both by the State Labor Commissioner and by the newspapers. A reporter
from the _San Francisco Examiner_ took a job as a laundry-worker, and
published appalling accounts of miserable wages, utter slavery as to
hours and degrading conditions generally. Even the city ordinance
forbidding work after ten at night (!) was found to be flagrantly
violated, the girls continually working till midnight, and sometimes
till two in the morning.

The first measure of improvement was the passing of a new ordinance,
forbidding work after seven in the evening. The workers, however,
promptly realized that the more humane regulation was likely to be as
ill enforced as the former one had been unless there was a union to
see that it was carried out.

About three hundred of the men organized, and applied to the Laundry
Workers' International Union for a charter. The men did not wish
to take the women in, but the executive board of the national
organization, to their everlasting credit, refused the charter unless
the women were taken in as well. Even so, a great many of the women
were too frightened to take any steps themselves, as the employers
were already threatening with dismissal any who dared to join a union,
but the most courageous of the girls, with the help of some of the
best of the men resolved to go on. Hannah Mahony, now Mrs. Hannah
Nolan, Labor Inspector, took up the difficult task of organizing. So
energetic and successful was she, that in sixteen weeks the majority
of the girls, as well as the men, had joined the new union. It was all
carried out secretly, and only when they felt themselves strong enough
did they come out into the open with a demand for a higher wage-scale
and shorter hours.