In full weeks her wage is $8.  Her income for the year had been $366, and she had been able to save nothing.  She had paid $208 for her board and lodging, at the rate of $4 a week; a little more than $100 for clothing; $38 for carfare, necessitated by living in the Bronx; $3 for a doctor; $2.60 to a benefit association, which assures her $3 a week in case of illness; $5 for the theatre; and $6 for Union dues.

Her work was very exhausting.  Evenly spaced machine ruffling on petticoats is difficult, and she had a great deal of this work to do.  She sewed with a one-needle machine, which carried, however, five cottons and was hard to thread.  It may be said here that the number of needles does not necessarily determine the difficulty of working on sewing-machines; two-needle machines are sometimes harder to run than five or even twelve-needle machines, because they are more cheaply and clumsily constructed and the material is held less firmly by the metal guide under the needle-point.  It was not her eyes, Yeddie said, that were tired by the stitching, but her shoulders and her back, from the jar of the machines.  Every month she suffered cruelly, but, because she needed every cent she made, she never remained at home, when the factory was open.

One of the most trying aspects of machine-speeding, in the sewing trades, is the perpetual goading and insistence of the foremen and forewomen, frequently mentioned by other workers besides Yeddie.  Two years ago, in a waist and dress factory where 400 operatives—­more than 300 girls and about 20 men—­were employed for the company by a well-known subcontractor, Jake Klein, a foreman asked Mr. Klein to beset some of the girls for a degree of speed he said he was unwilling to demand.  The manager discharged him.  He asked to speak to the girls before he went away.  The manager refused his request.  As Mr. Klein turned to the girls, his superior summoned the elevator man, who seized Klein’s collar, overpowered him, and started to drag him over the floor toward the stairs.  “Brothers and sisters,” Klein called to the operatives, “will you sit by and see a fellow-workman used like this?” In one impulse of clear justice, every worker arose, walked out of the shop with Jake Klein, and stayed out till the company made overtures of peace.  This adventure, widely related on the East Side, serves to show the latent fire, kindled by the accumulation of small overbearing oppressions, which smolders in many sewing shops.

The uncertainty of employment characterizing the sewing trades fell heavily on Sarah Silberman, a delicate little Austrian Jewish girl of seventeen, who finished and felled women’s cloaks.

She had always lived in poverty.  She had worked in a stocking factory in Austria when she was a little thing of nine, and had been self-supporting ever since she was fourteen, machine-sewing in Vienna and London and New York.