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Updated: June 26, 2025
Yetta Sigurdin, an Austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in New York three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a tobacco factory, a Union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work. Her hours were eight a day. In a full day, Yetta could roll 2200 cigarettes. So her best wage was about $12 a week.
But two or three women, on piece-work, earned about $9 and did nearly twice as much as the other workers. The speeders had helpers who used to assist them to thread the back of the machine and to remove and place the bobbins in front. The change or "doff" occupied about 20 minutes.
It is miserably paid at a shilling a day, or in some cases on piece-work terms which hardly work out at a higher figure. At haymaking and at harvesting there is work for women; and again in the hop-gardens, when the picking is over, women are useful at clearing up the bines.
Now, as is often the case in this world, the impostors were greatly in the majority; and accordingly they attempted to intimidate the remainder into coming down to their own standard as regards output of work, in the hope of thereby inducing me to abandon the piece-work system of payment.
She worked in a factory within walking distance, earning $7 a week in the busy season. Fanny was a pretty, fair girl, with a graceful presence, a wistful smile, and the charm peculiar to blond Russians with long gray eyes. She looked, however, painfully frail and white. In the factory she had worked for four years, first at time work, then at piece-work.
'Wholesalers' and manufacturers shut up their factories and 'give out' everything umbrellas, coats, hair-wigs, and shrouds to be made, they know not in what den, or wrung they care not from what misery ... Again, wages are depressed by over-stimulating piece-work; and its unscrupulous use by proprietors who hesitate to confess to paying women only $3 or $4 a week, yet who scale prices so that only experts can earn that sum.
Some factories pay by the month, but the general custom is to charge for hoeing by piece-work, and during manufacture, when the work is constant, there is paid a monthly wage. They are presided over by a 'mate, generally one of the oldest men and first settlers in the village. If he has had a large family, his sons look up to him, and his sons-in-law obey his orders with the utmost fealty.
Among these was the piece-work system, which too often means a system whereby the utmost possible speed is extorted from the toiler, in order that she may earn a living wage.
If you can't keep to your measures, you'd better not undertake piece-work. Take that last welt out, and put it in over the top. And make no more blunders, if you please, unless you want to be put to plain yard-stitching."
Two distinct principles were open to his choice corresponding to the methods of day's-wages and piece-work in modern social economics; he might either confide to his servants generally the management of his estate, and give them wages according to time, or give each a certain amount of capital, to be exclusively at his own disposal, promising to reward him according to his diligence and success.
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