Deadly to smoke, deadly to make. The idiocy of craft unionism leaves the majority of cigar-makers outside of the union. Matilda Rabinowitz on the strike of Pittsburgh’s stogie makers.

‘Cheap Smokes and Cheap Lives’ by Matilda Rabinowitz from Solidarity. Vol. 4 No. 30. August 2, 1913.

An obscure mass of workers, very little known, or heard of, in the labor world, are the stogie (cheap cigar) workers, 2,000 of whom are now on strike in the Pittsburg district.

The industry of making stogies is unique, and in this age of big business is practically in the hands of small manufacturers. The reason for this is that it takes very little capital to start a stogie factory. These “factories” are conducted mostly in tenements by erstwhile workers, and with the exception of the big trust factories where the hours are still longer and wages smaller, but where the “welfare” gag is used on the women and children, sanitation is a thing unknown.

There are very few men in the stogie industry, perhaps three percent; the rest are young girls and children, who work for a wage of from $2.00 to $6.00 a week. There they sit for ten and twelve hours a day in suffocating, tobacco-laden atmosphere, “stripping” and “bunching” and “rolling their lives into cheap smokes, of two-for-5 and three-for-5 stogies, or, as they are called by the workers “two-fors” and “three-fors.” The tobacco leaf, which is saturated before it is stripped, is very often, strung across the room in which the work is done, for drying, and the moisture is constantly dripping down on the heads of workers, while their feet are in continual dampness. “Tobacco heart,” which is a result of lack of oxygen for the blood, and tubercular throat are diseases very common among the stogie workers. It is a rare thing to see a healthy, blooming girl among them; all are anæmic looking, with sunken cheeks and flat chests, a fit commentary upon capitalist “cheap” production.

It is needless to say that such exploitation of women and children pays enormous profits to the big manufacturer who generally places his orders with the sweatshop keeper, who must economize on floor space, sanitation and work his help long hours in order to produce cheap for the market. Thus cheap smokes are made by cheapening and shortening the workers’ lives.

Struggling for years against such inhuman conditions, all efforts on the part of the stogie workers to organize, have been frustrated time and time again, not only by the tobacco trust, or the equally greedy smaller bosses association, but also by that well-known labor disintegrator, the A.F. of L.

More than 25 years ago, when capitalist enterprise first conceived the making of cheap stogies, and which, of course, meant cheap labor, the aristocrats of the International Cigarmakers’ Union, affiliated with the A.F. of L., speedily declared the stogie workers scabs in the trade, and coldly shut the door of the “union” in their face.

In those days stogies were made exclusively by hand, but later on the mould began to supplant the hand stogie, and this process meant still further reduction in wages. The erstwhile protestants against the methods of the A.F. of L. formed themselves into an Independent League, and in turn refused membership to the mould stogie makers.

The capitalists took advantage of Labor’s short-sightedness, and filled their factories with young girls and children, who are today the biggest and also the cheapest factor in the tobacco industry.

The stogie industry is practically confined to the three states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, with Pittsburg as the leading center, where about 10,000 are employed in the industry. Those now out on strike in Pittsburg comprise all the small shops which are still holding out against the tobacco trust.

These workers are organized in the I.W.W. and are making big efforts to carry on agitation among the workers of the trust-owned shops. These efforts, however, are for the present at least counteracted by the “bread and circus” schemes of the managers of the factories. They give the girls picnics and dances, take them out for automobile rides, and in many cases give them money to stay away from the “trouble-making I.W.W.” At the same time, side by side Jews and negroes are fighting a common enemy, unmindful of racial and religious differences, and looking only to the betterment of their economic conditions.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1913/v04n30-w186-aug-02-1913-solidarity.pdf