Women retail worker not making enough to eat and pay the rent is almost a law of capitalist accumulation. Theresa Malkiel on the Women’s Trade Union League campaign to lift the ‘salesgirls’ of New York City out of their abject condition.
‘W.T.U.L. to Organize Salesgirls’ by Theresa Malkiel from The New York Daily Call. Vol. 3 No. 353. December 19, 1910.
Will Help Department Store Workers Help Themselves.
PLAN CAMPAIGN
Women Unionists Will Point Out Necessity of Their Sticking Together.
The advice to shop early, given by every newspaper in the city, is a timely one and should be heeded by radical, and conservative alike.
For amid the season of general gin giving, when the department stores reap the greatest harvest an army of women and children is kept at work from fourteen to eighteen hours daily, with nothing extra for the increased hours of labor, except aching heads, swollen feet and a feeling of utter exhaustion.
The average pay given for this hard! toil in our department stores to the girl behind the counter ranges between $5 and $6. True that in some departments, like that of cloaks and suits, it rises to $10 or $12, but in others it falls as low as $2.50 weekly. But the sum agreed to is not always that received by the salesgirl. Scarcely a week passes that she is not fined for tardiness an hour’s wages for every five minutes, no matter whether there was a delay in the traffic or what else happened; 10 cents for every missing locker key: 5 cents for every spoilt pad, and 25 cents for every stolen rubber stamp, which the girls frequently snatch from each other. These sums often amount to 50 cents or $1 a week. On the remainder the girl is often expected to live, dress neatly and present a generally prosperous appearance.
How a lone, honest girl can exist on such a wage is made clear in a series of articles on “The Working Girl’s Budget,” written for McClure’s Magazine by Edith Wyatt. Following are a few items given by her:
“Her weekly budget was: Lodging. $1 (occupying a room with two other girls); luncheons, $2.05; insurance, 21 cents; clothing, contributions to church, occasional carfares and other expenses, 2.79; total, $6.”
Just Enough to Exist.
This is just what the girl was paid by the store for which she had worked for six years. “Her outlay in health during these years,” says Miss Wyatt, “has been extreme. She was worn, thin, wrinkled, although she was still in what should have been the prime of life.”
All that the girl allowed herself to spend for a good time was $1 per year, but in spite of her great economy and lack of proper food she was to become destitute the hour she was to lose her position.
Of another salesgirl whose wages were only $4 per week, Miss Wyatt has the following account: “She paid 6 cents a night in a dormitory of a charitable home for working girls: she ate no breakfast, her lunch consisted of coffee and rolls, which cost 10 cents; her dinner at night was a repetition of coffee and rolls for 10 cents; she had no convenient place for doing her laundry, and paid 21 cents a week to have it done. Her regular weekly expenditure was as follows: Lodging, 42 cents; board, $1.40; laundry 21 cents: clothing and all other expenses, $1.97: total, $4.”
If we were to cite a dozen more cases, the total would be the same–every one of the salesgirls just exist from hand to mouth, often on starvation rations, though they spend the most of their waking hours amid a; gorgeous display of wealth, their weary feet often bend from exhaustion and hunger. And yet, so demoralizing has been the effect of constant association with their lady customers, that these unfortunate wage slaves have come to look upon themselves as something better than the average wage earning woman, to consider their trade, in spite of its shortcomings, a step forward on the social ladder, a more genteel occupation than the monotonous drudgery of factory life.
Her Real Condition.
The salesgirl does not realize that her condition is akin to that of her sister in the shop, mill and factory; like the latter she, too, is greatly underpaid and much overworked. And still, while going under the tide of adversities, the salesgirl never recognizes her kinship to the other working woman, the absolute necessity of uniting with them for the purpose of bettering their common condition.
This, perhaps, because no effort has ever been made to arouse her from her false delusions.
The many efforts made by individuals and various societies to ameliorate the condition of the thousands of women employed in the department stores have always been made without the workers’ knowledge, without their active co-operation.
And now, after most of the attempts have practically failed, the Women’s Trade Union League is about to undertake the Herculean task of organizing this great army of salesgirls into a bona fide trade union.
An undertaking, perhaps, greater and harder than anything yet attempted by the league, but one worth the effort.
This is not a new-fangled idea–the organization of the department store workers, in our own department stores the carpenters, mechanics and electricians are all union men, receiving a wage three times as large and more, than that received by the clerks, and with only an eight-hour work day.
They Do It in Denver.
In Denver and many other Western cities the Retail Clerks Association has become a power. The women as well as the men are good standing members of their organization and command a minimum wage of $9 per week.
In formulating its plan for the coming campaign, the league is fully i aware of the many obstacles in its way. But, on the other hand, the very fact that the most of the salesgirls have left some other occupation and entered the department stores may help the league in the long run.
Their spirit of unrest, their desire for advancement, comes from the same roots as the spirit which has impelled man from time immemorial to unite his forces with his fellow men in order to better his condition. The salesgirls possess that that very spirit, but unfortunately for them it has been directed in the wrong channels. For the present the work of the league will consist in remolding their natural desire for advancement, in pointing out to them that individually they are absolutely helpless.
The league can and will succeed, for it has great faith in the timeliness of its undertaking.
The New York Call was the first English-language Socialist daily paper in New York City and the second in the US after the Chicago Daily Socialist. The paper was the center of the Socialist Party and under the influence of Morris Hillquit, Charles Ervin, Julius Gerber, and William Butscher. The paper was opposed to World War One, and, unsurprising given the era’s fluidity, ambivalent on the Russian Revolution even after the expulsion of the SP’s Left Wing. The paper is an invaluable resource for information on the city’s workers movement and history and one of the most important papers in the history of US socialism. The paper ran from 1908 until 1923.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-new-york-call/1910/101219-newyorkcall-v03n353.pdf
