Word: sweatshop
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...trade code to be approved by the President. Each such code was to ration production so that some plants would not work 24 hours per day while others stood idle, to reduce working hours so that more employees could find jobs, to set up a minimum wage so that sweatshop operators could not steal the market, to give labor a free hand so that it could organize and bargain collectively. Industrial minorities which refused to subscribe to majority codes could be put out of business, if necessary, by the President's power to set up a rigorous licensing system...
...York City was the worst "sweat" spot in the State and its dressmaking industry, employing 50.000 women, was the most "sweated" trade. Unscrupulous employers, with a labor surplus at hand, had battered wages down to the Chinese coolie level. In many a sweatshop the "U. S. standard of living," which the textile tariff is supposed to protect, had declined to a point where workers could subsist only with the help of charity. Girls were sleeping in subways because they could not earn the price of a bed. Hospitals were filling with women who had worked themselves into a state...
Saul Singer at 15 was proprietor of a hardware store in Sebastopol. At 17 he was earning $4 a week in a Manhattan sweatshop. He became in due course president of the $15,000,000 Garment Centre Capital buildings, president of the Cloak, Suit and Skirt Manufacturers' Protective Association. At 47 he has a rambling colonial house of 25 rooms and a large forested estate on Long Island where he employs two chauffeurs and three gardeners, owns saddle horses, a station wagon and two limousines...
...Sweatshops" are operated mostly by small unorganized dress manufacturers known to the trade as "contractors" because they contract the disposal of their entire production to wholesale jobbers. These contractors accuse the jobbers of driving such sharp bargains, of "jewing" prices down so low, that only by sweatshop methods can the little manufacturers meet the stiff competition. They profess sympathy with their.striking employes but claim they cannot accede to their wage and time demands until the jobbers agree to cease patronizing and encouraging sweatshop contractors. The jobbers retort that they are bound to seek the best possible prices, sweatshops...
...words crept into the strikers' back country vocabulary. Professional agitators taught them the word "sweatshop" which seemed particularly applicable to Southern mills, with their hungry hum ming machinery, high humidity,* closed windows, lint-laden air. Said one striker: "I ain't afeared of Hell. I've spent 20 summers in the mills...