“We work eight days in the week.  This may seem strange to you who know that there are only seven days in the week.  But we work from seven in the morning till very late at night, when there’s a rush, and sometimes we work a week and a half in one week.”

The socialist women did yeoman service, protecting the pickets, attending the trials, speaking at meetings and taking a full share of the hard work.  The organized suffragists and clubwomen were drawn into the thick of the fight.  They spread the girls’ story far and wide, raised money, helped to find bonds, and were rewarded by increased inspiration for their own propaganda.

The enormous extent of the strike, being, as it was, by far the largest uprising of women that has ever taken place upon this continent, while adding proportionately to the difficulties of conducting it to a successful issue, yet in the end deepened and intensified the lesson it conveyed.

In the end about three hundred shops signed up, but of these at least a hundred were lost during the first year.  This was due, the workers say, partly to the terrible dullness in the trade following the strike, and partly to the fact that they were not entirely closed shops.

Since then, however, the organization has grown in strength.  It was one of these coming under the protocol, covering the Ladies’ Garment Workers, in so many branches, which was agreed to after the strikes in the needle trades of the winter of 1913.  The name was changed from Ladies’ Waist Makers, to Ladies’ Waist and Dress Makers.

But the waist-makers’ strike was not confined to New York.  With the opening of their busy season, the New York manufacturers found themselves hard pressed to fill their orders, and they were making efforts to have the work done in other cities, not strike-bound.  One of the cities in which they placed their orders was Philadelphia.  It was with small success, however, for the spirit of unrest was spreading, and before many weeks were over, most of the Philadelphia waist-makers had followed the example of their New York sisters.

The girls were in many respects worse off in Philadelphia than in New York itself.  Unions in the sewing trades were largely down and out there, and public opinion was opposed to organized labor.

When the disturbance did come, it was not so much the result of any clever policy deliberately thought out, as it was the sudden uprising and revolt of exasperated girls against a system of persistent cutting down extending over about four years.  A cent would be taken off here, and a half-cent there, or two operations would be run into one, and the combined piece of work under one, and that a new, name would bring a lower rate of pay.  The practice of paying for oil needles, cotton and silk had been introduced, a practice most irritating with its paltry deduction from a girl’s weekly wage.  Next there was a system of fines for what was called “mussing” work.  Every one of these so-called improvements in discipline was deftly utilized as an excuse for taking so much off the girls’ pay.