These trade fortunes represent as clearly as possible the usual
industrial experience of the women workers in unskilled factory labor who
gave accounts of their income and outlay in their work away from home in
New York.


II

The chronicles printed below, taken from establishments of different
kinds and grades, express as clearly as possible the several features
most common to the trade fortunes the workers described--uncertain and
seasonal employment, small exploitations, monotony in occupation, and
fatigue from speeding.

Because of uncertain and seasonal employment, machine operatives in the
New York sewing industries frequently change from one trade to another.
This had been the experience of Yeddie Bruker, a young Hungarian
white-goods worker living in the Bronx.

The tenements of the Bronx appear as crowded as those of the
longer-settled neighborhoods of Manhattan, the lower East Side, Harlem,
Chelsea, and the cross streets off the Bowery, where so many
self-supporting factory workers live. These newer-built lodgings, too,
have close, stifling halls, and inner courts hung thick with washing.
Here, too, you see, through the windows, flower makers and human hair
workers at their tasks; and in the entries, hung with Hungarian and
German signs, the children sit crowded among large women with many puffs
of hair and a striking preference for frail light pink and blue princess
dresses. These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their