prices of all sorts of
food, fuel, lighting, the commonest clothing and the humblest shelter.

The strike had gone on for some weeks, when an effort was made to
obtain an injunction forbidding the picketing of the Haber factory.
This was finally to crush the strike and down the strikers. But
in pressing for an injunction the manufacturers came up against a
difficulty of their own making. The plea that had all along been urged
upon the union had been the futility of trying to continue a strike
that was not injuring the employers. "For," they had many times said,
"we have plenty of workers, our factories are going full blast."
Whereas the Haber witnesses in the injunction suit were bringing proof
of how seriously the business was being injured through the success of
the girl pickets in maintaining the strike, and, the money loss, they
assured the court was to be reckoned up in thousands of dollars. This
inconsistency impressed the judge, and the strikers had the chance
of telling their story in open court. "Strikers' Day" was a public
hearing of the whole story of the strike.

That night both sides got together, and began to discuss a
working agreement. After twenty-five hours of conference between
representatives of the Shirt Waist Makers' Union and of the
Manufacturers' Association, an agreement was arrived at, giving the
workers substantial gains; employment of all union workers in the
shops without discrimination; a fifty-two-and-a-half-hour week and
no work on Saturday afternoon; no charges for water, oil, needles or
ordinary wear and tear on machinery; wages to be decided with the
union for each particular shop, and all future grievances to be
settled by a permanent Board of Arbitration; the agreement to run till
May 1, 1911.

The workers' success was, unfortunately, not lasting. Owing to the
want of efficient local leadership, the organization soon dropped to
pieces. That gone, there was nothing left to stand between the toilers
and the old relentless pressure of the competitive struggle,
ever driving the employers to ask more, and ever compelling the
wage-earners to yield more. The Philadelphia shirt-waist strike of
1910 furnishes a sad and convincing proof of how little is gained
by the mere winning of a strike, however bravely fought, unless the
strikers are able to keep a live organization together, the members
cooeperating patiently and steadily, so as to handle the fresh shop
difficulties which every week