The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social StudyBlascoer, Frances
General
The Industrial Condition of Women and Girls in Honolulu: A Social Study
Blascoer, Frances
Child labor -- Hawaii -- Honolulu; Honolulu (Hawaii) -- Social conditions; Women -- Employment -- Hawaii -- Honolulu
As showing the beneficial effect of shorter hours on output, Miss
Goldmark quotes at length from the testimony of various Massachusetts
employers of labor. The Treasurer of the Atlantic Mills, in Lawrence,
stated: “We saw an improvement in the operatives directly after adopting
ten hours.... We have had more continuous and uninterrupted work
throughout the year than before.” The Report of the Massachusetts
District Police states: “One manufacturer stated to me a short time ago
that he had run his mill sixty-six hours per week, supposing that by so
doing he increased the production nearly one-eleventh, but was
persuaded ... to reduce his running time to sixty hours per week, and at
the end of six months found that the production of his mill had
increased nearly ten per cent, while the quality of work done was more
perfect.”
The entire question of the long day is as yet in its incipiency in
Hawaii, and the closing paragraph of Miss Goldmark’s preface is
peculiarly pertinent. She says:
“In the main opposition to laws protecting working women and children
has come from the unenlightened employer, who has been blind to his own
larger interests and who has always seen in every attempt to protect the
workers an interference with business and dividends. To this day it is
the short-sighted and narrow-minded spirit of money-making that is the
most persistent enemy of measures designed to save the workers from
exhaustion and to conserve their working capacities. Regular, continuous
labor and exertion is as necessary for the worker’s health as it is for
subsistence, and if legislation regulating the workday had sought to
invade legitimate work, it would long ago have defeated its own end....
“First the new industry, then exploitation, then the demand for some
measure of protection—such is the universal story. Nor is this a chance
sequence. It is the relentless record of history, the more impressive
for its unconscious testimony to a waste of human effort and experience,
in retrospect scarcely credible among a thinking people, yet in our very
midst persisting steadily to this day.”
Hawaiian employers, most of whom are kamaainas, sincerely interested in
the welfare of the Hawaiian girls and women, have not given adequate
thought to the broader social problems of their employes. Kind
treatment, good air and light do much to mitigate matters, but no woman
or girl can work standing continuously for ten or more hours a day and
retain her health. Nor will she in this way become a homemaker, and an
intelligent mother and member of the community.
AN ACT
RESTRICTING THE HOURS OF LABOR OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF
SIXTEEN YEARS.
_Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii_:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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