Helena Hunting The Librarian Principle Epub To Pdfl
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But of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking asunemployment, and it was inevitable that we should see much of it in aneighborhood where low rents attracted the poorly paid worker and manynewly arrived immigrants who were first employed in gangs upon railroadextensions and similar undertakings. The sturdy peasants eager for workwere either the victims of the padrone who fleeced them unmercifully, bothin securing a place to work and then in supplying them with food, or theybecame the mere sport of unscrupulous employment agencies. Hull-House madean investigation both of the padrone and of the agencies in our immediatevicinity, and the outcome confirming what we already suspected, we eagerlythrew ourselves into a movement to procure free employment bureaus underState control until a law authorizing such bureaus and giving the officialsintrusted with their management power to regulate private employmentagencies, passed the Illinois Legislature in 1899. The history of thesebureaus demonstrates the tendency we all have to consider a legal enactmentin itself an achievement and to grow careless in regard to itsadministration and actual results; for an investigation into the situationten years later discovered that immigrants were still shame-fully imposedupon. A group of Bulgarians were found who had been sent to work inArkansas where their services were not needed; they walked back to Chicagoonly to secure their next job in Oklahoma and to pay another railroad fareas well as another commission to the agency. Not only was there no methodby which the men not needed in Arkansas could know that there was work inOklahoma unless they came back to Chicago to find it out, but there was nocertainty that they might not be obliged to walk back from Oklahoma becausethe Chicago agency had already sent out too many men.This investigation of the employment bureau resources of Chicago wasundertaken by the League for the Protection of Immigrants, with whom it ispossible for Hull-House to coöperate whenever an investigation of theimmigrant colonies in our immediate neighborhood seems necessary, as wasrecently done in regard to the Greek colonies of Chicago. Thesuperintendent of this League, Miss Grace Abbott, is a resident ofHull-House and all of our later attempts to secure justice and opportunityfor immigrants are much more effective through the League, and when wespeak before a congressional committee in Washington concerning the needsof Chicago immigrants, we represent the League as well as our own neighbors.It is in connection with the first factory employment of newly arrivedimmigrants and the innum-erable difficulties attached to their firstadjustment that some of the most profound industrial disturbances inChicago have come about. Under any attempt at classification these strikesbelong more to the general social movement than to the industrial conflict,for the strike is an implement used most rashly by unorganized labor who,after they are in difficulties, call upon the trades-unions fororganization and direction. They are similar to those strikes which areinaugurated by the unions on behalf of unskilled labor. In neither case dothe hastily organized unions usually hold after the excitement of themoment has subsided, and the most valuable result of such strikes is theexpanding consciousness of the solidarity of the workers. This wascertainly the result of the Chicago stockyard strike in 1905, inauguratedon behalf of the immigrant laborers and so conspicuously carried on withoutviolence that, although twenty-two thousand workers were idle during theentire summer, there were fewer arrests in the stockyards district than theaverage summer months afford. However, the story of this strike should notbe told from Hull-House, but from the University of Chicago Settlement,where Miss Mary McDowell performed such signal public service during thattrying summer. It would be interesting to trace how much of the subsequentexposure of conditions and attempts at governmental control of this hugeindustry had their genesis in this first attempt of the unskilled workersto secure a higher standard of living. Certainly the industrial conflictwhen epitomized in a strike, centers public attention on conditions asnothing else can do. A strike is one of the most exciting episodes inmodern life, and as it assumes the characteristics of a game, the entirepopulation of a city becomes divided into two cheering sides. In suchmoments the fair-minded public, who ought to be depended upon as a referee,practically disappears. Anyone who tries to keep the attitude ofnonpartisanship, which is perhaps an impossible one, is quickly undersuspicion by both sides. At least that was the fate of a group of citizensappointed by the mayor of Chicago to arbitrate during the stormy teamsters'strike which occurred in 1905. We sat through a long Sunday afternoon inthe mayor's office in the City Hall, talking first with the labor men andthen with the group of capitalists. The undertaking was the more futile inthat we were all practically the dupes of a new type of "industrialconspiracy" successfully inaugurated in Chicago by a close compact betweenthe coal teamsters' union and the coal team owners' association, who hadformed a kind of monopoly hitherto new to a monopoly-ridden public.The stormy teamsters' strike, ostensibly undertaken in defense of thegarment workers, but really arising from causes so obscure and dishonorablethat they have never yet been made public, was the culmination of a type oftrades-unions which had developed in Chicago during the preceding decade inwhich corruption had flourished almost as openly as it had previously donein the City Hall. This corruption sometimes took the form of graftingafter the manner of Samuel Parks in New York; sometimes that of politicaldeals in the "delivery of the labor vote"; and sometimes that of acombination between capital and labor hunting together. At various timesduring these years the better type of trades-unionists had made a firmstand against this corruption and a determined effort to eradicate it fromthe labor movement, not unlike the general reform effort of many Americancities against political corruption. This reform movement in the ChicagoFederation of Labor had its martyrs, and more than one man nearly lost hislife through the "slugging" methods employed by the powerfulcorruptionists. And yet even in the midst of these things were foundtouching examples of fidelity to the earlier principles of brotherhoodtotally untouched by the corruption. At one time the scrubwomen in thedowntown office buildings had a union of their own affiliated with theelevator men and the janitors. Although the union was used merely as aweapon in the fight of the coal teamsters against the use of natural gas indowntown buildings, it did not prevent the women from getting their firstglimpse into the fellowship and the sense of protection which is the greatgift of trades-unionism to the unskilled, unbefriended worker. I rememberin a meeting held at Hull-House one Sunday afternoon, that the president ofa "local" of scrubwomen stood up to relate her experience. She told firstof the long years in which the fear of losing her job and the fluctuatingpay were harder to bear than the hard work itself, when she had regarded 2b1af7f3a8
