“There are two kinds of long hours:  those due to bad systematizing of laundry work, creating long waits between lots; and those due to very heavy work.  In regard to the first kind, it must be said that the shirt starchers, who are the main sufferers from waiting for work, are the best paid, and hence are not as indignant at frequent overtime as the week workers are.  Besides, though obliged to stay in the work-room, they are frequently seated throughout their waiting time, which sometimes lasts for four or five hours.  I saw one woman about to be confined, who sometimes starched shirts until two in the morning, after arriving at the laundry at half past seven on the morning before.

“The other kind of long hours involves constant standing, and is most apt to occur in laundries where only mangle work is done.  These laundries do not tend to work late at night, but they more frequently violate the sixty-hour law than the others do.  Work is almost absolutely steady.  The women stand on their feet ten and twelve hours, with just half an hour or an hour for lunch, and work with extreme speed.

“If your job is shaking the wrinkles out of towels and sheets, this in itself is violent exercise.  The air is hot and damp because you stand near the washers.  You are hurried at a furious rate.  When you finish one lot, you have to roll heavy baskets, and dump them upon your table, and then go on shaking and shaking again, only to do more heavy loading and dumping.  One girl always had a headache late in the afternoon.  After standing ten or twelve hours, there are few whose feet or backs do not ache.  The effect on the feet is perhaps the chief ground of complaint.  Some merely wear rags about their feet, others put on old shoes or slippers, which they slit up in front and at the sides.  The girls who press skirts by machine and those who do the body ironing have to press down on pedals in order to accomplish their tasks, and find this, as a rule, harder than standing still.  An occasional worker, however, pronounces it a relief.  But several I met had serious internal trouble which they claimed began after they had started laundry work.  Few laundries give holidays with pay.  Some give half a day on the legal holidays.  In the others, ‘shaking’ and ‘body ironing’ and all the hard, heavy processes of laundry work continue straight through Christmas day, straight through New Year’s day, straight through the Fourth of July, just as at other times.

“In recompense for these long hours of standing, the piece-worker often has fairly high payment financially.  But the opposite is true of the week worker.  In the down-town laundries, where the wage scale runs lower, the amount is usually inadequate for the barest need.

“The payment in laundries is extremely varied.  The wages of the majority of women I talked to in laundries amounted to between $8 and $4.50 a week.  But wages ranged from the highest exceptional instances in piece-work, in hand starching and in hand ironing, at $25 a week, for a few weeks in the year, down to $3 a week.