United States or United Arab Emirates ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A short time after this conversation I had trouble with the Cloak-makers' Union, of which Gussie was one of the oldest and most loyal members The cause of the conflict was an operator named Blitt, a native of Antomir, who had been working in my shop for some months.
THE Cloak-makers' Union had been a weak, insignificant organization, but at the call for a general strike it suddenly burst into life. There was a great rush for membership cards. Everybody seemed to be enthusiastic, full of fight. To me, however, the strike was a sheer calamity. I laid it all to my own hard luck.
My heart was dancing with joy over my conquest of her, and at the same time I felt that I was almost ready to lay down my life for her. It was a blend of animal selfishness and spiritual sublimity. I really loved her I was bubbling over with a desire to be good to somebody, to everybody except, of course, the Cloak-makers' Union.
But that, somehow, did not seem to have anything to do with my money-belt, as though I expected to go to college without encroaching upon my savings a case of eating the cake and having it The cloak-makers were so busy they had no time to attend meetings, and being little accustomed to method and discipline, they suffered their organization to melt away.
A new kind of Public Opinion had suddenly sprung up among the cloak-makers: a man who did not belong to the union was a traitor, worse than an apostate, worse than the worst of criminals And so, feeling like a school-boy in Antomir when he is made to furnish the very rod with which he is to be chastised, I went to the headquarters of the union, paid my initiation fee, and became a member.
There were cries of: "Speak! Go on! Say it!" Joe went on. Behind his words was a menace. "Then I want to say this to you. Your boss, Mr. Marrin, has done a cowardly and treacherous thing. He has made scabs of you all. You are no better than strike-breakers. If you do this work, if you make these cloaks, you are traitors to your fellow-workers, the cloak-makers. You are crippling other workmen.
Accordingly, to show sympathy for East Side strikers was within the bounds of the highest propriety. It was as "correct" as belonging to the Episcopal Church. And so public opinion was wholly on the side of the Cloak-makers' Union. This hastened the end. We succumbed. A settlement was patched up. We were beaten. But even this did not appease the men.
Instead, I would seek the society of other cloak-makers with whom I might talk shop I was developing speed rather than skill at my sewing-machine, but this question of speed afforded exercise to my brain. It did not take me long to realize that the number of cloaks or jackets which one turned out in a given length of time was largely a matter of method and system.
In New York it was the League which made possible the large organizations which exist today among the cloak-makers, the waist-makers and other white-goods-workers.
There was not a stroke of work in the shop. I was so absorbed in my new vocation that I would pass my evenings in a cloak-makers' haunt, a café on Delancey Street, where I never tired talking sleeves, pockets, stitches, trimmings, and the like. There was a good deal of card-playing in the place, but somehow I never succumbed to that temptation.
Word Of The Day