These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving
wages lower than the sweat-shop standard. They said that a foreign woman
in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an
American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a
half.

They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen
was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from
ten to fourteen hours a day. They said that sanitary conditions in the
cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to
endanger health and life. They said that the whole situation was so bad
that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years. Mostly
they were used up in two years. They proposed a labor union of retail
clerks as the only possible resource. Their effort failed.

The trades union idea at that time had not reached the girl behind the
counter. As a matter of fact it has not reached her yet, and it probably
never will. The department-store clerk considers herself a higher social
being than the ordinary working-girl, and in a way she is justified. The
exceptionally intelligent department-store clerk has one chance in a
thousand of rising to the well-paid, semi-professional post of buyer.
Also the exceptionally attractive girl has possibly one chance in five
thousand of marrying a millionaire. It is a long chance now, and it was
a longer chance a dozen years ago, because there were fewer millionaires
then than now, but it served well enough to cause the failure of the
trades union plan.

There is one thing that never fails, however, and that is a righteous
protest. Out of the protest of that little, obscure group of working