The younger and inexperienced the worker,
the more readily is she fooled into believing that the more work she
turns out, under a piece-work system, the more money will she earn,
not only in that week but in the succeeding weeks.

To this child-like and simple code of worldly wisdom and of ethics,
the policy advised by the organizer is indeed entirely foreign. To
some very good girls, indeed, it seems ethically wrong not to work
your hardest, or, as they say, do your best, especially when you are
urged to. To more, it seems a silly, not to say impossible plan, not
to try and earn as big a wage as possible. But the organizer comes in
and she approaches the question from the other end. She does not talk
about a standard of living, but she preaches it all the time. It is
her business and her vocation to bring the girls to see that the first
step towards getting more wages is to want more wages, to ask for more
wages, and then, seeing that the single girl has no power of bringing
about this result by herself, to show them that they must band
together with the determination to make their wage square with their
ideas of living, and not think that they must forever square their
mode of living with their wage.

In the acceptance into the mind of this idea is involved a complete
revolution.

It is in making of this ideal theory a living force, by helping girls
to put it into practice in everyday shop life that the girl organizer
has her special work cut out for her. And here she necessarily
contrasts favorably with the average man organizer when he tries to
deal with girls, because she understands the girl's work and the
girl's problems better, and the girl knows that she does.

I have taken wages as the prime subject of the organizer's activities
only because wages form the crux of the whole question. There, without
any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real
point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the
employe and the community, the standard of living that is possible,
as measured by the employe's share of the product of labor. But in
practice, money wages form only one element of the standard of living
problem, although the one around which least confusion gathers.

Whatever form the demands of labor organizations may take, the essence
of the demand is the same: better terms for the worker always, however
temporary circumstances or technical details may obscure the issue.

Tha