_No. 536 Tickets Pillow Cases_

Ah, one should write of the bleachery _via_ the medium of poetry! If
the thought of the brassworks comes in one breath and the bleachery in
the next, the poetry must needs be set to music--the Song of the
Bleachery. What satisfaction there must be to an employer who grows
rich--or makes his income, whatever it may be--from a business where
so much light-heartedness is worked into the product! Let those who
prefer to sob over woman labor behind factory prison bars visit our
bleachery. Better still, let them work there. Here at least is one
spot where they can dry their tears. If the day ever dawns when the
conditions in that bleachery can be referred to as typical of American
industrial life, exist the agitator, the walking delegate, the closed
and open shop fight.

I can hear a bleachery operator grunting, "My Gawd! what's the woman
ravin' over? Is it _our_ bleachery she's goin' on about?" Most of the
workers in the bleachery know no other industrial experience. In that
community, so it seems, a child is born, attends school up to the
minimum required, or a bit beyond, and then goes to work in the
bleachery--though a few do find their way instead to the overall
factory, and still fewer to the shirtwaist factory. No other openings
exist at the Falls.

There is more or less talk nowadays about Industrial Democracy. Some
of us believe that the application of the democratic principle to
industry is the most promising solution to industrial unrest and
inefficiency. The only people who have written about the idea or
discussed it, so far, have been either theorizers or propagandists
from among the intellectuals, or enthused appliers of the principle,
more or less high up in the business end of the thing. What does
Industrial Democracy mean to the rank and file working under it? Is it
one of those splendid programs which look epoch-making in spirit, but
never permeates to those very people whom it is especially designed to
affect?

It was to find out what the workers themselves thought of Industrial
Democracy that I boarded a boat and journeyed seventy miles up the
Hudson to work in the bleachery, where, to the pride of those
responsible, functions the Partnership Plan.

What do the workers think of working under a scheme of Industrial
Democracy?

What do the citizens of the United States think of living under a
scheme of Political Democracy?

The average citizen does not think one wa