Therefore, why not lunch rooms, and attractive lunch rooms, and good food, well cooked? Yes, it is good business, and besides it puts a woman on a much more efficient level to herself and society. At our tables the girls were talking about different lunch-room conditions they had come across in their work. One girl told of a glass company she had worked for that recently was forced to shut down. She dwelt feelingly on the white lunch room and the good food, and especially the paper napkins—the only place she had worked where they gave napkins. She claimed there was not a girl who did not want to cry when she had to quit that factory. “Everybody loved it,” she said. I tried to find out if she felt the management had been paying for the polished brass rails, the good food, and the napkins out of the workers' wages. “Not on your life!” she answered. She had been a file clerk.
Take dental clinics in the factories. Four teeth on our floor were extracted while I was at the laundry. For a couple of days each girl moaned and groaned and made everybody near her miserable. Then she got Miss Cross's permission to go to some quack dentist, and out came the tooth. Irma had two out at one dollar each. It was going to cost her forty dollars to get them back in. A person with his or her teeth in good condition is a far better citizen than one suffering from the toothache.
If I had my way I should like to see a rest room in every factory where women are employed, and some time, however short, allowed in the middle of the afternoon to make use of it.
Eight hours is long enough for any woman to do sustained physical work, with no possibility for overtime.
Nor have we so much as touched on what it means to live on thirteen dollars or fourteen dollars a week.
“But then you have taken away all the arguments for organization!”
Should organization be considered as an end in and of itself, or as one possible means to an end?
Word was passed this morning that “company” was coming! The bustling and the hustling and the dusting! Every girl had to clean her press from top to bottom, and we swept the floor with lightning speed. Miss Cross dashed to her little mirror and put powder on her nose. Hattie tied a curtain around her head to look like a Red Cross nurse. Every time the door opened we all got expectant palpitations. We were not allowed to speak, yet ever and anon Hattie or Mrs. Reilly would let out some timely remarks. Whereat we all got the giggles. Miss Cross would almost hiss, “GIRLS!” whereat we subsided. It was nerve wracking. And the company never came! They got as far as the third floor and gave out. But it was not until afternoon that we knew definitely that our agony was for naught.