It can only be a question of time, and of increasing industrial pressure, when an active trade-union movement will spring up among Canadian women.  Among those who advocate and are prepared to lead in such a movement are the President of the Trades and Labor Congress, Mr. J.C.  Watters, Mr. James Simpson of the Toronto Industrial Banner, Mrs. Rose Henderson of Montreal, Mr. J.W.  Wilkinson, President of the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, and Miss Helena Gutteridge, also of Vancouver.

The President of the National Women’s Trade Union League, in her opening address before the New York convention in June, 1915, summed up the situation as to the sweated trades tellingly: 

For tens of thousands of girl and women workers the average wage in sweated industries still is five, eight and ten cents an hour, and these earnings represent, on the average, forty weeks’ work out of a fifty-two week year.  Further, in the report of the New York State Factory Investigation Commission we find that out of a total of 104,000 men and women 13,000 receive less than $5.00 a week, 34,000 less than $7.00 a week, 68,000 less than $10.00 a week and only 17,000 receive $15.00 a week or more.  These low wages are not only paid to apprentices either in factories or stores but to large numbers of women who have been continuously in industry for years.  Again, the New York State Factory Investigating Commission tells us that half of those who have five years’ experience in stores are receiving less than $8.00 a week, and only half of those with ten years’ experience receive $10.00 a week.  Dr. Howard Woolston of the Commission has pointed out:  “Even for identical work in the same locality, striking differences in pay are found.  In one wholesale candy factory in Manhattan no male laborer and no female hand-dipper is paid as much as $8 a week, nor does any female packer receive as much as $5.50.  In another establishment of the same class in the same borough every male laborer gets $8 or over, and more than half the female dippers and packers exceed the rates given in the former plant.  Again, one large department store in Manhattan pays 86 per cent. of its saleswomen $10 or over; another pays 86 per cent. of them less.  When a representative paper-box manufacturer learned that cutters in neighboring factories receive as little as $10 a week, he expressed surprise, because he always pays $15 or more.  This indicates that there is no well-established standard at wages in certain trades.  The amounts are fixed by individual bargain, and labor is ‘worth’ as much as the employer agrees to pay.”

It has been estimated by the Commission that to raise the wages of two thousand girls in the candy factories from $5.75 to $8.00 a week, the confectioners in order to cover the cost will have to charge eighteen cents more per hundred pounds of candy.  It is also estimated that if work shirts cost $3.00 a dozen, and the workers receive sixty cents for sewing them we can raise the wages ten per cent. and make the labor cost sixty-six cents.  The price of those dozen shirts has been raised to $3.06.  The cost of labor in the sweated industries is a small fraction of the manufacturing cost.