And so Ona went back to Brown’s and saved her
place and a week’s wages; and so she gave herself
some one of the thousand ailments that women group
under the title of “womb trouble,” and
was never again a well person as long as she lived.
It is difficult to convey in words all that this meant
to Ona; it seemed such a slight offense, and the punishment
was so out of all proportion, that neither she nor
any one else ever connected the two. “Womb
trouble” to Ona did not mean a specialist’s
diagnosis, and a course of treatment, and perhaps an
operation or two; it meant simply headaches and pains
in the back, and depression and heartsickness, and
neuralgia when she had to go to work in the rain.
The great majority of the women who worked in Packingtown
suffered in the same way, and from the same cause,
so it was not deemed a thing to see the doctor about;
instead Ona would try patent medicines, one after
another, as her friends told her about them. As
these all contained alcohol, or some other stimulant,
she found that they all did her good while she took
them; and so she was always chasing the phantom of
good health, and losing it because she was too poor
to continue.
Chapter 11
During the summer the packing houses were in full
activity again, and Jurgis made more money. He
did not make so much, however, as he had the previous
summer, for the packers took on more hands. There
were new men every week, it seemed—it was
a regular system; and this number they would keep
over to the next slack season, so that every one would
have less than ever. Sooner or later, by this
plan, they would have all the floating labor of Chicago
trained to do their work. And how very cunning
a trick was that! The men were to teach new hands,
who would some day come and break their strike; and
meantime they were kept so poor that they could not
prepare for the trial!
But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees
meant easier work for any one! On the contrary,
the speeding-up seemed to be growing more savage all
the time; they were continually inventing new devices
to crowd the work on—it was for all the
world like the thumbscrew of the medieval torture
chamber. They would get new pacemakers and pay
them more; they would drive the men on with new machinery—it
was said that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at
which the hogs moved was determined by clockwork,
and that it was increased a little every day.
In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring
the same work in a shorter time, and paying the same
wages; and then, after the workers had accustomed
themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the
rate of payment to correspond with the reduction in
time! They had done this so often in the canning
establishments that the girls were fairly desperate;
their wages had gone down by a full third in the past
two years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that
was likely to break any day. Only a month after
