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"A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week. Out of the earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room.
Here, too, the individual is not conscious of the effect. He feels certain that he can perform his task just as well, and even the piece-worker, who is anxious to earn as much as possible, is convinced that he does not retard himself by conversation. But the experiments which have been carried on in establishments with scientific management speak decidedly against such a supposition.
It was his aunt's voice calling and he went instantly to a tall, austere lady in a linen collar who was knitting wash-rags with the feverish haste of a piece-worker in a factory. He stood before her obediently. "Don't go in to-day." "Why, Auntie?" In his voice there was a world of disappointment. "It's too rough there must have been a storm at sea."
She was a piece-worker and she had earned from $8 to $14 a week. The twenty idle weeks had been filled with continuous futile attempts to find anything to do. Application at department stores had been ineffectual, so had answered advertisements.
Very seldom is there any compensation for these long hours. Few of the laundries pay overtime. Of these, some dock the girls proportionately for every hour less than sixty a week they work. No laundries in which I worked, except one, give supper money. A piece-worker at least gets some advantage to counterbalance long hours.
In conditions such as described above, Natalya and other shirt-waist makers were working last fall, when one day she saw a girl, a piece-worker, shaking her head and objecting sadly to the low price the foreman was offering her for making a waist. "If you don't like it," said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters' out on the street, then?"
Some authors also claim that the publisher has no right to make successful books pay for unsuccessful. But here again he has every right. The publisher is not a piece-worker; he has to keep a large organization going, involving ramifications in every town.
Some give half a day on the legal holidays. In the others, 'shaking' and 'body ironing' and all the hard, heavy processes of laundry work continue straight through Christmas day, straight through New Year's day, straight through the Fourth of July, just as at other times. "In recompense for these long hours of standing, the piece-worker often has fairly high payment financially.
"Two hours af-noon, every day," ducking and giggling like a mechanical toy. Just a piece-worker, not a regular servant. "Pretty dress," I touched the satin on the step. "Whose?" "Mine." Grinning, she spread a breadth out over her knees. "Lady no like any more. Mine." It was a peculiar shade of peacock blue; unless I was mistaken, the one Mrs. Bowman had worn that night at Tait's.
Now, looking with a most dispassionate eye and an eager desire to find out what it is that Labour and its spokesmen are grouping after, can one find in these "marks of degraded status" any serious evil, or anything that is capable of remedy under any conceivable economic system? In all of them the wage-earner is on exactly the same footing as the salary-earner or the professional piece-worker.
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