These chronicles of the income and outlay of some New York factory workers have described monotony and speeding in machine-work.  The annals of the New York factory workers presented below describe monotony and speeding in hand-work.

Yetta Sigurdin, an Austrian girl nineteen years old, had been in New York three years, and in the last year and a half had been employed in a tobacco factory, a Union shop, as a skilled roller, on piece-work.

Her hours were eight a day.  In a full day, Yetta could roll 2200 cigarettes.  So her best wage was about $12 a week.  The average was, however, not more than $8, as the factory had been idle four weeks, and very dull for five months, though busy for the remaining six.

Yetta looked very robust and happy.  She seemed comfortable in her work and with her income, in spite of the extra labor of washing some of her own clothes and making her own waists.  This, no doubt, was due largely to her sane and reasonable working hours, and partly to the fact that her work did not require the intensity of watching and application demanded by rapid machine-work.  Indeed in some Union tobacco factories the rollers sometimes make up a sum among themselves to pay a reader by the hour to read aloud to them while they are at work.

Yetta paid $3 a week for room, breakfast, and supper in a tenement.  It was in an extremely poor neighborhood, but was fresh, pleasant, and well aired.  Her dinners cost about $1.50 a week.  She did part of her washing and part was included in the charge for board.  Her Union fee was 15 cents a week.  The members of the Cigarette Makers’ Union pay a weekly due of 5 cents for the support of a sanatorium in Colorado for tubercular tobacco workers.  Yetta contributed to this sanatorium and gave a 10-cent monthly fee for Union agitation.

She estimated the cost of her clothing at about $82 for the year.  A winter suit cost $14; a spring suit, $15; a summer dress, $5; and a winter dress, $18.  Six pairs of shoes cost $15.  She could not remember the items of the rest of her expenditure for dress.  Part of it was for underwear and part of it for material for waists she had made herself.

In spite of the monotony and speed of Yetta’s work, it did not exhaust her powers of living, because it neither required intense application nor was pursued beyond a reasonable number of hours.

Barbara Cotton, an American woman of thirty-two, a skilled hand-worker in an electrical goods factory, had been self-supporting for more than eighteen years, spending the last nine in her present employment.

In the electrical goods factory she separated layers of mica until it was split into the thinnest possible sheets.  She was paid by the number she succeeded in splitting.  The constant repetition of an act of such accuracy for nine hours a day had strained her eyes excessively and made her extremely nervous.