EMPLOYMENT OF CHILD LABOR IN THE TENEMENTHOUSE CIGAR FACTORIES OF NEW YORK CITY.

For reasons set forth in the opening chapter of this report, the investigation of the subject of child labor has necessarily been confined to a somewhat limited sphere.

In those quarters where the worst features of the system are known to prevail, the bureau has been unable to carry out either the intent or spirit of the law under which it was created.

tenement-houses of New York city, where hundreds, if indeed not thousands of children of tender years and delicate constitutions, are known to be passing a life of daily toil and drudgery amid the close air, the darkness and the fumes of filthy rooms, the officers of the bureau have been denied admittance; their authority to enter in upon the premises or into the buildings has been successfully repelled, and the position taken by the proprietors of these places as to the interpretation of their legal rights, sustained by the AttorneyGeneral of the State.

The neglect or refusal of this class of manufacturers to fill out the blanks sent them has been another and very serious obstacle encountered by the bureau in its efforts to secure facts and statistics of a valuable character. However, the Commissioner has endeavored to make the best of the unfortunate situation in which a defective law has placed him, and has been compelled to confine his efforts in this direction to the taking of testimony rather than presenting any facts resulting from a personal investigation of the tenement-house factories.

The employment by parents of children of tender age in the tenement-house cigar factories of New York city furnishes one of the strongest arguments presented in favor of the enactment of a stringent and effective law against the evil of enforced employment of children at laborious, unhealthy and immoral callings in many cases, to satisfy the greed of those who by nature are intrusted with all that pertains to their present or future welfare, and who should be compelled by the strong arm of the law to provide for the health, the moral and educational training of their own offspring. The testimony under this head, which is herewith presented, furnishes the evidence of a condition of existing affairs which I do not hesitate to say calls for prompt and effective action on the part of the Legislature to guard against its continuance.

A cigar-maker, being duly sworn, testified:
Q. What is your name? A.

Q. You are a cigar-maker? A. Yes, sir.

Q. Do you know of any factory in your trade employing children? A. Yes; I guess they all do more or less at least all that I have been employed in.

Q. What is the percentage of child labor, as compared to adult, in those factories in which you have been employed? A. There is a difference in different shops.

Q. Make a general estimate? A. I should judge there were, say from twenty to twenty-five per cent children.

Q. In what branch of the trade are they usually employed? A. They are employed at what we call "stripping" - that is, a majority are employed at that; some, under fourteen years of age, that I have seen, do porters' work, only fit for an able-bodied man, but then they get two good boys cheaper than an able-bodied man, and so they have the boys do the work.

Q. What is the appearance of these child laborers, physically? A. The physical appearance of the girls in cigar factories is that which we would find in some of the pauper schools that Dickens describes in England; when we take into consideration that they are to become the future mothers of the Republic it bodes no good to the coming generation of workingmen who are to assume the responsibilities of fathers, and the like, as they will do; the close confinement in an atmosphere where tobacco is being manufactured is detrimental to full grown people, and must be more so to those not physically developed so as to withstand, at least in some proportion, the evil effects of it; able-bodied men lose activity and have no- in fact, they become debilitated in time.

Q. How many hours do these children work per day? A. Ten hours per day—that is, ninety-five per cent of them do; from seven in the morning to twelve, and from half-past twelve to half-past five is about the average; in some of the shops the foreman steals four or five minutes, if he can do it, and it adds to the profits in the course of the year; I have seen them do that.

Q. Do employees receive a full hour for meal time during noon? A. Not over a half an hour, I do not believe; not over three per cent of the shops in this city give their children a half-hour-that is, week-wage laborers of all kinds.

Q. Do they eat their meals in the factory or outside? A. In the factory; not one in five hundred goes home, for the time allowed is so short.

Q. Of what does the meal usually consist? A. Poor-man's sandwich - two pieces of bread, with a little piece of bread in the middle; sometimes, if a scrap of meat is left over from supper the night before, they have that; or after a holiday, then they are liable to feast two or three days.

Q. Do they usually work by the day, piece or week? A. Those who are employed at stripping-some by the week and some by the piece; the majority, I think, are by the week.

Q. What are the average weekly prices paid, in round numbers, for the services of these children? A. Well, to state my own experience, I started in at seventy-five cents a week, and when I got to be about fourteen years old I got the enormous amount of $3.50 or $4; I got in with a philanthropist and he gave $4.

Q. What wages would a grown person receive, performing the same labor? A. Well, a grown person would, under the worst conditions, not be paid less than $1.25 to $1.50 per day; I guess a grown person would get about as much as five of these children.

Q. Does child labor, in your opinion, help to swell the earnings of a family? A. No, it cannot; my reason for saying that is, that the children who are packed into these factories to work are the children of people — a large part, at least who have come here from other countries, and have worked under unfavorable conditions in those countries, but who, having been lifted from abject want to where they see a chance for fair recompense for labor they become greedy, and perhaps, for a time, hoard away some of this money; but on the other hand, when we take into consideration that these children, from the fact that they are surrounded by immoral influences in these factories by the two sexes being, at an early age, thrown together, I think trouble enough ensues in a family of that kind to swallow up whatever they may have laid away; when children are put to work at so early an age, before they are physically developed to meet the burdens of life, I think, with girls at least, when they come to pass one of the most serious periods in their lives, they call upon the family for more than they are earning; of course these people, I do not suppose, are far-seeing enough to see it in this light; the total benefit to a family, taken one year with another, cannot be any more than it would be if the father worked to support and educate that family and place good members in society through his children, and virtuous women as the future mothers of the nation.

Q. Do you consider child labor a benefit or an evil to society? A. From the facts I have stated in answer to some of the other questions, I have pretty well covered that ground, but it certainly cannot redound to the benefit of society to have the two sexes so early thrown into the battlefield for bread; I do not think the influences beneficial, especially at a time when a child should be under restraint in order to build a foundation for their future morals; it cannot redound to the benefit of future society when these children grow up to take the responsibilities upon themselves that society demands; neither morally nor physically, I think; I also think that society, in the long run, must support these people, either as criminals or paupers, since that society didn't do away with this evil and give them an education, instead of putting them into the factories. Q. In what way will the prohibition of child labor, say under fourteen years, benefit the workingman? A. Well, at present chil

dren are employed by the capitalists because they are cheap and they swell his profits to a greater proportion than if he employed full grown people; these children, of course, throw out of employment full grown men, who also have the responsibility of a family resting on their shoulders, and who are, perhaps, more inclined to morally bring up their children to fight the battle of life, and alike to shield them and to bring them up as good members of society; furthermore, as this eternal greed for gold among the capitalists of the nation compels them to employ child labor because the various trades have been divided into different branches through the extensive invention of machinery, etc., and children can be taught to perform different functions in the trade, to the detriment of grown people, and in time of strikes, when men make a stand for their rights-that is, for a just remuneration for labor or services performed these children are called in to do the work that these people refuse to do from the fact that they were not sufficiently remunerated for it; there are a great many other points that I could answer that question with, but it would take me some time to think of. Q. Where are you employed? A. I am at work for Powell, Wennigman & Smith, at Forty-second street, between Third avenue and Lexington.

Q. Is there sufficient air space in that factory? A. Yes, I guess there is; there is good ventilation in that factory; in that respect it is an extraordinary factory; I do not believe there are three factories in New York so well ventilated as that; it never was intended for a cigar factory, I guess; it is well ventilated, and I think the best ventilated factory in the city; there has been so many people discharged, that that gives us more air space.

Q. What can you say of the education of these children; can they read or write? A. The children in our business are pressed into service from the time they are nine years of age, and from then on they work pretty steadily until they reach an age to assume the responsibilities of man and womanhood; their education can be imagined under these conditions; I think that the little boy or girl after a day of that kind, wants an hour or two of childhood, and but few would feel like going into a night school, I think.

Q. Do you know any thing about tenement-house cigar factories? A. Yes, indeed; I could write an encyclopedia on that subject; it is well known that this city is covered with tenements; I will picture to myself such a tenement as I have seen; I very well remember one tenement-house where manufacturing was carried on - on the first floor was a shop - the building being used as a tenement-house factory; the fences, whether they had been torn off for fire wood, had disappeared; there were a few posts in the yard; in the morning when I would come through the halls they would be filled with night sewerage, as they had more room I suppose there than they had in the closets and so used the hall; almost the first order of the day in that factory was, to get some little stripper girl

to clean out the muss in the halls- to shovel ashes on to it and clean it out; the building was inhabited by families numbering on the average about five or six members to a family-the father, mother and four children, and they were all pressed into the service of their employer; most of these families occupied two rooms and paid a large rent for them— paid as much rent as they would for three or four rooms in some other house, but they would not be so fortunate as to be cigarmakers; the husband would be employed at rolling or making bunches, and the wife at the same, as the case might be, and the children would do the stripping; these two rooms served as the workshop and of course dwelling; in most cases there would be no ventilation, because the houses are so built that unless you can get a whole floor through you get but little ventilation; they get a certain quantity of tobacco from the foreman enough to do a week or a half a week as the case may be, and that is prepared by the children for the parents to work up; the tobacco lies around the floor, and the workshop and kitchen are in the same room; tobacco is peculiar; if once any amount of it accumulates it begins to sweat and the rankness of it is carried off through the air; then add to that the steaming stew kettle on the stove, where the woman is about preparing dinner (and perhaps a "chinaman" that they used at night stands on the floor-perhaps there is a child using it —), you can imagine what the ventilation is and what the condition of these people is; indeed, the people in these places would work twenty-five hours a day if they could; most of them do work sixteer or seventeen hours, and after that, the woman, who has sat working at the table that long, would sit there longer but that her household duties would be neglected; the father, after working that many hours, wants to go out, and perhaps drink a glass of beer; there are a great many factories scattered throughout the city and about the same condition prevails in all of them; the only comparison that I could make, or that I could compare the New York tenementhouses to, would be the black hole of Calcutta ; in these tenementhouses, from the fact that the bosses employ child labor, they get the work done cheaper, as the services of the whole family are impressed to do their work, for the same amount of money which the head of the family should earn, if these conditions did not prevail.

Q. Do you know of legislation on this subject being had in other States-its general effects or what its general effects have been? A. I do; we have an example in New Jersey; Mr. Lorillard has been brought to realize the fact that the children in his employ should be placed on a footing so that they can take up the responsibilities of life in the proper manner; he has started evening schools, for instance, and compels the children in his employ to attend those schools for a certain time each year; and in Massachusetts and other States where legislation has been had, we find a much better condition of things prevailing there; a higher condition of things must prevail if children are sent to school instead of being crowded into a capitalistic work-house, which places them where they will not give proper consideration to their morals.