Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls’ earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the indignation at this that they marched out without even a parley, and organized in the street outside.  One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage.  A new union was the result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three days, owing to the rush of new labor.  At the end of it the girl who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great department store, at a salary of two dollars and a half a week.

Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling when their own time might come.  Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn would come soon.  He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust.  And every week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency.  Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat in the country; but that was something he did not understand or care about.

The only one who was not afraid of a cut was Marija, who congratulated herself, somewhat naively, that there had been one in her place only a short time before she came.  Marija was getting to be a skilled beef-trimmer, and was mounting to the heights again.  During the summer and fall Jurgis and Ona managed to pay her back the last penny they owed her, and so she began to have a bank account.  Tamoszius had a bank account also, and they ran a race, and began to figure upon household expenses once more.

The possession of vast wealth entails cares and responsibilities, however, as poor Marija found out.  She had taken the advice of a friend and invested her savings in a bank on Ashland Avenue.  Of course she knew nothing about it, except that it was big and imposing—­what possible chance has a poor foreign working girl to understand the banking business, as it is conducted in this land of frenzied finance?  So Marija lived in a continual dread lest something should happen to her bank, and would go out of her way mornings to make sure that it was still there.  Her principal thought was of fire, for she had deposited her money in bills, and was afraid that if they were burned up the bank would not give her any others.  Jurgis made fun of her for this, for he was a man and was proud of his superior knowledge, telling her that the bank had fireproof vaults, and all its millions of dollars hidden safely away in them.