Left to her own devices, the solution of her financial difficulties which the average girl finds is always to lessen her expenses so as to manage on the lessening wage that is inevitable in all trades if not resisted.  To find a cheaper room, to take one more girl into her room, to spend a few cents a day less for food—­these are the near-hand economies that first present themselves to the girlish mind.  This is on the economizing side.  When it comes to trying to earn more, to work longer hours is surely the self-evident way of increasing the contents of the weekly pay envelope.  The younger and inexperienced the worker, the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn, not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.

To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics, the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign.  To some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are urged to.  To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not to try and earn as big a wage as possible.  But the organizer comes in and she approaches the question from the other end.  She does not talk about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time.  It is her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing about this result by herself, to show them that they must band together with the determination to make their wage square with their ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their mode of living with their wage.

In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete revolution.

It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer has her special work cut out for her.  And here she necessarily contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to deal with girls, because she understands the girl’s work and the girl’s problems better, and the girl knows that she does.

I have taken wages as the prime subject of the organizer’s activities only because wages form the crux of the whole question.  There, without any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the employe and the community, the standard of living that is possible, as measured by the employe’s share of the product of labor.  But in practice, money wages form only one element of the standard of living problem, although the one around which least confusion gathers.

Whatever form the demands of labor organizations may take, the essence of the demand is the same:  better terms for the worker always, however temporary circumstances or technical details may obscure the issue.