minimum Wage bill on the ground that a large department store owner had told her that a minimum wage would result in increased efficiency on the part of the clerks and expense for the manager, so that the result would be a cutting down of perhaps two hundred girls from the force. She approved in that she felt that this occurrence would help to solve the problem of domestic service in Albany. On hearing this remark, Mr. Sweeney, secretary for the Albany Retail Clerks’ Union, jumped to his feet and said. “If passing a Minimum Wage bill will drive. girls out of the stores and into the homes where they will receive better wages then they receive in the stores, I say, let’s have the minimum wage.” He was strongly supported by members of his own union, by girls from various industries who were in attendance, foremost among them a woman, 40 years old, who was earning $8 a week after 9 years in a factory at Albany. Her story was discredited as a fairy tale by all legislators who heard it, as something trumped up to arouse the sympathies of unintelligent persons. The heroine among the retail clerks in Albany is the girl who is earning $12 a week, after as many years’ service and for 12 hours a day.

Her story is repeated all over the United States. Similar instances can be found in the small shops on which we all depend when we forget until after normal closing hours. So the retail clerk is appealing for aid, aid from those who already have an 8-hour day, from those who want it for themselves, for better conditions and decent wages, with all that both will mean to her in making life not only livable, but a happy, normal expression of her real self.

So a real campaign has been started in New York City–a triple educational campaign wherein the employe, the employer and the consumer will learn the Golden Rule anew and try to apply it to the retail clerk.

How many of us will need to brush up our memories a bit before we win our arm bands as campaign workers in one of the three capacities?

Life and Labor was the monthly journal of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). The WTUL was founded by the American Federation of Labor, which it had a contentious relationship with, in 1903. Founded to encourage women to join the A.F. of L. and for the A.F. of L. to take organizing women seriously, along with labor and workplace issues, the WTUL was also instrumental in creating whatever alliance existed between the labor and suffrage movements. Begun near the peak of the WTUL’s influence in 1911, Life and Labor’s first editor was Alice Henry (1857-1943), an Australian-born feminist, journalist, and labor activists who emigrated to the United States in 1906 and became office secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League in Chicago. She later served as the WTUL’s field organizer and director of the education. Henry’s editorship was followed by Stella M. Franklin in 1915, Amy W. Fields in in 1916, and Margaret D. Robins until the closing of the journal in 1921. While never abandoning its early strike support and union organizing, the WTUL increasingly focused on regulation of workplaces and reform of labor law. The League’s close relationship with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America makes ‘Life and Labor’ the essential publication for students of that union, as well as for those interest in labor legislation, garment workers, suffrage, early 20th century immigrant workers, women workers, and many more topics covered and advocated by ‘Life and Labor.’

PDF of issue: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.31924069101214