How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
A companion picture from across the hall. The man works on the
machine for his sweater twelve hours a day, turning out three dozen
"knee-pants," for which he receives forty-two cents a dozen. The
finisher who works with him gets ten, and the ironer eight cents a
dozen; buttonholes are extra, at eight to ten cents a hundred. This
operator has four children at his home in Stanton Street, none old
enough to work, and a sick wife. His rent is twelve dollars a month;
his wages for a hard week's work less than eight dollars. Such as he,
with their consuming desire for money thus smothered, recruit the ranks
of the anarchists, won over by the promise of a general "divide;"
and an enlightened public sentiment turns up its nose at the vicious
foreigner for whose perverted notions there is no room in this land of
plenty.
Turning the corner into Hester Street, we stumble upon a nest of
cloak-makers in their busy season. Six months of the year the
cloak-maker is idle, or nearly so. Now is his harvest. Seventy-five
cents a cloak, all complete, is the price in this shop. The cloak is
of cheap plush, and might sell for eight or nine dollars over the
store-counter. Seven dollars is the weekly wage of this man with wife
and two children, and nine dollars and a half rent to pay per month.
A boarder pays about a third of it. There was a time when he made ten
dollars a week and thought himself rich. But wages have come down
fearfully in the last two years. Think of it: "come down" to this. The
other cloak-makers aver that they can make as much as twelve dollars a
week, when they are employed, by taking their work home and sewing till
midnight. One exhibits his account-book with a Ludlow Street sweater.
It shows that he and his partner, working on first-class garments
for a Broadway house in the four busiest weeks of the season, made
together from $15.15 to $19.20 a week by striving from 6 A.M.
to 11 P.M., that is to say, from $7.58 to $9.60 each.[16]
The sweater on this work probably made as much as fifty per cent. at
least on their labor. Not far away is a factory in a rear yard where
the factory inspector reports teams of tailors making men's coats at an
average of twenty-seven cents a coat, all complete except buttons and
button-holes.
[Footnote 16: The strike of the cloakmakers last summer, that ended in
victory, raised their wages considerably, at least for the time being.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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