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LABOR AND SILK
Grown Old "In the Silk''
LABOR
AND SILK
By
GRACE HUTCHINS
With Drawings by
ESTHER SHEMITZ
NEW YORK
INTERNATIONAL
PUBLISHERS
LABOR AND INDUSTRY SERIES
Labor and Silk
By Grace Hutchins
Labor and Automobiles
By Robert W. Dunn
Labor and Coal
By Anna Rochester
{In preparation)
Other volumes are planned on Textiles,
Steel, Lumber, Oil, Meat-packing, Trans-
portation, Agriculture, etc.
/7?r^-
Copyright, 1929, by
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO., INC.
Printed in the U. S. A.
This book is composed and printed by union labor.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface to Labor and Industry Series ... 7
Author's Preface 9
CHAPTER
I. The Beginning of Silk 11
II. The Silk Industry ....... 18
III. Profits 37
IV. Mergers 55
V. Rayon 63
VI. Speed-up 82
VII. Pay Envelopes 99
VIII. Nightmares 114
IX. A Hundred Years of Class Struggle . . 129
X. The Silk Workers' Future 161
Appendices 178
Bibliography 187
Index 190
Illustrations
Grown Old "In the Silk" 2
Monthly Variations in Silk Machinery Activity . . 23
International Connections in the Rayon Industry . 68
The Warper 86
Silk Towns ...» 105
The Enterer 128
The Weaver 160
PREFACE TO LABOR AND INDUSTRY SERIES
This is one volume in a series of industrial studies beings
prepared by the Labor Research Association, an organization
devoted to the gathering and interpretation of economic ma-
terial for the labor movement.
The aim of this series is to present a picture of the de-
velopment of the important American industries in relation
to the workers employed in them. Other books dealing with
American industries have been written from the viewpoint
of the employer, the personnel manager and the technical
expert. But they have all been interested in perpetuating
the present system of exploitation and in piling up more prof-
its for powerful corporations.
The present series gives primary emphasis to the workers
and their problems. What does the future hold for the
workers in these industries under capitalism? What is the
trend of production? What are the wages, hours, and con-
ditions of employment, and how do these compare with those
in other industries? What is the extent of unemployment
and the job insecurity of the workers? What profits are
the companies making ? What mergers are being carried out ?
How are the corporations organized to protect their interests
as opposed to those of labor ? To what extent are the work-
ers organized — in company unions, in real labor unions?
How far has the "welfare" and "enlightened industrial re-
lations" propaganda of the employers succeeded ? What are
the prospects of effective unionization? These are a few of
the questions we shall attempt to answer in this series of
labor studies.
Written from an avowedly labor point of view, these
books will emphasize not only the specific grievances and
hardships of the workers in a given industry. They will
also attempt to make clear to the worker-reader the char-
7
8 PREFACE
acter of the forces operating in all American industry against
the development of strong, militant unions and for the main-
tenance of the capitalist system.
It is hoped that these studies may serve as useful manuals
for those who seek to put an end to the present conditions,
and those who take seriously the frequently voiced phrase:
Organize the Unorganized.
Besides presenting graphic pictures of the workers' lives
and struggles in particular industries, these volumes will also
suggest concrete programs of action to meet the offensives
of the corporations.
To those workers who desire a brief and simple analysis
of the complicated structure of American industry, who wish
to know the conditions that must be overcome before workers
in America can be organized into a powerful and victorious
labor movement, these books are dedicated.
Labor Research Association.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
This book describes the silk industry, the capitalists who
profit from it, and the workers who transform the delicate
threads into fabrics. The silk industry made such an ad-
vance during the war and the years following that the value
of products in 1925 was three times what it was in 1914.
While cotton, wool and knit goods were losing ground or
making only slight gains, silk manufacturing continued a
steady rise.
The extraordinary growth of the rayon industry is one
of the marvels of the twentieth century. Probably no other
enterprise in recent industrial history has seen such rapid
development in such a short time. Rayon now enters into
almost every kind of cloth that is made.
Yet while the silk and rayon industry was reporting its
success in millions and billions of dollars, silk workers were
striking for an increase in pay of one cent a yard woven.
Pater son, New Jersey, scene of historic strikes of silk work-
ers, saw another strike during the latter half of 1928. Though
the eight-hour day was supposedly won in this silk city ten
years ago, a large number of mills had slipped over on to a
longer day of nine, ten, eleven, twelve and even thirteen
hours.
Although silk workers have struggled for better condi-
tions ever since the industry began in the United States,
ninety years ago, no book has ever been written to explain
their situation and their demands. Many volumes have been
published to set forth the problems of silk production, but
none as yet on the industry from the viewpoint of the work-
ers. That is the reason for the present book. Silk workers
— and others — will find in it the story of a growing industry,
changing technically and financially, the story of working
conditions *'in the silk" and of long struggles for better con-
9
10 AUTHOR'S PREFACE
ditions, of workers' demands, union programs and the pros-
pects of organization.
Since the 1924 strike of silk workers in Paterson, the
writer has been gathering the material for this volume. So
many workers and other friends have helped in its prepara-
tion that it is not possible to mention them by name. A
year's traveling in Japan, China, India, Western Europe and
Soviet Russia, and visits to many foreign textile mills, made
vivid certain aspects of the silk industry in the East and in
the West. Conditions of work in capitalist countries and in
the Soviet Republic could only be most briefly compared in
a book of this size. The emphasis is on the silk industry
in the United States, on conditions of silk workers here, and
on the problems facing those workers.
For descriptions in the chapters on working conditions the
author is indebted to a great many members of the National
Textile Workers' Union and the Associated Silk Workers
of America, and to other rank and file workers not only in
Paterson, but in Passaic, N. J., New Bedford, Mass., Easton,
Allentown, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Among those
who patiently answered questions and told of their experi-
ences were Anna Burlak, Ellen Dawson, William De Mott,
Tom and Anna Moore, Karl Mueller, and Martin Russak.
Esther Shemitz was able to draw the pictures of silk work-
ers at the machines in a Paterson mill. She wishes to thank
the workers of this mill who allowed her to watch them at
the looms and frames.
The author wishes to thank all those who have painstak-
ingly read the manuscript, offered suggestions and con-
tributed most generously of their time, especially fellow
members of the Labor Research Association.
To all these — silk workers and others — who have been
collaborators, the writer extends deep appreciation. They
have made this study possible.
Grace Hutchins.
February, 1929.
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING OF SILK
The "Silk Special" has right of way over all fast express
trains across the American continent from Vancouver or
Seattle to New York. Why ? Because for the past ten years
raw silk has been always either first or second in value among
American imports and because a day's delay in delivery of a
shipment may mean thousands of dollars' loss to the trade.
This rushing of raw silk across the Pacific by the fastest
steamers from Japan and China and by the fastest express
trains to New York marks the new day in this industry. For
more than four thousand years silk stood for a luxury to be
enjoyed only by the rich and powerful in every land. From
the days of the Chinese Empress, Si Ling-Chi, who in 2602
B.C. learned how to reel silk thread and make garments, the
emperors, kings, lords, princes, presidents, capitalists and
their wives have expected to wear silk and use it for adorn-
ment.
So precious was the secret of silk culture that romantic
stories were told from one generation to another to account
for the knowledge passing from East to West. According
to one legend, a princess coming from China to India, to be
married, concealed the seeds of the mulberry and the eggs of
silk worms in her headdress. Another story tells of two
monks in the early Christian era who returned to the West
carrying mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs in the hollow of
their bamboo canes.^
Down through the centuries, kings and princes encouraged
1 Encyclopedia Britannica, "Silk."
II
12 LABOR AND SILK
sericulture and the hand weaving of gorgeous silks and satins.
With the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century,
came the steam power looms and the beginning of mass pro-
duction, not only of cotton and woolen goods but of silk
manufactures. Still for a hundred years more silk garments
were counted as a luxury and worn only by the ruling class.
In those days women saved for months to buy one black
silk dress to be kept for state occasions and to last the better
part of a lifetime.
Then suddenly came the cheapening of silk fabrics. Mass
production spread. The use of a cotton warp with the silk
weft or filling in mixed goods made a cheaper material. Then
came rayon to be widely used, especially in mixed goods. A
silk dress, perhaps half silk and half something else, costs
less now than a good gingham cost some years ago. Every
one is wearing "silk." Women's hosiery at one dollar a pair
may last only through four washings, but it looks like silk.
The hat band, half of cotton, may shrink when the hat gets
wet, but at least it looks like silk. The striped necktie shines
with a subdued luster, and the purchaser is just as well
pleased as if it were all of silk. What part rayon plays in
this new silk world is told in the chapter on Rayon.
This democratizing of silk has brought such increased de-
mand for the real silk threads, whether to put with cotton
or rayon thread, or to weave as real silk, that American con-
sumption of raw silk has increased by leaps and bounds in
the last few years. Since 1914, American demand for raw
silk has increased by 200 per cent, from 24 milHon pounds
yearly average (1910 to 1914) to 74 million pounds in the
year 1926-27, valued at $412,465,683.
Even before the war Japan and China supplied more than
half the raw silk in the world and nine-tenths of the raw
silk used in the United States. Silk growers of Japan have
kept pace with American demand. Attempts at silk culture
in the United States were never a success. It was tried in
THE BEGINNING OF SILK 13
colonial times and again, after the Revolution of 1776, in the
southern states. It is tried on a small scale now in southern
California. But silk manufacturers find it cheaper to import
raw silk. Japan is America's chief source of supply. The
United States is Japan's chief market. American mills now
consume about 75 per cent of the world's production of raw
silk. From Japan they purchase 84 per cent of their supply,
from China 15 per cent, and only i per cent from other
countries.
In Oriental Silk Filatures
Hands of Japanese and Chinese girls and children have
plunged silkworm cocoons in practically boiling water before
unwinding the delicate threads. This process kills the moth
which would otherwise escape by breaking through the co-
coon fiber. The writer has seen an overseer standing over
little children in a silk filature in China, to make them put
their hands down into the steaming water with the valuable
cocoons. Hands are cheap in the East.
Only workers who handle raw silk can appreciate the ex-
treme fineness of the thread. One pound of medium-fine
reeled silk (classified as 28-30 denier) is about 85 miles long.
The finest grade (8-10 denier) is like a spider web and a
single pound would stretch 280 miles. The writer saw the
unpacking of a raw silk bale in an American mill and heard
the foreman express his wonder how human hands could
turn the fine threads into such even hanks.
A reeling girl in Japan earns from 22 to 35 cents a day.
The big filatures provide company houses for living quarters
where the girls are almost prisoners. Food is largely rice
and barley boiled together, bean soup, and a very limited
amount of vegetables, fish or meat for luncheon and supper.
A Japanese silk authority confesses:^
^ Silk, December, 1927. Article by Yoshio Kimura.
14 LABOR AND SILK
Other labor conditions are not very agreeable. At present the
reeling girls work ii hours net each day. They usually start
jwork at 6 o'clock in the morning and finish at 6 o'clock in the
evening, with an intermission of half an hour for luncheon and
15 minutes each in the morning and in the afternoon for recrea-
tion. They are kept busy all the time they are at work. Reel-
ing girls at work appear like so many machines. Their eyes are
riveted on the cocoons being unwound, and their nimble fingers
are always attending to any mishap that may interfere with the
production of even-sized, defect-free raw silk.
It takes a reeling girl 150 days to produce one bale (133^^
pounds) of raw silk. A year's work of one girl produces at
the most 2j4 bales. All the work is done by hand. Labor
is so cheap in the East that few companies have tried to put
machinery in the filatures, though a machine has been in-
vented to do what human hands now do in boiling water.
A strike of Japanese silk workers against intolerable con-
ditions in a big filature started in the late summer of 1927.
The girls struck for a wage of 30 cents a day, better food,
better sanitation, and freedom to join the union.
In Chinese filatures, the workers have longer hours and
lower wages than in Japan. The up-to-date factories have a
working day of 12 to 14 hours. More primitive mills have
longer hours but their speed-up is not so intense. Night
work is common in all Chinese mills, whether British, Japan-
ese or Chinese owned.
The writer has been in Chinese filatures and remembers
the heavy humid air. The visitor immediately has a frantic
desire to get out of the unventilated rooms. The small dirty
windows are all closed. Little children, looking not more
than 6 years old, work near their mothers. All the women
are white-faced and emaciated.
For organizing and protesting against these conditions,
Chinese labor union members during these last two years
have been burned and mutilated, shot down and beheaded by
the police acting for and at the behest of foreign employers.
THE BEGINNING OF SILK 15
The heads of striking textile workers have been exhibited
on poles outside the mills. During the summer of 1927, a
strike of 55,000 silk workers in Shanghai was broken by the
commander of the Chinese garrison who shot into the ranks
of girl strikers. The Silk Spinners' Union had refused to
appeal to the striking workers to return to work.^
Dealing in Raw Silk
Silk from Japan and China and rubber from Singapore
make up the largest part of America's increasing import trade
across the Pacific. Ships of the Dollar Line, owned by
Robert Dollar, appropriately represent the United States in
the East with a big white $ sign on their black funnels.
Japanese steamship lines, the American Mail Line and the
Canadian Pacific Railroad share with the Dollar Line the
profits of carrying rubber and silk.
Between Japanese silk filatures and American throwing
mills stand also great Japanese banking houses and the silk
brokers, American and Japanese, with their new National
Raw Silk Exchange.
Mitsui, the J. P. Morgan of Japan, owns banks, factories,
shipping lines, mines and a vast raw silk importing and ex-
porting business. Two families in Japan, Mitsui and Mitsu-
bishi, are financial oligarchs comparable to the Morgan-
Kuhn-Loeb-Rockefeller oligarchy in this country. Mitsui,
Mitsubishi and their subsidiaries control more than 50 per
cent of the empire's foreign trade. They have power to con-
trol cabinets and so the government itself.
The New York branch of Mitsui and Company, importers
of raw silk, has its own cable quotations from Japan. This
firm can afford to hold aloof from the new Raw Silk Ex-
change which started business in September, 1928. But 116
3 For a fuller account of the labor struggles during this period see
Whither China? by Scott Nearing.
16 LABOR AND SILK
other silk companies, concerned in prices of raw silk, each
paid $2,500 for a seat in the new exchange. Before it be-
gan to function, one of the seats had already been sold again
for $5,500, netting its original holder, P. P. Belford, $3,000.
Other seats have sold for as high as $7,000.
This independent move of silk companies annoyed mem-
bers of the Cotton Exchange. The older Exchange, on an
understanding with Charles Cheney and some other leading
silk manufacturers, had sent a man to Japan to report on
prospects for their dealing in silk futures. While he was
gone, other silk companies got busy and formed their own
exchange. The Cotton Exchange is interested in raw silk,
because the cotton industry is using much silk. The silk
industry is using much cotton. Both are using much rayon.
But the old fences still supposedly enclose the preserves of
each.
Prices of raw silk vary so much that speculation can run
fast and free. Brokers can buy when prices are low, hold
the bales and sell when prices go up. Raw silk that soared
to $9.60 a pound in 19 19 was only $5 a pound in December,
1927. Daily quotations of Japanese raw silk prices are given
in the textile trade paper, Daily News Record.
Larger silk companies do their own importing and pay
through the foreign branch of a banking house. Four days
are allowed for the transaction by cable. Smaller concerns
are in every way at a disadvantage in this game of raw silk
buying. They cannot afford the expensive overhead required
to do their own importing and must depend on the middle-
men, who of course make a profit between Japanese pro-
ducing and American consuming mills. There is often un-
certainty about the exact weight of the silk, amount of
moisture content, etc. The manufacturer is usually paying
for at least 2 per cent more in weight of silk than he actually
receives. All these uncertainties increase the chances for
speculation.
THE BEGINNING OF SILK IT
Banking houses in Japan and America, steamship com-
panies, railroads, brokers, and silk companies in America all
profit by the low pay and miserable condition of girl slaves
in Japanese and Chinese silk filatures.
CHAPTER II
THE SILK INDUSTRY
Over 1,100,000 wage-earners are employed in American
textile mills — ^more than in any other manufacturing in-
dustry. Of all important manufacturing industries except
tobacco products, textile mills pay the lowest wages. The
average yearly earnings of textile workers, computed from
the latest government figures, are only $960.42. This means
a weekly average of only $18.46 for every week in the year.
Textile mill products are worth $5,342,617,000.^ Only
four of the 16 groups of manufacturing industries exceed
textile mills in the value of their products : the food group,
iron and steel industries, the chemicals group, and transpor-
tation equipment.
One in every eight of the 1,110,209 textile workers is "in
the silk." These 132,509 men, women and children are silk
workers. This means that they are employed by silk manu-
facturers classified by the census as
(i) Those engaged primarily in the manufacture of silk
fabrics and other finished silk products, not including knit fabrics,
hosiery and other knit goods made of silk; (2) those engaged
primarily in the manufacture of silk yarn.^
Besides these 132,509 who are called silk workers, an un-
counted number of the 468,352 workers in cotton manu-
factures are winding and weaving silk and rayon mixtures.
Many of the 186,668 hosiery and other knit goods workers
1 U. S. Bureau of the Census. Census of Manufactures, 1925, p. 213.
2 Ibid., p. 303.
18
THE SILK INDUSTRY 19
are using silk yarns thrown in American silk mills and rayon
yarns made in rayon plants. Of the 70,749 workers who are
"dyeing and finishing textiles/' a large number are dyeing
silk yarn or dyeing and finishing silk fabrics in the piece.
Some twenty-six thousand rayon workers are making rayon
yarn.
Silk Weighting
All that shimmers is not silk. The increased use of rayon
yarn by itself and in combination with silk and cotton warps,
is described in this chapter and in later sections of the book.
How one large company advertised as real silk what was not
silk and yet escaped the regulation of the Federal Trade
Commission is told in the chapter on profits of silk companies.
Another method of deceiving the purchaser as to the
amount and weight of real silk used in the material is called
weighting. Methods of weighting silk to make it heavier are
widely used. One of these processes of weighting silk in a
solution of tin or other mineral substance is sometimes called
"dynamiting." When tin is used to excess the silk soon
crumbles and cracks at the edges and the folds. The pur-
chaser wonders why the silk dress does not last. Often from
a fourth to a third of the weight of the silk consists of lead,
tin or zinc, which considerably shortens the life and durability
of the goods.
Overweighting of silk is condemned by the Federal
Trade Commission and by the United States Bureau of
Standards. In spite of efforts to regulate and limit the
amount of weighting to a certain percentage, the practice of
excess weighting continues and usually only the smaller silk
companies are fined in the cases that come before the com-
mission.
Overdevelopment
American mills are using three times as much raw silk as
they were using in 1914. It is not surprising, therefore, that
20 LABOR AND SILK
silk mills reported in 1925 an installed horsepower nearly
twice that of 1914. Other textiles had expanded also, but
neither cotton goods mills nor knitting mills showed anything
like so great a percentage of increase in equipment.
Percentage Increase from 1914 to 192$
In Wage-Earners In Horse Power
Silk Mills 22.5 90.8
Cotton Mills 17.3 43.0
Knitting Mills 24.0 43.7
From 1923 to 1925, cotton goods and knit goods had fal-
len behind in number of wage-earners and in value of output.
But silk mills were still gaining.
Percentage Increase or Decrease from
1923 to 1925
In Wage- In Horse In Value of
Earners Power Product
Silk Mills 5.8 3.2 6.3
Cotton Mills — 5.6 3.9 — 9.8
Knitting Mills — 3-9 — 3-8 — 4-5
To-day leading silk capitalists are talking about excess
capacity and overproduction. Charles M. Schwab, chair-
man of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, made a statement
recently on the situation in the steel industry. Paolino Gerli,
raw silk merchant and president of the National Raw Silk
Exchange, quotes Charles Schwab's statement but substitutes
the word "silk" for the word "steel." He says :
Silk manufacturers have only themselves to blame for the low
prices prevailing. In the first place they have been putting mil-
lions of dollars into new construction and equipment for the past
10 years: much of this new capacity is not needed, for to-day
the capacity of the silk industry is at least 25 per cent in ex-
cess of average annual consumption requirements. Producers
THE SILK INDUSTRY 21
undercut each other to keep their plants going- and their costs
down; there doesn't seem to be any cooperation in the matter
of prices.
Silk workers know only too well that many frames and
looms are idle. The Silk Association figures published by
the U. S. Department of Commerce show the following per-
centages of active silk machinery in relation to total equip-
ment:
Silk Machinery Activity
Per cent of active hours to full time total
Broad Narrow Spinning
Looms Looms Spindles
1925 88.7 59-5 97.9
1926 84.8 62.3 88.5
1927 86.5 56.0 89.6
Apart from narrow looms for ribbons, no longer so much
in style, silk machinery is averaging 88 per cent of capacity.
Excess capacity is also commonly given by comparing idle
machines with active machines. Such a comparison can be
made from these same Silk Association figures. On this other
basis, in 1927 the excess capacity was over 15 per cent for
broad looms and over 11 per cent for spinning spindles. But
all these figures are based on reports from only half the
industry. The small mills which do not report to the Silk
Association would show much greater idleness and irregu-
larity.
Irregularity
Textile manufacturers themselves come out periodically
with statements on overproduction. Such a statement made
in March, 1928, by B. Edmund David, large manufacturer,
depicts the situation in the silk :
22 LABOR AND SILK
Consumption has been enormous. Stimulated by low prices
and by the big values which were offered, the public responded
liberally. . . . The vogue for 54-inch goods caused an addition
of several thousand looms to the manufacturing facilities of the
country. . . . Many manufacturers adopted the two-shift sys-
tem, running their looms day and night, in an effort to reduce
overhead and thereby satisfy the pressure for always lower
prices. When that was done — when production was increased
within a short time nearly 50 per cent — we crossed the line and
began to stock the market with indigestible quantities which have
caused many a nightmare to those engaged in our industry since.
In the city of Paterson, there are to-day hundreds of small
mills running from 10 to 150 looms each, probably a total of
15,000 looms. There was a lull there during the fall of 1927.
Disaster overtook many of them. The market was supplied to
the saturation point and mills simply could not continue at the
same rate of production. To-day after a few months, all that
seems to be forgotten. There is a mad rush to grind out as
much merchandise as possible. Looms are run 24 hours a day
on two or three shifts. Some mills, running one shift only, work
12 to 14 hours a day.
But Paterson is not the only sinner. In Pennsylvania, New
England, the South, looms which were forced into idleness last
year are starting up. Production at the present moment is
probably the largest the silk industry has ever seen. . . .
Statements and charts on machinery activity reveal the
irregularity of production in silk mills not only from year to
year but vi^ithin the year. The chart on page 2^ shows the
little seasonal peaks in the line of activity.
Frames and looms standing idle at any time mean jobless
workers. Of the workers employed in the silk in the busiest
month of 192 1, 39,730 or three in every ten had been laid
oflF in the slowest month. In the good year, 1925, over 15,000
or one in every nine had been laid off in the dullest month.
Such irregularity of production is one of the basic evils in
the textile industries and in all industries under capitalism.
The "business cycle" of capitalist society with its ups and
downs of speed-up and overproduction followed by depres-
THE SILK INDUSTRY
23
Monthly Variations in Silk Machinery Activity
The dotted line shows changing percentages of active hours to full
time total for broad silk looms. The solid line shows the percentages
for silk spinning spindles. These are based on Silk Association figures.
24 LABOR AND SILK
sion and unemployment is acknowledged by a liberal
economist, Harold G. Moulton, to be largely due to the profit-
making motive. Here is his conclusion on the subject :
The forces which are at work in producing this ebb and flow
of business activity are embodied in the very warp and woof of
the modern industrial and financial structure. It may be con-
cluded therefore that the ebb and flow of business prosperity will
continue so long as the present industrial and financial structure
of society, with its profit-making motivation, is maintained . . .
undoubtedly business fluctuations are most pronounced under the
conditions that prevail in a profit-making and credit society.
*' Cockroaches" and Price-Cutting
''Jhere's looms here."
A visiting weaver from Passaic, who knows all too well
the thunder of looms, passes a house in Paterson with no out-
ward sign of factory work. The tell-tale noise of a loom
marks the house as one of these little family units where
father, mother and children work together on a frame or two
and a loom or two. They buy a second-hand loom for $250,
on time payments, and perhaps lose it in the end for failure
to meet the payments. They work all hours, defying union
rules on hours and overtime, and state laws on sanitation.
They sell the goods at any price to pay for the raw materials
and a meager living. They know nothing of cost accounting,
overhead charges, depreciation, or anything but a hand-to-
mouth buying and selling of what the family can weave.
These and other shops only a little larger are the ''cock-
roaches" of Paterson.
Price-cutting is such a recognized evil in Paterson that all
silk technical authorities take a hand in suggesting remedies.
One suggests as a solution mergers of the larger silk plants.
But another answers :
THE SILK INDUSTRY 25
This would undoubtedly mean a source of great economy to
the chosen few, but such a step would have little effect, if any,
in stemming the tide of overproduced haphazard fabrics poured
into the market by the thousand outside mills. It would not
check the ruthless practice of price-cutting by the innumerable
short-sighted and smaller units, which weave at random with no
definite estimation of market requirements or regard for true
values.
The same writer thinks a Paterson Silk Exchange could
control buying and selling enough to bring the "cockroaches"
into line or freeze them out.
A writer in the American Bankers' Association Journal
blames not only the little family units but all weakly capital-
ized manufacturers for bringing down prices of silk goods.
Since these small concerns do not have to pay the raw silk
brokers for 60 days (90 days are still allowed by some
brokers) they buy more than they could otherwise afford.
The small firms sell their manufactured silk at any price to
get ready funds and thus underbid the larger firms who want
to stabilize prices. Then comes a break in prices which up-
sets the calculations of other manufacturers.
The official census does not show the exact number of
small silk shops in Paterson, for those with a yearly product
valued at less than $5,000 are not recorded. However, there
were, according to the census of 1925, 691 silk establish-
ments in Paterson producing at least $5,000 worth a year.
The number of Paterson establishments increased 13 per
cent between 1923 and 1925 although the number of silk
workers in Paterson decreased 3 per cent during the same
period.
Increasing Concentration
Paterson is still "the silk city'* among industrial cities in
the United States. But Paterson now employs only 16,368
26 LABOR AND SILK
in the silk, or one-eighth of those classified as strictly silk
workers. It produces only about 14 per cent of the total
value of silk products although it has 42 per cent of all the
silk shops in the country.
But New Jersey has long since yielded to Pennsylvania as
the leading silk state. Already in 1919 the value added by
manufacture in Pennsylvania silk mills was 35 per cent of
the total in American silk mills while New Jersey's share
was 30 per cent. In 1925, Pennsylvania's share had risen
to 41 per cent while New Jersey's share had fallen to 24 per
cent. These figures do not tell the whole story of the impor-
tance of Pennsylvania silk, for the "value added" in other
states included millions of dollars paid for contract work.
Pennsylvania throwing mills handled yy per cent of the
26,402,000 pounds of raw silk thrown under contract.
This steady shift to Pennsylvania centers has accompanied
an increasing concentration in large plants. The 713 small
shops (mostly in Pater son) which employ on the average
less than 25 wage-earners, turned out in 1925 less than four
per cent of the silk mill products of the country. From big
enterprises, each producing $1,000,000 worth or more a year,
came nearly two-thirds of the total. In the four years from
1 92 1 to 1925 these big enterprises increased their strength
while smaller enterprises declined.^
Silk Industry
Big enterprises. 126 out of 1,565 i,e., S%
Employing 55403 workers out of 121,378 i.e., 46%
Producing $318,103,000 out of 1583,419,000 i.e., 54%
1925
Big enterprises. 179 out of 1,659 f ^^ 10.7%
Employing 65,931 workers out of 132,509 ^■^; 49-7%
Producing $505,677,000 out of $808,979,000 i.e., 62.5%
« Based on U. S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1925.
THE SILK INDUSTRY 27
These larger concerns turning out five-eighths of all the
production of all the silk enterprises, employ half the silk
workers in the United States.
A similar tendency shows up in the cotton goods industry
where, as we have noted, much silk is used in fine goods
mixtures.
Cotton Goods Industry
1921
Big enterprises. 344 out of 1,527 i.e., 22.^%
Employing 285,079 workers out of 425,817 i.e., 66.g%
Producing $922,111,000 out of $1,330,263,000 i.e., 69.3%
19^5
Big enterprises. 498 out of 1,366 i.e., 2^.4%
Employing 347*684 workers out of 445,184 i.e., 78.9%
Producing $i,352,97i,ooo out of $1,714,388,000 i.e., 78.9%
More than three-fourths of all the production of all the
cotton enterprises is carried on by about one-third of those
enterprises. These larger cotton companies employ more
than three-fourths of all the cotton workers in the United
States.
The same tendency is, of course, noticeable in all American
industry. In manufacturing as a whole, big enterprises, pro-
ducing $1,000,000 or more, now produce two-thirds of all
the manufactured products in the United States.
All Manufacturing
Ip2I
Big enterprises. 7,284 out of 249,486 i.e., 3.7%
Employing 3,375,9^6 workers out of 6,978,585 i.e., 48.7%
Producing . . . .$25,718,962,114 out of $43,563,957,189 i.e., 59.2%
28 LABOR AND SILK
1925
Bigf enterprises. 10,583 out of 187,390 i.e., 5.6%
Employing 4,760,229 out of 8,384,261 i.e., 56.8%
Producing $42,366,941, 140 out of $62,713,713,730 i.e., 67.6%
Two-thirds of all the production of all manufacturing en-
terprises is thus carried on by one-twentieth of those enter-
prises, employing more than half of all the workers in manu-
facturing industries.
In the textile industries the stage of monopoly is drawing
closer. It is already marked out in rayon. Details of the
international rayon cartel are in another chapter. The
American Woolen Co. comes close to a monopoly in wool.
Other textile industries show only gradual progress toward
concentration and a resulting monopoly control. Workers
watching this development from year to year will see the
small concerns go under and the larger ones survive, stronger
and more profitable than ever. In spite of this, all but the
largest silk manufacturers seem to believe that the silk in-
dustry is still in the stage of free competition. They are
very busy fighting among themselves for their small share of
the market. Also these smaller firms carry on only some one
branch of silk manufacturing. For example, most of the silk
that comes to Paterson mills has first traveled by auto truck
from New York to Pennsylvania for throwing and spinning.
Then it comes back to Paterson for winding and weaving.
After being woven in a small Paterson shop it must go on
to a separate dyeing and finishing plant and thence to the
New York jobber. This round of extra handling is elimi-
nated in the larger concerns.
The much greater output per wage-earner in the larger
establishments stands out to the detriment of the small firm
in its competition with the larger company in the following
table :
THE SILK INDUSTRY 29
Establishments Average Value
Producing of Product
Annually Per Silk Worker
Under |ioo,ooo , $2,334
$100,000 to $500,000 4,32to
$500,000 to $1,000,000 6,oig
$1,000,000 and over 7,660
To a certain extent the larger textile companies are "com-
bines" characteristic of capitalism in its highest stages of
development. They combine in a single enterprise the dif-
ferent processes otherwise carried on by numerous small
intermediary concerns. They are able to cut out competition
and install speed-up systems to get the greatest amount of
production per worker.
As in other industries, so in the silk, there are vertical
combinations and horizontal combinations. The vertical unit
in its maximum development seeks control of everything
from raw material to the distribution of the product to the
consumer. The horizontal combination involves the merging
of groups of mills making similar classes of goods, with the
idea of cutting overhead and reducing other costs. "An ideal
organization of this kind should dominate its field and thus
result in increased profits," explains the Textile World. The
merger of four large Paterson dyeing companies which we
shall describe later is an example of horizontal combination.
The General Silk Corporation (Klots Throwing Company),
the story of which appears in the chapter on profits, is an
example of vertical combination. Cheney Brothers of Con-
necticut is another example of vertical combination.
The results of such combines are explained by Rudolph
Hilferding, in his work Finanzkapital:
Combination levels out the fluctuations of trade and assures
the combined enterprise of a more stable rate of profit. In the
second place, it does away with trading. Thirdly, it gives
opportunity for technical improvements, and consequently for
30 LABOR AND SILK
new profits, which other enterprises have not got. Finally, it
strengthens the productive power of the combined enterprise
compared with that of others, and increases its capacity for
competition in periods of depression when the fall in prices of
raw materials does not keep pace with the fall in prices of
manufactured articles.
Silk and Rayon in Cotton Mills
At least one-tenth of the real silk used in American weave-
rooms goes into mixed fabrics produced by cotton mills. In
1927 cotton mills purchased 20 per cent while silk mills pur-
chased 13 per cent of the rayon yarn produced in this country
by Viscose and DuPont. The division between the silk in-
dustry and the cotton industry is being dissolved. Since
1 91 9 and 1 92 1 cotton mills have jumped ahead of silk mills
in the making of mixed goods. This fact is clearly shown
in the following figures which, moreover, do not include the
eighty-odd million yards of silk-striped and rayon-striped cot-
ton shirtings turned out by cotton mills.
Production of Mixed Woven Goods
(In Square Yards)
Silk Mills Cotton Mills
I919 64,271,000 51,405,000
1921 47,508,000 36,559.000
1923 104,402,000 150,848,000
1925 98,391,000 171,107,000
The raw silk and real silk yarns purchased by the cotton
industry in 1925 amounted to 4,432,000 pounds as against
about 2,000,000 pounds in 191 9. And during these six years
the amount of rayon used by cotton mills increased from
573,000 pounds to 14,335,000 pounds. The quantities of cer-
tain raw materials reported by the 1925 census throw further
light on this blurring of the old distinctions between the silk
and cotton industries :
THE SILK INDUSTRY 31
Certain Raw Materials Used in Textile Industries
(In Pounds)
ipip 1925
Silk Industry
Raw silk 25,891,000 35,188,000
"Spun" silk 4,768,000 4,597,000
Rayon yarns 3,039,000 15,728,000
Cotton yarns 17,958,000 15,390,000
Cotton Goods Industry
Raw silk 588,000 2,386,000
Silk yarns 1,414,000 2,046,000
Rayon yarns 573,000 14,335,000
Raw cotton and linters 2,751,798,000 3,105,185,000
Since 1927 rayon consumption has increased enormously.
Silk consumption in the United States also set a new high
record in the winter, 1928. The lines between the silk and
cotton industries grow ever more blurred. To workers in
the silk, therefore, certain facts about the latest developments
in the cotton industry are of immediate concern.
South vs. North
"No labor organization in any textile plant in South Caro-
lina," boasts an advertisement of the New Industries Com-
mission of Columbia, South Carolina. Southern communi-
ties are vying with each other in efforts to persuade northern
textile companies to move South. "Annual wage averaged
by persons engaged in the textile mills of South Carolina is
$631," continues this advertisement. This means, even by
the calculations of the employer, a steady average of $12.13
a week.
"No labor disputes or strikes. Reliable native-born labor,"
reads an advertisement of Columbus (Georgia) Electric &
Power Company, while Duke Power Company, a large anti-
32 LABOR AND SILK
union corporation, claims that North Carolina supplies "loyal,
native-born operatives."
The Chamber of Commerce of Houston declares that
"there has never been a mill strike in Texas." And the
Texas Power and Light Company joins the chorus : "In this
state you could save about half the wages on the same pro-
duction. Texas for Textiles."
"No time restrictions. Spartanburg employees are used
to working 55 hours a week." The Chamber of Commerce
of this South Carolina city advertises also "Good low cost
labor." Arkansas Power and Light Co. is not to be out-
done. It declares : "Low labor costs. Best of Anglo-Saxon
labor."
These advertisements might have added that women work
at night in all these states, and that five southern states —
North and South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi and
Florida — have no legal compensation for injured workers.
Tennessee and Alabama have only the most inadequate com-
pensation laws, administered by the courts instead of by a
commission. But these hardships to workers do not worry
the power companies. On the contrary, they are regarded
as advantages from the point of view of lowering operating
costs.
Since the southern migration started in full force in 1921,
about 1,000,000 northern spindles have moved South. In
1927 about 100,000 spindles and 2,000 looms were trans-
ferred from the North to Alabama, North and South Caro-
lina and Virginia.
Now for the first time southern states have more than
half the textile spindles in the United States. At the end of
1927 the U. S. Census Bureau reported 36,536,512 spindles
of which 18,155,218 are in northern states and 18,381,294 in
the cotton growing states. Undoubtedly more of the southern
spindles were active. Southern mills ran at 102 per cent of
THE SILK INDUSTRY 33
capacity in 1927. In other words they ran double or night
shifts for part of the year.
Hosiery companies are trying to escape the Full Fashioned
Hosiery Workers' Union, and 26 new hosiery mills began
work in the South in 1927. Three huge new plants for the
making of rayon yarns were started in the South in 1927.
It is, of course, easy to exaggerate the southern boom.
New England textile manufacturers are in no such desperate
plight as southern power companies would have us believe.
And many of them have long since established their own
southern mills. But it is true that in most of the coarser
cotton goods New England output has declined. In fine
cottons, and silk and rayon mixtures, on the other hand, the
New England mills have steadily increased their output and
are still far in the lead. In 1925, they produced 147,000,000
of the total 177,000,000 square yards of mixed goods. But
companies operating only in the North note with anxiety that
from 1923 to 1925 the output of mixed goods increased by
only 12 per cent in New England mills while it was increas-
ing by 162 per cent in southern mills.
Silk manufacturers are also beginning to consider the
opportunities in the South. The census of 1925 reported
twelve silk mills in Virginia, five in North Carolina, three
in Tennessee, two in West Virginia, and one each in Georgia
and Alabama. During the year 1927 five new silk mills were
opened in southern states. But any general development of
the silk industry proper in southern states seems most un-
likely in the immediate future. New York City is the un-
disputed center of all silk buying and selling, both for raw
materials and for finished goods. The nearness of Pennsyl-
vania silk throwing mills to the New York market will prob-
ably outweigh southern advantages for many years to come.
The very fact that large northern companies are pushing
into the southern field to protect their profits brings the
menace of low southern standards straight back to the wage-
34 LABOR AND SILK
earners in the North. Thus Pacific Mills, a large New-
England cotton company, is now manufacturing mixed goods
in South Carolina; Schwarzenbach, Huber & Company, im-
portant silk manufacturers, have their own southern mills.
Wage cuts in their northern mills follow as a matter of
course. The real pressure of southern competition falls on
northern workers. And silk workers will feel this more and
more, as southern mills increase their output of cotton and
silk, cotton and rayon, and silk and rayon mixtures.
The spectacle of women textile workers on night shifts in
one part of the country, while 20 per cent of the textile work-
ers are jobless and a considerable number of spindles and
looms stand idle in another part of the country, is typical of
the exploitation of labor under capitalism.
A World Market?
American textile mills are equipped to produce more than
America alone can consume under the present economic
system. The solution, according to some textile manu-
facturers, is to "Develop a world market for our products."
At present the United States, largest producer of cotton
textiles in the world, is exporting only 7 per cent of the
cotton cloth produced here. The 7,000,000 dozen pairs of
hosiery exported annually are barely 7 per cent of the total
American hosiery output. Still smaller is the percentage of
silk goods exported.
Americans come late into the field of competition for a
world marketing of textiles. Great Britain and the rest of
Europe are two or three generations ahead of us, and already
their textile exports are rapidly declining, due to the in-
creased production of textiles in the Orient. In silk goods,
Japan is steadily increasing her exports to the very countries,
Canada, Australia and Latin America, to which American
mill owners look for their possible markets.
THE SILK INDUSTRY 35
The High American Tariff Wall
Textiles came in for their share of "high tarif?" about
seventy-five years ago, on the plea of "enabling American
manufacturers in new industries to compete with European
manufacturers who paid lower wages." The New England
mill owners, with the special lobbying help of Francis Cabot
Lowell, forced through high protective tariffs for all kinds
of textiles. Lowell kindly took the infant silk industry under
his wing, in addition to his own special cotton interests. For
this he was given a vote of thanks by the Pater son silk
bosses.
High duties on manufactured silk goods have been main-
tained since the Civil War. A duty of 55 per cent ad
valorem, introduced in 1864, is still paid on all silk goods.
Raw silk has always been dut)^ free.
Instead of stabilizing production, this artificial protection
resulted in high prices, low wages, high profits and irregu-
larity of employment. Yet many textile workers, misled by
reactionary union officials, have been used by the employers
to assist in the agitation for a high tariff wall. A movement
is again under way "to cure the present ills in the industry
with another increase in tariff rates." This follows sig-
nificantly on a series of strikes against wage cuts. The
United Textile Workers, instead of utilizing all the resources
at its command to organize the workers, helps to stage an
exhibition showing the advantages of American-made as
against foreign-made textiles, thus cooperating in the cam-
paign of the employers for higher duties. Such activities are,
of course, only playing into the hands of the employers,
because in the end a high tariff adds to the profits of the
owners and not to the wages of the workers.
Competition between North and South, competitive adver-
tising by local communities and power companies, speculation
36 LABOR AND SILK
in raw silk, overdevelopment seen in excess capacity and
periodic overproduction, overlapping between silk and cotton
industries, irregularity, speed-up here, idle looms and un-
employment there, price-cutting by weaker companies, in-
creasing concentration of production in the hands of larger
manufacturers, combinations to save costs, big banks profit-
ing by close relations with textile companies, poor outlook
for a world market to relieve overproduction — the whole pic-
ture of the textile industries to-day reveals the confusion and
anarchy of capitalism.
CHAPTER III
PROFITS
Always a matter of concern to the working class to know
exactly what profits the owning class is making from the
amount produced, it becomes more vital at a time of wide-
spread wage cuts. Christmas presents of lo per cent pay
slashes were given to the workers by most northern textile
mills at the turn of the year 1927-28. Contrary to what is
generally supposed, many southern mills followed by cutting
wages early in 1928. Northern textile workers were mean-
while told repeatedly by company spokesmen that cuts were
"necessary because of competition with southern mills."
Even the New Bedford workers were told that story, al-
though New Bedford still has almost a monopoly of fine
goods manufacturing for the United States. Rates of pay
for silk workers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecti-
cut were cut 10 per cent during the past year, but so "quietly
and gradually" that a united protest of the workers was fore-
stalled.
Textile workers were led to believe from company an-
nouncements that the year 1927 had been a bad year and
that financial losses preceded the pay cuts. On the contrary
in all textiles except possibly the woolen industry, 1927 was
a comparatively prosperous year for the bosses. Deliveries of
raw silk to United States mills showed an average increase
of 12 per cent over 1926. Rayon production was 15 per
cent more than in 1926 and yet not sufficient to meet the
demand for rayon. Even wool production increased 5.7 per
cent over the previous year.
Exact figures in published balance sheets of the larger
2>7
38 LABOR AND SILK
textile companies show that many of the mills which have
cut wages have been actually in a very prosperous condi-
tion. After funds have been set aside for depreciation and
replacement of machinery and buildings, after government
taxes and interest on loans have been paid, there has still
remained a surplus to be divided among stockholders.
Many of the larger companies are able to use the chaos
of the industry as a whole and the hardships of their less
powerful or less astute competitors as an opportunity to
strengthen their own position. Dividing silk companies, as
textile bankers divide them, roughly into three classes, we
find a certain number of larger companies successfully mak-
ing profits, many border-line companies which might make
profits, and a large number of small unsuccessful concerns
which do not and never could make profits. Unto him that
hath shall be given, is the rule in capitalist society. The
large concerns become more successful; the small ones are
eliminated.
ip2y a Good Year
A study of 26 textile manufacturing corporations, made
by the accountants Ernst and Ernst, places the combined
total net profits for the year 1927 at $13,953,000 as com-
pared with a combined deficit of $4,205,000 in 1926. Only
two of the firms reported a deficit in 1927 compared with
15 in the previous year.
The American Bankers' Association Journal for March,
1928, writing on "Profits in the Silk Industry," compares
1926 and 1927 reports of several leading silk, rayon and
hosiery manufacturers. Eleven companies for which exactly
comparable statements were available, had aggregate earn-
ings of $10,588,000 in 1927 as compared with $8,728,000
in 1926, a gain of 21 per cent. These figures show net profits
available for dividends or to carry to surplus after all ex-
PROFITS 39
penses, depreciation, interest charges and provision for taxes
have been deducted. From the bankers' list and from other
sources/ the following list has been compiled:
Net Profits of Silk Companies
Company ip2^ ip26
Belamose Corp $199,000 $61,000 d
Belding-Heminway 522,000 797,000
Celanese Corp 2,754,000 909,000
Century Ribbon Mills 68,000 156,000 d
General Silk Corp.* 126,000 d 1,397,000
Gotham Silk Hosiery Co., Inc.... 3,697,000 2,879,000
Julius Kayser & Co.f 1,729,000 1,139,000
H. R. Mallinson & Co 464,000 547,000 d
McCallum Hosiery Co 175,000 326,000$
Phoenix Hosiery Co 820,000 l,7S9>ooo
Real Silk Hosiery Mills, Inc 545,ooo 731,000
Tubize Artificial Silk Co 2,600,000
Van Raalte Co., Inc 16,000 136,000
d means deficit,
* Years ending September 30; 9 months ending September 30, 1937.
t Years ending June 30.
$ Before certain charges.
Gotham Silk Hosiery Company is the prize winner of these
companies. Its "earnings" were around $3,700,000. Its
"capitalization consists of preferred and common stock car-
ried at $9,630,000 and a surplus of $3,926,000, on which
combined investment last year's return was at the rate of
27.3 per cent !" For the first half ot 1928, the net profit is
$1,389,000. No wonder that the company declared a stock
dividend in January, 1928.
The Real Silk Hosiery Mills, Inc., busily engaged in fight-
ing against the Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers' Union,
was still able to gather in $540,000 in profits in 1927 and
$245,000 for the first half of 1928. Its ratio of current
1 Moody's Manual of Industrials, and Standard Corporation Records,
Standard Statistics Co., 1928.
40 LABOR AND SILK
assets to current liabilities is now 2 to i, and the company-
has working capital of over $2,000,000. It employs 3,000
workers in two plants, one in Indianapolis and the other in
Philadelphia.
Some Leading Silk Companies
SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL AND COMPANY
Sidney Blumenthal (The Shelton Looms) turned a 1926
loss into a profit of $1,056,000 in 1927, equal to $43.85 a
share on the preferred stock, and $3.73 a share on the com-
mon stock. For the first part of 1928 they inspire a column
in the Wall Street Journal headed "Big Profits Seen for
Blumenthal." It seems that profits for the second three
months of 1928 exceeded profits for the entire first half of
last year. The company owns three subsidiaries, South
River Spinning Company at South River, New Jersey, for a
spinning plant, Uncasville- Shelton Company at Uncasville,
Conn., and the Shelton Home Building Association. The
main plant at Shelton, Conn., employs 2,500 workers. The
company tolerates a weavers' club, watched over paternal-
istically and not affiliated with any general labor union, but
allowed to invite outside labor men or women to speak at
Saturday evening meetings. These weavers are mostly
American-born of English or Scotch descent.
Blumenthal is one of the small group of silk manufacturers
who, together, produce two-thirds of the total silk value in
the United States.
THE CHENEY FAMILY
Cheney Brothers, oldest silk manufacturers in the United
States, own the town of South Manchester, Conn., control all
its public utilities and the scenery too. The company is a
family affair and does not publish its balance sheet, because
the stock is "closely held." Capitalization was doubled in
PROFITS 41
1925 from $10,000,000 to $20,000,000. Five members of
the family who are stockholders are also officers of the
corporation and receive substantial salaries. Seven of the
directors are Cheneys. They are also directors of the local
•electric and water companies and of the street railroad.
Charles Cheney, president of the company, is also director
of the Chemical National Bank, New York. Among other
directors of this big bank are Lammot DuPont, president of
the great DuPont company, and others with close Morgan
connections.
As a New Year's present to 4,500 employees, Cheney
Brothers announced a wage cut of 10 per cent on January 2,
1928. They claimed to be paying 23 per cent more in wage
rates than their competitors in the industry. As the name
"Cheney Silks" has a special trade value the company has
"been able to maintain a price level above most of their com-
petitors. But average earnings of silk workers in Connecti-
cut are less than average earnings of silk workers in New
Jersey, and Cheney Brothers employ almost half of all the
silk workers in Connecticut. The visitor's questions about
wage rates are evaded by the guide who shows him through
the great plant.
That the Cheney Brothers had not reduced their own stand-
ard of living was clear to the visitor this spring who saw
the beautiful mansions and lawns of the family estates domi-
nating the town. Magnificent old trees, planted when the
company was established in 1838, partly screen the brothers'
big houses and gardens. The quiet park-like security of
these estates is a contrast to the shattering thunder of weave-
rooms in the mills, a good half mile beyond. On the other
side of the mills are the company-owned houses for workers,
so proudly shown to all visitors as part of the "Cheney
welfare."
But only about one-tenth of the workers can live in these
houses. Single men and women are watched over in com-
42 LABOR AND SILK
pany boarding houses. Nothing is said about the families of
lower paid workers. And rents of all the company's houses
have been increased in spite of the wage cut.
"We are all one big family here," asserts the personnel
manager. The company has beaten the union to it. It has
provided baseball grounds, basketball field, silver cups as
trophies for the winning teams, and above all the company
union, called "employees' representation" by the industrial
relations department. A council of 25 representatives from
the various departments is carefully supervised by the com-
pany. "Oh, yes, we supervise the elections," said the com-
pany guide. "An election committee meets beforehand, and
the employees may vote for one of the three names highest
on the list."
No real labor union has ever succeeded in getting a toe-
hold within the sacred boundaries of South Manchester.
Every organizer of every real textile union knows that the
Cheney watch-men will put him off the premises the mo-
ment they discover he is there. To assist the watch-men,
the Cheneys keep their own police force in an imposing sta-
tion-house at the entrance to the town.
SAMUEL J. ARONSOHN
Another family corporation is Samuel J. Aronsohn, Inc.,
capitalized for $1,000,000, but never revealing its profits in
any balance sheet. Not needing to sell stock on the open
market, Aronsohn believes that the financial status of his
company is his own private affair. That the corporation is
in a strong position is known to "the trade." Mills at Pater-
son, N. J., Christiana, Coatesville and Scranton, Pa., employ
about 1,000 workers on broad silks. Aronsohn's does its
own throwing in the big Scranton mill.
"If the union gets into Scranton, I'll move my factory to
another town," announced Aronsohn. He discharged a girl
PROFITS 43
for talking unionism and threatened to discharge another.
"Wouldn't you like a shorter work week, 48 hours instead
of over 50?" an organizer asked some of the Aronsohn
workers. "Gee, we don't earn much even on 50," was the
answer.
Aronsohn himself lives at the Hotel Plaza, New York
City. Room and meals at this hotel cost more for one day
than a young girl in his Scranton throwing mill can earn
in a week.
CORTICELLI'S PROFITS AND WORKEPS
Corticelli Silk Company, second largest silk concern in
New England, employs over 3,000 workers in five mills at
Florence, Leeds and Haydenville, Mass., and at New London
and Norwich, Conn. The company's profits for the last
three years have easily paid annual 7 per cent dividends on
$1,500,000 preferred stock and $4 a share on 50,000 shares
of common stock. Working capital has averaged $4,000,000.
This statement does not include the profits of Belding-
Corticelli, Ltd., in Canada, controlled by Corticelli Silk
Company.
Known to the world by its trade mark of a kitten playing
with a spool of silk, the company makes not only sewing,
embroidery and knitting silks, but also silk hosiery, dress
silks, and satins. The mills at Haydenville and Leeds handle
the raw silk material. At Florence, New London and Nor-
wich it is woven into goods. Farmers' wives and daughters
work in these New England mills to help pay the farm taxes
or mortgage interest. Polish and French workers are here
too. One of the older Corticelli buildings at Leeds called
the "button shop" is a rickety, dirty wooden structure still
used for over a hundred girls. Picking on the top floor is
done by 75 girls working for only $10 a week. It is espe-
cially tedious work, very hard on the eyes, for the electric
44 LABOR AND SILK
lights glare up from below the glass tables. The girls must
see and pick out every straw, hair or foreign particle from
the raw silk floss. No talking is allowed in the room.
Downstairs in the spreading room girls are spreading the
floss in even layers in machines, preparing the silk for spin-
ning. Those on time work in this department are getting
from $13 to $16 a week.
Corticelli's is a non-union company. Neither the United
Textile Workers nor the Associated Silk Workers has ever
organized these men and women. But in 1922 when a wage
cut was put through, workers responded with a spontaneous
strike even without an organization. They were beaten and
went back to work at the cut rate.
The amount paid in dividends to Corticelli stockholders
this last year could have added $5 a week to the earnings of
more than 1,000 workers.
MALLINSON OFFICIALS' SALARIES
The papier mache elephant in Mallinson's Fifth Avenue
show window does not tell the secrets of the firm. The
profits of H. R. Mallinson Company for 1927 were $463,000
after depreciation and other charges were deducted. Already
for the first half of 1928 Mallinson reported net profits of
$520,000, which is more than for the whole of 1927. Divi-
dends of 7 per cent on nearly $2,000,000 of preferred stock
have been paid regularly for the last seven years.
Minority common stockholders have sued the company,
charging that Hiram R. Mallinson, president, and E. Irving
Hanson, vice-president, receive excessively large salaries. A
few years ago the president's salary was increased from
$80,000 to $125,000 a year. The vice-president's was in-
creased from $40,000 to $85,000 a year. The lesser stock-
holders think the former salaries were "adequate" ! To New
PROFITS 45
York silk workers averaging $i,ioo a year, a $40,000 a year
salary would seem quite "adequate/' The stockholders' suit
has just been dismissed; officials' salaries have not been
reduced.
Not all the shimmering de luxe silks of this company
are what they are advertised to be. Stuart Chase, in Your
Money's Worth, shows up Mallinson in a battle with the
Federal Trade Commission on false advertising. "Witness
the case of H. R. Mallinson, a great New York silk house.
It advertised 'silks de luxe; the world's finest silk, the word
Mallinson on the selvage assures you of the genuine' in con-
nection with certain products which did not measure up to
the words used." The case against this large company was
dismissed but one of the commissioners in a minority report
said it seemed to him "utterly illogical and unfair," to dis-
miss the case against a large company and prosecute smaller
concerns. Mallinson had been selling artificial silk, which
costs about half as much as real silk to produce, at real silk
prices.
The great modern factory of this company in Astoria,
Long Island, is only one of the six mills owned and run by
the same corporation. Throwing plants in Paterson and
Trenton, N. J., for their own use, another broad silk mill
in Union City, N. J., plants in Allentown and Erie, Pa., for
the making of plain and Jacquard silks, all contribute toward
the profits, probably $1,000,000 in 1928. Silk workers in
any one of these towns seeing a Mallinson plant of moderate
size cannot afford to underestimate the power of this big
non-union silk company. Low wages of their women
workers, long hours in the company's Pennsylvania plants,
speed-up in making even those figured "silks de luxe" all
tend to hold down wages and speed up the pace for other
silk workers.
46 LABOR AND SILK
GENERAL SILK CORPORATION, formerly KLOTS THROWING
COMPANY
This big corporation, reorganized in 1927, constitutes a
complete vertical combination in the silk industry. It owns
and operates either directly or through its subsidiaries fifteen
modern mills in six states. Its throwing mills in Pennsyl-
vania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and New Jersey
do 8 per cent of all the silk throwing in the United States.
It has a spun silk division in New Bedford, Mass., weaving
mills at Central Falls, R. I., and Carbondale, Pa., and its
own purchasing offices in Kobe and Yokohama, Japan, and
in Canton and Shanghai, China. It purchases raw silk in
the East, throws silk both for its own use and on commission,
produces spun silk, weaves and finishes and sells all kinds
of silk goods.
Marcus Frieder, president of the big company, and
Leonard P. Frieder, vice-president, are now identified by
all New Bedford textile workers as responsible for the
"Frieder plan" of speed-up which will be described in a
later chapter.
Charles Cheney of Cheney Brothers helped to reorganize
this big silk corporation in 1927. Each stockholder of the
former company by this "readjustment" increased his hold-
ings. The company expecting to make larger profits can
thus conceal the profits by increasing the number of shares.
Holders of preferred stock in the old company fared even
better, receiving no to 150 per cent in preferred stock of the
new company. The working capital of this corporation is
now $3,500,000. For the purchase of its own raw silk the
company has nearly $3,000,000 in letters of credit.
But the 4,000 wage-earners employed by the General Silk
Corporation are kept in ignorance of the company's size and
power. The fifteen mills are so scattered that workers do
PROFITS 47
not even know how many the company employs. They know
only that wage-earners in throwing mills average less than
$1,000 a year.
DUPLAN SILK CORPORATION
Duplan Silk Corporation, associated by rumor with
Cheney, B. Edmund David, and Schwarzenbach, Huber in a
proposed merger, announces profits of $1,051,000 for the
year ending May 31, 1928. The Duplan corporation itself
was made by a merger this year of three partly owned
subsidiary companies, now called the Dorranceton, Puritan
and Guaranty Divisions, operating plants at Kingston,
Wilkes-Barre and Nanticoke, Pa. The corporation now em-
ploys about 5,000 workers.
At the Wilkes-Barre plant the older workers have lately
been laid off, and a large number of very young workers
employed. The workers are sure that many of these children
are under the legal age for such employment. It is said that
the parents, desperately up against it on account of low
wages, have "persuaded" school superintendents to sign cer-
tificates for the early employment of these children. Some
of the youngest workers are earning only $3 a week, and
many get only $5 or $6 a week. This Duplan mill in Wilkes-
Barre is a throwing plant and young workers easily learn the
spinning and winding.
Profits of this corporation and its subsidiaries have been
over a million dollars each year for the past four years, after
depreciation and taxes were set aside. Net tangible assets
on May 31, 1928, were $14,486,000 or over $289 a share of
preferred stock and over $27 a share of common stock. The
big banking house, Lehman Brothers, responsible this sum-
mer for selling Duplan 8 per cent stock, has a representative
on the new board of directors of the corporation.
48 LABOR AND SILK
SCHWARZENBACH, HUBER AND COMPANY
This company, one of the four big concerns named in the
silk merger rumor, is very reticent about its financial affairs.
The corporation is known to be one of the largest silk manu-
facturers in the country, with sixteen mills in five states.
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia, and Ala-
bama, employing 4,776 workers. The stock is closely held.
No balance sheet is published. Even the total capitalization
is not revealed.
A shrewd guess would place this company as at least in
the class with Duplan Silk Corporation, making profits of a
million dollars a year. The combined capital of the four big
companies mentioned in the rumored merger is over $50,-
000,000 and reported in the Journal of Commerce to be
nearer to $100,000,000. Schwarzenbach, Huber and Com-
pany was probably contributing a good quarter of the amount.
Meanwhile in the company's Bayonne, N. J., plant weavers
earn an average of $22 a week on three looms and $13 a
week on two looms. A young weaver starts on one loom at
$10 a week. Winders get an average of $18 a week.
Spoolers who spool the silk get $20 a week. The working
day is nine hours.
AMALGAMATED SILK CORPORATION
By a merger in 1923, this concern became one of the large
silk companies in the United States, with mills at Bing-
hamton and Hornell, New York ; Allentown, Catasauqua, East
Mauch Chunk, East Stroudsburg, Emaus, Green Lake, Kutz-
town, Marietta, Northampton, Olyphant, and York, Penn-
sylvania, and Norfolk, Virginia. With its own dyeing and
finishing company at Allentown it is in a position to carry
through broad silk manufacture from raw material to distri-
bution in sales-rooms on Fifth Avenue, New York City. The
PROFITS 49
corporation announced profits of $474,000 for the six months
ending April 30, 1928.
Over 2,000 workers employed by this company are so
scattered over Pennsylvania, in more than a dozen small
plants, that they do not know each other as employees of one
big concern. The company has avoided New Jersey where
silk workers are partly organized.
SUSQUEHANNA SILK MILLS
Busily selling $8,000,000 worth of 5 per cent gold deben-
tures this summer through Lee, Higginson & Co. and the
National City Company, a Rockefeller house, Susquehanna
advertises itself as "one of the largest manufacturers in the
world of piece-dyed silk, silk mixed textile and artificial silk
fabrics woven in the raw and dyed and printed later accord-
ing to demands.'' With its subsidiaries it owns and operates
eleven mills and plants in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio
and Georgia and is equipped to perform every process in
course of manufacturing from preparation of thread for
weaving to finished product."
Current assets of $12,820,000 of this company are more
than eleven times the current liabilities. For six years the
net "earnings" have averaged over five and a half times the
necessary $469,000 to meet the debentures sold this summer.
About 4,000 employees work in the eleven plants owned
by Susquehanna. The corporation runs a savings fund at
6 per cent interest, because, they say, such a savings fund
helps to avoid "labor turnover." This means that workers
feel it is difficult to get back their savings if they want to
leave. The president of the company, Henry Schniewind,
Jr., also president of the Silk Association of America, lives
on New York's "gold coast," just off upper Fifth Avenue,
not far from the H. C. Frick mansion-museum. Silk and
50 LABOR AND SILK
steel have been profitable for presidents and owners of large
companies.
C. K. EAGLE AND COMPANY
When Charles K. Eagle, the big silk manufacturer, com-
mitted suicide in 1928 it was found that he had left a
million dollars "for a foundation for working girls." An-
other $1,110,000 was disposed of in specific bequests. To
make up to "the poor working girls*' for what is not paid
them in wages, he directed that the money be used to "furnish
them more comfortable living surroundings and accommoda-
tions." The foundation is to give first preference to "Ameri-
can girls of American parentage."
His company employs 4,163 workers in seven Pennsylvania
mills at Shamokin, Kulpmont, Phoenixville, Bethlehem,
Gettysburg, Mechanicsburg and Bellefonte. The concern is
now expanding with the purchase of a huge twelve-story
corner building in New York City's garment center, in order
to provide direct service to the cutting-up trade. The C. K.
Eagle Company does its own throwing and also commission
throwing, winds, weaves, dyes and finishes plain and Jacquard
silks.
Ribbon Mills, Union and Non-Union
A comparison of two ribbon mills, one union and the
other non-union, shows both to be in excellent financial condi-
tion, in spite of fashion's decree against ribbons. Taylor,
Friedsam Company, the union firm, employs 250 workers
on wide and narrow Jacquard ribbons. With capital
authorized up to $500,000 they are doing a successful busi-
ness, and are respectfully regarded in textile trade circles as
in high standing.
The non-union ribbon mills of Miesch Manufacturing
PROFITS 51
Company are owned now by the John C. Welwood Corpora-
tion. The company has recently grown by a merger de-
scribed in a later section. Its capitalization was increased
from an original $100,000 to $1,000,000 in 1920. John C.
Welwood, president of the corporation, lives on upper Fifth
Avenue, overlooking Central Park. He is the largest stock-
holder in his company. Assets of over $3,000,000 of the
concern are in ratio of about three to one of liabilities. It
claims "the largest ribbon business in the world." Broad
silk mills at Hawley, Honesdale, and White Mills, Pa., also
help largely in building up the profits of the John C. Wel-
wood Corporation.
New Bedford, a Mixed Goods Center
The great 1928 strike of New Bedford textile workers
against a wage cut of 10 per cent makes the profits of New
Bedford fine goods companies especially significant. Late in
1927, just before the New England textile pay cuts began,
the trade paper, American Wool and Cotton Reporter, under
the heading "Mill Shares," boasted, "We bought a few shares
of Wamsutta (a New Bedford Company) three or four
months ago at $50 a share. Within a few days Wamsutta
sold at %y2, and as this is written Wamsutta is at $69. We
bought some Amoskeag common at $52. Now it is $60.
We are sure that a careful selection of mill shares at present
prices will pay large profits" (Emphasis mine. — G. H.)
Textile World, in its annual review number, reports for
New Bedford fine goods mills "favorable operations for
1927. ... At least fifteen New Bedford cotton mill corpo-
rations have never missed paying dividends since they started
paying them, covering a period fourteen to thirty-six years."
The dividend rate for the past ten years has averaged $11.27
per share. Eighteen out of twenty-three mill corporations
paid dividends in 1927, one disbursing as high as $32, an-
52 LABOR AND SILK
other $28, and a third $12 a share. One company, Soule,
declared an extra dividend of $20, making $28 a share in all.
The Labor Bureau, Inc., made a special study for the New
Bedford unions, revealing the fact that twenty-two companies
together had a surplus in 1926 of $18,992,000 and in 1927
of $19,024,000.
Border- Line Companies
Between the larger corporations, declaring profits, merging
and growing still larger and the weak concerns, always on
the verge of bankruptcy, are the companies called by the
banking houses "border-line.*' Bankers keep their eyes espe-
cially on these border-line firms, extending credit, advising
changes in management, or planning to merge a half dozen
of them into one large consolidation.
Here are five typical silk mills in Scranton, Pa., all "oper-
ating steadily" this year, and all non-union, as are practically
all Pennsylvania mills. The Mutual Silk Throwing Company
employs 150 workers, the Bliss Silk Throwing Company em-
ploys 100, the Keystone Silk Company has 50 workers,
Katterman and Mitchell has 160, and the Black Diamond
Silk Company employs 200 in two mills. They work from
fifty to fifty-four hours a week in a state where the average
wage for silk workers is below $18.
Two typical non-union broad silk companies in Paterson,
N. J., are Audiger and Meyer Silk Company and Gilt Edge
Silk Mills of New Jersey, Inc. Officers of Audiger and
Meyer do not reveal their financial status, but they meet their
ordinary contracts promptly, do an active business and are
sold up to $15,000. In their modern plant at Paterson, they
have 212 Jacquard looms for the making of fancy tie-silks.
The company is capitalized at $100,000.
Gilt Edge Silk Mills, also non-union, is a larger concern,
capitalized at $200,000 with plants at Paterson, N. J., and at
PROFITS 53
New Bedford, Mass. The New Bedford mill employs 115
workers who did not go out on strike with the New Bedford
fine goods cotton workers this year. The last financial state-
ment of this company gave current assets of $768,000 and
liabilities of $203,000, a ratio of 3.7 to i. The mills operate
regularly and are sold up to $75,000. This is what the
bankers call "a very satisfactory showing."
A typical union broad silk shop in Paterson, John Hollbach
Company, is reported as in good financial condition. It has
paid-in capital of $350,000 and authorized capital up to
$500,000. The company was established in 1896, incor-
porated in 19 16, and continues a steady business, manufactur-
ing plain and Jacquard tie silks and corset cloth. It is a
successful concern, sold up to $10,000. Workers in this
shop have union conditions. That means the eight-hour day
and the forty- four-hour week. It means a price list for
weaving, ranging from ten cents to fifteen and one-half cents
a yard, according to the kind of silk to be woven.
Small Concerns
In a list of six new silk firms recently incorporating, only
one has a capitalization as high as $100,000. The others are
all less, and one is capitalized at only $5,000. A multitude
of small concerns in Paterson, N. J., has led to the belief
that any silk worker can buy a loom and a winding frame
and set up a silk mill. Often the looms are bought second-
hand, for only $250, and paid for on time payments. Some
silk workers have now become petty capitalists. Incorporat-
ing in small concerns, they hire space and have one loom-
fixer for several mills, and are winding and weaving silk.
But their financial success is uncertain, to say the least. They
are ignorant of buying and selling, of raw silk trading, throw-
ing, dyeing, finishing and distributing. They see other small
54 LABOR AND SILK
concerns about them, but they forget or know nothing about
the 179 big mills commanding the market and the skilled
services of experts in each line, employing half of all the
silk workers and producing nearly two-thirds of all the silk
produced in the United States.
CHAPTER IV
MERGERS
"1928, YEAR of mergers/' was the slogan of banking houses.
Wall Street Journal and Journal of Commerce. Big mergers
just put through in automobiles, gas and steel, encourage
banking interests to press on for mergers in the textile
industries. A big plan for making over the whole textile
city of Fall River, smaller mergers of dyeing companies and
other textile concerns, persistent rumors of a big merger
coming in the silk industry, keep the textile banks in hopeful
competition.
A corporation lawyer, Gilbert H. Montague of New York,
speaking before the Mining Congress, states that general
conditions are now favorable for mergers.
More and bigger consolidations among producers, manufac-
turers and distributors under proper conditions and with ade-
quate legal safeguards, are permitted and indeed invited by the
present attitude of the court and the government. By avoiding
unlawful acquisitions of capital stock, and by taking care to
leave outside enough competitors to insure effective outside
competition, such consolidations can now be set up in many
industries in entire conformity to the law. . . . More and bigger
consolidations may soon be expected in a number of industries
that are now the worst sufferers from these conditions. —
(Emphasis mine. — G.H.)
As larger undertakings succeed, smaller undertakings are
absorbed or fail. The big fellows can divide the markets
among themselves, fix the prices and divide the profits. The
rayon cartel already has this control over the rayon industry.
In other branches of textiles, mergers planned, outlined or
55
56 LABOR AND SILK
already executed are hastening the concentration of produc-
tion and control in the hands of a few larger companies.
Bankers and Mergers
Without the big investment banking houses, this process
of increasing concentration of production would be impos-
sible. The big investment bankers — ^usually with the help of
smaller investment bankers — sell to the general public of
large and small investors the securities through which mil-
lions of dollars are gathered in for big plants and up-to-the-
minute equipment. The investment house draws off its per-
centage for the deal — the large banking firms having, inci-
dentally, unloaded most of the risk on the smaller banking
firms — and on the basis of inside information the investment
house picks up blocks of the choicest stocks and bonds for
the members of the firm.
Industrial capital (including textiles) and finance capital
are thus growing together more and more closely. The big
banks wield an all-powerful weapon. They can grant or
refuse credit to the industrial corporations and thus control
policy. Biggest companies, already successful, can get most
credit, which makes possible technical progress, which in turn
makes a larger profit, which again increases the size of the
companies.
Various banking houses are financing the textile mergers
described in this book. But directly and indirectly all large-
scale industry in this country is depending more and more
upon the two giant financial groups, Morgan and Rockefeller.
Directors of big textile corporations are also directors of big
banks. Some of their names and connections are given in
Chapter III, company by company.
The Daily News Record, textile trade paper, is valiantly
promoting mergers of textile companies by quoting in full
the speeches of bankers and "experts" who advocate such
MERGERS 57
consolidation. Paul M. Mazur, of the big banking- house of
Lehman Brothers, asserts : "With mergers the textile business
of America may be able to prosper; without mergers, its
hope of rehabilitation is desperate indeed." Alexander
Whiteside, president of the Wool Institute, declares that "the
day of alliances — possible combinations — in the textile field is
at hand."
As bankers see the problem, "textile mills can be roughly
grouped into three classes. First come those unusually suc-
cessful concerns which have been able to make money even
during the depression of the last few years due to ability
of the management. . . . The second group is made up of
companies whose number and size are still large in spite of
the drastic elimination that has already taken place — com-
panies . . . which are not now successful but give promise
of profitable operations provided certain changes are made.
The third and last group consists of those units which for
one reason or another are no longer economically justified."
This is the analysis of a bank president, Walter S. Bucklin
of the National Shawmut Bank of Boston, much concerned
in loans to textile companies. The smaller unsuccessful mills
in his third class would never be considered for any merger
or consolidation. In his second class would fall a very large
number of silk mills, some of them promising for mergers.
The big successful mills in his first class are the most desir-
able for mergers. Though already large, they can be made
into bigger and better consolidations. It is the investment
bankers who profit most by the refinancing and rehabilitation
schemes. Every new merger tightens the financiers* hold on
industry.
Rumors of Mergers
A merger of four large silk corporations, Cheney Bros.,
Schwarzenbach, Huber & Co., Duplan Silk Corp. and B.
58 LABOR AND SILK
Edmund David Company has been rumored, denied and
rumored again. It would include companies employing more
than 15,000 workers and a total capital of from $50,000,000
to $100,000,000 (estimates vary) ; the bankers to execute the
scheme would be J. P. Morgan & Co. It is described by the
Journal of Commerce as a plan of broad silk producers and
bankers, "with the view of centralizing mill operations, elimi-
nating disastrous competition and waste, and controlling
more effectively the flow of surplus merchandise." The four
companies "would dominate the industry." "The consoli-
dated corporation would be like the U. S. Steel Corporation
or the American Woolen Company." Charles Cheney, presi-
dent of Cheney Bros., showed his interest in mergers by
helping to reorganize the Klots Throwing Company to be-
come the big General Silk Corporation.
Another rumor, or perhaps it is the same one in another
form, associated the name of Floyd H. Rowland, consulting
engineer, with a $100,000,000 merger of silk companies, to
be called the Silk Products Corporation. Rowland beHeves
in the vertical as against the horizontal merger, in other
words, in a corporation controlling everything from raw
material to distribution of product, rather than in a grouping
of mills making similar classes of goods. He outlined before
the recent convention of cost accountants a theoretical merger
of silk firms, and ended thus : "Now that I prove these facts,
and the paper merger is a success, it is only necessary to
prepare a financing plan, get the options, determine the
management, find the right bankers and see that the bonds
sell, after which we will try to earn our first dividend equal
to our estimated savings."
Smaller Mergers of 1^28
In order to compete successfully with the two leading
dyeing companies. National Silk Dyeing Company and United
MERGERS 59
Piece Dye Works, a merger of four dye works to be known as
the Associated Dyeing and Printing Corporation was effected
in May, 1928. The four which put their business and assets
into the new corporation were Royal Piece Dye Works, Colt
Dye Works, Uhlig Piece Dye Works, and Cramer and King,
all of Paterson, N. J. Four small companies have thus
combined into one large one. Net profits of these four com-
panies for the last four years were: $430,000 in 1924,
$436,000 in 1925, $667,000 in 1926, $957,000 in 1927. Ap-
parently the dyeing business has been steadily improving, but
there has been no advance in wages in any of these four
companies. Women dye workers who were slaving for
twenty-five cents an hour in Paterson in 1925 are still slaving
for twenty-five cents an hour in 1928.
These four that have merged their interests employ among
them about 2,000 workers. They are capitalized at over
$6,000,000. Banking houses headed by Eastman Dillon Com-
pany and the International Germanic Trust Company carried
out the financing of the new corporation, which becomes one
of the largest silk, rayon and mixed goods dyeing and finish-
ing companies in the United States.
Coupled with news of this completed merger goes the
report of a second large merger of dyeing companies in Pater-
son, not yet complete.
The Miesch Manufacturing Company, owned by the John
C. Welwood Company, has just been merged with the Buser
Silk Company. This company is described in the chapter on
profits. The two merging concerns run eleven plants in New
Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and have now become
a $3,000,000 corporation, the Miesch Manufacturing Com-
pany employing 2,000 workers. The best of the looms in the
Buser mill have been moved to the Miesch plant and the
old looms are discarded. The company states that all
workers in the Buser factory have been taken into the
Miesch mill.
60 LABOR AND SILK
A private meeting of hosiery manufacturers and bankers
at the Manufacturers* Club in Philadelphia in 1928 will
almost certainly result in a merger of seven big hosiery mills
in a $15,000,000 plan. The five concerns operating seven
plants in the South, Pennsylvania and the West, are American
Textiles of Bay City, Mich., True Shape Hosiery Company
of Philadelphia, Minneapolis Knitting Works of Minneapolis,
Thos. W. Buck Hosiery Company of Philadelphia, and
United Hosiery Mills Corporation of Chattanooga, Tenn.
These companies employ about 5,000 workers.
Textile mergers are reported in Great Britain and in
Europe. Four British silk firms are uniting to put throwing
and spinning, weaving, printing, dyeing and distribution all
under one central control in a big vertical merger. Man-
chester cotton-spinning companies are launching the Lan-
cashire Textile Cornoration to control 2,000,000 spindles.
In the South
The huge anti-union Cannon Mills group in North Caro-
lina has just become still larger by a merger completed in
1928. Cannon Mills Company acquires all the assets of
Cannon Manufacturing Company and of eight other com-
panies making cotton towels, yarns, sheetings, and rayon
fabrics. Its output of towels alone constitutes over 50 per
cent of all the cotton towels produced in the United States.
Profits of this company and the merged companies for the
last three years have averaged $4,000,000 a year. C. A.
Cannon, an officer of the company, is also a director of the
Duke-controlled Piedmont and Northern Railway. Cannon
interests are putting a new mill in Badin, N. C, the American
aluminum town. The town advertised for an industry to
use wives and daughters of aluminum workers.
Cannon employees are working eleven and twelve hours a
day on day and night shifts, sixty hours a week, for wages
MERGERS 61
averaging little more than $2 a day. Profits of the company
for this past year could have doubled the wages of 6,000
mill workers.
The other big mills group in North Carolina, the anti-union
Chadwick-Hoskins, is also involved in a vast merger to be
floated by the banking house of Flint & Co., New York. The
financing company took an option on 150 cotton-spinning
mills in five southern states, North and South Carolina,
Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. B. B. Gossett, who is
president of Chadwick-Hoskins, an official in the Gossett
Mills and also a railroad director, will be executive head of
the huge consolidation. Gossett Mills have already expanded
enormously by a merger of five South Carolina mills. "If
this merger is completed," The Daily News Record quoted
cotton men as stating, "a considerable number of smaller
cotton merchants are going to have to go out of business.
The big cotton firms will get all the trade."
By a merger of Brandon Mills with Poinsett and Wood-
ruff Mills, all of Greenville, the Brandon Corporation in
1928 became the biggest South Carolina company, with a
capital of $9,500,000. South Carolina does not regard the
Pacific Mills and the New England Southern Mills, with
headquarters in Massachusetts, but operating plants in the
southern state, as strictly South Carolina concerns. Pacific
Mills have an authorized capital of $40,000,000.
"No labor organization in any textile plant in this state,"
boast the South Carolina super-boosters, in their community
ads, appealing to textile manufacturers to come South.
Wages in South Carolina mills average just over $12 a
week.
The Fall River Plan
"Forward Fall River," "Fall River might as well be the
starting point." The greatest textile consolidation in the
62 LABOR AND SILK
history of the industry is prophesied as Homer Loring and
the banking interests swoop down to take possession of the
little old New England city.
A merger is well under way to turn twenty or twenty-five
successful corripanies into one, crush out the small concerns
unable to keep up with the procession, scrap 1,000,000 spindles
as out-of-date, install new automatic machinery, throw out
10,000 mill workers and their families, and thus build a
"smaller and better Fall River." The first step was the
merging of three banks into one, the B. M. C. Durfee Trust
Company, which will control the banking situation and thus
"be in a position to dictate just what course mills are to
follow . . . Mr. Loring made it clear that without such a
bank, the second step, a merger of the mills, and the instal-
lation of up-to-date machinery would be impossible." Boston
financial leaders have the consolidation well in hand. New
York financiers and banking interests are watching Loring's
plan with interest, and may bid to get control of the New
England textile industry.
When the Fall River textile industry is made over it is
generally understood that other New England cities will be
taken up one by one in a movement to merge the entire
textile industry of New England.
CHAPTER V
RAYON
Twenty years ago rayon was a joke. A mill in Man-
chester, England, was laughed at for years as "the mill
where they weave silk stockings out of cabbages." To-day
rayon is a $2,000,000,000 world industry.
The rayon boom affects the working class in one way and
the owning class in another. Silk workers weave rayon as
they weave real silk. The thread breaks a little more easily,
but it is more uniform in quality. The same looms can
weave silk, rayon, and cotton or mixtures. Working women,
daughters and wives of workers, are wearing rayon stockings
and underwear. It is cheaper than silk. Rayon socks and
underwear for men are now on the shop counters. Rayon
mixtures make inexpensive dresses and shirts. Meanwhile
the making of rayon fiber is drawing thousands of workers
into a new low-paid industry.
But most of all the rayon boom affects the owning class.
"The public has gasped at the stupendous figures recently
given out by some of the companies manufacturing rayon,"
as one engineer puts it. Shareholders in British and Ger-
man rayon companies have "earned" more than 600 per cent
without lifting a hand. In the United States rayon factories
costing $6,000,000 or $8,000,000 or $10,000,000 and more are
springing up in the South. Governor Byrd of Virginia made
special trips to New York in 1928 to secure for his state
another $10,000,000 rayon plant.
64( LABOR AND SILK
What Rayon Is
The earliest processes of making raj^on or artificial silk
used cotton linters for the cellulose base. To-day 75 per
cent is viscose rayon, made from wood pulp.
Rayon means "the artificial silk product, the basis and
chief ingredient of which is cellulose." This is the official
definition of the Federal Trade Commission. The U. S.
Bureau of Standards describes it as made from "cellulose
by pressing or drawing the cellulose solution through an
orifice and solidifying it in the form of a filament."
Finely ground wood or cotton is made into a thick pulp
or jelly by certain substances of a rather complex chemical
nature. The pulp is then forced through the very small
holes of a spinnerette, so minute that over 1,000 holes are
contained in an area no larger than a five-cent piece. The
liquid comes out in tiny smooth rods, often finer than a human
hair. The rods harden when exposed to the air or treated
with certain chemicals. Thus man makes a filament which
is chemically the same as the secretion of the silkworm.
Until lately rayon fibers have broken easily when wet.
But perfecting of the rayon-making process has largely done
away with this difficulty. Another improvement lately has
reduced the high luster of rayon. It is often spun into thread
with fibers of real silk.
The manufacture of artificial silk began in France in 1892.
In the next twenty years the Courtauld family in England
were laying the basis of their great fortune in artificial silk
manufacture, but their extraordinary profits were not re-
vealed to the public until after the war.
The Boom
Courtauld's introduced their subsidiary, the Viscose Com-
pany, into the United States in 191 2. Since then the United
RAYON 65
States has moved up from fifth place in the ranks of rayon-
producing companies to first place as largest producer, now-
turning out more than a quarter of the world's supply, and
gaining steadily each year. Great Britain is second in the
rayon race, Italy third (probably second in 1928), Germany
fourth, France and Belgium fifth and sixth, the Netherlands
and Japan seventh and eighth.
But British and German corporations still control the
largest producing companies in the United States, Viscose,
Glanzstoff and Bemberg. They are linked up with the vast
international rayon cartel dominated by Courtauld's of
Britain. The "Big Three" in the rayon world are Courtauld's,
Glanzstoff of Germany, and Snia Viscosa of Italy. And the
greatest of these is Courtauld's.
About 200,000 workers are now employed in rayon fac-
tories of a dozen countries. World production of rayon
jumped from 40,000,000 pounds in 1919 to 285,000,000
pounds in 1927. This is a gain of 612 per cent in eight years.
Total world production for 1928 will be more than
300,000,000.
For the United States the story of this rayon boom is told
in Department of Commerce figures:
1927
Number of establishments... 19
Wage-earners (average no.) • • 26,341
Wages $28,649,441
Cost of materials $25,747,792
Value of products $109,888,336
Value added by manufacture $84,140,544
Horse power 122,406
In only two years the number of workers increased by 38
per cent and the value of products by 25 per cent, while horse
power increased by 83 per cent. But the increase in amount
spent for wages did not keep pace with the larger number
Percentage of
^925
Increase
14
19,128
Z1-1
$22,975,605
24.7
$18,447,965
39.3
$88,060,962
24.8
$69,582,997
20.9
66,966
82.8
66 LABOR AND SILK
of workers employed. Average earnings of rayon workers
were less in 1927 than two years before.
For 1928 it was expected that rayon production in the
United States would be 100,000,000 pounds. During 1927
not only the year's home output of around 75,000,000 pounds
and a reserve supply of some 12,000,000 pounds was con-
sumed in the United States but more than 16,000,000 pounds
was imported. American textile mills use about one-third
of the world rayon supply.
Opinions differ as to whether rayon is cutting into the silk
and cotton goods industries. Most silk manufacturers think
rayon is making for the increased salability of silk and fine
goods. "Rayon has given to the textile industry a new fiber
to blend with silk, wool, linen and cotton," according to H.
R. Mallinson, one of the leading silk merchants.
The largest amount of rayon is used for underwear.
Hosiery comes next. Cotton goods manufacture is third.
Silk manufacture is fourth in consumption of rayon. Cotton
mills are using more and more of this new fiber each year
for popular mixtures. Both cotton and silk textile workers
are winding and weaving rayon. "Good news for silk-
worms,'* says the New York Evening Jouriial. Profits of
rayon companies, to be described in this chapter, have been
made solely from the production of rayon yarn. None of
the rayon companies weaves its own fabrics. They pro-
duce rayon filaments and spin them into yarn to be sold to
hosiery, silk or cotton mills for knitting or winding and
weaving.
Munitions and Rayon
The secret of this big jump forward in rayon production
since the war is connected with preparation for the next war !
A New York Times writer has let the cat out of the bag.
The secret was already known in Europe.
RAYON 67
"Munitions plants were easily converted into rayon mills/'
(Emphasis mine. — G.H.) "The Armistice released man-
power and raw materials." Both rayon (artificial silk) and
dynamite can be made from nitro-cellulose. The nitro-
cellulose process of making rayon in an artificial silk factory
can be changed overnight into the production of dynamite.
Under the innocent name of artificial silk factories, muni-
tions plants are extended and maintained. It is probable
that equipment in all rayon plants, not only those using the
nitro-cellulose process, can be adapted for explosives.
DuPont, largest munitions corporation in the world, and
Nobel, dynamite maker and donor of the "Peace Prize," are
now making large additional profits from artificial silk.
Tubize, an international explosives trust and artificial silk
corporation, also connects the rayon industry with the chemi-
cal industry.
These great rayon plants are of vital importance to govern-
ments in connection with war preparedness. The Italian
government has paid big subsidies to Snia Viscosa, now in
the giant combine with Courtauld's. The British government
in 191 1 paid a subsidy to British Celanese, now a private
independent company.
Rayon Cartel and Price Control
The rayon cartel comes closer to an international trust
than any other known international cartel. This is the
opinion of the U. S. Department of Commerce in a special
report on cartels. The rayon trust controls 85 per cent of
world rayon production. It has interests in Great Britain,
the United States, Germany, Italy, Holland, France, Canada,
AustraHa, India, Switzerland, and Japan.
European cartels worry American capitalists. Dr. Julius
Klein, director of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Com-
merce, speaks for American business interests when he says
68
LABOR AND SILK
RAYON 69
the cartel is "a deliberately planned weapon to rout American
business from foreign markets/* But the rayon cartel is
peculiar. The official report continues :
The rayon industry represents the striking anomaly of an
American industry producing a staple manufactured product of
which the United States produces and consumes more than any
other country in the world, but which is either directly controlled
by or closely affiliated with foreign interests, in this particular
case Courtauld's (Great Britain) and Vereinigte Glanzstoff-
Bemberg (Germany), the leading members of the international
combination. This condition is explained primarily by the fact
that the basic patents of the industry are largely of European
origin and that the European producers displayed considerable
initiative and enterprise in taking advantage of the possibilities
of the American market.
Also they showed considerable initiative in taking ad-
vantage of low-priced workers in the southern states. But
this fact is not pointed out in the Department of Commerce
report.
This international trust aims to eliminate "harmful com-
petition" through (i) an agreement on prices; (2) a certain
specialization in marketing without a definite territorial divi-
sion; (3) an improvement of the product through inter-
change of patents and technical improvements.
Such international fixing of a stable price gives rayon a
big advantage over raw silk. It eliminates, as intended, the
speculation in prices which is easy in the raw silk trade. It
allows no underbidding of one company by another. Average
prices of rayon yarn have continued steadily below $2 a
pound ever since early 1924. Throughout the last year and
a half they have averaged continuously below $1.50, while
raw silk prices went up and down between $5 and $6 a
pound.
This gigantic control over millions of dollars and thousands
of workers' lives heads up in Courtauld's of Britain. The
70 LABOR AND SILK
American Viscose Company, its subsidiary here, produces
more than half the total American output. A combine with
the German Vereinigte Glanzstoflf and the Italian Snia
Viscosa was concluded in 1927. "Close relations" were al-
ready established with the Dutch Enka, which is now build-
ing a vast American Enka plant in Asheville, North Carolina.
With the adherence of the French producers during the
second half of 1927, Courtauld's and its related companies
now control between 80 and 90 per cent of the world rayon
production.
The new combine is mainly held together by the inter-
change of shares. The whole trade has been rationalized.
There has been no attempt as yet to control raw materials,
wood pulp and cotton linters. "It is probably true that no
great industry ever before has been built up with so little
competition and so few failures."
What this international octopus of the "Big Three" means
to American rayon workers is seen in the wage figures.
Production and profits have increased mightily, even in the
two years from 1925 to 1927. But earnings per worker were
cut by 10 per cent, averaging now only about $20 a week.
Such an average for 26,000 wage-earners means that very
many workers are earning far less than $20 a week.
Courtauld's-Viscose Sky-Rocketing
What this international power means to the owners is
seen in the spectacular profit figures of the company con-
trolling 85 per cent of the world's rayon supply. Profits of
$22,000,000 in 1927 told only part of the Courtauld story.
"Courtauld Shares Rise $65,000,000 in Value in Ten
Minutes on Wild London Exchange," headlines on the front
page of the New York Times in February, 1928, carried the
good news to the possessing class. "The Old Lady of
Threadneedle Street, as the Bank of England is called, had
RAYON 71
a front row seat to-day at the most spectacular trading per-
formance in artificial silk shares on the Stock Exchange
which the commercial world has ever experienced. . . . The
excitement spread like wild fire and affected all other sections
of the artificial silk market. . . . Habitues of the Exchange
found a parallel only in the great Kaffir boom in the '90s."
Dividends of Courtauld's for 1927 were nominally at the
rate of 25 per cent. But several stock dividends had been
issued in previous years to conceal the fabulous profits on
actual investment. For every one dollar put into Courtauld's
in 1913 the investor can now get $34. This is an increase of
over 3,000 per cent. After the February sky-rocketing an
extra dividend was declared in July, 1928, of $6,000,000.
"A man who purchased 100 of the ordinary shares when
the company was floated, and who had kept them as well as
the previous bonuses received, could have realized a profit
of is, 300 if he had sold them at £9 on the evening of
the report. In 1920 he would have received a scrip bonus
of 100 per cent; in 1921 one of 200 per cent and a gift in
1924 of 400 5 per cent preference shares. Even then he
would have left to him his preference shares."
Courtauld's inspires a long article in the Wall Street
Journal and special articles in the textile trade papers. ''If
has a capital of $160,000,000, only $10,000,000 of which was
paid in. All the rest came out of profits. And the present
market value of its securities is about $500,000,000."
(Emphasis mine. — G.H.)
Samuel Courtauld is one of England's multi-millionaires,
with an income of over $5,000,000 a year, "earned" in arti-
ficial silk. Fourteen other relatives share heavily in the
profits of the corporation. For 300 years in England, ever
since the Huguenot persecution drove them out of France,
this family has been one of "master silk weavers," employing
first apprentices and then a few "hands," profiting comfort-
ably from the toil of their workers.
72 LABOR AND SILK
Courtauld's largest subsidiary, the Viscose Company in
America, paid in a goodly share of the $22,000,000 profits
reported by the parent company for 1927. American Viscose
was originally financed out of the accrued profits of Cour-
tauld's, and is now capitalized at $10,400,000. It is turning
out in 1928 about 60 per cent of the total American produc-
tion of rayon.
The Viscose Company is a non-union corporation, employ-
ing 15,000 workers in five huge plants at Marcus Hook and
Lewiston, Pa., Parkersburg and Nitro, West Va., and
Roanoke, Va. A new plant at Meadville, Pa., will employ
1,000 more workers.
The financial pages of the papers regret that "unfortu-
nately for the investor, securities in the two largest and most
prosperous producers, namely the Viscose Company and the
DuPont Rayon Company, are not available." These securi-
ties are kept securely in the hands of the two families and
their friends who control the two vast parent companies.
The Rise of DuPont Rayon
The mammoth power of DuPont and General Motors has
already put DuPont second to Viscose in American pro-
duction. DuPont will probably be first within the next three
years.
New DuPont rayon plants of eight units at Waynesboro,
Va., will cost $46,000,000. Construction will be rushed at
top speed because the demand for rayon is great. Each unit
will employ more than 800 workers, all kept non-union by
the anti-union policy of DuPont. This gigantic plant will be
the largest in the world. Its production will put Virginia
ahead of any other state in the world in rayon output.
Another new DuPont rayon plant already under way at
Ampthill, near Richmond, Va., is costing $8,000,000. A
special concrete roadway out to the new plant from the
RAYON 73
Richmond-Petersburg turnpike has been built by the DuPont
Engineering Company. A specially constructed railroad
siding to the rayon plant now runs from the tracks of the
Seaboard Air Line Railway.
The third unit of DuPont Rayon at Old Hickory near
Nashville, Tenn., is costing $4,000,000. A paltry $200,000
from DuPont profits this year is building a new office for
the DuPont Rayon Company in Buffalo. This rayon cor-
poration, with a big plant in Buffalo, and these newer plants
in Tennessee and Virginia, was capitalized at $25,000,000.
The parent company issued $10,000,000 of new stock in
1928 to pay 6 per cent, in view of the big rayon expansion
program. Rayon in 1927 brought in more than one-eighth
of the DuPont total income.
Internationally DuPont Rayon, through the parent com-
pany, E. I. DuPont de Nemours Company, is directly con-
nected with Nobel Chemical, with Comptoir des Textiles
Artificiels in France, and with Mitsui in Japan. It is in-
directly connected with the rayon trust through Nobel and
the French interests.
Combined profits of all DuPont companies for the last
year and a half are stupendous, reflecting in part the record
profits of General Motors. In the first six months of 1928
DuPont cleared $30,125,125. This gives the owners a profit
of $11.32 a share or about 51 per cent on their investment.
The company's investment in General Motors brought them
approximately $20,000,000. DuPont holdings in U. S. Steel
sold at $2,600,000 profit in March. Extra dividends of
nearly $16,000,000 were declared by the DuPont Company
two months later.
For 1927, DuPont "earned" $41,113,968. This was more
than 10 per cent increase over 1926. A statistician examin-
ing fifty-five leading common stocks for the six years, 1921
to 1927, found that an investment of $1,000 in DuPont six
74 LABOR AND SILK
years ago had paid more than i,ooo per cent. "An invest-
ment of $8,000 in DuPont has increased to $88,480."
From some of his surplus, Pierre DuPont, chairman of
General Motors, on leave of absence to work for Governor
Smith as Presidential candidate, donated $50,000 to the 1928
Democratic campaign. Big business and politics worked
hand in hand. John J. Raskob, vice-president of the DuPont
Company and chairman of the Finance Committee of General
Motors, was chairman of the Democratic National Com-
mittee. Lammot DuPont, brother of Pierre and president
of the main company, supported Hoover and the Republican
campaign.
Senator DuPont of Delaware, brother of Pierre, hardly
needed his salary of $10,000 as a senator in Congress. Sena-
tors' salaries were raised by Congress early in 1926, "in
almost stealthy haste," from $7,500. DuPont of Delaware
was a powerful ally in the Senate for the super-power trust
which has so far escaped investigation.
The company surplus of over $30,000,000 this past half
year would be enough to double the half year's average wages
of more than 50,000 rayon workers. DuPont rayon workers
in Buffalo are averaging $20 a week or barely over $1,000
a year, when the minimum family budget calls for $2,255.97.
In Virginia the girl rayon workers get 24 cents an hour or
$11.88 for a 495^-hour week.
Other Important Producers
AMERICAN BEMBERG CORP.
Johnson City, Tenn., and a new plant at Elizabethton, Tenn.,
costing $3,000,000. Employs 6,000 workers.^ Output about
4,500,000 pounds a year. Incorporated 1925. Capitalized at
13,500,000.
Part of international rayon trust. Branch of German Bemberg
1 Number of workers reported by companies differs from total given
by Department of Commerce.
RAYON 75
and connected with Verelnlgte Glanzstoff Fabriken of Germany.
Closely connected with Enka of Holland. British branch of
Bemberg established June, 1928, capitalized at $6,250,000.
The new American plant is built by Lockwood Greene Com-
pany. Edwin Farnham Greene, former treasurer of Pacific
Mills, and still a director, is chairman of this company.
Dividends on 7 per cent preferred stock are "guaranteed by
Vereinigte Glanzstoff and by Bemberg of Germany."
AMERICAN GLANZSTOFF CORP.
Elizabethton, Tenn., plant to cost $37,500,000. Near new
Bemberg plant. First unit costing $7,000,000 now complete.
Employs 5,500 workers. Output about 4,500,000 pounds a year.
Incorporated 1927. Capitalized at $7,000,000.
Part of international rayon trust. Branch of German
Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken. Parent company (V. G. F.)
shared with German Bemberg in establishing American Bemberg.
Closely connected with Courtauld's, I. G. Farbenindustrie, etc.
Also connected with Dutch Enka, and French C. T. A.
Profits of parent company for 1927 — $2,600,000.
By merger in Germany capital of V. G. F. increased March,
1928, from $3,500,000 to $18,500,000. Dividend of 20 per cent
declared for past year. American Glanzstoff has very "friendly
relationship" with neighboring Bemberg plant.
CELANESE CORP. OF AMERICA
Amcelle, Cumberland, Md. Employs 2,000 workers. Output
3,000,000 pounds a year. Building new plant to cost $1,500,000.
Incorporated 1925. Capitalized at $7,050,400.
Independent of international rayon trust. Branch of British
Celanese, Ltd., with branch in Canada. Rejected invitation of
Courtauld's-Glanzstoff to enter combine.
Its subsidiary, Safety Celluloid Company, merged in 1927 with
Celluloid Company of Newark, N. J. Transaction carried out
by J. P. Morgan and Company, "who owns a substantial interest
in both companies."
Profits of Celanese Corp. of America for 1927 — $2,754,072.
Recent sale of $11,481,800 stock. Money will be used to build
new plants. Company was originally subsidized by British
Government as British Cellulose and Chemical Manufacturing
Company.
76 LABOR AND SILK
Wages of workers in these two companies range from |8 a
week for young workers to $i8 a week for men.
INDUSTRIAL RAYON CORP.
Cleveland, Ohio. New plant to be built at Covington, Va.,
costing $7,500,000 "will provide homes for employees." Cleve-
land plant employs 1,475 workers.
New plant will employ 2,000 more in first unit.
Output about 4,250,000 pounds a year. New plant will more
than double production. Incorporated 1925, buying out Industrial
Fiber Company (original company established 1920 as merger
of American Borvisk and Italian Snia Viscosa). Capitalized
at $11,426,000 (recently increased).
Closely connected with Dutch Breda, but not directly in inter-
national rayon trust.
Profits of corporation for 1927, $908,000, and for first half
of 1928, $680,000, increase of 153 per cent over same period in
1927.
TUBIZE ARTIFICIAL SILK CO. OF AMERICA
Hopewell, Va. Plant expansion has cost $2,000,000. Employs
3,200 workers. Output 7,000,000 pounds a year. Incorporated
1920. Capitalized at $5,000,000. Part of international rayon
trust. Branch of Belgian Tubize (Fabrique de Soie Artificielle
de Tubize), which has branches in France, Poland and Hungary.
International Holding and Investment Company (formed by
Alfred Loewenstein, multi-millionaire), owns majority of shares
in Belgian Tubize. Company had cash on hand of $4,250,000
in January, 1928. Ratio of current assets to liability was eight
to one.
International Holding and Investment Company also controls
Dutch Breda, and blocks of stock in German V. G. F,, Bemberg
and Dutch Enka.
Alfred Loewenstein, Belgian rayon financier and multi-
millionaire, owned $41,000,000 of rayon stock, including a
majority of Belgian Tubize. He had ambitious plans to
complete the international rayon cartel in a still larger com-
bine, but died mysteriously in July, 1928, by drowning in
the English Channel. He is said to have lost $60,000,000
RAYON 77
just before his death. While in New York, in April, shortly
before his death, he and his party occupied twenty-six rooms
costing $400 a day at the Ambassador Hotel.
Earnings of women rayon workers in the Tubize plant at
Hopewell, Va., average $11.88 a week, or about $617 a year.
It takes a woman rayon worker at Tubize eight montl^s to
earn $400. Men rayon workers are paid one cent more an
hour. A company paper. The Tubize Spinnerette, "pub-
lished for and edited by employees of Tubize Artificial Silk
Company" at Hopewell, is full of pious exhortations about
"making work a pleasure." The company baseball teams,
company tennis teams, company cafeteria, "our girls' corner,"
all aim to keep the workers contented on the low wages.
Rayon Workers
A letter about conditions in the Tubize plant in 1928 fol-
lows:
We finally secured jobs in the finishing room of a rayon mill,
where we get 24 cents an hour for a nine-hour day, five hours
on Saturdays. It takes six weeks to learn the work, we were
told, and costs the :;ompany f 100 to teach a beginner, "and we
expect people once hired to stay."
We are living in a company dormitory. Asked if we belonged
to a union, we said no, and were told that "we aren't union
here because we don't need it; if anything is wrong just go to
the foreman and he will make it right."
A copy of the rules of this dormitory includes such provisions
as: "Each girl shall keep her room clean and make her bed
before going to work. She will be expected to clean it thoroughly
once a week; if she wishes the company to do this, the charge
will be 25 cents.
"No girl is permitted to keep food or eat in her room. Ready-
cooked food may be eaten in the kitchenettes. The matron will
be glad to advise the girls in any way she can, except on Thurs-
days; on that day the assistant matron will take her place,
"Girls going out for more than an hour, or overnight or for
78 LABOR AND SILK
a week-end, are expected to register before leaving and on their
return."
Weekly pay is made by check, and in order to get them
cashed at the company stores, you have to buy something, or they
charge you ten cents for cashing it. Nothing is as cheap down
South as in the North, except labor power, and that is dirt cheap,
especially the Negro labor.
The only way I can describe the work is to say that we beat
the kinks out of artificial silk and get kinks in our shoulders
doing it.
The letter carries the whole story. Men spinners and
twisters in this plant (Tubize at Hopewell, Va.) get one cent
more than the girls — 25 cents an hour. They work in alter-
nating shifts each week, from 7 a. m. to 3 p. m. and then from
II P.M. to 7 A.M. At one time spinners were paid for over-
time, but now they get their straight 25 cents for all Sunday
and overtime labor.
In the Twentieth Century plant at Petersburg, Va., work-
ers were getting 33 cents an hour until the end of May, 1928,
when pay was cut to 30 cents. The superintendent promised
a return to the old rate when business picked up. But when
business did pick up, he broke his promise and a spontaneous
strike followed. Two hundred organized workers, mostly
girls, walked out, demanding the old rate. After six days
the strike was broken. The workers went back to their
machines, "but with a vision of what might be when the
union comes."
"It seems that the unions have forgotten us," said the
strike leader. "Everything was against us. We had no
union and the local press either lied about us or refrained
from informing the public. I asked the reporter why he
didn't give us more publicity. He told me that the Chamber
of Commerce doesn't want anything said about the strike
because it might drive new industries away!' (Emphasis
mine. — G.H.)
RAYON 79
A worker gave the following description of a strike at the
Bemberg plant at Elizabethton, Tenn., in 1927.
Three hundred of the workers at the Bemberg Works of this
city are on strike, and efforts are being made to tie up the entire
mill employing 1,300 men and women.
Conditions in this mill are abominable. The bosses do not
know what humanity is. They work the men 66 to 72 hours a
week at wages of 28 to 32 cents an hour. The girls and women
work 10 hours a day, 56 hours a week. They begin with $8.96
for 56 hours. The average scale for women is 20 cents an hour
after they learn how to do the work.
Living expenses, on the other hand, are as high as in the big
cities. Board and room cost from $7 to $10 a week.
The work is unhealthy for the women and many of them get
tuberculosis. But there is a vast reservoir of workers in the
hills of Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky to draw on, —
innocent, ignorant "hill-billies" who are being turned into
industrial slaves.
The workers in this plant have struck before. Last spring
they were on strike, but after three days went back defeated.
This time they are demanding 8 hours' work and higher pay.
They are trying to form a local union and hope this time that
they will win. Up to the present only 300 have gone out, but
these men and women are doing everything possible to get out
the 1,000 others.
When workers begin to strike in the South — and twice within
a period of a few months — ^then there is hope for the American
workers.
Special health hazards for rayon workers are now recog-
nized by British trade unions. They are demanding a
government inquiry into the causes of disabilities among
rayon operatives. British rayon workers have been partially
blinded from the acids used and have suffered from chest
and limg troubles. "Firms think more about acid than they
do about the health of their employees," comments one
leader. The atmosphere of rayon spinning rooms is de-
scribed by workers as "etherized."
Rayon plants usually operate twenty-four hours a day.
80 LABOR AND SILK
There is a tendency to try to make this in two shifts instead
of three, employers acknowledge. A majority of the workers,
60 per cent, are women. In Virginia and Tennessee, where
the largest rayon plants have settled, there is little protective
legislation on the hours of work for women. Virginia law
allows a ten-hour working day, Tennessee a ten and a half
hour working day, out of every twenty-four hours. Night
work is common in both states. Women are used for over-
time work on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Most of
the larger rayon plants make Saturday a five-hour working
day.
Rayon engineering experts, explaining why rayon plants
have been built in the South instead of the North, state
frankly, "Hours of labor in southern states are, in many
cases, longer than those permitted by the laws of northern
or eastern states." The problem of housing for employees
worries the engineers, because "it is doubtful whether, in the
event of providing a village for employees, work could be
found for all the men since about 60 per cent of the em-
ployees required would be women." A mill village for work-
ers in the new Industrial Rayon plant at Covington, Va., is
laid out near the mill. But the mill executives are building
for themselves a choice residential section on the hills, two
miles from town.
Class-conscious workers, hearing the rayon foreman's
words, "We aren't union here because we don't need it," can
guess the rest of the story. Working hours are nine, ten,
eleven or twelve hours a day or night. Pay is twenty- four
to thirty cents an hour. Weekly earnings of rayon workers,
skilled and unskilled. North and South, averaged $23.09 a
week in 1925, but only $20.77 ^ week in 1927, by Department
of Commerce figures. Company managers are watching
every move of every employee in order to keep the union
out.
All this is in an internationally organized industry, one of
RAYON 81
the largest and richest of international combines. As the
industry has grown richer and larger, in the last two years,
workers' pay has gone down. In Italy, as in the United
States, wages of rayon workers have recently been cut by lo
per cent.
Rayon workers are practically unorganized in every one
of the five leading rayon countries. The 26,000 American
rayon workers must be included in any effective plan of
textile union organization.
CHAPTER VI
SPEED-UP
'Wanted: weaver to run six looms." This sign on a
Paterson mill was up in the morning, gone in the afternoon.
A weaver willing to run six looms had been taken on.
Anna Martin, a woman broad silk weaver in Paterson, has
stood out for fifteen years, ever since the great 1913 strike,
against the multiple loom system. Always she has refused to
run more than two looms. But in 1928 she has had to give
in; the third loom has been put on her and the fourth will
be added as soon as the mill gets more orders.
At the Equity Mills in Paterson the writer watched a
weaver tending four looms. The Equity was running a
thirteen-hour day in the spring of 1928. It had closed down
for a while, and when it was opened up again it was easy to
find workers who would take the longer day.
Doubling up of machines, new devices on old machines,
new machines and new processes with fresh division of labor,
longer hours, extension of piece-rate in place of time-rate —
all these familiar types of speed-up have been tried out in a
drive to increase the workers' output of silk goods.
Tending More Machines
In Pennsylvania all the weavers are running four looms.
At the Egypt silk mills of Allentown weavers have been
tried on six looms and even on eight, but they cannot keep
it up. The Paterson Chamber of Commerce is critical of the
speed-up in Pennsylvania, where the workers' average out-
put is greater than in New Jersey. "They are little more
82
SPEED-UP 83
than loom tenders and not weavers at all. The machine is
the craftsman; the worker is the servant of the machine."
A letter from Scranton, Pa., says, "They are speeding up
machinery, and in most cases one girl is doing the work of
two, with very little extra compensation."
Winders in many Pennsylvania mills have faced a new
form of speed-up this year. Formerly on a time-rate of pay,
the, winders are now put on a pound-rate per week. Each
worker must wind so many pounds of silk as her "task" for
the week. If she cannot make the task — and it is all a fast
worker can do to make it — she gets less pay. If she can do
a little more — and only the very fastest workers can do more,
with good luck in the quality of silk — she gets a little more
than the task-rate. Winders say it means less pay than for-
merly for most of the workers.
Over a hundred girls in the rayon winding department of
the Manville-Jenckes Company mill at Manville, R. I., struck
this year against an order to run more spools for the old rate
of pay.
There is plenty of speed-up in Paterson also. Many
weavers are tending three or four looms. Winders, each
tending, not so long ago, one side of a machine with forty
ends of yarn, now tend at least two sides, and often three
sides with 120 ends. The speed-up of weavers and winders
passes on to the warpers and loomfixers. Because a weaver
does more a warper must do more. A loomfixer used to
look out for forty looms, but now he often has 100 and
must teach the job to a young helper at the same time.
The speed-up of production spread to New Bedford fine
goods mills. Testimony at the forty-eight-hour hearing in
the State House, Boston, February 15, 1928, brought out the
fact: "Weavers are doing up to 300 per cent more work
since the advent of the quality-destroying multiple system.
. , . From New Bedford we get the report that forty years of
age is the limit, and workers with flat feet must get out. Iti
84 LABOR AND SILK
matters not that their feet became flat chasing around from
loom to loom or in the course of their work."
The "Frieder Plan" of speed-up now advocated by the
New Bedford Manufacturers' Association is in force at the
National Spun Silk Mills of which Leonard P. Frieder is
vice-president and general manager. Marcus Frieder is
president of this company and of ten other companies in the
big General Silk Corporation, formerly the Klots Throwing
Company. Weavers on this plan run twelve looms, instead
of four or six as a few years ago. "The harder we work, the
less we get," said a Lancashire weaver known as one of the
most skilled weavers in New Bedford. He described
Frieder's as the worst mill he had ever worked in after
twenty years in silk and fine goods mills of that city. On the
Frieder plan an automatic magazine is attached to the loom
to feed the filling into the shuttle. But with poor silk the
filling often breaks after the transfer of the bobbin, and the
loom stops like an ordinary loom. The weaver must then
connect the thread with the thread that was broken.
The Allen- A Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, made the
two-machine system their issue with the Full Fashioned
Hosiery Workers' Union in 1928. Branch No. 6 of the
union in their statement to the people of Kenosha explained,
**Full fashioned hosiery manufacture is at best a nerve-
racking occupation for the worker. There are 14,000 needles
to a full fashioned machine. These needles have to be kept
in perfect order, at great strain on the eyes. Topping, like-
wise, is wearing on the eyes, and it is significant that most
of the girl toppers, though still young, are compelled to wear
glasses."
Not only silk workers and hosiery workers, but other tex-
tile workers are involved in the speed-up. The South wins
out in the game. Striking weavers of the Loray mills at
Gastonia, N. C, issued the following statement in the spring
of 1928: "We were making $30 to $35 a week and were
SPEED-UP 85
running six to eight looms. Now we are running ten to
twelve looms and getting $15 to $18 a week. We can't live
on it. All we are asking is simple justice. A weaver cannot
run ten or twelve looms at any price. It is more than a man
can stand, let alone a woman. There used to be women
weavers in the mill, but when the number of looms increased
the women all had to give up the work." The Loray mills
are owned by the great Manville-Jenckes Company of Paw-
tucket, R. I., capitalized at $39,000,000.
At the Converse mill in South Carolina three women
weavers, with the assistance of four battery fillers, young
girls of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, now do the work for-
merly allotted to ten weavers. The terrible pace makes a
nineteen-year old girl look like an old woman.
"Nice fast worker, ain't he ?" asked the boss at the Pacific
Mills of Lyman, S. C, pointing out a young man working
like a machine. "Yes, only the youngsters can stand the pace
that way. But there are plenty of 'em." The Pacific Mills
gives a bonus to the worker who keeps up with the pace-
maker. Pacific Mills has big rayon and silk departments.
New Machines
Another form of the technical revolution is the introduction
of new machines utilized in the speed-up of workers. The
"ads" in the masters' trade journals tell the story:
One machine doing the work of three. Three men doing the
work of seven, in less time, less floor space, with a smaller
investment, with one-third the handling and with better results.
By actual test we find that this unit due to its construction and
arrangement can be operated by less help than the older Palmer
operated individually.
The Van Vlaanderen Machine Company thus introduces
finishing machines, a Palmer, a Tenter and a Quetsch in one.
86
LABOR AND SILK
SPEED-UP 87
A machine advertised in the trade journals to-day by an
established company is already in the larger silk mills. "Fast
appearing in the silk mills that set the pace," the "ads" can
truthfully claim.
Other advertisements read as follows :
"New Quilling and Copping Machine; Uniform Cops,
less labor/' (Italics in advertisements are mine. — G.H.)
"Perfect seams made by Low-Priced Help." "Our customers
adopting our Special Light Frictionless Type, Perfect
Balanced Bobbin are increasing production at least one-third
with less labor." "Lever so mechanically counterbalanced
that a boy can operate the machine." A Skein Dyer: "the
price is so moderate that it has made the cost of hand dyeing
prohibitive. They are driven by only a J4 H. P. motor con-
trolled by a snap switch."
For the Crawford Stop Motion, this claim is made : "This
nimble stop motion halts with the machine the instant the
yarn breaks out at the carrier — There's no chance of the yarn
running into waste . , . and each operative can tend more
machines." "lOO per cent Production Increase through
Batten System for Ribbon Looms," and a 50 per cent saving
in weavers' wages are promised in one "ad."
"Universal High Speed Warping. Half to two-thirds re-
duction in labor cost," reads another advertisement. Intro-
duction of four of these and 6y2 of their spindles has re-
placed seventeen slow-speed warping units and 1,350 spooler
spindles in a well-known southern mill. A one-half to two-
thirds reduction in labor costs on warping and reeling is
directly attributed to this change."
An automatic Warp Let Off for Broad Silk Looms is
described "to permit a weaver to tend one more loom than
when weights are used."
Other advertisements explain employers' devices for what
they think will be a painless speed-up :
88 LABOR AND SILK
Getting all hands ahead of the game. As soon as your
operatives have personal quotas — production standards — the job
becomes a game. Reach the goal, beat the record, get there on
time or ahead ! The production standard for each machine will
be the normal expected output, including allov^^ances for all
necessary stops.
The fun thus described is given by Veeder Counters, count-
ing the picks or units thrown in the day by the weaver.
"The looming of greater profits on the horizon of the
textile industry. If you would receive actual value for every
cent spent in production pay your weavers by the pick via
Root Pick Counter; they register nothing but picks actually
woven/' advises another advertisement. "Spindle Speed
Tests. Make them frequently and avoid the lazy spindles.
So simple a boy can use it/"^ is the boost for another device.
These "ads" are taken from recent numbers of the Ameri-
can Silk Journal, Silk, Daily Nezvs Record and the Textile
World. One issue of Silk for March, 1928, lists forty-five
new patents of interest to silk manufacture!^. The writer
has watched the advertisements in textile trade journals for
six months. The great majority stress speed and pace in
production. Of course they never mention the effect of a
machine on the comfort or health of employees.
Workers' Output Increased
Silk workers in the Cheney Silk Mills at South Man-
chester, Conn., know the meaning of the speed-up. The
employment manager of this plant "reported at a conference
of the American Management Association that at this large
silk mill, employing 'normally' 4,400 persons, the number of
wage-earners in relation to each $1,000 worth of product had
decreased by 46 per cent from 1914 to 1926, the number of
salaried employees had decreased 5 per cent, and power
SPEED-UP 89
consumed per hour had increased 21 per cent. Or, in terms
of 1914 dollars, value of individual production had increased
by 86 per cent."
One silk worker in these mills who produced $1,000 worth
of silk for Cheney in 1914, was producing $1,860 worth of
silk for them in 1927.
This increased output of each silk worker since 1914 shows
up also in government figures for the silk industry in the
United States as a whole. Wage-earners increased by 23
per cent in the eleven years from 1914 to 1925. Horse power,
which includes engines and electric motors, increased by 91
per cent. Value of total output, in terms of the 191 4 dollar,
increased by 83 per cent.^
In 1914 each wage-earner produced $1,012 worth of silk,
but in 1925 each one produced $2,452 worth, which means
$1,515 worth in terms of the 1914 dollar. This is a 50 per
cent increase in productivity. Two silk workers produced in
1925 what it took three workers to produce in 1914.
Most of this increase has happened since the war. Wage-
earners **in the silk" increased by only 5 per cent in the six
years from 19 19 to 1925. Horse power increased by 22 per
cent. Value of total output in terms of the 1919 dollar in-
creased by 41 per cent.
In 1 91 9 each wage-earner produced $2,366 worth of silk,
but in 1925 each one produced $3,191 worth, in terms of the
1919 dollar. This is a 35 per cent increase in productivity
in six years. Three workers produced in 1925 what it took
four workers to produce in 1919. One worker in four could
be laid off with no loss of production. Or put it another
way: One wage-earner in 1925 put out as much in six hours
as he had put out in eight hours in 1919. He is doing as
1 The figure used in this computation is given in the Census as the
'Value added by manufacture" and is here corrected for the change in
the value of the dollar by the wholesale price index of the U. S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
90 LABOR AND SILK
much in a thirty-six-hour week as he did formerly in a forty-
eight-hour week.
The worker's output has risen in each of the leading silk
states. The actual number employed in silk mills increased
only in Pennsylvania — from 53,152 wage-earners in 1919 to
60,809 in 1925. In New Jersey, New York, Connecticut
and Massachusetts fewer silk workers were employed in 1925
than in 19 19. The figures of changing output for these five
states are interpreted on page 184.
What Employers Say
Textiles do not show as much increase of output per
worker as certain other industries, but textile manufacturers
are boasting of the speed-up and the increased productivity
of each worker. The American Wool and Cotton Reporter
for July 21, 1927, prints the following on its front cover:
Are Wages Too High ?
Wages are too high in any individual textile mill unless that
mill — on the basis of full time — is to-day operating its equipment
with a little more than 50 per cent the same number of operatives
that it had on its payroll ten years ago. In every branch of
textile manufacturing it has been discovered that operatives can
tend twice the number of machines than has been their habit. In
many cases operatives are tending three times as many spindles
and four times as many looms. (Emphasis mine. — G.H.) . . .
By this stretching out of the machinery, the wages per week per
operative can be increased, but the actual wage per machine
radically decreased.
This editorial was written two months before the first of
the 10 per cent pay cuts which swept like a scourge through
New England mill towns in 1927-8.
Labor Extension
In the midst of the pay cut epidemic, a manufacturers'
journal, the Textile World, printed an article on increased
SPEED-UP 91
output of textile workers. It gives the speed-up a new name,
"labor extension, which means making labor go further in
mill operations." It states that increase of output per opera-
tive in some mills is "lOO per cent, 200 per cent, or even
more." This means, say the manufacturers themselves, that
employees "are earning larger profits for their employers"
"Labor extension is efficiency," explains the employing class.
"Labor extension is speed-up," explains the working class.
Engineers have in some cases gone into the mills and made
recommendations to the management based upon the num-
ber of employees it could weed out. But they do not describe
their plan as a speed-up. J. M. Barnes of the Barnes Textile
Service explained the labor extension or labor specialization
system to labor officials in New Bedford: "Take away all
battery work and any other labor which is not strictly
weaving, and the weaver can run still more looms. . . . The
higher paid hands do the skilled work on a greater number of
looms while the other work is done by younger, less experi-
enced people at lower pay." He acknowledged that a large
number of workers were immediately displaced when the
new system was introduced. Others estimate that 20 per cent
of the workers are dismissed and become "disemployed."
A Portuguese striker in New Bedford summed it up.
"They take away six looms and give the worker twelve auto-
matics. The company profits, but the worker gets no more
wages. And what becomes of the displaced workers?"
Since 1899 the volume of American manufactured goods
has increased two and three-quarter times while the number
of workers employed is only 1.8 times as great. Herbert
Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce, in his annual report for
1927 interpreted these figures. Output per factory worker
has increased 49 per cent in the last twenty-seven years and
40.5 per cent since the war. This means that two factory
workers now put out as much as three workers put out in
92 LABOR AND SILK
1899. Three factory workers now produce more than four
workers produced eight years ago. Manufacturers could lay
off one zvorker in four of those employed in 1919 and still
make a gain in production. And as a matter of fact the
manufacturers in 1925 were meeting the nation's increasing
demands with 7 per cent fewer workers than they had em-
ployed in 1 91 9.
Meaning of the Speed-Up
Long names are used to describe this technical revolution,
but they cannot hide its meaning for workers. In Europe,
the system is called "rationalization." Writers on rationaliza-
tion analyze the general tendency under these three headings :
1. Lower wages, longer working hours and speed-up plans
with present equipment of a plant.
2. Introduction of new machines and other equipment with a
system of "scientific management," involving a reorgan-
ization of production in the individual plant, to increase
output per worker.
3. Combination and centralization in the industry as a whole
to develop the most efficient plants and standardize the
industry.
One worker is producing more than he ever produced be-
fore, and employers can get along with fewer workers. To
the owners this means lower labor costs and increased profits.
To the workers it means greater exploitation and increase
of unemployment in almost every industry throughout the
country.
Unemployment
It is estimated that "normal" unemployment leaves always
about 1,000,000 workers in the United States out of jobs.
This is the labor surplus on the market from which the em-
SPEED-UP 93
ploying class can choose its supply of labor. A year of
business depression increases the so-called normal unemploy-
ment, but no one ever knows exactly how many are unem-
ployed in the United States, for there is no national system
of unemployment insurance or labor exchanges which could
give the accurate information.
Labor-saving machinery and speed-up of workers have
brought now a new unemployment. "Laid off," say the work-
ers. "Technological unemployment," say the government
officials. "Relief needed as never before," say the social
workers, and send out extra special appeal letters.
The average unemployment of the members of trade
unions was i8 per cent in January, February and March,
1928. This was the A. F. of L. report given in the American
Federationist for May. It means that at least one in every
six skilled trade union members was out of a job. Careful
estimates for the country as a whole gave over 4,000,000 as
unemployed in March, 1928.
A study of 32,719 textile workers in Philadelphia in
March, 1928, showed 6,584, or about 20 per cent, unem-
ployed. Most of the unions in that center reported that 50
per cent of those who were employed were on part time
work.
For silk workers no definite estimate of unemployment
was possible. Of 8,000 silk workers in the Easton-
Phillipsburg center only about 3,500 were employed in May,
1928. For silk workers in Paterson, N. J., the Associated
Silk Workers stated in May, 1928, "We have estimated that
there are about 300 to 500 ribbon and hatband weavers who
have no shops or connection with shops. There are always
about 300 to 400 weavers who have only part time work;
that is, work three weeks and 'loaf three weeks or more."
As an estimate of present unemployment in the spring of
1928, "We would say about 3,000 — including all branches
of the industry." This would mean 18 per cent of unemploy-
94 LABOR AND SILK
ment among the 16,368 silk workers, listed for Paterson, in
the latest census. Probably one out of every six silk workers
was out of a job in 1928.
When only part of the surplus labor in the United States
can be absorbed even by newly created industries, a crisis is
recognized. "I have watched this crisis approaching for
years," said Ethelbert Stewart, Commissioner of Labor
Statistics, in February, 1928. "It is not created by a slump
in the nation's production or prosperity, but by more effi-
cient machinery and manufacturing methods. Every machine
that is built to do the work of four men throws three out of
work. . . ."
Union Policies on Machinery
Textile workers were among the first industrial workers
to learn the meaning of machinery under the complete control
of the employers. When these "iron men" appeared in
England more than a hundred years ago, workers discovered
two facts : first, iron men took away jobs from handworkers,
and second, profits from the vastly increased production of
iron men went entirely into the hands of their masters.
Handworkers were maddened by the helplessness of their
position. They burned the mill built by Richard Arkwright
who had patented his invention of the spinning jenny in
1 771. They broke the mule spinning machines patented by
Crompton a few years later. Mass demonstrations in
Lancashire in 1779 were called "riots" by the capitalist
authorities. Weavers broke the first power looms, which
were patented by Cartwright in 1785 and put into general
use about the time England and America were fighting each
other again in the War of 1812.
By the time spinning frames and power looms were set
up in New England cotton mills, workers had accepted iron
men as inevitable. Lancashire weavers, called "mob-ites"
SPEED-UP 95
by their masters, because of the so-called mobs in England,
led the first factory strike in the United States at Paterson
in 1828, but it was a strike for shorter hours, not against
power machines. Two of the long strikes, Paterson 191 3
and Paterson 1924, were started against the multiple loom
system.
The official policy of the American Federation of Labor
on machine development has been stated at every annual con-
vention since 1897. Increased production as a result of the
development of machinery should be utilized as a means to
reduce the hours of labor. At Atlantic City in 1925 and
again at Los Angeles in 1927, the reports on shorter work
day adopted by the convention called for the five-day week.
"If an3i:hing has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt
it is that the reduction in the daily hours of labor and the
work week, has been accompanied by a most material increase
in the volume of production. ... It is no longer a question
of whether the five-day week can be established. It is estab-
lished. It is here."
The five-day week may be here for a small number of
skilled workers, grouped in trade unions. Even in organized
trades, the practice is not general. In textiles, union mem-
bers have in some instances achieved and maintained the
forty-four -hour, five-and-one-half-day week. For the great
mass of textile workers, as well as for the millions of
workers in other unorganized industries, the A. F. of L.
statement stands as a mockery. As a cure for existing hard-
ships in industry, the A. F. of L. instead of aggressively
striking out to organize the workers, joins hands with the
employers in their policies of still further mechanizing the
workers and pyramiding industry under capitalist control.
On the theory that increased profits will somehow come back
to the workers in higher wages, a theory that is only too
forcibly disproved by the experience of lock-outs and wage
cuts, Federation officials spend their time elaborating schemes
96 LABOR AND SILK
for "Union Management Cooperation" and offering them-
selves to the employers as safe investments to stem the tide
of radicalism.
The stated policy of the United Textile Workers echoes
that of the A. F. of L. It is "to see that the worker gets
a share of the increased profits coming to the company
from the improvements in machines. As the value of prod-
ucts increases the workers' share should increase as much.
As to the speed-up of workers on the machines, we fight it
wherever it occurs, and we are going to keep on fighting it."
It is a policy that has been stated but never carried out.
Thomas F. McMahon, president of the United Textile
Workers, has lately advised the textile manufacturers to
curtail uneconomic operations, close inefficient mills, displace
20 per cent of the workers and provide steady work for the
remainder. As for the displaced workers he says, "It would
be better for them to seek employment elsewhere and allow
80 per cent to live under American living conditions than
under conditions existing at present, where all are suffering
because of lack of employment." President McMahon him-
self has a salary at least five times as large as the average
silk worker's earnings.
The Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers, affiliated to the
United Textile Workers, state their policy on machinery in
the preamble of their constitution:
The high development of machinery increasing the production,
thereby creating a greater number of unemployed, makes com-
petition keener for a job and thereby creates a tendency to lower
wages. We therefore pledge ourselves to secure the 44-hour
week and call upon all workers engaged in the manufacture of
knit goods to combine into a compact federation, to be affiliated
with the American Labor movement.
The first trade rule of this hosiery union reads, "No mem-
ber of this federation shall operate more than one ingrain
machine nor more than one footer. No member of this
SPEED-UP 97
federation shall accept a position to operate two silk ma-
chines."
The policy of silk workers on the multiple loom system
was discussed even before the great Paterson strike of 191 3.
That strike started against the three- and four-loom system
and was turned into a demand for the eight-hour day. The
strike was lost and the four-loom system came into some of
the Paterson mills.
Since the 1924 strike, opinion has been divided in the
Associated Silk Workers as to the correct policy on the
multiple-loom system. It was one of the main issues in
that strike, and some of the workers who went back defeated
left the union as a result. After six months it was voted by
the union to permit three- and four-loom weavers to remain
in the union and to recognize shops operating under the
multiple-loom system.
The left wing National Textile Workers* Union, organized
in New York City in September, 1928, states its policy in
relation to rationalization or speed-up as follows : against the
speed-up system in all its forms; forty-hour, five-day week;
abolition of overtime work; where overtime is permitted,
payment equaling time and a half for overtime and double
time for Sundays and holidays; fight against the piece-rate
system ; for week work and weekly pay.
The Long View
In an address before the Congress of the Red International
of Labor Unions in April, 1928, the executive secretary, A.
Losovsky, gives a proper analysis of the "rationalization'*
of industry. "We cannot oppose machines as such. But we
must demand the shorter work-day of seven hours, rest
periods during work hours, increase of wages, and safety
measures for the protection of life and health. It is not
98 LABOR AND SILK
necessary — it is not our job — ^to assist the owners in putting
through rationalization."
Rationalization under capitalism benefits the owners and
increases exploitation of the workers. A long view ahead
sees machine development in a workers' republic giving all
workers leisure enough to live and to create. It is already-
reasonable to estimate that the world's needs for goods and
services can be supplied by four-hour shifts of adult workers
in mines, factories and transportation. But this can never
be achieved under the present capitalist system of production
and distribution. Only an integrated, scientific system of
socialism, with the producers in control, would make this
possible.
CHAPTER VII
PAY ENVELOPES
"Always in debt when the children are little."
John Lamson looked around the room, and every silk
worker, old or young, nodded his head. "Can't help it,"
he went on. "Even a warper's pay isn't enough for a family.
The wife must work, too. The children must work as quick
as they're old enough, or rather as quick as the law will let
them."
It was a meeting of a union executive board. Every man
present picked up the statement and proved it from his own
experience. Some of the men had been in the silk for forty
years. Some were young unmarried fellows who had left
school at the seventh grade only a few years before, though
they wanted to stay on for high school.
Child Workers
What these union silk workers were saying is acknowl-
edged even by the employers. James Chittick, a manufac-
turer now known as a silk "expert," has written a standard
book on silk manufacturing and its problems. In it he states
that one weaver's wage will not support a family, but if the
family between them earn three times a weaver's wage, "it
is quite sufficient to support them very comfortably." To get
this "comfortable" family income, Chittick justifies child
labor.
A hard and fast age limit has its disadvantages, as some
children are as mature at 13 as others are at 16, and if the age
limit is set too high it debars many children, anxious and well
99
100 LABOR AND SILK
able to work, from g-etting it and leaves the employer short of
their labor.
This is the argument of a representative of the employing
class v^hile thousands of adult silk v^orkers are vi^alking the
streets looking for vi^ork.
Hovi^ell Cheney, vice-president of Cheney Brothers' silk
mills at South Manchester, Conn., is chairman of the com-
mittee on child labor of the National Association of Manu-
facturers. They do not call it child labor, but give it a fancy
new name, "J^^io^ Education and Employment Committee."
In their pamphlet on "Junior Education," Cheney baldly asks
this question, "What can the schools do to attract a better
type of children to factory work?" After discussing stand-
ards of child labor, he adds, "but in no case should these
standards prevent the employment of physically able children
over fourteen years who are unable or unwilling to go fur-
ther in school than the sixth grade, and who in the judgment
of their parents or guardians would be better employed at
work."
In Textile World, an employers' trade paper, a writer,
"K. C. L.," gives advice on directing young workers, from
his experience as manager of a cotton mill :
It requires a great deal of diplomacy on the part of the
spinning room overseer to bring all his help up to the same
standards of efficiency due to the fact that most of them are
children. . . . They have to be constantly watched or they will
go from bad to worse in order to make more time for play or
rest. The overseer should never give up until he gets them to
where they will give him a good day's work with a minimum of
trouble.
Silk manufacturing shows a larger percentage of workers
under sixteen than any other manufacturing or mechanical
industry.
The last Federal census of occupations shows 8 per cent
PAY ENVELOPES 101
or about one in twelve of all "laborers and semi-skilled" silk
workers as under sixteen. This is a higher percentage of
child labor than is reported by any other branch of the textile
industry. Over 10,000 children under sixteen work in silk
mills in the United States.
In actual numbers of children employed, textiles with their
54,649 workers under sixteen come first, while the iron and
steel industries come second.
Children Under 16 in Textile Industries, 1920
Occupation Per Cent of
Laborers and semi-skilled Number All Workers
Textile, cotton 21,875 5.8
Textile, silk 10,023 8.0
Textile, knitting 7,991 6.y
Textile, woolen and worsted 7,^77 4-8
Textile, all other 7,683 4.4
54,649 5.9
Close-Up s
Fifty-eight silk workers gave in writing the facts about
their working conditions, including the age at which they
first went into the silk. Thirty- four of these workers, or
more than half, had started work in American silk mills
under sixteen. One of these who was big for her age had
begun when only nine years old. Three others were under
twelve. Six were between twelve and fourteen, and twenty-
four other workers were between fourteen and sixteen years
old when they left school and went to work in the silk.
One Allentown girl winder, sixteen years old, after a
year's experience, is earning $6.50 a week, on a nine-hour
day. The family of six live on $34 a week, brought in by
three wage-earners.
A spinner in Allentown, fifteen years old, has already
102 LABOR AND SILK
worked for a year in the silk. She now earns $9 a week.
Three others in the family of five are working outside the
home.
A winder in Scranton after ten years' experience is averag-
ing $14 a week. She must help to support younger brothers
and sisters.
In a Paterson household there are four wage-earners
earning $60 among them for a family of six. The girl of
nineteen is a quill-winder and has already been in the silk
three years. She earns now $15 a week.
Gertrud Braun is seventeen years old and one of a family
of seven. She earns $18 a week as a straightener, after two
years' experience. There are three other wage-earners in the
household and all four together make $75 a week. Three
of the children are under sixteen. The three who are over
sixteen are all working.
Mary Fuller is a winder earning $20 a week and support-
ing herself and a child under sixteen.
An Easton weaver earning $28 is supporting himself and
his wife who does not go out to work.
A loomfixer, John Mason, who usually would be earning
$45 a week, has had to take a job as a weaver averaging $25
a week.
In thirty-six other families more than one wage-earner
is necessary to bring in the needed income.
Every worker knows what the family situation means to a
child who must leave school and go to work. Karl Mueller,
a hatband weaver, writes :
There were five children. Mother was working at the time.
Her work was broad silk picking, which work includes exami-
nation of the woven goods and removals of filling knot marks
and loose ends, etc. For her work at home we had a wooden
frame made, upon which the woven goods was placed on rolls
and wound and unwound from two separate rollers. She was
able to earn from $8 to $13 per week at this work. Father, of
course, sometimes worked at home on her frame in the evening
PAY ENVELOPES 103
and also on Saturday afternoon in order to give her a chance to
attend to the children and finish her housework. . . .
At the time of the 19 13 strike Father and Mother were both
employed by the Cedar Cliff Silk Company as pickers. The
oldest son, who was 18, was weaving broad silk at the time and
was earning |i5 a week. The oldest daughter, next in age, 16,
was employed as a quill-winder and was earning $3.50 a week.
Both started to work at the age of 14, neither completing
grammar school. I graduated from grammar school that year
at the age of 14 and was anxious to go to high school, being of
a studious nature and regarded as a bookworm. . . . No mem-
ber of the family worked during the entire time of the strike.
After the strike was over I went to work as a floor boy in a
hatband shop, working fifty-five hours a week (the standard
at that time) for I3 per week.
The 9-hour day became the standard in May, 1916. The
youngest of the family, a daughter, started to work in a ribbon
mill as quiller, receiving $5 per week, later becoming a warper,
and higher-skilled work resulted in increased pay.
The hardest times for the family were the years when all of
the children were small. . . . Fortunately no one was ever sick
for a long time nor were there any serious operations or doctors'
bills at any time. . . . When the children went to work they
were given 10 per cent of their wages as pocket money. . . .
Mother stopped working at home when the youngest child started
to work in the mill.
Women in the Silk
Silk workers are convinced that the great majority of the
men in the industry are earning too little to support a family.
When we come to study such figures as there are about
wages in the silk, and the cost of living, we shall see that
experience and statistics confirm each other. The daughters
and wives of silk workers do not go into the mills to earn
luxuries, but to help provide the necessities of life.
Silk mills everywhere employ a high percentage of women.
Low wages of men send women into the mills. Women are
"cheap" and their presence pulls down the level of wages
for the men.
104 LABOR AND SILK
In every country silk mills go in search of women and
girls in districts where mines and steel mills use the men.
In the old days in Paterson the big locomotive works used the
men. Now the locomotive works have gone into Pennsyl-
vania, and Paterson needs a man-employing industry. James
Wilson, president of the Paterson Chamber of Commerce,
states that they are trying to persuade such an industry or
industries to come to the city. He does not explain why
busmess men of the Chamber of Commerce worked to put
women originally in the place of men workers in the silk
industry.
So in Pennsylvania, the silk map shows mills dotting the
anthracite coal region.
In the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton district, steel and other
man-employing industries take the fathers and husbands.
But the men do not earn enough to keep a family in health
and decency, so wives go into the silk mills and daughters
follow as soon as they are fourteen, fifteen or sixteen years
old. Coal operators, steel corporations and silk manufac-
turers all profit by the resulting cheapness of labor.
The old myth about girls going into industry for a short
time just to earn a little extra money "until their Jack comes
along" has been exploded once and for all by studies of
women in various industries by the Federal and state women's
bureaus. These all indicate that most of the women at work
in the United States are either sharing the responsibility for
a family's support or are wholly dependent on their own
earnings. After studies in many states, the Federal Women's
Bureau agrees with the silk workers at the union meeting.
The bureau says :
The burden of support of dependents does not, as a rule, fall
upon one wage-earner alone. ... A contribution of part or all
earnings by several wage-earners for the support of the family
is the more usual situation.
106 LABOR AND SILK
Earnings
PAY DAY
Pay day in the silk comes every two weeks in the middle
of the week. Pay is for the two preceding weeks and leaves
always three days' work done but not paid for. Thus a man
who has been out of work and finally gets a job must still
wait two weeks and a half before getting any pay. A weekly
pay day is advocated by the Associated Silk Workers and by
the National Textile Workers' Union.
Petty fines for mistakes or lateness are often deducted from
the pay. Piece workers may have had bad luck in the
goods handled and so find in the envelopes even less than
the average. "Bad silk" will hold up piece workers all along
the line. The weaver gets it in the neck for every mistake
made before the silk comes to him. A survey made by
employers states that the weaver must average one-third of
his time repairing broken ends and other imperfections. Yet
he is paid by the piece.
One old weaver expressed it, "I have two wa'ps, do you
hear, and they are worse than wa'ps. If the ends don't break,
a shaft-cord will give way and smash things generally. Two
wa'ps and they won't give me a minute's peace."
Weavers paid by the yard and winders paid by the pound
must accept the boss's measure. Trickery in the count of
the piece worker's output is not unknown. The silk worker
never knows just how much he will get on pay day. The
time worker has other difficulties. One Paterson worker
describes them thus:
If you were late five minutes you would be docked. If you
quit your job without telling the boss three days ahead he would
keep three days' pay on you. If you went to the toilet and
stayed ten minutes you would be fired.
For the student all figures on silk workers' actual earnings
are unsatisfactory. Official Federal or state wage statistics
PAY ENVELOPES 107
are based on payroll records of manufacturers who report
periodically to the government or submit their books to
government investigators on the understanding that the name
of a company shall never be made public. Monthly state
figures show only the average weekly earnings for the total
number of employees on the payroll for the month. The
Federal census of manufactures, taken every two years, gives
figures showing the total amount spent in wages and the
average number of wage-earners, by industry and by state.
From these figures average yearly earnings may be computed.
"Average'' earnings do not, however, tell the actual
amounts the workers receive. Many earn more and many
earn less than the average. The union wage rates for time
workers in Pater son give a fair indication of the highest
earnings in the silk. These are so far above the average
figure that a very considerable body of silk workers must be
earning amounts below the average.
The U. S. Women's Bureau, in its study of women in
Paterson industries in 1922, gives a median wage instead of
an average. This is a little more definite since the median
weekly earnings are the actual earnings in a given week of
the worker who is at the exact middle point in a list of all
earnings shown. It means that half of the workers earned
more and half earned less than the median amount. But the
median, like the average, gives no information as to the
range between the highest and lowest figures.
Routine state reports of weekly average earnings are pub-
lished from one to three months after the period to which
they refer. The Federal census of manufactures and all
special industrial studies are very much slower in appearing.
Thus, the latest silk figures from a Federal census of manu-
factures refer to 1925. Since that year wage cuts have swept
through the textile industry in the North.
But with all these disadvantages, state and Federal reports
are the best source for general figures on wages. They give
108 LABOR AND SILK
the only facts we have, based on payroll records, for the silk
industry as a whole.
WEEKLY EARNINGS
Four of the leading silk states publish figures each month
giving average weekly earnings of employees in certain in-
dustries. Here are their latest figures for textile workers :
Average Weekly Earnings, 1928
Dyeing and Hosiery
Silk Cotton Finishing and Knit
Goods Goods Textiles Goods
Pennsylvania (July) 1 1748 $21.46 $24.90 $24.73
New Jersey (July) 23.11 17.71 24.25 27.30
New York (July) 21. 11 20.98 25.05 17.38
Massachusetts (June) 21.78 18.01 22.69 I94i
More than half of all silk workers are women. A detailed
study of women in New Jersey industries made by the Federal
Women's Bureau in 1922 showed the median week's earnings
of 3,543 women silk workers as $15.90. This means that in
1922 in New Jersey silk mills 1,771 of these women earned
more and 1,771 of them earned less than $15.90.
Women in New Jersey Textile Industries, 1922
Median Week's Earnings
Cotton textiles $16.75
Hosiery and knit goods 16.10
Silk textiles i5-90
Woolen textiles 14-75
But silk workers in New Jersey have had cuts of 10 and
20 per cent since this study was made, while the cost of living
(contrary to what most people think) is sHghtly higher than
it was in that year.
PAY ENVELOPES 109
That Pennsylvania women earn far less will almost cer-
tainly be shown in a study now undertaken by the Pennsyl-
vania Bureau of Women and Children.
The "aristocratic tenth" of silk workers have a weekly rate
of $40 to $45 a week "when working." This tenth includes
loomfixers, twisters and men warpers. Women warpers in
Paterson get about $35 a week. Union rates for loomfixers
and twisters are $44 for the forty-four-hour week, or $1 an
hour.
Broad silk weavers are thought to average $30 a week on
three looms, "when working." Women winders, quill-
winders, examiners, pickers, folders, blockers and straight-
eners almost certainly average less than $20 a week. From
inquiries among 100 silk workers and interviews with nine
union officers, the following weekly averages have been
roughly estimated :
Estimated Weekly Averages, 1928, Paterson, N. J.
Weavers, broad silk $30
Weavers, ribbon 35-40
Weavers, hatband 40
Winders (women) 18
Quill-winders (women) 12-14
Quill-winders — ribbon (women) 18
Warpers (men) 40
Warpers (women) 35
Twisters (union rate) 44
Loomfixers (union rate) 44
Dyers' helpers and finishers 23
Miscellaneous women workers 12-18
In Pennsylvania silk workers are now averaging only
$17.48 a week according to the latest state figures. A 10 per
cent pay cut in many Pennsylvania silk mills in 1928 brings
down the averages, which were already far below the Pater-
son center. Paterson workers have been at least partly
unionized. Pennsylvania workers are still unorganized.
110 LABOR AND SILK
More than three-quarters of the silk workers in the anthra-
cite district of Pennsylvania are women. Also, the large
number of throwing mills in Pennsylvania helps to pull down
the state average, as spinners everywhere have lower wages
than warpers and weavers.
Prevailing Weekly Rates in Scranton District
(estimated)
Young workers I 5-00
Spinners 12.00
Winders i4-00
Weavers 18.00
Weavers are paid only five cents a yard on plain silk in
this center. Scranton is always the lowest-wage city in
Pennsylvania.
Prevailing Weekly Rates in Easton-Bethlehem District
(estimated)
Young workers $ 7-00
Spinners 16.00
Winders 18.00
Weavers 25.00
YEARLY EARNINGS
If a silk worker's weekly pay could be multiplied by fifty-
two to show his yearly earnings, that man would be in a class
by himself. Men and women in the silk do not expect more
than nine or ten months' work in a year. After autumn and
spring rush, mills close down entirely for some weeks or at
best lay off a good number of workers. Members of a family
never want to work in the same mill, because then all would
be thrown out of work when that mill closed down. When
one mill is closed, another may be running, at least part time,
and the family must try to live on earnings of the one lucky^
enough to keep a job.
PAY ENVELOPES 111
The average yearly earnings for all silk workers in the
United States in 1925 was about $1,077. But the census
of manufactures shows differences in the five silk states.
Average Yearly Earnings of Silk Workers in 1925
(Computed from U. S. Census of Manufactures)
United States $1,077
Pennsylvania 951
Philadelphia, Pa 1,044
Scranton, Pa 770
New Jersey 1,312
Paterson, N. J 1,346
New York 1,117
Buffalo, N. Y 1,106
New York, N. Y 1,224
Connecticut i,i97
Massachusetts 1,052
For 346 women silk workers in New Jersey in 1922 the
yearly median earnings were $839. The employing class
buys a woman's labor for a whole year at less than the price
of a Durant or a Dodge six-cylinder car.
Women in New Jersey Textile Industries, 1922
Median Year's
Industry Earnings
Hosiery and knit goods $995
Silk textiles 839
Woolen goods 741
Cotton textiles Not reported
Living Costs
What matters to a worker is not what government statistics
may say about his earnings, but what the pay envelope will
actually pay for in rent, light and fuel, bread, meat and
clothing.
Many standard of living studies have been made. The
112 LABOR AND SILK
most useful is the "minimum health and decency budget" of
the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for a family of father,
mother and three children. The cost of this quantity budget
is priced by the Labor Bureau, Inc., from time to time.
Their latest figures for ten cities show that even this mini-
mum for a family with three children still costs over $2,ocx)
a year in industrial centers of the United States.
Paterson and Scranton are not among the ten cities for
which the budget has been priced, but the pricing for Read-
ing, Pa., gives an approximate estimate for such towns.
There is a glaring deficit between the average yearly earnings
of a silk worker and the cost of a family's living even at the
low level of this minimum budget. Pennsylvania workers
do not average even half the minimum necessary for health
and decency.
"Minimum for Health and Decency" Family Budget
Compared with Earnings of Silk Workers
IN 1925
Cost of Average Annual
Living Earnings Deficit
Paterson, N. J |2,i88 $1,346 | 842
Philadelphia, Pa 2,402 1,044 1,358
Scranton, Pa 2,188 770 1,418
From partial figures for 1927 and 1928, the deficit seems
to be more glaring than it was in 1925.
Not in the Budget
The ruling class expects the working class to live at a
minimum level. Many things which men and women want
and need for themselves are not included in the government
budget. The Labor Bureau, Inc., has added the following
list of very modest needs which it would include in a so-called
"skilled worker's budget."
PAY ENVELOPES 113
A home with simple but attractive furnishings, not such bare
living quarters as the government budget allows.
Clothing more adequate than the scanty allowance of the,
minimum budget.
Weekly savings.
A short vacation each year.
Cultural education for at least one child.
Books and papers for the family.
To provide these necessaries requires at least i6 per cent
more in family income beyond the cost of the minimum
budget. For Scranton, the Labor Bureau estimates that the
less inadequate budget calls for $2,639 in 1928.
In terms of a weekly wage, the minimum budget calls for
a steady $41.50 a week in a small city for a family of five.
The "skilled worker's budget" calls for at least $50 a week for
fifty-two weeks in the same city. Even the union loom-
fixer in New Jersey cannot alone provide for a wife and
three children the modest standard of the "skilled worker's
budget." Working fifty-two weeks a year at $44 a week, he
would fall $350 short of the "skilled worker's" family budget,
and he would have only $100 saved from the bare "minimum
of health and decency" family budget. But other silk workers
earn far less than loomfixers, and wages are lower in other
silk centers than in New Jersey. Most silk workers, what-
ever their craft, have jobs less than fifty-two weeks a year.
The "average" silk worker in New Jersey, with $23.11 a
week— even assuming fifty-two weeks of work — would face a
weekly deficit of $18 in the minimum family budget.
At least ninety in every hundred workers in the silk who
have families to support know from bitter experience that
one worker's wage alone can never be stretched to cover the
rent of the drab, uncomfortable little home plus the cost of
the family's food and clothing.
CHAPTER VIII
NIGHTMARES
The good shoemaker, Nicola Sacco, wrote to his son,
Dante, shortly before he himself was done to death by the
ruling class in Massachusetts, "The nightmare of the lower
classes has saddened very badly your father's soul."
For workers in the silk, as for others of the working class,
there are three outstanding nightmares — ^unemployment, ill-
ness and old age.
We have seen how the speed-up is increasing the silk
workers' production and reducing the number of wage-earners
required for a certain output. It has already increased the
number of jobless silk workers. The rapid pace calls for
young hands and makes men and women old before their
time. The boasted increase in productivity is intensifying
these nightmares of the working class.
The illness nightmare haunts the workers of each industry
in its own special form. In the silk as in all textiles there are
special strains in the long day, in the shattering noise and
the dampness of work rooms, and in the slow physical ex-
haustion of overworked, underpaid workers.
Strain
A half hour in the close air, even of a model weave room,
in the crashing, shattering noise of the looms, gives the
visitor a frantic desire to escape. An English writer de-
scribes the Jacquard loom as making "a most dreadful noise,
but in the factory noise does not seem to matter or at any
rate has to be endured." Eight, nine, ten hours a day, forty-
114
NIGHTMARES 115
four, fifty or sixty hours a week in the weave room drains
the life-blood of a man or a woman. What a textile worker
is up against is described by Sir Thomas Oliver, a British
medical authority :
He is on his feet all the day; he has to keep moving over the
floor space allotted to the machinery which he tends — ^there is
never a minute of rest except when he is mending broken threads
and then it is not cessation of work but change. His nervous
system is in a state of tension from the time he commences work
until he finishes. Strain is known to be more exhausting than
work. To strain must also be added the influence of noise and
of work carried on in overheated rooms and a humid atmosphere.
In all textile factories the main object is to get out of machinery
the greatest production possible, to secure which machinery has
to be sped up to a degree almost impossible for human strength
to cope with for any great length of time.
If any outsider wants to see for himself what long hours
and speed-up in silk mills do to a man's life, let him look
through the doorway at the faces of silk workers in an
evening union meeting. Workers' eyes and cheek bones tell
the story.
The strain on a human body of standing, stooping, watch-
ing for eight, nine, ten or eleven hours a day has never been
accurately measured, even by specialists in industrial disease,
but it is measured in faces and bodies. Weavers have an
intent stare that does not leave their eyes when they leave
the machines. To provide against the eye-strain of long-
continued watching for breaks and imperfections, the best
oculist and the best glasses would be none too good.
Workers cannot aflFord to consult the best oculists nor buy
the best glasses. I watched an old weaver bending intently
over his looms. His glasses were down on the end of his
nose. He had four looms to tend and he was doing overtime
that brought his working day up to thirteen hours. Only one
worker? There are thousands under a similar strain.
116 LABOR AND SILK
Weavers frequently suffer from deafness caused by the
loom thunder. As one young weaver expressed it, "When
any one wants to speak to you, he has to yell into your ear
above the noise. It hurts the ear-drum. I have been quite
deaf for a long time. Many weavers find themselves deaf."
After a few years of work, the weaver's back is bent in a
peculiar curve. To relieve the body from the shattering jar
of the looms, the weaver gets the habit of bending his knees
while standing at the machine. (See Frontispiece.)
The National Industrial Conference Board, an employers*
organization, has recognized the fact of special strain in silk
mills. In the study of Hours in Relation to Output and
Health in Silk Manufacturing they state that silk yarn is so
delicate it requires more attention than cotton or woolen
yarn. There is less opportunity for rest in silk than in cotton
or wool manufacturing. The report states :
Often the chief fatigue factor, even under excellent working
conditions, is not so much actual physical effort as it is the
tension of continued watching, of being constantly on the alert.
. . . Again, as in other factory industries, noise, monotony,
poor ventilation, standing, reaching, stooping, eye-strain, etc.,
alone or in combination, may cause serious fatigue. Sometimes
the operatives most exposed to these objectionable features are
women and children who suffer in consequence considerable
fatigue, although the required physical effort may be light.
Workers themselves state it more simply:
"My, but I'm tired, always tired now," said one vigorous
woman who always ran two looms but finds three almost
unbearable.
"I was so tired this morning I didn't hear the alarm clock
go off."
"All day long I think about half past five, half past five.
If only it was half past five."
"I am working on a job that half kills me," writes another
NIGHTMARES 117
worker. "The clash of looms sounds like the gnashing of
teeth in hell."
"Gee, there is about the same difference when you strike
a set of bad warps or a good set, as there is between heaven
and hades."
"My God, what a hell of a life."
The worker who has been out of work or ill, who has had
illness in the family and debts to pull him down, looks at a
steady job as the highest good. So when unemployment is as
widespread as it is now in every silk center, the bosses have
found it easy enough to cut pay, lengthen hours, and get
workers to accept these worse conditions. Resistance has
been at a low ebb. But the strong resistance of the working
class is gathering itself together again.
The Long Day
PENNSYLVANIA
Pennsylvania law limits working hours for women in fac-
tories to ten hours in any one day, six days and not more
than fifty- four hours in any week. Night work for women is
forbidden between lo p.m. and 6 a.m. Night work for men
is common in Pennsylvania silk millks. Silk workers from
Easton at the organizing convention of the National Textile
Workers' Union had to leave New York in time to get back
for a night shift in the mills, lasting from ii or 12 p.m. to
8 A.M. Children between fourteen and sixteen, with working
papers, are allowed to work nine hours a day, fifty-one hours
a week, but not at night after 8 p.m.
Pennsylvania silk workers have had no organization strong
enough to demand shorter hours for all workers. The usual
working hours in Pennsylvania silk mills are nine a day and
fifty or fifty-one a week.
118 LABOR AND SILK
NEW JERSEY
The other day the Paterson Morning Call carried these two
advertisements :
WANTED — Experienced weavers on hard silk; hours from 7
to 7; none but experienced need apply. Apply Ring- Silk Co.,
85 Marlock St.
WANTED — ^Weavers and winders for night work, from 4 p.m.
to 3 A.M. Apply Commerce Silk Co., 15^^ Van Houten St.
Winders are women. They are expected to answer an
advertisement for night work of ten or eleven hours. A
hundred years ago, hours of work in Paterson were from
7 to 7, and workers struck for a shorter work day.
Paterson silk workers fought for the eight-hour day and
the forty- four-hour week for more than twenty years and
finally won them in 1919. But in the last two years Pater-
son mills have been slipping over to longer hours and now
even the ten- or eleven-hour day is not uncommon in the
smaller factories. While 3,000 workers are walking the
streets looking for work, others are doing overtime. Workers
will take overtime when earnings for a shorter work week
are or have been below the average rate. Pay cuts of more
than 20 per cent in the last few years have put pressure on
the workers to take longer hours.
New Jersey law forbids night work for women between
10 P.M. and 6 A.M. by Act of jp^J. But the State Attorney
General, urged on by Passaic woolen manufacturers, has
been trying to have the law declared unconstitutional. There
is no penalty attached to breaking the law, so that it is re-
garded as unenforceable. The law limits working hours
of women in factories to ten hours in any one day, six days
or fifty-four hours in any one week. Children between four-
teen and sixteen, with working papers, are allowed to work
NIGHTMARES 119
eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week, but not at
night after 7 p.m.
Hours of work and state laws in New York, Connecticut
and Massachusetts are given in Appendix V.
Breaking the Long Day
Most of the northern states have laws requiring seats for
all women workers who "shall be allowed to use the seats."
Whoever saw seats for spinners, winders or weavers in a
textile mill? Even if the seats were there these workers
could not stop to use them. Regular rest periods during
working hours are unknown in textile mills. The strain of
standing and stooping for eight or nine hours a day goes
unrelieved except for the brief lunch period. Not until tex-
tile workers have a union strong and militant enough to de-
mand and enforce a living wage for a shorter work week
will that strain be relieved.
What that one hour more a day, nine hours instead of
eight, eight hours instead of seven, means to a worker's
health and life cannot be expressed in words. Up one hour
earlier on dark winter mornings and in the mills before the
sun is shining on the street, out into the dark again at night
when the mill day is over — the worker never sees his family
by daylight from one end of the winter week to the other.
Summer allows daylight outside the mill but the hours inside
are worse. As Martin Russak, a young silk weaver, puts it
in a verse which he calls Summer:
You cannot frighten us, priest,
With your stories of burning hell;
We work all summer in the mills.
The lunch period is often too short to change clothes,
get outdoors and back again. By the time a worker is ready
120 LABOR AND SILK
to leave at night, he probably has spent nine hours in the
mill if he is on an eight-hour day, ten hours in the mill if
he is on a nine-hour day, eleven hours in the mill if on a
ten-hour day.
The very workers most in need of a strong union to de-
mand shorter hours are often too exhausted at night to
attend union meetings. The writer has seen silk workers,
keenly interested in the union, fall asleep at a meeting from
exhaustion after the day's work.
Health Hazards
"So constructed as to better withstand Weave Room Hu-
midity," reads an advertisement in Silk of harness cords made
by the Crompton and Knowles Loom Works. The machine
is precious; its costs the employer money to replace it. It
must be made to withstand weave room humidity. The body
of a weaver is not "so constructed as to better withstand
weave room humidity." But it costs the employer nothing
to replace the worn-out body of a weaver with the body of
another younger weaver.
Weave room humidity is a recognized health hazard
throughout the textile industry. If the air is not damp
enough for the goods, artificial humidifiers may be used.
Windows are not opened "because the delicate thread of the
yarn would break with a gust of wind."
The soaker who soaks the spools of silk thread in water
and chemicals is described by a fellow-worker as exposed to
special health hazards. "He is always wet up to his hips.
He always reminds me of a galley slave, working monoto-
nously all day long, putting the silk into one trough, taking
it out of the one previously filled. He has no time to speak
to any one, stopping only when the boss gives him orders.
The perspiration rolls down his face and neck and he has
grown a sallow yellow. The air is very foul in this section
NIGHTMARES 121
of the factory, and it is very unpleasant to pass through it,
but the soaker must toil here all day."
Dampness, bad air, fatigue from long hours of constant
standing and stooping, the poor food of low wages, cause
the high percentage of deaths among textile workers re-
corded in the following government mortality figures.
Percentage of deaths of males and females due to tuber-
culosis in relation to the total mortality for the silk, wool
and cotton industries and for all manufacturing and me-
chanical pursuits are shown in the special U. S. Census
Mortality Statistics for 1909:
Percentage of Deaths Due to Tuberculosis
Males Females
Silk 19.8 37.7
Wool 22.3 29.3
Cotton 21. 1 29.7
All manufacturing 15.5 27.4
The very high rate among workers is especially significant
since more than half of all silk workers are women.
The Prudential Insurance Company reports 38.8 per cent
of deaths of silk workers due to tuberculosis as compared
with 23 per cent in seventy-nine other occupations.
In the cool language of disinterested observers, the Na-
tional Industrial Conference Board sums up the question of
tuberculosis in silk manufacturing:
It may be considered as established that the death rate from
tuberculosis among silk mill operatives is distinctly high as
compared with the average rate for factory industries in general.
There is a strong presumption, moreover, that conditions in the
industry itself are partly responsible, although these conditions
have not been identified.
Dr. Ahce Hamilton of the Harvard Medical School,
authority on occupational diseases, does identify some of
the conditions:
122 LABOR AND SILK
Textile dust is not in the dangerous class. The cause of
tuberculosis in the industry must be largely conditions of ex-
haustion from moisture, heat, long hours, and the youth of the
workers. Most significant of all are the low wages causing
privation. The women's death rate from tuberculosis which is
usually low is strikingly high in this industry. The causes are
all preventable.
Physicians of the Workers' Health Bureau, in physical
examinations of 404 Passaic textile workers, including many
silk dye workers, selected at random during the great strike
of 1926, found twenty-five cases of positive tuberculosis.
This was six out of every hundred or one of every seventeen
workers examined.
Accidents in the textile industry are fewer than in many
other industries. This fact blinds people to the number of
accidents that do occur in textile mills. Thirty-one of every
thousand textile workers are injured each year, according
to the National Industrial Conference Board. One in every
thousand textile workers is permanently disabled each year.
Nine of every 100,000 textile workers are killed each year.
Not many? An accident resulting in permanent disability
means everything to the one man or woman or young worker
who is injured. A fifteen-year-old girl quiller employed
illegally in a New York silk mill, earning only $10 a week,
had her fingers caught and badly injured in the quilling
machine. The employer was required to pay double com-
pensation because a fifteen-year-old girl is not allowed by
New York law to operate this machine, but this does not
repair the permanent injury to the worker's hand.
Among Dye Workers
Disease among dye workers and finishers is a natural re-
sult of working conditions. There are 13,135 men, women
and young workers employed in the dyeing and finishing of
textiles in the state of New Jersey (April, 1928), mostly in
NIGHTMARES 123
Pater son, Passaic and nearby towns. Eighty-five per cent of
all the silk textile dyeing in the United States is done in
this center.
Many plants do only dyeing and finishing. But the larger
textile mills now often have their own dyeing and finishing
department. All the dyeing rooms the writer has ob-
served or heard described have the same conditions —
steaming, damp air, smells of acids and other mordants, and
wet stone floors. Sometimes there are wooden boards on the
floor to protect the workers' feet ; sometimes there are none.
Sometimes the workers wear rubber boots or unusually
heavy shoes, supposedly water-proof; sometimes there is no
such protection. Often the worker's outside clothes hang in
the same damp dye rooms where he works. He must put on
these damp clothes when he goes out. But this dangerous
dampness is not the only hazard for dyers and finishers.
A physician, Dr. W. G. Thompson, in a standard book on
occupational diseases gives a good description of health
hazards in dyeing and finishing :
Dyers make use of a great variety of poisonous substances
such as coloring, bleaching, and fixing agents, called "mordants."
Among the most important of them are ammonia, the mineral
acids, naphtha, gasoline, chloride of lime and other bleaching
agents, salts of such metals as copper, arsenic, iron and chro-
mium, aniline dyes, wood alcohol, and a variety of coloring mate-
rials made from foreign woods, some of which are poisonous.
The hazards of the trade comprise irritation of the respiratory
system from inhalation of hot vapors and fumes, often strongly
acid or alkaline, or, as in the case of chlorine, specifically
poisonous. The workroom is often hot and filled with steam.
The bare hands and arms may suffer from skin irritations or
the dyestuff may spatter into the face and injure the eyes. The
workmen are in some cases almost constantly wet from their
own perspiration, from spattering the clothing or where clothes
have become saturated with the moisture from the kettles where
the hot processes are used. Anemia and digestive disorders are
common.
124 LABOR AND SILK
The specific poison, aniline, causes recognized conditions
of disease, described by Sir Thomas Oliver :
Aniline is widely used in the dyeing of textiles and is re-
sponsible for many cases of poisoning. On cotton printing, for
example, aniline is inhaled both as a vapor in the warm, moist,
dyeing rooms and as a dust in the "napping" and finishing
processes. Its poisonous action is worst in the more highly
heated rooms, as in drying rooms, where the temperature may
reach 120° to 140° F. Chronic aniline poisoning gives rise to
anemia, bronchitis and predominating nervous symptoms.
In plain language, dyers, dyers' helpers and finishers feel
sick and dizzy most of the time from fumes, heat and steam.
Fainting and vomiting are very common. Yet hours of
work are often longer than in any other part of the indus-
try— twelve or even thirteen hours a day or night whenever
there is a rush of work. The average time worked by
seventy-five dye workers studied was fifty-eight hours and
forty minutes a week.
For these conditions, easily breaking the health of the
strongest man, the dyer himself, with knowledge and experi-
ence of the chemicals used, gets $1 an hour. A dyer's helper
or finisher gets fifty cents an hour. A woman helper or
finisher gets twenty-five cents an hour, sometimes thirty
cents.
The Workers' Health Bureau gives the following story of
mill conditions as told by seventy-seven dye workers ex-
amined :
The dye houses work day and night. The air in some of the
processes such as dyeing and drying is that of the tropics. The
steam is so thick you cannot see the worker opposite you. Dan-
gerous machines stand in this fog, and workers constantly run
the risk of serious accidents from walking into them. The
atmosphere is unbearable, filled as it is with fumes from bleaches,
acids and other chemicals. Floors are running with water, so
that workers must wear rubber boots or wooden shoes for
NIGHTMARES 125
protection. Clothes are dripping- with steam and perspiration.
Yet workers are forced to work ten, twelve, even fourteen hours
a day or night during the rush season, and, in many instances,
are left totally unprovided for in slack seasons when the market
is glutted and mill owners hold their stocks of materials for
better prices.
The conclusion of the Workers' Health Bureau, and of
Dr. Alice Hamilton, who reviewed the whole report, is
that the dye workers of Passaic and vicinity are suffering
from an unusually high rate of disease, due to their occupa-
tion, and largely preventable.
Silk City Poverty
"Two weeks away from starvation." A fortnight out of
work, a fortnight of illness in the family and savings are
gone. How else can it be when the great majority of work-
ers are getting so much less than the wages that would
allow for savings? Even with more than one wage-earner
in the family, the burden often becomes too great. Then
the worker's family in desperation must choose between star-
vation and "charity" help.
The president of Pater son's Chamber of Commerce, James
Wilson, is also president of the Paterson Charity Organiza-
tion Society. The right hand of charity gives in "relief" a
fraction of what the left hand of business takes as profit.
The writer went to the office of the charity organization
to ask whether the families of silk workers were on the
lists of those needing relief. "Our families are practically
all in the silk or have been," was the answer. "We have
over 8,000 records of those needing help. Last year we had
over 600 active cases for relief. Never before has there
been so much unemployment and need of relief as during
these last two years." This was in 1928.
In this small city of only 136,000 population, there are
126 LABOR AND SILK
more than 8,000 records of families who have had to accept
"charity." The rich Hke the word; it covers a multitude
of sins. To the working class it spells the ugliness of
poverty. Dingy tenement houses when people want to be
clean, evictions for non-payment of rent, lack of milk for
children, the white plague of tuberculosis, hunger, disease,
death; then the charity visitors step in.
The C. O. S. Christmas campaign among the very same
business men who have laid off workers and increased
unemployment brought a small charity fund in 1927 of
$3,091.35 for "relief." The two outstanding reasons for
need of help, as stated in the year's report of the Paterson
Charity Organization Society, are "unemployment" and "in-
capacity through illness or accident." Next in number of
cases come "care of children" and the "aged."
Lack of Social Insurance
In European countries through the pressure of workers*
organizations, unemployment and old age are regarded as
social causes of want and are at least partially covered by
some form of social insurance. Old age pensions are pro-
vided by statute in twenty-six foreign countries. State health
insurance is common in Europe. The cost of such insurance
is usually shared by workers and employers; in some coun-
tries the government also contributes. Eighteen countries
have some form of public insurance for those who are un-
employed. In the Soviet Union a comprehensive system of
social insurance providing against unemployment, illness,
accidents, old age, invalidity, etc., is provided for all workers
at the expense of industry.
In the United States, a very few large silk companies have
set up private schemes of old age insurance and a limited
provision for illness. But such private funds serve to tie
workers to one company and take away their independence.
NIGHTMARES 127
They do not touch the problem of workers thrown out by-
new machinery or a slackening in the company's business.
These funds, like other welfare schemes, are a part of the
open-shop system and are aimed against the trade unions.
In the great majority of cases the silk worker and his
family, in this country, when they are overwhelmed by one
of the nightmares of capitalist industry must either submit
to the degrading ordeal of charity or starve.
It is true that in the principal silk states widowed mothers
of young children receive a "pension," but the amounts
allowed are very small and the families are supervised in
typical charity fashion. Also, most states have now a work-
men's compensation law under which a silk worker injured
in connection with his work — or the family of a worker
killed on the job — receives after long delay an inadequate
amount of money. But in the problems of silk workers
the industrial accident plays a minor role. Tuberculosis and
other illnesses, irregular employment, and the hopeless un-
employment of old age are their more usual nightmares.
There is no compensation for their occupational diseases.
There is no insurance against unemployment or old age.
We can fairly say that this richest of all capitalist coun-
tries makes no social provision for the silk workers it throws
on the scrap heap. Until the workers are united in strong,
militant unions and a political party of their own, they will
continue to suffer without even a measure of protection
given by social insurance.
128
LABOR AND SILK
The Enterer
CHAPTER IX
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE
In the hundred years of textile strikes in this country
since the first in 1828, no struggle of silk workers has been
more spirited, more vivid in workers' memory than the
Paterson strike of 191 3. "Gentle, alert, brave men," wrote
John Reed, when it was over. "Ennobled by somethihg
greater than themselves. They were the strike — -not Bill
Haywood, not Gurley Flynn, not any other individual."
Lawrence 1912, Paterson 1924, Passaic 1926, New Bed-
ford 1928, Paterson 1928 — each strike dramatizes the class
struggle. Older weavers remember other dates too — Pater-
son 1902 and 1900 and 1894, Fall River 1884, and Paterson
1878, Fighting continuously against pay cuts, for shorter
hours, and for recognition of the union, textile workers
have written important pages of American labor history.
Early Strikes
PATERSON 1828
The first strike of factory workers in the United States
was declared at Paterson, N. J., in 1828, a hundred years
ago.^ Men spinners, children and women walked out of the
cotton mills at 12 o'clock of a July day and were joined by
the carpenters, masons and mechanics of the town. It was
cotton in Paterson then. Silk began twelve years later.
The masters had "conceived that it would add to the
comfort and health of the children to take their dinner at
1 Commons, John R., and associates, History of Labor m the U. S.,
Vol. I, p. 418.
129
130 LABOR AND SILK
one instead of 12 o'clock, it being a more equal division of
time between their meals." ^ The workers struck for the 12
o'clock noon hour. Their fellow workers in building trades
and machine shops showed their solidarity by striking at the
same time in sympathy, and all demanded a shorter day of
ten hours. The bosses called out the militia to drive the
workers back to work, discharged the strike leaders, and then
gave in on the noon hour question. It was the first time in
America that the militia was used against the workers.^
The bosses in a statement given to the papers boasted that
they have united "determined to resist the unworthy efforts
of the mechanics, and teach the children the necessity of
civility and obedience. The ringleaders of the mechanics,
among whom were some Manchester mob-ites, have been
discharged, and all things are going on quietly." *
These children under sixteen were from the families of
the men spinners who all lived in company-owned tenements.
There were more women than men in the mills. They
worked eleven, twelve, thirteen or fourteen hours a day,
from sunrise to sunset. The bosses, backed up by public
opinion, wrote that it was good for the children to work
long hours in the mills.
But the solidarity of all the workers, striking together,
women, children, men of the factories, mechanics, masons
and carpenters, was feared even then by the masters. An-
other strike in Philadelphia that summer called forth an edi-
torial in the New York Evening Post, "We cannot too
deeply regret the frequent recurrence of these disorders
which tend to throw a shadow over the brilliant hopes which
the philanthropist and the patriot have formed for our coun-
try."
The first labor union, the Mechanics* Union of Trade As-
2 New York Evening Post, July and August, 1828.
3 Commons, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 418.
^New York Evening Post, loc. cit.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 131
sedations, was formed that year in Philadelphia. The mem-
bers were not fully class-conscious, but they wrote that they
worked unceasingly for a meager subsistence in order to
maintain "in affluence and luxury the rich who never labor,"
that the products of their work were accumulating into "vast,
pernicious masses," and "would prepare the minds of the
possessors for the exercise of lawless rule and despotism,
to overawe the meager multitude and fright away that
shadow of freedom which still lingers among us."
FOR SHORTER HOURS — 1 83 5
Demanding a shorter working day, 2,000 Paterson cotton
mill workers came out on strike in July, 1835. Twenty mills,
all in the town, were completely tied up. The working day
"from sunrise to sunset" meant thirteen and one-half hours
in the summer. Strike demands were for an eleven-hour day,
abolition of the store-order system and of excessive fines.
The organization calling the strike had a long name, "Pater-
son Association for the Protection of the Laboring Classes,
Operatives of Cotton Mills, Etc." A vigilance committee
did effective work in raising relief and keeping up the spirit
of the strikers. Workers in other centers showed their
solidarity with Paterson strikers. Newark working men sent
$203. New York appointed committees in every city ward
"to raise funds and take such other measures as they may
deem expedient to sustain the operatives at Paterson."
The Paterson Courier, called by the strikers "organ of the
factory lords," acknowledged some weeks after the strike be-
gan that the operatives were resolute in standing out. But
after six weeks a compromise finally broke the strike. Two-
thirds of the workers returned to work at twelve hours for
five days a week and nine hours on Saturday. Bosses had
thus yielded one hour and a half of the long day. Workers
132 LABOR AND SILK
who still stood out for an eleven-hour day were blacklisted,
"especially the children of the leaders."
Spirited strikes of New England textile workers at
Lowell, Dover, Fall River, Taunton and Springfield and two
of Philadelphia workers, all in these early years, were usually
against wage cuts. General cuts of 15 to 25 per cent were
sweeping through cotton mills. Two thousand girl strikers
in Lowell marched through the streets of the city. "One
of the leaders mounted a pump and made a flaming speech.*'
But though the workers resisted the cuts with militant spirit
they were usually driven by starvation to go back into the
mills at the reduced rate.
The first silk mill was started in Paterson in 1840. The
Cheney Brothers had already started a successful silk mill in
Connecticut. But the cotton industry was still strong in
Paterson until i860. Silk gradually took the place of cotton
in the mills, and Paterson became the chief silk center of the
United States.
"fighting mc donnell," 1878-1890
"Organize the unskilled," was the cry of J. P. McDonnell,
leader of the Paterson strike of 1878, and president of the
International Labor Union. A pay cut in Paterson mills that
June brought out the operatives in a long strike of eight
months.
McDonnell, editing a daily paper, The Labor Standard,
first from Fall River and then from Paterson, called strike-
breakers "scabs" and was sued for libel. Two months' im-
prisonment and $500 fine could not stop fighting McDonnell
in his work. "He was again arrested and sentenced to a short
term of imprisonment in 1880 for publishing a letter dis-
closing the terrible conditions existing in the brick-making
yards in Paterson." It was McDonnell who brought about
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 133
the Labor Day law passed in New Jersey in 1887, the first
in the United States.
Textile workers from Fall River came down for a big
convention of the International Labor Union at Pater son in
December, 1878. Cotton mills were moving South. Silk
mills were expanding rapidly. The silk manufacturers had
organized a few years before in a national association.
Pelgram and Meyer had started their Pater son mill in 1871.
The width of silk was much narrower than it is now, and
the weaver was not under so much strain of crashing noise
and speed-up. As one old weaver puts it, "In those days the
looms rattled. To-day they thunder." But long hours and
periodic attempts to cut wages kept the workers always tired,
always uncertain of the future. Another bitterly fought
strike of Paterson silk workers came in 1884, also on the
question of wages.
McDonnell saw that the future would be dark for un-
organized workers. He had been a friend and co-worker
of Karl Marx, and repeatedly imprisoned in Europe. His
work in the United States was for industrial unionism to
organize the unskilled, while Samuel Gompers was develop-
ing his policy of craft unionism for skilled workers. Mc-
Donnell led strike after strike in the textile industry in the
next few years, but in the end the workers were starved into
submission to wage cuts.
Between 1873 and 1880 wages of textile workers in Fall
River were reduced by 45 per cent. Workers were out on
strike for many weeks in 1875 against one of these slashing
cuts. The strike was broken by the owners who introduced a
yellow-dog contract requiring the workers "to sign an agree-
ment to join no association in which individual members were
to be governed by the will of the majority in respect to wages
or hours of labor." A sixteen-week strike of 14,000 cotton
mill workers, begun in June, 1879, was also broken by the
masters who brought in French-Canadians as strikebreakers.
134 LABOR AND SILK
Five thousand Fall River spinners and weavers in ten cot-
ton mills walked out on strike against another pay cut in
1884. After eighteen weeks this strike also was broken by
the master class. This time the imported strikebreakers were
Swedes. Leaders of the strike and of the spinners' union,
fifty of them, were blacklisted and never again able to get
jobs in Fall River mills.
These were the years when the employing class in the
United States was beginning to amass greater and greater
wealth. Less spectacular than Carnegie, Frick and Rocke-
feller, but no less secure in possessions, the textile masters
of New England — Lowells, Lawrences and Cheneys — built
up fortunes at the expense of low-paid workers,
POLICE CLUBBING 1894
It was low wages that brought on the strike of ribbon
weavers and other silk workers of Paterson in March, 1894.
Skilled weavers had been earning at the most only $14 a
week. This was "insufficient to buy the commonest kind of
food and purchase coal and wood," even the owners' paper,
The Daily Guardian, acknowledged. Women winders were
getting only $4.50 a week.
Demanding "a uniform price list that will guarantee us
living wages," workers from one mill and then another joined
in the walk-out until fourteen mills were closed down. As
the strikers picketed Bam ford's mill one March morning,
police charged the lines, "clubbing unmercifully, irrespective
of sex." The capitalist press then called it a riot. But the
workers' paper. The Labor Standard, declared, "There has
been no rioting in this city. The strikers have been orderly
and lawful. There has been no bomb throwing. And yet
the newspapers have been filled with reports about *Anarch-
ists' and 'Reds' in Paterson and even bomb throwing has
been charged."
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 135
New York ribbon weavers joined the strike. A crowd of
Paterson strikers walked all the way into New York to visit
fellow strikers. Later the New York strikers returned the
visit. Paterson silk bosses organized with New York bosses
to resist the workers' demands.
Some of the mills increased the rate of pay, but others
did not. The strike was neither won nor lost.
Already there were three craft unions in Paterson — the
Horizontal Warpers' Association, the Ribbon Weavers'
Union and the Loomfixers' and Twisters' Union, all of them
organized during the eighties. Another, the Silk Workers'
Union, small but militant, was organizing workers not in-
cluded within these craft lines. Five years later the Broad
Silk Weavers' Union is mentioned and the Silk Workers*
Union is not so strong.
"blowing fish horns," 1899-1902
Inch by inch the silk workers fought for a meager increase
in pay. Strike after strike appears on the front page of
Paterson daily papers through 1899, 1900, 1902. Picketing,
arrested, picketing again, arrested again, the strikers, men
and women, were determined to earn a living wage, but found
the police, the jails, the courts and the churches used against
them by the owning class.
A strike called by the United Ribbon Weavers' Union of
America in 1899 lasted eight months and ended in a one-cent
increase in the piece-rate. During this strike the Paterson
authorities arrested, jailed and fined a number of girl strikers
for calling "scab" at strikebreakers going into the John Hand
mill. The worst "crime" was serenading the scabs. Girl
strikers blew "fish horns of a fancy make and all of the
same color." A boy striker called a patrolman "peanut nose"
and was fined $5.
Other long strikes marked the turn of the century for silk
136 LABOR AND SILK
workers. The Broad Silk Weavers' Union was recognized
in Pater son only after many struggles. The United Textile
Workers of America was established in 1901 and Paterson
craft unions became affiliated with it one by one. Mean-
while Paterson silk bosses started plants in Pennsylvania
during 1898 and 1899 to use the cheap labor of girls whose
fathers worked in steel and anthracite. Silk workers in
Pennsylvania averaged only $5 a week, according to state
figures. Silk mills in the anthracite and the Lehigh valley
grew and multiplied, and the employing class prospered.
"We must have an injunction to stop the strikers from
picketing," the Paterson bosses announced in the paper dur-
ing the strike of 1902. ^'Arrests seem to have no effect."
The 1902 strike lasted many months and included not only
broad silk weavers and ribbon weavers but also the silk dye
house workers.
Women were active on the picket line. Strikers serenaded
and "annoyed" strikebreakers, but were "very careful not to
resort to any disorderly acts," complained the ruling class,
and the authorities could not agree as to whether peaceful
picketing was or was not illegal. But the decision went
against the strikers, of course, and the Ribbon Weavers'
Union had to pay fines of $1,000 in picketing cases. Pelgram
and Meyer finally granted an increase of a cent and a half
a yard.
The manufacturers in their Silk Association announced
that 20,000 silk workers in Paterson were earning $10,000,-
000 a year and producing $30,000,000 worth of silk. In
weekly pay this meant an average of less than $10 a week per
worker. Foreign workers in Passaic dyeing plants were
working sixty hours a week for less than $5. Textile workers
in Lawrence, Mass., were averaging less than $10 a week.
Meanwhile cost of living during the ten years, 1903- 191 3,
according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, increased
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 137
by 60 per cent. The stage was set for the great strikes of
1912-1913.
Pater son — IQ12
The "Detroit faction" of the Industrial Workers of the
World led a strike of silk workers in New Jersey in 1912.
Craft unions had held the Paterson field for twenty years.
Teavens of the American Federation of Labor had been
organizing for the United Textile Workers. By 191 o there
were 30,000 organized textile workers out of 800,000 in the
United States, less than 4 per cent. Few of the women and
few of the foreign-born workers belonged in the old craft
unions.
The Katz strike in Paterson, 1912, was the beginning of
the broad silk weavers' protest against the four-loom system.
It started with the weavers, but the less skilled workers also
joined the strikers' ranks. Rudolph Katz of Paterson was a
member of the Socialist Labor Party and of the Detroit fac-
tion of the Industrial Workers of the World, later to be
called the Workers' International Industrial Union. Boris
Reinstein, formerly also of the S. L. P., came in to help
him lead the strike. It attracted little public attention at first
but it showed the skilled workers that foreign-born non-
English-speaking workers could stand with them through
weeks of hunger,
BILL HAYWOOD IN ACTION, I9I2-I3
The spirit of the great I.W.W. textile strikes, Lawrence
1912, Little Falls 1912, Paterson 191 3, is in Bill Haywood's
Book and also in a newspaper man's memories of Big Bill
Haywood at Lawrence. A wage cut in Lawrence mills,
where pay was already very low, brought out more than
20,000 workers. Marlen E. Pew, now editor of Editor and
138 LABOR AND SILK
Publisher, as a young newspaper reporter in 191 2, was sent
to Lawrence to cover the strike for the Scripps papers.
Writing in his own journal in 1928 when Bill Haywood died,
Pew describes Haywood as he saw him in action in 19 12.
Haywood hastened to the scene of the strike and proceeded
at once to organize the workers under the banner of the I.W.W.
In a few days the strike was brought to a system. If I recall
correctly thirty-two dialects were spoken by the strikers, of
whom there were men, women and children. To swing this
mass and keep it in line called for master technique and Haywood
had it in abundance.
Reporters who covered the meetings of the strikers in Franco-
Belgian Hall, where a soup kitchen was established in the base-
ment, will never forget Big Bill on the platform, calling through
interpreters the roll of the faithful and dictating the policies of
the campaign. Nor will they forget Big Bill at the head of a
strike picket parade at 5 o'clock of a frosty morning, with
thousands following down the main broad street of the city,
singing the stirring Marseillaise and at the sight of the gray-
coated state police or the blue-coated militia, uttering that weird,
foreign "boo-boo" than which nothing could be more bitterly
contemptuous.
Ambushed in some alley aliead would be a hundred or more
city and state police who, when the paraders would reach a
given spot, would dash out and club men and women with
startling violence. ... I have seen a group of women pursued
by mounted officers through a park, driven until they fell in the
snow. Scores of strikers would be arrested and lined up before
a magistrate who dealt to them unmerciful sentences.
One striker, I recall, was sentenced to a penitentiary term for
carrying concealed weapons, and the reporters sniffed cynically
when the weapon was shown and proved to be an ordinary
pocket knife. Broken heads were common enough. Another
reporter and I found a woman in her dreary tenement rooms
dying from the premature birth of a child as result of a club-
bing. She held in her hands a sacred picture and called upon
God to avenge the crime against her. . . . Day by day the
terror of the strike increased. . . .
The man (Bill Haywood) possessed striking magnetic quali-
ties as a speaker. After the picket parade had been battered to
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 139
pieces by the police, he would rally the strikers in the afternoon
and the next morning they would turn out again to brave the
organized armed assaults.
One day in the basement of a Catholic church Big Bill ad-
dressed a meeting of women strikers. Several reporters were
present. In the company of women Big Bill was the soul of
gentleness. . . . He urged passive resistance and told the women
that while he appreciated their spirit in the campaign, he hoped
in view of police violence, they would not venture out to do
picket duty but would urge their men to do this service.
At the back of the hall a little woman with a red bandanna
over her head was making signals to Big Bill that she wished
to speak. He beckoned to her to come forward. He put out
his big hand and raised her to the platform. "This sister-
comrade has something to tell us," said the big miner, smiling
appreciatively.
In broken English the woman said: "Now, ladies, me have
big idea. Mr. Haywood, he say ladies not go on picket line in
morning because cops he strike with club. Very good, but we
must win strike. Men all right, but not so brave in striking
as ladies. Now I have big idea. Many ladies in strike are like
me, see! (opening her wrap) soon have child.
Now all ladies who are large with child must come early to
picket line in morning. We go ahead and the men follow us.
We sing and march and then, from alley, the cops charge on us.
But when they see us and that we are large with child they not
hit us — no, they have mothers and wives and they will say, 'No,
no, we no club good mothers like this,* and they go 'way and
leave us alone."
Big Bill, tears streaming down his red cheeks, grabbed the
earnest little woman in his arms and made a speech about self-
sacrificing motherhood that I recall as a classic. Of course he
told the woman that the "big idea" was but a sweet dream, and
that no one should risk it. It is with a sense of craft shame that
I here record that a certain morning newspaper in Boston next
day headed its false story thus: "Haywood Urges Expectant
Mothers to Head Picket Parade."
Terrorism against the workers in Lawrence went to all
extremes. The National Guard was called out. Young
Harvard undergraduates were allowed credit in their college
courses without mid-year examinations in return for military
140 LABOR AND SILK
service against the Lawrence textile workers. A frame-up
against Lawrence strikers landed Joseph Ettor and Arturo
Giovanitti in jail charged with a "bomb plot." But when
the strike was over, William Wood, president of the Ameri-
can Woolen Company, was himself indicted for placing dyna-
mite among the strikers. Ettor and Giovanitti were ac-
quitted. The woolen monarch. Wood, finally committed
suicide in 1926, after a life of financial trickery and deceit.
According to specific charges against his estate, he had
cheated his company of at least $2,500,000.
The Lawrence strike was a victory. Instead of a wage
cut the strikers gained a small wage increase, though not
the 15 per cent increase demanded by the workers. "The
women won the strike at Lawrence," said Bill Haywood
speaking at Paterson a few months later. "The women will
win the strike at Paterson."
The Great Strike, Paterson — ign^
"You don't believe in the Class Struggle? Just go out
to Paterson and make a noise like a free citizen. See what
happens to you. Thafs all John Reed did, and he got
twenty days in jail. It's getting so you can't even collect
your thoughts without being arrested for Unlawful Assem-
blage." Thus the old Masses commented on police terror in
Paterson, 191 3. "The I.W.W. in Paterson has given the
world a supreme example of the power of a working man
to wake up the public when he simply keeps his hands in
his pockets."
Bill Haywood himself describes the city and the strike in
his autobiography : ^
Paterson, the silk city of America, is built near the mosquito-
infested swamp lands of New Jersey. It is a miserable place of
factories, dye-houses, silk mills, which are operated by from
20,000 to 25,000 workers. There is not a park in the workers*
5 William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood's Book, p. 261.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 141
quarter for the children to play in, no gardens or boulevards
where mothers can give their babes a breath of fresh air. . . .
The workers were on strike for better conditions and to pre-
vent the companies from increasing the number of looms that
they should operate. Among these workers, as in Lawrence,
were many nationalities — Italians, Syrians, Armenians, French,
Germans, Jews from all countries, and many others.
Daily meetings of the strikers were held in Turn Hall and
other places. We often had great mass meetings in the adjoin-
ing town of Haledon where we spoke from the veranda of a
house occupied by a Socialist.
Barred from holding any meetings in Paterson, the strikers
went out over the bridge to Haledon. Walking out by the
hundreds, the striking workers passed the Paterson police,
massed at the city line waiting to arrest the I.W.W. leaders.
Next morning mass picket lines would form again at each
mill, to be clubbed and beaten back by the police. Recorder
Carroll in the Court would deal out heavy sentences to all
pickets gathered up in the police net. There were 25,000
striking silk workers, and their weapon was the picket line.
After nine weeks of police brutality, the picket lines were
still forming and reforming. Chief of Police Bimson was
known to the strikers as "Chief Bums."
John Reed pictures the county jail with forty strikers
crowded together. Dutchmen, Italians, Belgians, Jews,
Slovaks, Germans, Poles, "wops, kikes, hunkies," there they
were, united in one common struggle. John Reed's cell was
4 X 7 in size "with an open toilet of disgusting dirtiness
in the corner." A crowd of pickets had been jammed into
the same lock-up only three days before, eight or nine in a
cell, and kept there without food or water for twenty-two
hours. Among them was a young girl of seventeen who
led a procession right up to a police sergeant's nose and
defied him to arrest them. "In spite of the horrible dis-
comfort, fatigue and thirst, these prisoners had never let up
cheering and singing for a day and a night."
142 LABOR AND SILK
The strike had started as a protest of weavers against the
four-loom system. The president of the Broad Silk Manu-
facturers* Association describes in a state report on the
strike the bargain made by a silk employer, Henry Doherty,
with the officials of the United Textile Workers. He "en-
tered into a compact with them that in consideration of his
making his mill a union shop and joining the Master Mill
Owners' Association, they would endeavor to furnish him
with weavers who would run four looms on the same class
of work as they were running in the East. . . . Other
weavers were needed and taken in who were not allied with
any organization but who were taken later by the LW.W.
This produced friction among the workers and was the cause
of the strike a year ago, and also the cause of the beginning
of the recent strike."
The strike became a general walk-out of all silk workers,
including the dyers and dyers' helpers. When Bill Haywood
came in, demands were strengthened to make the eight-hour
day the main point of the strike. He predicted the unem-
ployment sure to come from the multiple-loom system and
declared the solution lay in shorter hours of work. "The
eight-hour day. The forty-hour week." And then, "To the
worker belongs the product of his work." Speaking at a
mass meeting of 6,000 children, workers in the Paterson
mills, Haywood said, "Who made all the beautiful things
around us? The working class. Who gets them all? The
capitalist class."
Up in strike headquarters at Helvetia Hall, Bertha John-
ston was receiving and acknowledging checks, money-orders
and dollar bills as they poured in for strike relief, totaling
$63,000. Tom Moore at the next desk was keeping record
of members. Upstairs over their heads, John Reed was re-
hearsing the chorus of strikers for the great Pageant to be
held in Madison Square Garden, to dramatize the silk
workers' struggle. "Whoever heard of learning to sing with
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 143
your feet?" Bertha Johnston asked John Reed when feet
thumped out the tune above her head while she added up
columns of figures. But the chorus did learn to sing. A
parade was held the day before. The great Pageant was a
success, "the greatest labor pageant ever held in America/*
described in Bill Haywood's Book.
A friend of the strikers pawned her furniture to help pay
for Madison Square Garden. Upton Sinclair was one of
those who worked to meet expenses of the Pageant, so that
all proceeds should go for Paterson relief. Yet enemies
charged that the I.W.W. was taking the money raised for
relief ! It is an old charge, ever new in every strike.
The 191 3 strike was called a failure. The eight-hour day
was not won until six years later. It is not really won even
to-day. The four-loom system was established in many
Paterson mills. The I.W.W. dwindled and lost its hold in
the East. But workers who went through this greatest of
Paterson strikes will never forget its lesson. They had
learned the meaning of class solidarity.
A local of the Workers' International Industrial Union,
formerly the Detroit faction of the I.W.W. established in
1912, and a local of the I.W.W. also, continued to exist in
Paterson, even after the Associated Silk Workers and the
Amalgamated Textile Workers were organized in 191 9.
Associated Silk Workers — ipip
Paterson hatband weavers, ribbon weavers, and then
broad silk weavers broke away from the United Textile
Workers in 1919. All charged that the older officials be-
trayed the rank and file in the campaign for an eight-hour
day and a forty-four-hour week.
A strike to demand the shorter week was officially called
in February, 191 9, but the ribbon weavers found they were
not supported in their stand by the local or national officials
144 LABOR AND SILK
of the United Textile Workers. The War Labor Board,
injected into the strike, recommended forty-two and one-half
hours a week. United Textile Workers' officials recom-
mended compromising with the employers on a forty-eight-
hour week.
Rank and file hatband weavers took matters into their
own hands, called a strike in July and won the forty-four-
hour week. For this action they were expelled by the United
Textile Workers. A secret meeting between the United
Textile Workers' officials and the manufacturers agreed to
postpone adoption of the shorter week. A strike of the
broad silk weavers' local and of rank and file workers in
five ribbon shops followed in August, and continued several
weeks until the forty-four-hour week became general through-
out the city.
Meanwhile the Associated Silk Workers was organized
independently in August by the 300 hatband weavers ex-
pelled from the United Textile Workers. They were soon
joined in the new union by ribbon weavers whose charter had
been revoked by the older union's national organization. The
story of the Associated Silk Workers continues in later sec-
tions of this book.
Amalgamated Textile Workers
"One Big Industrial Union for the Textile Industry."
With this vigorous slogan the Amalgamated Textile Workers
of America, organized in May, 1919, led brilliant and suc-
cessful strikes in Lawrence, Paterson, Allentown, Pawtucket
Valley, West Hoboken and Lawrence again, until a final vic-
tory at Lawrence in November, 1922. Its greatest strength
was among wool and silk workers. In Paterson alone, the
Amalgamated led three strikes, one of broad silk weavers
for the forty- four-hour week in 191 9, one for a wage sched-
ule a few months later, and another for the dyers.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 145
The dyers' strike was part of the general forty-four-hour
campaign of 191 9. More than a thousand dye-workers
struck. The companies would make no concession, though
hours in dye houses were even longer than in the silk weaving
shops. A few shops finally promised a forty-eight-hour
week, only to go back on their word when the workers were
back on the daily grind.
Spies of the Sherman Service were busy among the
strikers. One active "striker" who played the piano enthusi-
astically for the singing of the strike songs was found to be
in the pay of that agency. Another operative carelessly left
his "report" in his coat pocket when he took his suit to the
tailor. The tailor sympathized with the strikers and turned
in the papers to union headquarters.
Arrests for handing out strike notices to workers at the
mill gates, arrests of pickets in the early morning, lack of
funds to feed the workers through many weeks of holding
out, betrayal by spies^ — and then the dyers drifted back to
work. But "in principle" the eight-hour day and the forty-
four-hour week were recognized in the Paterson silk industry
generally. Dyers had stood with other silk workers to de-
mand shorter hours.
The period was favorable for labor organization. The
war boom was still on. Cost of living had increased so
greatly that the need of increase in wages was overwhelming.
All unions were at their peak. The slump of 1921 had not
yet come.
While Paterson hatband and ribbon weavers were starting
the Associated Silk Workers in 19 19, broad silk weavers be-
came a local of the Amalgamated Textile Workers and led
the struggle for the forty-four-hour week which was gained
in the broad silk shops in August, 191 9.
This was the year of victory at Lawrence, too, when after
a fiery strike of fifteen weeks, the woolen and worsted
workers won a 15 per cent increase in wages and the forty-
146 LABOR AND SILK
eight-hour week. This strike recalled the terrible and glori-
ous days of 191 2. Workers were beaten on the picket line
by police and by hired thugs, and the final triumph, described
in The New Textile Worker, was "due to the blood shed by
the workers." When relief was failing, children of strikers
were secretly sent to sympathizers in other towns. A spy
within the inner circle of the union itself worked against the
strike. It was a four months' struggle before the strike was
won. These Lawrence textile workers, 30,000 strong, also
became members of the Amalgamated Textile Workers along
with the Pater son broad silk workers.
The silk workers at Allentown, Pa., formed a local of
the Amalgamated Textile Workers. The United Textile
Workers* Allentown local of 1,250 members in 191 9 re-
volted against a dishonest union treasurer. The Amalgamated
came in with a progressive program and vigorous organizers.
A strike was called against an attempt to reintroduce the
ten-hour day in certain shops. A thousand workers were
out. Strikers picketed plants of the Allentown Spinning
Company and the Allentown Silk Company. Arrests of
pickets could not stop the strike. Something of the spirit of
Paterson came for a few years into Allentown, but for a few
years only. The organization lapsed when the Amalgamated
Textile Workers disbanded in 1923.
Much of the success of the Amalgamated in fields where
other unions had failed lay in its plan of local autonomy.
The local had as much freedom as was "consistent with
healthy, centralized strength." It paid attention to workers
whom the older unions had ignored. "Our appeal is to all
unorganized textile workers from the dyers and spinners of
silk yarn to the weaver of carpet and the truckman who
carts it from factory to freight station."
After the war and post-war boom an unusual slump in
the textile industry starting in April, 1920, lasted a year and
a half and affected all textile labor unions. More than half
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 147
the union members stopped paying dues. Most of the mills
closed for six or eight months and the rest ran only on
short time.
The Pater son local of the Amalgamated Textile Workers
voted in 1921 to merge with the Associated Silk Workers
so that all silk weavers, hatband, ribbon and broad silk,
would stand together in the one union. The United Textile
Workers broad silk weavers' local in Paterson had disbanded
in 1920.
In New England in 1922, another great struggle, nine
months long, led by the Amalgamated Textile Workers,
was successful. It was a long and strenuous fight against a
20 per cent reduction in wages. Eighty thousand workers
in various textile centers stuck it out week after week, month
after month, until a final settlement in November left them
victorious. Not that the meager wages, always averaging
under $20 a week, were increased, but the wage reduction was
withdrawn. The Amalgamated, in this ninth inning of its
last game, scored a victory.
Hidden away now in the New York Public Library is the
account of those five years of a progressive industrial textile
union. The union failed in the end for lack of effective
leadership. Copies of the union organ. The New Textile
Worker, are already crumbling at the edges and the folds,
and the reader must turn the pages carefully as they fall to
pieces in his hand. But the record of that vigorous union is
written also in the lives of 50,000 textile workers, many of
them silk workers, who were its members.
Paterson — 1924
It was the night of October 14, 1924. Turn Hall, Pater-
son, meeting place for generations of silk workers, was
packed to the limit with men, women and young workers
who had been out on strike for two months against the
148 LABOR AND SILK
speed-up system and for retention of the eight-hour day.
The streets outside were Hned with people who could not get
into the hall.
Police who had been overactive for eight weeks were
quiet for once. Two weeks before, they had arrested 107
strikers on the picket line. On October 6, at the City
Hall, they had charged a meeting of workers, swinging
their night-sticks, cracking heads, fingers and wrists, and
arresting a dozen men and women. Police did not know it
was a meeting planned by the American Civil Liberties
Union to test free speech and put Paterson police terror on
the front page of the New York Times.
But now Chief of Police Tracey's orders were, "Make no
trouble." So the police stood and looked at the strikers
and at the little group of leaders, speakers and committee
for whom the crowd made way. As they stepped into the
hall, every worker was on his feet, shouting, cheering, toss-
ing a hat in the air, sending the speakers up the aisle to
the platform with a call of victory that will echo down the
years in Paterson. This meeting meant that Turn Hall was
again open for daily strike meetings, and that H. M. Wicks,
the popular Communist speaker who had withdrawn to call
the bluff of police authorities, would come again to speak.
More than 13,000 broad silk workers, members of the
Associated Silk Workers' Union, had been out on strike since
August 12. Locals of the United Textile Workers had
not scabbed, but Sara Conboy, secretary of this organization,
had sent a letter to all A. F. of L. unions in the country
calling the Associated Silk Workers "an outlaw organiza-
tion" and telling them not to support the Paterson silk
workers. The letter instead of being a knock-out turned
out to be a boost for reHef .
Demands for the eight-hour day to offset the three- and
four-loom system were strengthened to include a 15 per cent
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 149
wage increase, and recognition of the union, the Associated
Silk Workers. Relief work was well organized. Tickets
for grocery orders were given to all strikers' families. Funds
came in steadily from other unions and from class-conscious
workers in other centers.
Conditions in Paterson had been growing worse since the
1922 strike of broad silk weavers. Rates had been cut so
drastically that workers found they were actually earning
less on three and four looms than they had formerly earned
on two looms. In the midst of post-war high cost of living
a skilled weaver was still averaging only $21 a week. A book-
keeper for a silk company asserted in The Paterson Sunday
Chronicle, "I wish to state that in the last three years, during
which I have been keeping books for a lOO-loom concern,
not one of our weavers made $1,000 a year, hut $goo and
even less, or about $16 to $19 a week."
And this was at a time when the minimum family budget
called for over $2,000 a year or about $42 a week. Then,
as now, at least two wage-earners in a family were necessary
to support five people (three children under working age)
even on the lowest level of health and decency.
This 1924 strike of the Associated Silk Workers was a
partial victory seen in the long view of the class struggle.
By December 12 many shops had settled with the union. Not
every concern granted an increase in rate of pay, but many
did. Enlightened workers know now that there were mis-
takes in the conduct of the strike. It was a short-sighted
policy to oppose the three- and four-loom system as in it-
self the main evil. Basic issues of a wage increase and the
eight-hour day as reducing unemployment should have been
kept more clearly in the forefront of union demands. But
the union was recognized in Paterson as able to unite workers
of differing nationalities, Italians, Jews, Syrians, and Eng-
lish-speaking groups. Ribbon weavers and broad silk weavers
150 LABOR AND SILK
were in one union. Out of the struggle came a new genera-
tion of class-conscious younger workers. They had seen the
employing class use injunctions, courts, police, church and
press against them. They had been educated by policemen's
clubs on the picket line, as their fathers had been educated
in 191 3, and their grandfathers in 1894 and 1878.
Passaic — 1^26
The great strike of Passaic, 1926, was of special signifi-
cance to silk workers because dyers of the United Piece
Dye Works and the National Silk Dyeing Company, as well
as silk workers of the Dundee Textile Company, struck
with the woolen workers. Sixteen thousand workers of
Passaic, Garfield and Lodi, New Jersey, walked out in
January, 1926, against a 10 per cent wage cut and for
recognition of the union. Companies dealing out the cut
had declared profits running in some cases up to 93 per cent
on capital invested. Wages for woolen workers had averaged
$17 a week for women and $24 for men.
A United Front Committee of Textile Workers, under
left-wing guidance, led the strike. Demands for abolition
of the wage cut were strengthened to include a 10 per cent
increase over the old rate, return of money lost by the cut,
time and a half for overtime, the forty-four-hour week, sani-
tary conditions required by law, no discrimination against
union workers, and first of all recognition of the union.
Every day for twelve months through 1926, Passaic textile
workers faced police on the picket line. Their spirit equaled
the spirit of Paterson, 191 3. Albert Weisbord, leader of
the strike, was arrested, held in jail for days and released
on the extraordinary bail of $50,000. All the most active
strike leaders were repeatedly arrested. Newspaper and
movie men had their cameras smashed by police clubs and
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 151
came out next day in armored cars and airplanes to get
pictures and news. Chief of Police Zober, most active against
the strikers, was later found to be guilty of stealing auto-
mobiles and was suspended from the police force for "violat-
ing the criminal laws of New Jersey."
Denouncing the strike leadership as Communist, the com-
panies refused to deal with the United Front Committee.
Forstman and Huffman, employing about half the workers
involved, had a company union of their own, which went to
pieces during the strike and was never revived.
Summing up the strike as it ended, Albert Weisbord
wrote in his book, Passaic:
The Passaic Strike has marked a milestone in labor history.
. . . Sixteen thousand textile workers, men, women and children,
have waged a terrific struggle against one of the most powerful
sets of employers in this country. Poles, Russians, Ukrainians,
Slovaks, Hungarians, and Germans, all have struck with un-
exampled discipline and firmness in the face of all the forces that
the ruling powers of capitalist society can hurl against them.
Two years after the strike, in September, 1928, the United
Textile Workers' convention expelled the delegates from
Passaic, elected by the local unions, on the ground that they
were active in the Textile Mills Committee at New Bedford.
Passaic locals withdrew from the United Textile Workers
and affiliated with the National Textile Workers' Union.
Spies in Hosiery — ig^S
Labor spies figured prominently in battles of hosiery
workers in 1928. A. R. MacDonald, "industrial engineer,"
head of a large labor spy service, was active against union
organizers of the Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers' Union
at the Real Silk Hosiery Mills in Indianapolis. Real Silk
maintained a sort of company union, the Employees' Mutual
152 LABOR AND SILK
Benefit Association, but the knitters almost to a man lined
up with the real union. A "yellow dog" contract, pledging
the employees not to belong to a trade union, was then
clamped on the workers. The union retains its following but
the membership is secret.
At Kenosha, Wisconsin, labor spies were continuously em-
ployed by the Allen-A Company. This concern in February,
1928, locked out 300 workers in the full-fashioned depart-
ment of its Kenosha plant, because they belonged to the
hosiery workers' union. The workers turned the lock-out
into a strike and picketed the mills. Strikebreakers were put
in by the company to run two machines each, although union
men agree that one machine is all a skilled knitter can oper-
ate. A sweeping injunction, police clubbing, arrests, fines in
court cases, frame-ups, spies — all the usual weapons of the
employing class have been used against the striking men and
girls in Kenosha.
A lock-out of workers at the Mil fay plant of Buffalo in
1928 was turned into a strike for union recognition and
union conditions. When the workers refused to sign a "yel-
low dog" contract they were locked out. For a seventy- to
seventy-four-hour week, Milfay knitters had been averaging
$40 in earnings. Union knitters on the same kind of work
would earn $60 up, for forty-eight hours. Fines were im-
posed by the company for thirty seconds' tardiness, for going
to the toilet often, and for unavoidable breakages.
The Duffys, owners of the Duffy Silk Throwing Mills,
tried to conceal their connection with the Milfay company,
but finally admitted their responsibility for the importation
of thug strikebreakers. Through contracts, the Milfay con-
cern is tied up with the Berkshire Knitting Mills, one of the,
largest anti-union hosiery companies in the country. The
owners had hoped to hide from the union by establishing a
plant in Buffalo, 400 miles from other hosiery centers, and
concealing their identity.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 153
Shorter Strikes
Girls in Wilkes-Barre silk mills walked out on strike in a
spontaneous protest against a wage cut in 1927. The strike
attracted no general attention, but it proved that young girl
workers can be aroused. When asked about this Wilkes-
Barre strike, President McMahon of the United Textile
Workers dismissed it as beneath his attention. "We have
so many strikes, you know."
Easton and Phillipsburg silk workers struck early in 1927
against a pay cut of 15 to 25 per cent. The R. H. Simon
weavers were the first to go out, and after a few weeks
gained back half of the cut wages. Workers of the Stewart
Silk Company were out for nine weeks and also won a com-
promise of half the pay slash. Phillipsburg workers at the
Tirrell Brothers Silk Corporation were out for ten weeks
and won better shop conditions with abolition of the whole
cut. During these strikes in the Easton-Phillipsburg center,
a meeting arranged by the Workers' (Communist) Party for
Albert Weisbord was broken up by the police. But these
local strikes stopped the wage cuts.
Southern workers have recently proved that they are be-
ginning to realize the class struggle. The Henderson, N. C,
strike in 1927 was a spontaneous revolt against low wages.
One thousand cotton mill workers found the state militia
and machine guns used against them. The militia was called
out on the personal order of the mill owners and their at-
torney. Silk workers of the Covington, Va., plant of
Schwarzenbach, Huber & Company walked out in protest
against the introduction of foreign workers at lower wages.
The management smoothed things over hastily and the 250
strikers went back to work.
Battling to keep the forty-eight-hour week, Rhode Island
textile workers in 1928 had to accept the fifty-four-hour
system. A concerted drive by the mill owners was aimed to
154 LABOR AND SILK
put over a 10 per cent cut and longer hours. A three months'
strike at the Parker mills, Warren, R. L, resulted in a partial
victory. The union, United Textile Workers, was recognized
by the company, and a lO per cent wage cut was rescinded.
But the 450 cotton mill workers went back to work on a fifty-
four-hour week.
The Darlington Textile Company of Pawtucket used an
injunction, state police, deputy sheriffs and local police against
the 200 striking workers in May, 1928. Weavers and loom-
fixers started the walkout against a wage cut and were joined
by the beamers in a sympathetic strike. National officials of
the United Textile Workers have been kept busy negotiating
with the employers for a settlement. The $24,000,000 Man-
ville-Jenckes Company has used its company union to vote in
the fifty-four-hour week for 2,000 workers. The United
Textile Workers led a strike at this mill in 1926, when the
company began to hire non-union workers. State militia was
used against strike pickets. The big Manville plant is only
one of the chain of mills owned by this great company. Its
plants at Gastonia and High Shoals, North Carolina, run on
an eleven- and twelve-hour basis.
New Bedford — 1^28
The five months' strike of New Bedford cotton fine goods
workers against a 10 per cent wage cut in 1928 included
many silk workers. Two New Bedford silk mills settled
independently with their workers early in the strike. Many
of the 26,000 workers who stayed out on strike for twenty-
six weeks were winders and weavers of silk and rayon in
mills manufacturing mixed goods.
The mills dealing the cut had recently declared substantial
profits as recorded in a previous chapter. The Pierce Manu-
facturing Company had maintained a dividend rate of $32
per share since 1923. In 1927, eighteen of the twenty-three
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 155
important mills in New Bedford paid dividends totaling
$2,100,000. The dividend rate figured for the past ten years
is $11.27 per share.
Yet, early in April, 1928, a notice appeared on the mill
bulletin boards announcing the cut. Unions were not con-
sulted or considered. The answer was a walk-out of all
workers. Union officials must have guessed the cut was com-
ing when wage rates were slashed in Fall River and other
New England centers earlier in the year. If New Bedford
workers had struck in January when Fall River wages were
cut, they would have caught employers in the busy, early
spring season. As it was, spring and summer orders had
been filled and store shelves were piled high with fine goods
before the wage cut was announced. For the first few weeks
the strike was almost a lock-out.
Wages in New Bedford had averaged $19.95 i" 1927, but
dropped to $19 for the first three months of 1928. The cut
would have brought average wages down to $17.10 in return
for almost fifty hours of work.
An "average" tells only a small part of the story. Skilled
workers earning $25 or $30 a week bring up the average.
Countless workers were getting less than $15 a week. But
the minimum family budget called for $41 a week in New
Bedford in 1928.
Organized workers in New Bedford had been for many
years members of the American Federation of Textile Opera-
tives, started in 191 6. Craft unions of loomfixers, warp
twisters, weavers, slasher tenders and carders were repre-
sented on a Textile Council of which William E. G. Batty
and Abraham Binns were officials. Early in the strike the
American Federation of Textile Operatives merged with the
United Textile Workers.
Unorganized workers in New Bedford were led by the
Textile Mills Committee, known as the T. M. C. Largely
Portuguese, these unorganized workers have a tradition of
156 LABOR AND SILK
industrial union leadership dating from I.W.W. days. Mass
picketing by these left-wing strikers, led by William Murdoch
and Fred Beal, began in the early days of the strike. The
local T. M. C. organized in June as the New Bedford Textile
Workers' Union. Demands of the left-wing union included
not only abolition of the wage cut, but also a 20 per cent
increase in wages over the old wage scale, forty-hour, five-
day week, abolition of speed-up, equal pay for equal work,
no discrimination against union members, and recognition of
the union.
The "show-down'* date, July 9th, when employers tried
to open the mills, saw more than 5,000 strikers picketing
the gates. Textile Council followers had separate picket
lines. But rank and file strikers came together for an all-
night watch over mills where scabs were reported at work.
The New Bedford Cotton Manufacturers' Association at
last broke their policy of silence. Mass picketing must stop.
The police must "tolerate no fooling." Two hundred and
twenty-five men and women were arrested in one day.
Militia with loaded guns faced unarmed workers standing
outside the jail where their leaders, Murdoch and Beal, were
imprisoned. Augusto Pinto, Portuguese bicycle rider for
the Textile Workers' Union, was sentenced to jail for five
months for "obstructing policemen" and "disturbing the
peace." He was arrested twelve times. Four policemen
set upon him one night in the "house of correction" and beat
him with a blackjack over the chest, head, arms and legs.
After three weeks on a farm to recover from this terrible
beating, Pinto came out on the picket line again, only to be
immediately arrested by the police. The International Labor
Defense, handling Pinto's case, defended over 600 New Bed-
ford strikers arrested on the picket lines.
Relief work was carried on by the Textile Council through
a Citizens' Relief Committee. The Workers' International
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 157
Relief distributed aid from two stations, one at the north
and one at the south end of the city.
The strike was settled in October, 1928. Officials of the
Textile Council, representing seven craft unions, voted to
accept a 5 per cent wage cut proposed by the State Board of
Conciliation, and accepted as a compromise by the manufac-
turers' association. Rank and file workers voted against
yielding to any cut. A second vote was ordered by the union
officials "to accept the cut," and by a small majority, only a
handful voting, the members of these United Textile Work-
ers* locals voted to take the reduction.
The Textile Workers' Union held out with fighting spirit
for continuing the strike. But police of five cities, armed
with riot sticks, were sent out against these left-wing leaders
in what the police chief called a "cleaning and sweeping up
process." Not only those on the picket line but others who
were quietly at work in relief headquarters were hunted
down and arrested. Cases of 662 strikers arrested during the
twenty-five weeks' struggle were still pending in the New
Bedford courts at the beginning of 1929.
Paterson — 1Q28
In October, 1928, about 3,000 Paterson silk workers,
mostly weavers of plain broad silk, came out on strike for
enforcement of the eight-hour day, for an increase in wage
rate, and for recognition of the union. They represented
nearly 200 small shops. The Associated Silk Workers, in
calling the strike, published a standard price-list for broad
silk weaving ranging from 9^ to 155^ cents a yard, accord-
ing to the kind of silk to be woven. This price-list involved
an increase in rates of about 10 per cent. Jacquard weavers,
in the same union, already enjoying better conditions, voted
to contribute toward relief, but refused to strike as a measure
of solidarity.
158 LABOR AND SILK
A vigorous strike committee of 50 members arranged daily-
mass meetings of strikers and daily mass picketing to bring
out workers in the larger shops. Early dark mornings in the
autumn saw picketers meeting at strike headquarters in Turn
Hall. At the whistle of the picket captains, men and women
piled into buses for the drive across town to more distant
shops, or strode out in lines to picket the nearer mills. "It's
the women that does it !" exclaimed a woman picket, leading
back a line of women, and the writer remembered Bill Hay-
wood's words about women as the backbone of a strike.
Seventeen pickets were arrested in one day, but the cases
were later dismissed in court.
Many employers, eager not to miss the busy season, came
forward day by day to settle with the union. In many cases,
however, strikers on returning to work found that the settle-
ment was only a fake. Bosses went back on their promises.
Shops would return to the longer day and the lower pay rate
as soon as the workers were back on the job. Many workers
stood out for real settlements and came out again on strike.
Officials of the Associated Silk Workers claimed that the
strike committee was too much under left-wing influence,
and in the midst of the strike declared this committee dis-
banded. This action was upheld by a 2 to i vote of a general
membership meeting of the union. Jacquard weavers and
ribbon and hatband workers, not themselves on strike, helped
to pile up the vote against the left wing.
Left-wing workers, maintaining that the strike committee
was unfairly and unwisely dismissed, withdrew from the
Associated and formed a Paterson local of the National
Textile Workers' Union. By January, 1929, this new indus-
trial union, with one man and two women organizers, had
started work to organize all Paterson silk workers, including
the dye workers.
The strike was officially called off by the Associated during
the last week of December, 1928, with the statement, "this
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CLASS STRUGGLE 159
does not mark the end of our struggle with the silk bosses for
the eight-hour day, a decent minimum wage, and union recog-
nition. . . , From now on the strategy will be unceasing
guerilla warfare with individual bosses, rather than a general
strike." «
In the textile industries, lowest paid of all important in-
dustries, wage cuts and anti-union drives by employers have
goaded the workers, in many instances unorganized, to strike
against intolerable conditions. In the year, 1928, one hun-
dred years after the first Pater son strike, at least 30,000
textile workers, preferring starvation for themselves and
their dependents, have again made use of this weapon to free
themselves from the tyranny of the mill owners. Freezing
and drenched in rain, they have stood valiantly on the picket
line, holding out for months against starvation on the one
hand and police brutality and imprisonment on the other.
Surely the time has come to weld these workers into one
strong union which can successfully resist the attacks of the
employers, and develop the collective power which workers
need in the silk as well as in other textile industries.
^ For an analysis and the lessons of this Paterson strike, see pamphlet
The Paterson Textile Workers by Albert Weisbord.
160
LABOR AND SILK
The Weaver
■V.
CHAPTER X
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE
Many American workers, in silk and other industries, com-
fort themselves in the face of speed-up, wage cuts, and un-
employment, with the chilly consolation that after all they
are better off than workers in Europe and the Orient. They
do not yet realize that American standards are genuinely
threatened by the unemployment and the very low wages in
other countries. But textile workers are beginning to see
that northern standards are pulled down by lower wages and
longer hours in the southern mills. Paterson workers know
that they are suffering from the competition of Pennsylvania.
The strong trend toward concentration together with in-
creased efficiency and the speed-up system is casting a shadow
of serious and steadily increasing unemployment among silk
workers.
Grievances
Speed-up is taking three forms. With existing equipment,
old machinery and wasteful methods of management, em-
ployers expect workers to accept lower wages, longer work-
ing hours and doubling up of machines. With new machines
and new efficiency methods of management in the local plant,
the individual worker is expected to double and treble his
present output. Displaced workers are thrown out to join
the growing army of the unemployed. With a tendency
toward centralization or combination in the textile industry
as a whole, the most efficient plants are developed to produce
more and the less efficient are crowded out.
i6i
162 LABOR AND SILK
In many mills, say the textile trade journals, half the
number of workers are now producing more than was for-
merly produced by the larger number. Instead of shortening
hours to take up this "slack" in employment, there is a tend-
ency to lengthen hours and "make labor go further." About
17 per cent of the silk workers, and a higher percentage of
all textile workers, were unemployed in 1928.
For the unemployed, thrown out by new machinery and
efficiency, and for the "normally" unemployed, there is no
social provision in the United States. The larger the num-
ber of unemployed silk workers, the greater is the bargaining
power of the boss. "If you don't like it, you can get out.
We can get plenty more workers any minute."
Jobless silk workers find no openings in other industries
for the same story is told in each industry. With 7 per cent
fewer workers, manufacturing industries are producing 40
per cent more than in 1919. Lack of any unemployment
insurance and of any national system of unemployment ex-
changes leaves the United States marked as the most back-
ward of all western capitalist countries.
In earnings, silk workers average $20.71 a week, slightly
more than other textile workers, but not enough to bring the
general average for all textile workers above $20 a week.
The latest government figures show that textile mill workers
average only $18.46 a week. Countless women and young
workers earn less than $15 a week. In Massachusetts, boast-
ing of "progressive" legislation, textile workers averaged
$20.40 a week in 1928. The industry as a whole pays lower
wages than any other basic industry in the country.
While textile workers average less than $20 a week, the
minimum family budget, for the lowest standard of health
and decency, calls for $40 to $42 a week in industrial centers
of the United States. At least two, often three members of
the family and in countless cases the whole family must work
to earn a meager living.
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 163
Economic pressure brings the children into the mills at
sixteen or younger. A larger percentage of workers are
under sixteen in the silk industry than in any other industry.
Exploitation of these young workers, forever cut off from
high school, college and other educational advantages, is
justified as "necessary" by employers. Young workers
"come cheaper" than adult workers. Yet there are enough
unemployed older workers to replace all the children in the
mills.
Averaging fifty-one hours a week, textile mills are now
tending to lengthen hours of work, instead of reducing hours
to match increased output. The eight-hour day, won by
Paterson silk strikers after bitter strikes, is unknown in any
other textile district. The New York and Massachusetts
forty-eight-hour law allows nine hours a day. The majority
of silk workers average fifty hours a week. Many men and
women in silk and other textile centers are even now working
ten and eleven hours a day. At the recent convention of the
new National Textile Workers' Union, the demand that
brought the most prolonged applause from all delegates was
the one calling for the "forty-hour, five-day week." Night
work is still common not only in the South but in New
Jersey and Pennsylvania too. Only a strong union can bring
about reduction of the present long hours.
Contradictions in the textile industry puzzle economists,
managers and owners alike. Immense operations and im-
mense profits of big companies exist side by side with the
free competition and trade of small concerns. Southern
companies compete with northern companies, but large cor-
porations own plants both North and South. Overproduction,
since the wartime inflation, is generally recognized as a basic
evil in the textile industry, yet mills are allowed to run night
shifts and long days when shortening the work day would
seem an obvious solution.
A general tendency toward centralization is as marked in
164 LABOR AND SILK
textiles, and In the silk branch, as in other industries.
Mergers are encouraged by big banks; then planned and
accomplished. Yet small concerns go on underbidding recog-
nized companies and preventing the stabilization of buying
and selling.
In all this confusion of unplanned production of textiles,
unplanned buying and selling, characteristic of capitalist
society, the workers are always the losers. Yet whenever,
in a hundred years* history, textile workers have demanded
better conditions, abolition of pay cuts, increased wages or
shorter hours, they have always found the police power of
the state used againt them. Textile workers in the United
States to-day are scarcely better off than they were fifty
years ago. Many Paterson silk workers are worse off than
they were forty years ago. The strain of speed-up and
unemployment is far worse.
Where is the silk worker who has any security against
unemployment, against illness, against old age? Where is
the silk worker who has even a week's vacation with pay out
of a year's work?
In Soviet Russia
Only in one country has the silk worker a genuine measure
of security. In the Soviet Union the silk worker, like all
other industrial workers, has social protection against unem-
ployment, against illness, whether temporary or permanent,
and against old age. He has two weeks' vacation with pay.
A pregnant woman worker has two months' leave of ab-
sence with pay before the baby is born, and two months'
leave of absence with pay after the baby is born. Free medi-
cal care is provided by the industry and by the state for all
workers. Men and women in Soviet Russia have equal pay
for equal work. The family is provided for in case of the
death or desertion of the wage-earner.
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 165
A young worker may not work eight hours a day in a
factory until he is eighteen years old. At sixteen, he may
work six hours in the factory and two in the factory school,
being paid for eight hours' work. In the factory school the
training is in general and social educational subjects for the
earlier years and in special vocational subjects in the last
year or two of the course.
The writer visited a large silk factory and a larger cotton
factory in Soviet Russia. After visiting many textile mills
in four different countres, one can bear witness to the freer,
richer life that textile workers already enjoy in the workers'
republic.
Most significant of all is the fact that Russian silk workers
from now on are to work only seven hours a day. One by
one the textile factories have gone on the seven-hour-day
continuous process basis. Among the large plants that
shifted to the seven-hour-day plan in 1928 were the Abelman
in Vladimir province, the Sverdlov, the Proletarian Victory
and the Red Banner textile factories.
The first day of the new order at the Abelman factory be-
gan dramatically with the hiring of over 900 unemployed
workers. The new program at the Red Banner plants called
for 3,000 additional workers. The labor exchange could
provide only 700 textile workers of whom 200 were specially
qualified. The other workers needed for the new system of
reduced hours were immediately trained in special classes.
The program of the Gosplan (State Planning Commis-
sion) based on the seven-hour-day system calls for progres-
sive increase of production and a lowering of factory ex-
penses. For instance, in the Abelman factory, the plan
outlined a 30 per cent increase in output and a lowering of
expenses by 38 per cent on spinning and 48 per cent on
weaving.
Those especially responsible for the welfare of textile
workers in Russia are interested in studying weavers' deaf-
166 LABOR AND SILK
ness, referred to in this book. A young weaver from
America, one of the rank and file trade union delegation to
Russia in 1927, found herself the subject of special interest
to these textile experts in the Soviet Republic on account of
her deafness. They told her of their efforts to do away with
the terrible noise of looms, and thus protect the weavers from
that strain.
Workers have the deep satisfaction of knowing that the
industry is theirs, and that their day's work fits into a plan
of coordinating all industry. "These are our railroads, our
factories, our country," the Russian worker will explain to
a visiting worker. "We run them and improve them because
they are ours. We will make them constantly better and
strengthen Socialism year by year."
What the Gosplan means in this workers' republic is sum-
marized by Stuart Chase in Soviet Russia in the Second
Decade:
The goal to be achieved by the plan is simple and straight-
forward; a maximum production of necessities and plain com-
forts for the workers and peasants of Russia at a minimum of
human effort, while scrupulously safeguarding at the same time
the health, safety, education, opportunity for leisure, and work-
ing conditions of those who labor. In other words, however
great the benefits of low cost production, it must not be obtained
at the expense of the fundamental health and welfare of the
workers. Only enough capital will be permitted to flow into a
given industry to balance consumer requirements; just enough
shoe factories to provide shoes for the people of Russia; just
enough textile mills; just enough sugar factories.
To integrate in detail the economic life of one hundred and
fifty millions of people over a six-thousand-mile stretch of ter-
ritory is a bigger job than has ever been attempted in adminis-
trative annals.
Demands
American silk workers cannot hope to secure under capi-
talism the protection accorded to textile workers in the Soviet
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 167
workers' republic. Russian workers gained their freedom
through a revolution. To secure even a small measure of such
protection under capitalism will require a strong and militant
union organizing broadly and persistently. Such a union
will make certain immediate demands.
The forty-hour, five-day week is a first step in securing
protection against the worst phases of speed-up. To lessen
the strain of long hours, the shorter work week is a basic
demand. That such a shorter week will mean the employ-
ment of many workers now unemployed is obvious. With
fewer unemployed the workers have greater bargaining
power to resist wage cuts and secure increases.
Demand for the abolition of overtime work must go with
the demand for a shorter week. Extra pay for overtime
work is no solution of the basic grievance. If a double or
triple shift is needed for production, it should be effected by
the employment of more workers.
Payment by week rather than by piece is an immediate
demand. Payment by piece is in itself a form of speed-up
and as such should be abolished. Silk workers and other
textile workers are beginning a new drive against the whole
piece-rate system.
Increase of wages is so urgent a necessity as to require no
explanation. An immediate 20 per cent increase in pay
would mean nothing more than the restoration of the wage
paid to silk workers a few years ago. As we have seen in
discussing the conditions of the workers, silk wages are en-
tirely inadequate to provide the necessities of life.
Equal pay for equal work regardless of sex is a demand
for the protection of men as well as of women. When a
woman can be hired at lower wages to do the work for which
a man gets more, employers take advantage of the cheaper
labor, and a larger number of men go jobless.
A minimum wage for young workers means again the pro-
tection not only of children but of adult workers. In silk
168 LABOR AND SILK
throwing mills where child workers can easily learn the
process, young people under sixteen are underbidding older
workers in the competition for jobs. Demand for a minimum
wage is basic.
Abolition of child labor under sixteen should be by Federal
Amendment. For young workers between sixteen and
eighteen, the six-hour day and five-day week should be
secured and maintained by the union until such protection
can be provided for by adequate legislation in the United
States.
Prohibition of night work for women is a demand dis-
puted by certain women of leisure who talk about equal op-
portunity for women and know nothing of what the "oppor-
tunity" to do night work means to working women. Most
of the women in industry are now carrying a double burden
of housework and factory work. Night work increases the
burden. It should be prohibited by law, and the law en-
forced by a strong union.
Demand for social insurance must include the condition
that it is provided by the industry and by the state, never
from the meager savings of the workers. Private insurance
schemes promoted by employers are used as weapons against
unions and should be abolished. Unemployment insurance
should provide an amount equal to wages earned up to a
certain amount per week. An adequate system of old age
pensions, health and accident insurance is of the utmost
urgency.
Freedom of speech, press and assembly are vital to the
workers for the protection of their right to organize, to
strike and to picket. Abolition of injunctions in labor
struggles is an immediate demand. Calling out of militia,
Federal troops, guards, gunmen or deputy sheriffs to be
used against the workers must be prohibited by law. Such
prohibition is an immediate demand.
It is not the job of the workers to see that companies com-
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 169
bine to become more efficient. But in the face of the increas-
ing tendency toward concentration of production in the hands
of fewer and larger companies, in the face of the larger
profits of these larger companies, it is the job of the workers
to resist every attack upon their working conditions. The
larger the company the more power it has to keep out a
union and compel acceptance of its own terms. Now, before
consolidations progress any further, is the time to organize
silk workers in the unorganized centers. These workers and
textile workers generally cannot successfully resist the power
of the big corporations unless they build a powerful union.
Extent of Organization
Less than 5 per cent of the 1,110,000 textile workers in
the United States are organized in any unions. At the peak
of organization strength, just after the war, 225,000 textile
workers, or from 22 to 25 per cent of the total number, were
organized in the United Textile Workers, the Amalgamated
Textile Workers, the American Federation of Textile Opera-
tives and in independent local unions. The depression of
1920-21 caused a loss of from 50 to 60 per cent in the total
number of union members. The unions have never regained
their lost strength. In 1928 not more than 40,000 textile
workers were organized. Union strength was confined
largely to Massachusetts, New Jersey and the vicinity of
Philadelphia.
Of the 132,500 silk workers, less than 3 per cent are or-
ganized. The Associated Silk Workers enrolled about
25 per cent of the 16,368 silk workers of Paterson, and a
few individuals in other centers. The United Textile Work-
ers of America, the A. F. of L. union, has not more than 300
strictly silk workers on its books, if we except those who are
members of the American Federation of Full Fashioned
170 LABOR AND SILK
Hosiery Workers. The National Textile Workers' Union
had just begun to organize in Paterson in 1928.
The most important unions now engaged in organizing silk
workers may be briefly described.
Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers
The American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery
Workers has been affiliated with the United Textile Workers
since 1926. Founded in 1913 it had 3,000 members by 1920
and has recently, through vigorous organization work, in-
creased its membership to 12,000. By a special agreement
with the United Textile Workers the Full Fashioned keeps
the right to strike and has its own strike fund.
Of the 187,000 knit goods and hosiery workers in the
United States about 12,000 hosiery workers are in the
Full Fashioned. Half the members of this union work in
and around Pennsylvania. Seamless hosiery workers are
unorganized. There are 50,000 hosiery and knit goods
workers in Pennsylvania and 36,000 in New York State.
Tennessee has 15,000 and North Carolina 14,000.
The union does not stand for equal pay for equal work for
men and women. Its "lady hosiery workers" have less repre-
sentation than the men, one for every 300 "lady" members,
as compared with one to every 100 men. "But in no case
shall the lady members be entitled to a representative unless
the lady membership of the Branch averages at least twenty-
five members." The clause reads as if it were written the
middle of last century.
Associated Silk Workers
Having voted to table the proposal for a merger with the
United Textile Workers on the same basis as the Full
Fashioned Hosiery Workers, the Associated Silk Workers
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 171
continued as an independent union with about 3,500 mem-
bers in the fall of 1928. It was started by the hatband and
ribbon weavers of Paterson in 191 9, joined by the broad silk
weavers in 1921, and showed its greatest strength during the
1924 strike in that city. Its present strength is largely among
the hatband, ribbon and a section of the broad silk known as
the Jacquard weavers.
With the old local in Paterson and smaller locals in New
York City, West Hoboken, and Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and Allentown, Easton and Stroudsburg, Pa,, the Associated
calls itself a national union. About a third of its members
are women workers. Few of the women winders have
been organized. The 13,000 dyers and finishers of textiles
in New Jersey (chiefly in Paterson and Lodi, New Jersey)
have never been organized by the Associated Silk Workers,
National Textile Workers' Union
Meeting in New York City, September 22-23, 1928, a con-
vention of 169 delegates from twenty-one cities and towns
organized a new progressive organization, the National Tex-
tile Workers' Union of America. The four main branches
of the textile industry were represented — cotton, silk, woolen
and worsted, hosiery and knit goods. Workers in the silk
came from Easton, Allentown, Bethlehem, Wilkes-Barre,
Scranton, Nanticoke, Old Forge, and Luzerne in the great
Pennsylvania silk area.
From New Bedford came delegates from the fifty-six
mills on strike, representing the New Bedford Textile
Workers' Union recently organized with a membership of
2,500. In all there were ninety-three delegates from the
cotton goods section of the industry, tweny-four from the
woolen, thirty-three from the silk, and nineteen from the
knit goods section. Forty-five of the 169 delegates were
women. More than a third were under twenty-five years of
172 LABOR AND SILK
age. From the six Passaic locals, withdrawn the week before
from the United Textile Workers, there were twenty-four
delegates.
The constitution of the new union contains a special pro-
vision that wages of the union officials shall be no higher
than the average wage of a skilled textile worker. Union
dues are graded according to the wages of the members.
Those earning $50 to $99 a month will pay dues of 50 cents
a month.
The basis of the union structure is the mill as a unit.
Where more than 500 members work in one mill, the unit is
the mill-department, to insure democratic discussion of all
union questions.
This new union is organized "in order to unite all workers
in the industry info one strong organization which will be
able to launch a determined struggle for higher wages,
shorter hours, and better working conditions." The pre-
amble of its constitution reads in part:
The formation of all-powerful trusts in the textile industry
has made the old craft form of trade-union organization obso-
lete, impotent. Our union is, therefore, built along industrial
lines with the mill as its basic unit. Only an organization which
unites all workers regardless of craft, nationality, race, or creed,
can serve as an instrument in the hands of the textile workers in
their struggles against the mill magnates.
The traditional policy of cooperation between workers and
employers is bankrupt. It results in the lowering of the standard
of living of the textile workers, merciless wage-cuts, inhuman
speed-up, dwindling-down of the trade-union organization. The
policy of our union must be one of bold, uncompromising struggle
for the interests of the workers as against the interests of the
bosses. The basis of our union must be the recognition of the
fact that there cannot be peace between the working class and
the master class, that only a militant class struggle of the workers
can better their conditions, can put an end to wage slavery, and
emancipate the working class.
The National Textile Workers' Union will lead the textile
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 173
workers in this struggle, and will join hands with the other sec-
tions of the working class in America and throughout the entire
world for a united front against the system of capitalist oppres-
sion and exploitation and for the complete freedom of all toilers.
Economic demands of the National Textile Workers'
JJnion adopted by the convention are as follows :
WE FIGHT
1. Against wage cuts and for higher wages.
2. Against the speed-up system in all its forms.
3. For a 40-hour — 5-day week.
4. Against overtime; where overtime is permitted — for time
and a half for overtime. Double time for Sundays and
holidays.
5. For equal pay for equal work for women and young work-
ers. Minimum wage of $20 a week.
6. Against piece-work, and the piece-rate system. For week
work and weekly pay. For a standard scale.
7. Against child labor.
8. Against night work, especially for women and young
workers.
9. For 6 legal holidays a year with pay.
For the New Bedford strike the program of the new union
call&J for abolition of the 10 per cent wage cut ; 20 per cent
increase in wages over the old scale; forty hours and five
days a week ; abolition of speed-up ; equal pay for equal work
of men, women and young workers ; no discrimination against
union members ; recognition of the union.
An organizer of the National Textile Workers' Union is
in charge of each regional district. Recognizing that 50 per
cent of all textile workers are women, the union has several
women organizers in northern textile centers. The educa-
tional program includes a weekly paper, shop papers, a
library and research department in each local, workers'
classes in every textile center, sports clubs, and recreation.
174 LABOR AND SILK
Problems of Organisation
Any union conducting a national campaign to organize silk
workers will have to take into consideration certain character-
istics of the industry and its workers. Tactics and union
structure must be determined accordingly.
1. Silk workers are of many nationalities. Italians, Syrians,
Jews, Belgians, Poles and others are working in the typical
plant. The last census reported one-third of the population
of Paterson as foreign-born. One out of every four women
silk workers in New Jersey in 1922 was foreign-born. The
same mixture of nationalities prevails in Pennsylvania silk
towns. Only a union that understands the approach to the
foreign-born worker, that uses foreign language organizers,
that emphasizes the solidarity of all races against the em-
ployers, will succeed in organizing silk workers.
2. Silk workers, particularly in Pennsylvania, are largely
women and a large number of them are young women. The
union should choose organizers who have enthusiasm, per-
sistence, and a knowledge of the tactics that appeal to girl
workers.
3. Only an industrial union will be effective. Workers
must be organized by shop, not by craft. Old craft lines
have broken down where automatic stop looms have largely
displaced much of the weavers' skill. Work in throwing
mills does not require any great measure of skill. The union
must think by factory and not by crafts. All workers in one
mill or mill-department — skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled —
should belong to one union local.
4. The union will have to fight not only the small mill with
20 to 200 workers but, in Pennsylvania particularly, all the
financial power of a great company owning dozens of mills,
each in a different town. Only a large-scale union campaign
or a large-scale strike can succeed in such an industry.
5. Persistence and stability in the work of organization
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 175
will be essential. Such towns as Allentown, the largest silk
center in Pennsylvania, have seen unions come and go. The
United Textile Workers just after the war period had 1,250
members in Allentown locals, but now only a handful of
union members are left. The Amalgamated Textile Workers
led a strike there in 1920, just before the slump that weak-
ened all unions. The Associated Silk Workers also attempted
some organization work in this district.
ORGANIZING THE SOUTH
Most of the 300,000 unorganized textile workers in the
South are in cotton mills. But as the southern mills gradu-
ally increase their output of fine goods with silk mixtures,
they are coming into competition with a section of the north-
ern silk industry. Some 26,000 southern textile workers are
in the huge new rayon plants, feudal in their management
and remote from other industries. Some 40,000 are in the
knitting mills, including plants turning out full-fashioned
silk and rayon hosiery. A few thousand workers — exact
figures were not given in the 1925 census of manufactures —
are scattered through mills classified as silk mills in Virginia
and other southern states. Only in the Piedmont district
has unionism begun to take hold among southern textile
workers.
Unorganized southern mill workers have been in the past
opposed to unionism. Families of old American stock, com-
ing down from rough cabins in the hills, thought at first that
the mill village was a paradise. A little cash in hand from
working in the mills seemed like wealth in comparison with
bare existence in the mountains. They found the whole com-
munity around them opposed to a labor union and its prin-
ciples as a "foreign institution."
But the second generation of textile workers is beginning
to wake up. They are realizing that the whole family has to
176 LABOR AND SILK
work in the mills in order to live in the company houses and
make a meager living. They hear now about better condi-
tions in other states and in other southern industries. Wages
are higher in furniture manufacturing, in steel and in coal.
The mill village will lose its hold on the children as they grow
up.
Unless unions begin at once on a far-reaching, large-scale
campaign to organize southern textile workers, we shall find
the new industrial South more and more powerfully anti-
union. The textile industry in the South is for the most part
large-scale industry. Big northern companies, with southern
branches, compete with big southern companies. Mergers
are as much the tendency in the South as in the North.
To forestall the anti-union policy of big cotton and rayon
companies, a union should go for the "big fellows." The
only force that can oppose the financial power of large scale
industry and of the great banks behind it is working class
solidarity. In this rapidly expanding southern industry,
new conditions are bringing in new ideas. There is far less
unemployment than in northern textile centers. All is on the
up-grade. Now is the time to organize southern textile
workers.
Outlook
The contrast is only too clear between the programs of the
various unions, their demands for better conditions, and the
actual conditions, described in this book, under which silk
workers are living and working.
More and more the benevolent and clever employers will
try to head off organization by welfare schemes and company
unions; but most of these same employers will not hesitate
to spy on their workers and blacklist those who try to or-
ganize. The building up of a strong union will not be easy.
Whenever in the past hundred years silk workers have de-
THE SILK WORKERS' FUTURE 177
manded better conditions, abolition of pay cuts, increased
wages or shorter hours, always they have found the police
power of the state used against them by the employing class.
Under capitalism this will continue. It is part of the same
world-wide struggle that calls out textile workers on one side
and British police on the other side in Bombay and Shanghai.
The textile strikes of 1928 in Germany, France and Poland
were not something foreign to American silk workers.
Beyond certain immediate aims, silk workers in capitalist
countries cannot hope to go. For exploitation of workers,
chaos in production, irregularity and uncertainty of employ-
ment there is no solution under capitalism.
The future depends upon organization. With united ac-
tion silk workers can resist wage cuts and lengthening of
hours. With 100 per cent organization, silk workers, as well
as other textile workers, can gain wage increases, shorter
hours, and some protection against the worst phases of the
speed-up system. With a union headed by fearless and un-
tiring leaders, textile workers will truly join hands with other
workers in America and throughout the world against capi-
talist oppression and exploitation and for the complete eman-
cipation of all workers.
APPENDICES
I. SILK MANUFACTURES*
Description of the Industry
This industry embraces two classes of establishments: (i)
Those engaged primarily in the manufacture of silk fabrics and
other finished silk products, not including knit fabrics, hosiery,
and other knit goods made of silk; (2) those engaged primarily
in the manufacture of silk yarn, known technically as organzine,
tram, hard or crepe twist, and spun silk, and of warps. The
greater part of the work performed by throwsters and by warp-
ers is done on contract. (For table see next page.)
II. PROCESSES IN SILK MILLS
The following simple descriptions of processes in silk mills
are based partly on a written account by Anna Burlak, a Bethle-
hem silk weaver, partly on an account by Shichiro Matsui in his
History of the Silk Industry in the United States, published in
the magazine Silk, and partly on the writer's observations in silk
mills.
I. Throwing. When the raw silk arrives from Japan or
China, it is converted into yarn in the throwing mill. The word
throwing comes from the Saxon "thrawan" to twist. "The pur-
pose of the throwing mill is to twist, double, twist, and combine
again as often as necessary to produce the desired yarn. The
silk goes through five or six processes in the throwing mill,
soaking, winding, spinning, doubling and reeling. Organzine,
used chiefly for the warp, goes through a second spinning. Tram,
used chiefly for filling, is made by combining two or more ends
(or threads) of raw silk and then twisting them together more
or less loosely."
Doubling is a process whereby yarn from two or more bobbins
is wound on to another bobbin, without any twist, making a
heavier silk.
Spinning. The process by which the silk is run from one spool
to another, meanwhile putting 60 twists into the silk per inch.
The girls must work swiftly to keep several hundred spools
HJ. S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1925.
178
APPENDICES
179
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180 LABOR AND SILK
running all the time. The spinners run twelve machines per
girl.
"Throwing machinery is simple, automatic and run at a high
speed. Devices which cause the machine to stop automatically
when an end breaks are now generally used." The workers are
usually young girls who supply new skeins and bobbins and tie
in breaks.
Reeling. Before being dyed in the yarn or shipped to another
mill, the silk must be reeled again into skeins. "To prevent
tangling during the dyeing the skeins are laced by running short
strings in and out across each skein, dividing it into four parts."
2. Winding. The skeins are put on reels or swifts and are
wound from these to bobbins. The winder now usually tends
three sides of the machine totalling 120 ends of yarn.
Quill-winding. The filling or woof for weaving usually con-
sists of tram or loosely twisted yarn, but is frequently spun silk.
The silk is wound from spools on a quill or bobbin. This work
is done by girls also. The quills are put in the steaming room
for half an hour to take the brittleness out of them and then
they are ready for the weavers.
3. Warping. Preparing the warp takes more time and skill
in silk manufacture than in other textiles. Warpers are both men
and women. Warps contain from 120 to 300 threads to the inch,
and even 600 threads for especially heavy goods. "The yarn
is first run on a large horizontal reel, known as the warper, and
then in the reverse direction on to a loom beam." Each end of
silk must be placed in the proper slit called the dent, in each
reed, or comb. "This is a tedious hand process, one which re-
quires close attention, as well as supple and deft fingers on the
part of the worker." The big reel, "operated by power, slowly
revolves and winds an even band of yarn on itself until a sec-
tion of the required length is obtained."
Beaming. "The warper is reversed and the yarn slowly wound
on a large spool, called a beam, that is placed at the back of the
loom." Defects are remedied by the beamer, while the yarn is
wound on the beam.
4. Entering-in. Each individual end of the warp is carefully
drawn through a heddle eye of the loom harness. The tedious
process is usually done by hand, two skilled operatives working
together. The yarn is then drawn through the dents of the
loom reed.
5. Twisting-in. The ends of a new warp are tied to the ends
APPENDICES 181
of the old warp. Each end is tied separately, usually by hand.
Twisters are usually men. In coarser warps, a machine can do
the twisting-in about three and a half times as fast as it can be
done by hand. On a Jacquard loom, the process of twisting-in is
more complicated as each warp yarn has an individual weighted
heddle.
6. Weaving. The weaver controls the loom which is power-
driven, the shuttle shooting automatically back and forth with a
terrific noise. Most looms are now equipped with stop-motion
devices, so that the loom stops whenever a break occurs in the
filling yarn. The weaver then repairs the break.
A few silk looms, used for mixed goods, have a magazine at-
tachment for the automatic changing of the filling. But on most
looms, the shuttle is still changed by the weaver as soon as the
yarn runs out. Weavers are both men and women. The fineness
of silk yarns means that the silk weaver cannot handle as many
looms as the cotton or woolen weaver.
For complicated patterns, the Jacquard loom is used. The
pattern is woven according to holes punched in the Jacquard
cards which hang in festoons above the loom.
"Ribbons are woven in the same manner as broad silks. The
only difference is that, due to their narrowness, from 20 to 30
ribbons may be woven on the same loom at once."
7. Picking. The cloth is examined and all defects or foreign
particles are removed. Pickers are usually girls. It is practically
the only process in silk manufacture during which the worker
may sit down.
8. Dyeing. Silk is dyed either in the skein or in the piece.
Skein-dyeing is now done by a machine which turns the skein
in the dye-bath. Workers hang the skeins on the wheel, tend
the machine and remove the finished skeins, to be dried in an
extractor. Air in dye-rooms is always steaming and unhealthful.
Drying rooms are excessively hot.
Piece-dyeing follows the manufacturing processes. Broad silks
to be piece-dyed are woven in the gray. Piece-dyeing usually in-
cludes degumming, bleaching, dyeing, inspecting and drying.
Printing. Silk printing in the United States is done by ma-
chine or roller. The pattern is stamped on the silk as it rolls
through the machine. The receiver then takes the printed goods
from the other side of the roller.
Weighting. "Silk dyeing is frequently followed by a process
called weighting or loading, by which the volume and weight of
182 LABOR AND SILK
silk are arbitrarily increased." The substance used for weighting
is usually tin.
Finishing. Finishing processes are often numerous and com-
plex. Names for these processes are sizing, drying, calendering
and tentering. The object is to smooth and stretch the material,
singe off any loose fuzz, and to roll it on boards for shipment.
III. NUMBER OF TEXTILE WORKERS
Average number of wage-earners in 1925 in
Dyeing and
Silk Finishing Knitting Cotton
State Mills of Textiles Mills Mills
Pennsylvania 60,809 8,271 So,43o 18,743
New Jersey 28,196 19,270 5,146 8,977
New York 13,030 6,852 35,774 9,90S
Connecticut 9,977 2,408 1,657 I4,773
Massachusetts 6,497 13,872 10,551 98,939
Rhode Island 6,087 9,860 1,821 34,420
Other New England states.... N.R.i N.R.i 3,701 27,718
Maryland 1,127 97 939 2,365
Virginia 1,222 N.R.i 2,732 8,035
All other states 5,564 10,119 73»9i7 244,477
Total United States 132,509 7o,749 186,668 468,352
iN.R. means "no report."
The workers in silk mills, dyeing and finishing plants, knitting
mills (including hosiery) and cotton mills, account for 858,278
of the 1,110,209 wage-earners in textile mills in 1925. Of the
remainder, 165,224 were in mills making woolen and worsted
goods, and 86,707 were scattered among the minor textiles, —
linen, carpet, cordage, oilcloth, etc.
Number of Textile Workers! in the South
Southern textile centers are unorganized. There has been
much exaggeration about the number of textile workers in the
South. The 1925 census of manufactures reported:
230,000 cotton goods workers in North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Alabama, Virginia.
40,000 knit goods (including hosiery) workers mainly in Tennessee,
North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.
26,000 rayon workers centered in Virginia and Tennessee (advance
figures for 1927).
APPENDICES 18a
In all there are about 300,000 textile workers in southern states.
Cotton workers in the South, although mainly working- on
coarser goods, use silk and rayon to a certain extent. Knit goods
workers use silk yarn thrown in Pennsylvania and shipped to
the South. The southern knit goods industry would be directly
affected by a strike in silk-throwing mills.
IV. PRODUCTIVITY OF SILK WORKERS
Pennsylvania Output
Wage-earners in the silk in Pennsylvania increased by 15 per
cent in the six years after the war, from 53,152 in 1919 to 60,809
in 1925. Value of total output, in terms of the 1919 dollar, in-
creased by 65 per cent.
This meant a 44 per cent increase in the productivity of each
silk worker for the six years from 1919 to 1925. Three workers
were producing more in 1925 than four workers produced in
1919. One worker in four could be laid off, and the output of
the companies still increased. One wage-earner was putting out
more in six hours in 1925 than he put out in eight hours in 19 19.
New Jersey Output
In New Jersey in 1925 fewer silk workers were employed than
in 19 19. Wage-earners in the silk decreased in the six years by
13 per cent, from 32,326 in 1919 to 28,196 in 1925. But value
of total output, in terms of the 1919 dollar, increased by 11
per cent.
Productivity of each wage-earner increased by 30 per cent.
Four workers were producing more in 1925 than five workers
produced in 1919. One worker in five could be laid off and
output still slightly increased. A New Jersey silk worker was
putting out as much in 6y^ hours as he put out formerly in 8
hours.
Paterson Output
In Paterson also fewer silk workers were employed in 1925
than in 19 19. Wage-earners in the silk decreased in the six years
by 25 per cent, from 21,836 in 1919 to 16,368 in 1925. In other
words, 5,468 silk workers who were employed in 19 19 were not
employed in the silk in 1925. Value of total output in terms of
the 1919 dollar decreased by 8 per cent.
184 LABOR AND SILK
But the output of each wage-earner increased by 22 per cent.
Each silk worker produced $2,883 worth of silk in 1919, but
$3,519 worth in 1925, in terms of the 1919 dollar. Five workers
were producing more in 1925 than six workers produced in 19 19.
One worker in six could be laid off and output still slightly in-
creased. A silk worker was putting out more in 73/2 hours than
he had put out formerly in p hours.
New York Output
This richest state in the United States showed a still larger
increase in the productivity of each silk worker. Wage-earners
in the silk decreased in the six years by two per cent, from 13,342
in 1919 to 13,030 in 1925. Yet value of total output, in terms
of the 1919 dollar, increased by 69 per cent. Output of each
wage-earner increased by 72 per cent, from $2,654 in 19 19 to
$4,570 in 1925, in terms of the 1919 dollar. Three workers were
producing more in 1925 than five workers produced in 19 19.
Two workers in five could be laid off and output still slightly
increased. One wage-earner was putting out more in 6 hours in
1925 than he put out in p hours in ipiQ.
Connecticut Output
In Connecticut in 1925 fewer silk workers were employed than
in 1919. Cheney Brothers employ more than a third of all the
silk workers in the state, and we have seen from their own
statement that the number of wage-earners was reduced and
productivity increased. For the state as a whole, wage-earners
in the silk decreased in the six years after the war by 11 per
cent, from 11,254 in 1919 to 9,977 in 1925. Value of output in
terms of the 1919 dollar increased by 5 per cent.
Output of each wage-earner increased by 18 per cent, from
$2,712 in 1919 to $3,222 in 1925, in terms of the 1919 dollar.
Six workers could put out in 1925 a little more than 7 workers
put out in 19 1 9. One worker in seven would be laid off and out-
put still slightly increased. One silk worker was putting out
m,ore in seven hours than he put out formerly in eight hours.
Massachusetts Output
In Massachusetts, wage-earners in the silk increased by 14
per cent, from 5,697 in 1919 to 6,497 in IQ^S- Value of total
APPENDICES 185
output, in terms of the 19 19 dollar, increased by 31 per cent.
Output of each wage-earner increased by 15 per cent, from
$2,624 in 1919 to 13,025 in 1925, in terms of the 1919 dollar.
Seven workers could put out in 1925 about what eight workers
put out in 1919. One worker in eight could be laid off and out-
put still maintained. One silk worker of this state in IQ23 was
putting out, as much in seven hours as he had formerly put out
in eight hours.
V. LAWS ON HOURS OF WORK
New York
The so-called 48-hour law in New York, limiting the hours of
women factory workers, allows a 9-hour day and a 49 3^ -hour
week, if Saturday is a half day. It also allows 78 hours of over-
time during the year to be so spread out that no woman works
more than 54 hours in one week. But by securing permission
from the Department of Labor, employers can add this 78 hours
of overtime to the working week and make a regular schedule
of 51 hours throughout the year.
Night work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. is not allowed for
women factory workers in New York. Children between 14 and
16 in this state are allowed to work an 8-hour day, 44 hours a
week, but not at night after 6 o'clock. Young workers between
16 and 18 are allowed to work 9 hours a day, 54 hours a v/eek,
but not at night after midnight.
Connecticut
The Cheney Silk Mills, employing more than a third of all the
silk workers in Connecticut, are on a schedule of S}i hours a
day, 49 hours a week. Connecticut law limits working hours of
women in factories to 10 hours in any one day, 6 days or 55
hours in any one week. Night work for women is forbidden
between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. Children between 14 and 16, with
working papers, are allowed to work 8 hours a day, 6 days a week,
but not at night after 6 p.m.
Massachusetts
The battle in the Massachusetts state legislature through the
winter of 1928 to change the law and allow night work for
women textile workers was won by workers when the House
186 LABOR AND SILK
finally voted down the bill which had been passed by the Senate.
Allowing night work would have seriously menaced the 48-hour
law. Massachusetts textile bosses were determined to "make
labor go farther" by using women on night shifts. They were
defeated on March 28, 1928.
The law in this state still limits the working hours of women
to 9 hours a day, 6 days and 48 hours a week. No night work
for women is allowed between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. or for women
textile workers after 6 p.m. Children between 14 and 16 with
working papers are allowed to work 8 hours a day, 6 days or 48
hours a week but not at night after 6 p.m. Young textile workers
(boys under 18 and girls under 21) work 10 hours a day, 6 days
or 54 hours a week but not at night after 6 p.m.
For hours of work in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, see pages
117 and 118.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
American Labor Year Book, Research Department, Rand School of
Social Science, New York.
Avram, Mois H., The Rayon Industry, Van Nostrand Co., New York,
1927.
Bimba, Anthony, History of the American Working Class, International
Publishers, New York, 1927.
Blanshard, Paul, Labor in Southern Cotton Mills, New RepubUc, New
York, 1927.
Chase, Dunn, Tugwell, Soviet Russia in the Second Decade, John Day,
New York, 1928.
Chittick, James, Silk Manufacturing and Its Problems, Chittick, New
York.
Commons, John R., and Associates, History of Labour in the United
States, Macmillan Co., New York, 192 1.
Davison's Silk Trade, The SUk Guide, Davison Publishing Co., New
York, 1928.
Dunn, Robert W., Company Unions, Vanguard Press, New York, 1927.
, Soviet Trade Unions, Vanguard Press, New York, 1928.
, Americanization of Labor, International Pubhshers, New York,
1927.
Foltzer, Joseph, Artificial Silk, Pitman and Sons, London, 192 1.
Foster, William Z., Misleaders of Labor, Trade Union Educational
League, New York, 1927.
Haywood, William D., BiU Haywood's Book, International Publishers,
New York, 1929.
Hooper, Luther, Silk; Its Production and Manufacture, Pitman & Sons,
London.
International Economic Conference (May, 1927), Summary Memoran-
dum on Various Industries.
Lenin, N., Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism, Communist Party
of Great Britain, London.
Lovestone, Jay, The Government Strikebreaker, Workers Party, 1924.
Manchester, H. H., The Story of Silk and Cheney Silks, Cheney Bros.,
New York, 1916.
Matsui, Shichiro, History of the Silk Industry in the United States,
Howes Publishing Co., New York, 1928.
Moody's Investors' Service, Moody's Manual of Indtistrials, New York,
1928.
National Industrial Conference Board, Hours in Relation to Output and
Health in Silk Manufacturing, New York, 1919.
187
188 LABOR AND SILK
National Textile Workers' Union, Constitution, 1928.
Price, George M., Labor Protection in Soviet Russia, International Pub-
lishers, New York, 1928,
Rawlley, R. C, Economics of the Silk Industry, P. S. King, London^
1919.
Russak, Martin, "Memories of a Silk Weaver," New Masses, New York,
1928.
Saposs, David J., Left Wing Unionism, International Publishers, 1925.
Standard Statistics Co., Standard Corporation Records, New York, 1928.
Russia After Ten Years, Report of the American Trade Union Delega-
tion to Soviet Russia, International Publishers, New York, 1928.
Trumbull, L. R., History of Industrial Pater son, Herrick, Paterson,
N. J., 1882.
Tugwell, Rexford Guy, Industry's Coming of Age, Harcourt, Brace &
Co., New York, 1927.
Vorse, Mary Heaton, The Passaic Textile Strike, General Relief Com-
mittee of Textile Strikers, Passaic, 1927,
Walton, Perry, The Story of Textiles, John S. Lawrence, Boston, 1912.
Weisbord, Albert, Passaic, Daily Worker Publishing Co., New York, 1926.
, The Paterson Textile Workers, Workers' Library Publishers,
1929.
Wicks, Harry M., The Paterson 1924 Strike. Unpublished Manuscrip)t.
Wolfson, Theresa, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, Interna-
tional PubUshers, New York, 1926.
Workers' Health Bureau, Report of Medical Examination of 404 Tex-
tile Workers in Passaic and Vicinity, New York, 1927.
Periodicals
American Silk Journal, Organ of the Silk Association of America
(monthly), 373 Fourth Ave., New York.
American Wool and Cotton Reporter (weekly), 154 Nassau St., New
York.
Daily News Record, 8 East 13th St., New York.
Daily Worker, 26 Union Square, New York.
Facts for Workers (monthly), Labor Bureau, Inc., 2 West 43rd St.,
New York.
Federated Press, Weekly Labor Letter and Daily News Service, 166 W.
Washington St., Chicago, 111.
International Press Correspondence, Postamt 66, Schliessfach 213, Vienna
IX, Austria.
Masses. Files for 19 12 and 19 13.
National Textile Worker, Organ of National Textile Workers' Union,
104 Fifth Ave., New York.
New Textile Worker, Organ of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of
America, Files for 1919-1922,
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
New York Evening Post, Files for 1828.
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Textile Worker, The, Organ of the United Textile Workers of America
(monthly), Bible House, Astor Place, New York.
Textile World (weekly), 334 Fourth Ave., New York.
Wall Street Journal (daily), 44 Broad St., New York.
Government Documents
Connecticut State Department of Labor and Factory Inspection, Bi-
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Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, Division of Statis-
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New Jersey Bureau of Statistics of Labor and Industries, Report, 1913.
New Jersey Department of Labor, The Industrial Bulletin, Monthly
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New York State Industrial Commission, The Industrial Bulletin, Monthly
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Pennsylvania State Department of Labor and Industry, Labor and In-
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U. S. Bureau of the Census, Biennial Census of Manufactures, 1925.
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, 1920.
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Record Book of Business Statistics, Textiles
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U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, The International
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INDEX
Amalgamated Silk Corporation,
48-49
Amalgamated Textile Workers,
143, 144-147
American Bemberg Corporation,
74-75
American Federation of Textile
Operatives, 155
American Glanzstoff Corpora-
tion, 75
American Silk Journal, 88
American Wool and Cotton Re-
porter, 90
Aronsohn, Samuel J., 42-43
Associated Silk Workers of
America, 44, 97, 143-144, 148,
149, 170- 17 I
Barnes Textile Service, 91
Batten System, 87
Beaming, 180
Beginning of silk, 11-17
Bemberg Works, strike in, 79
Blumenthal, Sidney, and Com-
pany, 40
Broad Silk Weavers' Union, 135
Cartel, rayon, 67-70
Celanese Corporation, 75-76
Centralization, tendency toward,
163-164
Cheney Brothers, 40-42, 88, 89
Child workers, 99-101, 163
Company union, 151
Concentration, of industry, 25-
30
Contract work, 179
Contradictions, in textile indus-
try, 163
Corticelli Silk Company, 43-44
Courtauld, Samuel, 69, 70, 71, 72
Crawford stop motion, 87
Daily News Record, 88
David, B. R, 21-22
190
Deafness, among weavers, 116
Demands, of silk workers, 166-
169
Dollar Line, 15
Doubling, 178
Du Pont Rayon, 72-74
Duplan Silk Corporation, 47
Dye Workers, disease among,
122-125
Dyeing, 181
Eagle, C. K., and Company, 50
Easton-Bethlehem district, wages
in, no
Entering-in, 180
Establishments, number of, 179
Ettor, Joseph, 140
Exports, 34
Fall River plan, 61-62
Fatigue, 116, 117
Filatures, oriental, 13-15
Fines, of workers, 106
Frieder Plan, 84
Full Fashioned Hosiery Work-
ers' Union, 33, 39, 84, 96, 151-
152, 170
General Silk Corporation, 46
Giovanitti, Arturo, 140
Grievances, of silk workers, 161-
164
Hamilton, Alice, 121
Haywood, Bill, activities in
Lawrence Strike, 137-140
Hazards, health, 120 #; among
rayon workers, 70
Horizontal Warpers' Association,
135
Hours of labor, 163; in South,
80; laws regulating, 185-186
Humidity, in weave room, 120
INDEX
191
Industrial Rayon Corporation,
Industrial unionism, necessity of,
174
International Labor Defense, 156
International Labor Union, 133
I.W.W., 140, 141, 142, 143; in
Lawrence Strike, 137-140; in
Paterson Strike, 137
Johnston, Bertha, 142, 143
"Junior Education," 100
Katz Strike, 137
Labor Bureau, 112
Labor spies, 151-152
Labor Standard, The, 132, 134
Lawrence Strike, 137-140
Laws, regulating hours of work,
185-186
Leading silk companies, 40-50
Left Wing, 97, 150, 156, 158
Living costs, 111-113
Loomfixers' and Twisters' Union,
135
Lozovsky, A., 97
Machinery, 20, 21 ; new types of,
85-88; union attitude toward,
94-.97
Mallinson, H. R., Co., 44-45
Mass picketing, 156
Mass production, spread of, 12
Material, cost of, 179
McDonnell, J. P., 132 #
McMahon, Thomas F., 96, 153
Mechanics* Union of Trade Asso-
ciations, 130- 13 1
Mergers, 55-62, 164
Moore, Tom, 142
Multiple-loom system, 82
Munition plants, from rayon
factories, 66-67
National Industrial Conference
Board, study on output and
health, 116, 121
National Textile Workers'
Union, 97, 151, 158, 163, 171-
174
Nationalities, among silk work-
ers, 174
New Bedford, 37, 51-52, 53, 83,
84, 91 ; Strike, 1 54-1 57
New England, output of, 33
New machines, 85-88
New Textile Worker, 146, 147
Oliver, Sir Thomas, 124
Organization of labor, 42, 43, 44,
169-177; in South, 31 ff, 61,
175-176; problems of, 174-176
Oriental filatures, 13-15
Output, of workers, 88-90, 183-
Overproduction, igff, 34, 163
Pacific Mills, 85
Passaic Strike, 150- 151
Paterson, 24-26, 28, 82, 83, 94;
strikes in, 129 #, 137, 140-143,
147-150, 157-159; wages in,
109; working day in, 118
Pennsylvania, silk industry in,
26, 28
Picking, 181
Piece-work, 106
Police, anti-strike activities of,
134-135, 138, 139, 148, 150-151,
156
Poverty, among silk workers,
125-126
Price Control, of rayon, 67-70
Price-cutting, 24-25
Printing, 181
Processes, in silk mills, 178 ff
Productivity, of silk workers,
183 #
Products, value of, 179
Profits, 37-54; of specified com-
panies, 39
Quill winding, 180
Rationalization, 92, 97-98
Raw silk, 12-13; dealing in, 15-
17; prices of, 16
Rayon, 12, 63-81; monopoly in,
28
Red International of Labor
Unions, 97
192
INDEX
Reed, John, 140, 141, 142, 143
Reeling, 180
Ribbon Weavers' Union, 135, 136
Schwartzenbach, Huber, and
Company, 48
Scranton district, wages in, no
Silk, 88, 120
Silk Workers' Union, 135
Social Insurance, lack of, 126-
127
South, number of textile workers
in, 182-183; organizing work-
ers in, 175-176; silk industry
in, 31-34; strikes in, 31-32
Soviet Russia, silk workers in,
164-166
Speed tests, 88
Speed-up, 82-98, 161 ff
Spies, labor, 151-152
Spinning, 178, 180
Standard of living, studies of,
111-112
Stewart, Ethelbert, 94
Strain, on workers, ii4#
Strikes, 78, 79, 84-85, 129-159;
in South, 31-32; Japanese, 14,
15
Susquehanna Silk Mills, 49-50
TariflF, 35-36
Technological unemployment, 93
Terrorism, against Lawrence
strikers, 138-140
Textile World, 51, 88, 90, 100
Thompson, W. G., 123
Throwing, 178
Tuberculosis, 121
Tubize Artificial Silk Co., 76-77
Twisting-in, 180-181
Unemployment, 92-94, 162
Union management cooperation,
96
Union policies, toward machinery,
94-96
United Front Committee, 150,
151
United Ribbon Weavers' Union,
strike of, 135
United Textile Workers, 44, 96,
136, 142, 148, 151, 153, 154,
155, 157
Value of products, 179
Viscose Co., 70-72
Wage cuts, 27, 38, 41, 51, 90
Wages, 18, 41, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52,
61, 83-84, 90, loi, 103, 108, III,
141, 149, 150, 155, 162, 179
War preparedness, relation of
rayon industry to. 67
Warping, 180
Weaving, 181
Weekly pay, advocated by unions,
106
Weighting, 19, 181-182
Weisbord, Albert, 151, 153
Welfare work, 42, 49
Winding, 180
Women workers, 32, 34, 103-104,
174; in rayon industry, 80; on
picket line, 136; yearly earn-
ings of, in New Jersey, in
Workers, number of, 18-19, 27,
179, 182-183; rayon, 65, 70, 74,
76, 77 ff; wages of, 18, 41, 43,
44, 45, 47, 48, 52, 61, 83-84, 90,
101-103, 108-111, 149, 150, 155,
162, 179
Workers' Health Bureau, 122,
124, 125
Workers' (Communist) Party,
153
Working day, length of, 117-
120
Yearly earnings, 1 1 o- 1 1 1
Yellow Dog Contract, 151-152
Young Workers, 99-101, 163