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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SWEAT-SHOP The sudden closing of the window made her prison cell seem darker than before. It needed the contrast of the vision to make her see the sordidness and squalor ? the grim reality ? of that long dark room, with its chaos of noise, its nerve-destroying speed. Scattered through the East Side of New York there are hundreds such sweat-shops, engaged in the various branches of the garment trade. Sometimes there will be half a dozen in the same tenement; one above another. Even the factory inspectors are never sure of the exact number. They are running so close a race with bankruptcy, it is hard to keep track of them. Often half a dozen will fail on the same day, and as many new ones will start the next. It is not on record that any one ever found a good word to say for the sweating system. Such shops exist because I and you and the good wife and the priest who married you like to buy our clothes as cheaply as possible. Yetta's shop manufactured vests. The four women at each table formed a team. With separate operations on the same garment, they had to keep in exact unison. If any one slowed up, they all lostmoney by the delay. They were paid by the piece, and long hours, seven days a week, brought them so infinitesimal a margin over the cost of brute necessities that the loss of a few cents a day was a tragedy for the older women with children to feed. Yetta, the youngest of all, was Number One at her table. The name of Number Two was Mrs. Levy. She was anywhere between twenty-five and fifty, bovine in appearance, but her fingers were as agile as a monkey's. She sat stolidly before her machine, her big body, which had lost all form, almost motionless, her arms alone active. Her face was void of any expression. Her washed-out ey...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217918435 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217918433 |
| Weight | 0.84 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.58 In |
| List Price | $20.96 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 256 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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