to bed, she would start felling seams at midnight; and in order to complete the cloaks he had brought before he returned to the shop in the morning, she would sew until she saw the white daylight coming in at the tenement window, and it was time for her to prepare breakfast again.  With all this industry, as her husband had been ill and there had been three months of either slack work or idleness, the family had fallen in debt.  Rent, food, and shoes alone had cost them $400.  This left less than $100 a year for all the other clothing and expenses of six people in New York.  Against such a standard of living as this, then, cloak finishers were obliged to compete as long as they attempted to underbid the hours and prices of home work.

Among the stronger girls who had taken work home, Ermengard Freiburg, a powerful young Galician woman of twenty-eight, who had been finishing cloaks ever since she was eleven, had earned $1 in the first week and had advanced rapidly to $3 a week.  In the last years, however, she had not carried any work home.  She had sewed on piece-work from eight in the morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or overtime.  She had earned from $20 to $25 a week in the busy weeks when the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $6 and $7.  Ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade fortunes.  All her concern and conversation were for the numbers of women cloak makers who lacked her own wonderful strength.  Successful without education, she was astonishingly destitute of the wearisome fallacy of complacent self-reference characteristic of many people of uncommon ability.  During the past year she had twice been discharged for organizing the workers in cloak factories where she was employed.  In the first establishment subcontracting had made conditions too hard for most of the women; and in the second, wages were too low for a decent livelihood for most of the workers.

These instances serve to express in the industry and lives of women cloak workers the subcontracting system, long seasonal hours, home work, and an unstandardized wage—­the features under discussion in the cloak making trade in the spring of 1910.

The whole cloak making trade of New York presents, for an outside observer, the kaleidoscopic interest of a population not static.  The cutter of one decade is the employer of another decade.  In the general strike of the cloakmakers in 1896 nearly all the manufacturers were German.  In the strike of last summer nearly all the manufacturers were Galician and Russian.

This aspect of the New York needle trades must be borne in mind in realizing those occurrences in the last strike which led to the present joint effort of both manufacturers and workers to standardize the wage scale, to regulate seasonal hours, to abolish the subcontracting system and home work, and to establish the preferential Union shop throughout the metropolitan industry.