Browse Primary Sources
"Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" - Barbara Ehrenreich - Harper's
"At the beginning of June 1998 I leave behind everything that normally soothes the ego and sustains the body -- home, career, compansion, reputation, ATM card -- for a plunge into the low-wage workforce. There, I become another, occupationally much diminished 'Barbara Ehrenreich' -- depicted on job-application forms as a divorced homemaker whose sole work experience consists of housekeeping in a few private homes. I am terrified at the beginning, of being unmasked for what I am: a middle-class journalist setting out to explore the world that welfare mothers are entering, at the rate of approximately 50,000 a month, as welfare reform kicks in. . . . "
Harper's 1999-01-01
"Christmas From Behind the Counter" - The Independent
The Independent 1907-12-05
III-"The Woman's Invasion" - William Hard; Rheta Childe Dorr -Everybody's Magazine
Everybody's Magazine 1909-01-01
V- "Working with the Working Woman" - Cornelia Stratton Parker - Harper's Magazine
Harper's 1921-11-01
IV-"Working With the Working Woman" - Cornelia Stratton Parker - Harper's Magazine
Harper's 1921-10-01
IX-"Prisoners of Poverty: Women wage-workers, their trades and their lives" - Helen Campbell - New York Tribune
The manufacturers of cloaks and jackets reported "piecework" as the rule. The great dry-goods establishments had the same word. Here and there was one where work was done on the premises, and where skilled hands held the same places year after year, the wages ranging from six to ten dollars, hardly varying. But for most of them the same causes stated in the third chapter, "The Methods of a Prosperous Firm," have operated, and it has been found expedient to settle upon "piece-work" and let rent be paid and space be furnished by the workers themselves."They like it better," said the business manager of the great firm against whom there have never been charges of dishonesty or unkindness in their treatment of employees. "It would be impossible to do all our work on the premises. We should want the entire block if we even half did it. But we know some of the women, and we pay as high as anybody; perhaps higher. It saves them car fares and going out in all weathers, and a great many other inconveniences, when they work at home, and I don't see why there should be any objections made.
The New York Tribune 1886-12-19
VIII-"Prisoners of Poverty: Women wage-workers, their trades and their lives" - Helen Campbell - New York Tribune
Lotte went home dumb, and sat down at her machine. There was no money in the house, nor would be till she had taken home this work; but as she bent over it the blood poured in a stream from her mouth. She tried to rise, but fell back; and when the screaming children had brought in neighbors, Lotte's struggle was quite over. When they had buried her in the Potter's Field by Lisa, they took the bundle of work stained with her lifeblood and carried it back to its owners."She 'll need no more," said the old neighbor from the floor above as she laid it on the counter. "You 've cut her down and cut her down, till there was n't life left to stand it longer. There's not one of you to blame, you say, but I that know, know you 've fastened her coffin-lid with nails o' your own makin', an' that sooner or later you 'll come face to face, an' find that red-hot is cowld to the hate that's makin' ready for you. An' as for him that stands there smilin', if it were n't for the laws that spare the guilty and send the innocent to their deaths, God knows it would be the best thing these hands ever did to tear him to bits. But there 's no one to blame. Ye 're sure o' that. Wait a while. The day 's comin' when you 'll maybe think different; an' may God speed it!"
The New York Tribune 1886-12-12
VII-"Prisoners of Poverty: Women wage-workers, their trades and their lives" - Helen Campbell - New York Tribune
Since the Church first began to misinterpret the words of its Founder, since men who built hospitals first made the poor to fill them, the " thou shalt not" of the priest has stood in the way of a human development that, if allowed free play, had long ago made its own code, and found in natural spiritual law the key to the overcoming of that formulated by men to whom the divine in man was forever unrecognized and unrecognizable.This is no place for the discussion of what, to many good men and women, seems the only safety for human kind ; but to one who studies the question somewhat at least with the eyes of the physician, it becomes certain that no " thou shalt not" will ever give birth to either conscience or love of goodness and purity and decent living, or any other good that man must know; and that till the Church learns this, her hold on men and women will lessen, year by year. Every fresh institution in the miles of asylums and hospitals that cover the islands of the East Biver, and stretch on farther and farther with every year, is an added disgrace, an added count in the indictment against modern civilization. There are moments when the student of social conditions abhors Philanthropy ; when a disaster that would wipe out at one stroke every institution the city treasures would seem a gift straight from God, if only thereby the scales might fall from men's eyes, and they might learn that hiding foulness in an asylum is not extirpation; that something deeper and stronger than Philanthropy must work, before men can be saved.
The New York Tribune 1886-12-05
VI-"Prisoners of Poverty: Women wage-workers, their trades and their lives" - Helen Campbell - New York Tribune
To this end, then, toils the employer of every grade, bringing every faculty to bear on the lessening of waste, whether in material or time; the conservation of every force working in line with his purpose. Naturally, the same effect is produced as that mentioned in a previous paper. The employees come to represent "so much producing power," and are driven at full speed or shut off suddenly like the machines of which they are the necessary but still more or less accidental associates. Certain formulas are used, evolved apparently from experience, and carrying with them an assurance of so much grieved but inevitable conviction that it is difficult to penetrate below the surface and realize that, while in degree true, they are in greater degree false. In various establishments, large and small, beginning with one the pay-roll of which carries 1,462 employees, and ending with one having hardly a third this number, the business manager made invariably the same statement : "We make our money from incidentals rather than from any given department. You are asking particularly about suits. I suppose you'll think it incredible, but in suits we work at a dead loss. It is only an accommodation to our customers that makes us keep that department open. The work should be put out to mean any profit, but we can't do that with the choicest materials, and so we make it up in other directions. You would have to go into business yourself to understand just how we are driven."
The New York Tribune 1886-11-28