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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday December 30, 1909
New York, New York – The Call Supports Uprising of Shirtwaist Makers
From The New York Call of December 29, 1909:
SHIRTWAIST STRIKERS PRESENT FACTS OF GREAT
STRUGGLE TO THE PUBLIC OF NEW YORK CITY—–
WORKING GIRLS’ STRIKE RESULT OF OPPRESSION
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Discontent With Shop Conditions Had Been Steadily Growing
for Years-What Led Up to Present Situation-Employers
Desperate and Losing Ground Rapidly, While Strikers
Are Standing Solid, but Financial Aid Is Needed.
—–By WILLIAM MAILLY.
When 30,000 workers in one trade, mostly girls under twenty years of age, quit work with one accord and go on a general strike almost without warning and with little preparation there must be some exceptional reason for their action.
The present strike of shirtwaist makers is an exceptional strike. Behind it is a long, bitter story of working conditions that had gradually become unbearable-a story of low wages that went lower in hard times, but never higher in good times, of long hours of day and night and Sunday labor in the busy season and idleness or semi-idleness in the dull season, of unsanitary shop conditions, with poor light, foul air and unhealthy surroundings, of the tyranny, and some times worse, of petty bosses and foreman, of a subcontracting system which relieved the manufacturer, so-called, of responsibility, but made it possible for contractors to employ labor at beggarly wages and to reap large profits-all these things had combined to make the general lot of the shirtwaist makers miserable, degrading and increasingly oppressive.
And these things prevailed because the shirtwaist makers were unorganized. They had no union. They were competing among themselves to their own undoing and the great benefit of their employers. They were helpless to resist oppression because they not act together. They were victims because they submitted being victimized.
What Led to the Revolt.
But a change had to come. Such a state of things could cannot prevail indefinitely. And when the change did come it came all the more quickly because the force that impelled it had been gaining strength for so long a time. Like a long-smoldering volcano that suddenly erupts, so the growing discontent among the shirtwaist-makers found vent in a revolt that burst forth within a few hours…..
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