Mary Minora Feeds Family of Six on $1 a Week, 1914

“Girl Mother Feeds Six on $1 a Week” from the June 5, 1914, issue of The Sun She Tells Commissioner of Pittance Earned as Garment Finisher—Wage of 50 Cents a Day—15-Year-Old Child Wife Arouses Sympathy for East Side Toilers

The United States Commission of Industrial Relations, at its hearing in the City Hall yesterday, listened to an unusual story of the strugglers of finishers on men’s garments to earn a living in their tenement homes, as told by Mrs. Mary Minora, a child mother of a six-months-old baby, whose husband is out of work. Mrs. Minora will be 15 on September 4 next. She has been married for two years.

It was announced that before the commission resumes its sessions next Monday some of the members will visit sweatshop tenement homes to see conditions for themselves.

Mrs. Minora said through an interpreter that she started to do finishing work a long time ago. She was then 10 years old and obliged to leave school because her parents needed her help. Her husband and father have been out of work for nine months, she said, and she and her mother have been supporting a family of six. She said that by working hard she was able to make from 50 to 60 cents a day, and that her mother earned about the same wage.

They pooled their resources, she said and sometimes were able to spend a dollar for food from pushcarts in one week. They also tried, she said, to put five cents a day aside for clothes. They always tried to do the best they could, she added, but sometimes it was hard.

The little mother’s face beamed as she left the room with her $2 witness fee and her baby.

Mrs. Falzoni, another tenement house worker with three children and a mother and father dependent upon her, told of long hours of work and meager returns.

“How do you pay for your food out of the little you earn?” a commissioner asked.

“Oh, as God provides,” was the reply.

Meyer Shoenfeld, a special agent and adviser of the American Clothing Manufacturers, asserted that much of the testimony of witnesses to the effect that tenement house work is still going on and that working conditions and wages are bad is greatly exaggerated. He said that the statements of members of labor unions as to conditions of tenement house work “were inspired by sentiment.”

Shoenfeld said that Miss Lillian D. Ward of the Henry Street Settlement House, who testified as to bad conditions in tenements where women do the finishing of men’s garments, “was guided by her good heart more than her judgment, perhaps.”

Shoenfeld insisted that it was a fad to go to the East Side and magnify anything bad in order “to play to the galleries.” The witness was formerly an organizer for the Brotherhood of Tailors. He was the leader of the brotherhood’s strike 10 years ago.

Joseph Gold, chairman of the board of directors of the Brotherhood of Tailors said conditions of finishers in tenements were just as bad as Miss Ward had pictured them.

B.A. Larger, general secretary of the United Garment Workers of America, said he is in favor of abolishing the contract system of labor because it tended to increase the number of unemployed.