[Illustration:  MRS. J. BORDEN HARRIMAN President of the Colony Club, New York, the most exclusive Women’s Club in the country]

I know a corset factory which makes a feature in its advertising of the perfect sanitary condition of its works; when visitors are expected, the girls are required to stop work and clean the rooms.  Since they work on a piece-work scale, the “perfect sanitary conditions” exist at their expense.  In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday.  This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their employers.  It always fails.

It seems to the women who have studied these things that proper sanitary conditions, lunch rooms, comfortable seats, provision for rest, vacations with pay, and the like are no more than the wage earner’s due.  They are a part of the laborer’s hire, and should be guaranteed by law, exactly as wages are guaranteed.  An employer deserves gratitude for overtime pay no more than for fire escapes.

Testimony gathered from all sources by the Consumers’ League, women’s clubs, and women’s labor organizations has proved beyond doubt that good working conditions, reasonable hours of work, and living wages vastly increase the efficiency of the workers, and thus increase the profits of the employers.

The New York Telephone Company does not set itself up to be a benevolent institution.  Its directors know that its profits depend on the excellence of its service.  There is one exchange in the Borough of Brooklyn which handles a large part of the Long Island traffic.  This traffic is very heavy in summer on account of the number of summer resorts along the coast.  In the fall and winter the traffic is very light.  Six months in the year the operators at this exchange work only half the day, yet the company keeps them on full salary the year round.  “We cannot afford to do anything else,” explains the traffic manager.  “We cannot afford operators who would be content with half wages.”

[Illustration:  MISS ELIZABETH MALONEY]

The old-time dry-goods merchant sincerely believed that his business would suffer if he provided seats for his saleswomen.  He believed that he would go into bankruptcy if he allowed his women clerks human working conditions.  Then came the Consumers’ League and mercantile laws, and a new pressure of public opinion, and the dry-goods merchant found out that a clerk in good physical condition sells more goods than one that is exhausted and uncomfortable.

The fact is that welfare work, carefully shorn of its name, has proved itself to be such good business policy that in future all intelligent employers will advocate it; public opinion will demand it; laws will provide for it.