Between sixty and seventy thousand organized men and women in the city are employed in these industries.  The Union members constitute ninety-five per cent of the workers engaged in the trade, and about ten thousand of these members are women.[24]

It seems at first strange to find that the multitudinous fields of the metropolitan needle trades,—­industries traditionally occupied by sewing women,—­are, in fact, far more heavily crowded with sewing men.  There is, however, a division of labor, the men doing practically all the cutting, machine sewing, and pressing, and in many cases working at hand-finishing; the women practically never cutting, machine sewing, or pressing, and in all cases working at hand-finishing.

A general strike involving all these men and women in the cloak making trade was declared on the 8th of July, 1910.  The industry had for years burdened both its men and women workers with certain grave difficulties—­an unstandardized wage, the subcontracting system, competition with home work, and long seasonal hours.

The subcontracting system bore most severely on the women in the trade, as the greater proportion of the finishers were women, and before the strike nearly every finisher was employed by a subcontractor.

The wages paid to finishers in the same shop, whether they were girls or men, were the same.  But as compared with cutters, basters, and operators the finishers both before and since the strike had always been paid relatively below their deserts.

Wages were lowered, not only by the unstandardized rates prevalent through the sub-subcontracting system, but also by the practice of sending hand-finishing out of the factories and shops to be done at home.  When inquiry was made of numerous self-supporting girls employed as cloak finishers, most of them said that at the end of the working day they were too exhausted to carry any sewing home.  But work had been carried away by various strong girls in the trade, and by old men, and by young men to their families.

Among the women cloak finishers, Rose Halowitch, a delicate little Russian girl of seventeen, a helper in a cloak factory, who gave her account to the Consumers’ League, about two years and a half ago received a wage of from $3.50 to $6 a week.  In busy weeks she would work from eight in the morning till eight at night, with only one stop of an hour for her insufficient noon lunch, for which she could afford to spend only 6 or 7 cents.

Among the home workers Rhetta Salmonsen, a Russian woman of forty, the mother of four children, used to finish at night the cloaks brought to her by her husband, who worked through the day as an operator in a cloak factory.  Between them they would earn $12 and $15 in busy weeks.  In these weeks there were some occasions when Mrs. Salmonsen would do the housework till her husband came home late at night.  After clearing away his supper and putting the children