“The dining rooms were usually below the street-level, and varied in ventilation, crowding, and disorder.  In one the waiters were Greek immigrants, who were in their shirt-sleeves, wore ticking aprons and no collars, and were frequently dirty and unshaved.  In the fourteen meals I had there, I sat down only once to a clean table.  The coffee boilers along the side of the room would be boiling over and sending streams of water over the charwomen.  The dirty dishes would be piled into large tin tubs with a clatter, and pulled out rasping over the floor.  The charwomen would beg the waiters to clear the tables, which looked as if garbage-cans had been emptied upon them.  The steward could not enforce his authority.  There was constant noise and disorder in the room.  In another dining room, that of a pleasant, ramshackle old hotel near the river, where a breeze came into our laundry through sixteen windows, the employees were seated in one of the restaurant dining rooms after the noon rush hour was over, served by the regular waiters, and given attractive and varied fare and meat from the same cuts as the guests.  ‘They have respect for the help here,’ said one of the women.

“The dormitories were, with one exception, on upper stories.  One room in an expensive modern hotel, where there were twenty-seven beds, in tiers, was aired only by three windows on an inner court.  The room looked fresh and pleasant because of its white paint and blue bedspreads; but it was badly ventilated, both by condition and because the girls would keep the windows closed for warmth.  This was a frequent cause of poor ventilation in other dormitories and in work-rooms.

“The hours of work were irregular, and varied in different places.  In one large laundry I worked over ten hours for seven days in the week—­more than seventy-two hours.  About nine and a half hours seemed to be the usual day.  Four hotels gave fifteen-minute rest pauses for tea, morning and afternoon; two gave them once a day.  These rests are of incalculable relief.  One hotel gave twenty-minute pauses, so that the hours were:  7.20 to 9; 9.20 to 11.25; 12.30 to 2; 2.20 to closing time.  This arrangement gave very short work periods, but during them the women were able to work vigorously; and they accomplished an astounding amount.

“However, in most of the hotel laundries the women were tired all the time.  They dragged themselves out of bed at the last possible minute.  They lay in their beds at noon; they crawled into them again as soon as the work was over in the evening.  Some did not go out into the air for days at a time.  The greatest suffering from any one physical cause came from feet.  ‘Feet’ was the constant subject of conversation.  But the women had no idea what was the trouble with their feet, and, in many cases, accepted as inevitable discomfort that could have been alleviated by foot-baths, care, plates, and proper shoes.  Colds hung on endlessly.  Sore throats were common.  A girl who fed doilies into a mangle complained that constantly watching a moving apron made her eyes ‘sore,’ so that she could not see distinctly and sometimes fed in several doilies at a time without noticing it.  The lack of air undoubtedly had a profound influence on the women’s vigor.  In the old hotel near the river, where the laundry had sixteen windows, the women were in capital health.