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Updated: June 29, 2025
Don't think I'm accusing you if the Hands is a sweatshop. You trust Croft, and he's abused his trust. That must be it. For God's sake, give me a chance to help you put things straight." For a moment a long moment Peter senior did not speak, and Peter junior would have given much to know where his thoughts had gone. They were away somewhere with the Hands or with the girl who had made Petro listen.
They lived in a miserable tenement over in Hester Street, where her mother had been toiling from dawn until midnight with the needle, with her tiny brother helping to sew on buttons, "finishing" daily a dozen pairs of pants, and making thirty cents. Myra was amazed. "Thirty cents dawn till midnight! Impossible!" And then her father who worked all day in a sweatshop.
These young women have already brought, and are every day bringing into the dreary sweatshop and the speeded-up factory a spirit of fearlessness and independence both in thought and action, which is having an amazing effect upon the conditions of factory industry in the trades where they work.
There was the sharp bark of a sawed-off revolver, and the wounded man just reached the shelter of a doorway as the bullet sang over the spot on which he had stood a second before. The sight unnerved Hamilton. He clutched the reporter's arm. "Chinese, Camorrists, sweatshop workers, and negroes!" he cried, a hysterical note in his voice. "Are there no Americans in an American city?"
The contractor or sweatshop boss was a mere labor broker deriving his income from the margin between the piece rate he received from the merchant-capitalist and the rate he paid in wages.
But you are in the same class with the plutocrat who enjoys the profit on the work of ten or twenty thousand men. Utter disregard of others where it does not affect your own wages is your rule, and you know it. What better joke is there than the joke about the union label? How many hats on your rack have union labels in them? How many of you can swear no sweatshop ever saw your clothes?
With all that the merchant-capitalist took no appreciable part in the productive process. His equipment consisted of a warehouse where the raw material was cut up and given out to be worked up by small contractors, to be worked up in small shops with a few journeymen and apprentices, or else by the journeyman at his home, all being paid by the piece. This was the notorious "sweatshop system."
A young friend of mine who came daily to Hull-House consulted me in regard to going into the paper warehouse belonging to her father that she might there sort rags with the Polish girls; another young girl took a place in a sweatshop for a month, doing her work so simply and thoroughly that the proprietor had no notion that she had not been driven there by need; still two others worked in a shoe factory; and all this happened before such adventures were undertaken in order to procure literary material.
There was not a particle of blood in her haggard face. Jombatiste read on the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in a sweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from the foul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to the very depths of misery, a wife and two children.
I think it is well for American laboring-men to know that this evidence puts beyond question the fact that the sweating business, while it may begin with the clothing trade, by no means ends there. "The plague of the sweatshop" is not something of interest to the tailors and sewing-women only, but is of equal importance to workers of every class.
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