“The workers have to fill a shuttle every minute and a half or two minutes. This necessitates the strain of constant vigilance, as the breaking of the thread causes unevenness, and for this mishap operators are laid off for two or three days. The operators are at such a tension that they not only stand all day, but may not even bend their knees. The air is thick with lint which the workers inhale. The throat and eyes are terribly affected, and it is necessary to work with the head bound up, and to comb the lint from the eyebrows. The proprietors have to retain a physician to attend the workers every morning, and medicine is supplied free, as an accepted need for every one so engaged. One year is spent in learning the trade; and the girls last at it only from three to four years afterward. Some of them enter marriage, but many of them are thrown on the human waste-heap. One company employs nearly 1,000 women, so that a large number are affected by these vile, inhuman conditions. The girls in the trade are mostly Slovaks, Poles, and Bohemians, who have not been long in America. In their inexperience they count $1.50 as good wages, although gained at ever so great a physical cost.”[5] These wretched conditions are not uncommon. Thousands of women who are forced to earn their living and are contributing their full share toward making America the great commercial power she is to-day are laboring under just such injustice. [5] Alice Henry, _The Trade Union Woman_. =Women and Unions.= Most of the union leaders have viewed with alarm the increasing number of women that are being drafted into industry each year. The reasons for this are clear to all who know the history of trade unionism and know how the workmen greet the coming into industry of any new group of available workers. The war has made labor conditions chaotic; and the shortage in certain lines has given opportunity for the employers to substitute women for men, because women for the most part are economically defenseless and, therefore, can be secured for a lower wage than men. Women are more easily exploited than men because they have not been so long in the industrial struggle with its keen competition. They are less able to appreciate the value of cooperation for mutual protection. One union leader said, “I look upon the large number of women who are being drafted into industry as a real menace to the women themselves, to society, and to labor.” The situation presents itself something like this: Organized labor has a very close relation in its feeling to all labor and to all the different groups of workingmen organized and unorganized; and it regards an injustice to an unorganized worker as being indirectly an injustice to itself. The reason for this sympathy is of course primarily selfish, for the union man knows that if his fellow laborers in another trade are unprotected, and an injustice is practised upon them, it will be only a short time until the same thing will be