The process of inspection is different for different qualities of material.  Before the material is bleached, the number of yards and the character of treatment for each piece are specified on stamped orders issued from the planning room and sent with the cloth through the processes of production.  It may as well be said here, that several girls have been promoted from manual work to work in this planning room, where they stamp orders, on a bonus at different rates, giving them a wage of about $10 a week in full time on office hours of 8 hours a day.[51]

The inspector receiving the bales from the yarding machines now counts off the number of yards and cuts the bale in accordance with these directions.  Some material she inspects yard by yard for imperfections and dirt.  After marking the yards on the cut piece, she sends it on to the folder if it is clean, and if it is spotted, to girls who wash out the spots and press the cloth.[52] On other material, imperfections are marked by the girl at the yarding machine, by the insertion of slips of paper.  As the inspector has less to do on these pieces, she not only counts and cuts, but folds them.

Before the introduction of the bonus system, one girl used to fold, inspect, and ticket.  She used also to carry her material from a table near the yarding machine.  Boys now bring the material except where at the yarding machines for heavier stuffs it is pushed along the table.  The hours, as for almost all of the bonus workers, have been shortened by 45 minutes.  The wages which were $7.50 a week are now between $10 and $11 on full time.  Almost all the workers here said they greatly preferred the bonus system and would greatly dislike to return to other work.

But in dealing with the heavier materials the work was tiring, and more tiring under the new system than before, as the number of pieces lifted had been increased.  It was said while there was every intention of fairness on the part of the management in arranging the work; it was sometimes not evenly distributed in slack times, the same girls being laid off repeatedly and the same girls chosen to work repeatedly instead of in alternation.

In the further processes of folding, some of the work and the lifting to the piles of the sheer, book-folded stuff is light, but requires great deftness; other parts of the work and the lifting to the piles are heavier.[53] The wage before the bonus was introduced was $7.50 a week, and with the bonus rose to $11 a week, in full time.  As with the inspectors, the work was now brought to the folders, and the hours were shortened by 45 minutes.  Here there was great variation in the account of the system.

One of the folders on light work, a wonderfully skilful young woman, who had folded 155 pieces a day before, and now folded 887, could run far beyond her task without exhaustion and earn as much as $15 a week.  She and some of the expert workers paused in the middle of the morning for 10 or 15 minutes’ rest and ate some fruit or other light refreshment, and sometimes took another such rest in the afternoon.