ish employers. The workers are principally recently
arrived foreigners, Russian and other Slavic Jews, Italians and other
immigrants from eastern Europe. They are in an overwhelming majority
women, or, to be more accurate, girls.

During all the earlier part of the year 1909 the Ladies' Waist Makers'
Union No. 25 had been showing quite undue activity and unwelcome
persistence in preaching unionism and its advantages among all and
sundry of these foreign girls, and with quite unusual success. The
managers of the Triangle Shirt Waist Company awoke one morning to a
sense of what was happening. To quote from a writer in _The Outlook_:

One of the firm appeared before the girls and told them in kind
phrases that the company was friendly to the union, and that
they desired to encourage it, and that they might better give
assistance, they would like to know what girls belonged to it. The
girls, taken in by this speech, acknowledged their membership;
only, instead of a few that the company had thought to discover
and weed out, it developed that one hundred and fifty girls were
members. That evening they were told, in the same kind way, that,
because of a lull in the trade, due to an uncertainty as to
fashions in sleeves, there was for the time being no more work.
The girls took their discharge without suspicion; but the next
morning they saw in the newspaper advertisements of the company
asking for shirt-waist operators at once. Their eyes opened by
this, the girls picketed the shop, and told the girls who answered
the advertisement that the shop was on strike. The company
retaliated by hiring thugs to intimidate the girls, and for
several weeks the picketing girls were being constantly attacked
and beaten. These melees were followed by wholesale arrests of
strikers, from a dozen to twenty girls being arrested daily.

Out of ninety-eight arrested all but nineteen were fined in sums of
from one to ten dollars.

With the aid of the police and a complaisant bench the Triangle
Company had been successful in its attempt to empty the young union's
treasury, and had likewise intimidated the workers till their courage
and spirit were failing them. The manufacturers had accomplished their
object.

At this stage the New York Women's Trade Union League took up the
battle of the girls. Every morning they stationed allies in front
of the factory, to act as wit