Super-exploitation in the service industry.

‘Millionaire Schrafft Restaurant Chain Enslaves Thousands of Girls at $5 a Week’ by Another Schrafft Slave from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 116. July 22, 1929.

MAKE ENORMOUS PROFITS FROM SLAVES SWEAT

Workers Pay Double for Uniforms

I think it is necessary for the workers who read the Daily Worker to know about conditions in the Schrafft chain of restaurants in New York City.

Hundreds of working girls begin to work anew each day in the kitchens and on the counters of these slave pens as cooks, bakers, salad girls, dishwashers, waitresses, etc. They slave for the huge profits of the company. Here is where the female and male workers are exploited most terribly.

$15 a Week.

The wages are as low as possible. Most girls work here for $15 a week. Cooks, who stand over hot stoves all day with hardly a breath of air slave for $15 a week. The highest a worker can make in Schrafft’s is $21 a week.

The workers have to sacrifice every ounce of energy they have for the bosses’ profits without getting a decent wage. The workers cannot stand the slavery in the Schrafft stores very long, and are forced to soon quit. Girls come and go. That does not help much, the company finds plenty of other girls.

“Cheap Labor”.

The conditions of the Schrafft slaves are not improved by this. The only way to better the conditions is organize. The Schrafft Co. hires mostly girls because they can pay them very low wages. They are called by the bosses “cheap labor.”

Profits on Uniforms.

To make their enormous profits, the Schrafft bosses find yet other ways to exploit the workers. Each worker is forced to buy a complete uniform from the company. For an ordinary smock you have to pay $1.75. Caps are 35 cents.

Both of these articles are worth far less than these prices which the company soaks the workers for them, and the firm makes 100 per cent profits on them. We have found that the same clothes could be bought elsewhere for 75 cents for the smock, and 19 cents for the cap.

More Profits.

Very often it happens that these uniforms are sold by the company twice. Girls who are there only two or three days leave their working clothes in the locker. The company takes them after a week or so, cleans them a little, and then re-sells them as new. Again profits for the company. Under the terrific speedup the poor girls have to work a whole day for these clothes-a day of nine long hours.

Rotten Meals.

Schrafft’s is so “generous” as to give the employees two meals. One is lunch, which costs 95 cents. The workers are charged the same for this meal as the customers, who are mostly petty-bourgeoisie, and can afford this price, which the workers cannot.

The other meal consists of a sandwich and some coffee. The workers must pay the same price the richer customers pay.

What eats do the workers get? Never any freshly cooked food. We get only what is left from the day before. Often there is served us such a terrible mixture of leftovers that you lose your appetite even to look at it. In the cold winter they don’t give us any thing warm, but only cold salad left over from the day before. This gives an idea of our slavery in Schraffts.

I was glad to notice another Schrafft slave recently who recently wrote worker correspondence for the Daily Worker. I agree with her–we must organize into the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, which is at present leading the cafeteria workers’ strike.

ANOTHER SCHRAFFT SLAVE.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n116-NY-jul-22-1929-DW-LOC.pdf