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Updated: June 27, 2025
Seven o'clock sees folks on all roads leading to the bleachery gate. At 7.10 the last whistle blows; at 7.15 the power is turned on, wheels revolve, work begins. It must be realized that factory work, or any other kind of work, in a small town is a different matter from work in a large city, if for no other reason than the transportation problem. Say work in New York City begins at 7.45.
New girls appear now and then to take the places of those who get married or the old women who must some time or other die. But not strange girls. Everyone in the bleachery grew up with everyone else; as Ella Jane said, you know their mothers and their grandmothers, too. It so happened that a cataclysmic event had visited the Falls the week before my appearance.
Three of the enterprises to a greater or less degree reorganized by this new system in this country employ women workers. These establishments are a New Jersey cotton mill, a bleachery in Delaware, and a cloth finishing factory in New England. The reduction of costs for the owning firms inaugurating Scientific Management has already received a wide publicity.
The actual number working in the bleachery was about six hundred and twenty men and women. Odd, the different lights in which you can see a small town. The chances are that, instead of being a worker, I might have spent the week end visiting some of the “élite” of the Falls. In that case we should have motored sooner or later by the bleachery gate and past numerous company houses.
Many that day at the bleachery said they weren't going—didn't like Charlie Chaplin—common and pie-slinging; cheap; always all of that. Sweet-faced Mamie, who longs to go through Sing Sing some day—“That's where they got the biggest criminals ever.
Under Old Business was a long discussion on health benefits and old-age pensions. For some months now the bleachery has been concerned on the subject of old-age pensions. Health benefits have been in operation for some time. The question was, should they pay the second week for accident cases, until the state started its payments the third week?
It was to find out what the workers themselves thought of Industrial Democracy that I boarded a boat and journeyed seventy miles up the Hudson to work in the bleachery, where, to the pride of those responsible, functions the Partnership Plan. What do the workers think of working under a scheme of Industrial Democracy?
It is significant that with all the fun, the standard of efficiency and production in our bleachery was such that out of eighteen like industries in the country, we were one of the only two running full time. Thirteen were shut down altogether. That first day I asked Mamie what time work began in the morning. Mamie giggled. “I dunno.
It was the bleachery folk you saw on the streets, in the shops, at the post office, at the movies. The bleachery folk, or their kind, I saw at the three church services I attended. If anyone had dared sympathize with us—called us “poor devils”!
Yet they had no concrete idea what they would shake it for. Just before I came the bleachery girls were called into meeting and it was explained to them that Bryn Mawr College was planning a two months' summer school for working girls. Its attractions and possibilities were laid forth in detail.
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