n girls
Anglicized their names, and Jenny had probably been Giovanna at home.

"At the collar machine, at which I was stationed after lunch, there was
an adequate guard where the collars were slipped in. Where they came out,
however, they had to be pushed in rapid succession under the farther side
of a burning hot cylinder with no guard at all. To avoid touching the
cylinder with my arm in this process, I was obliged either to raise it
unnaturally high, or to stand on tiptoe. 'You didn't get burned to-day or
yesterday,' said Jenny, 'but you sure will sometime. Everybody does on
that machine.'

"In the ironing of collars and cuffs by machinery, there is continual
risk of burns on hands and arms. At a sleeve-ironing machine, in another
place I received some slight burn every day. And when I asked the girls
if this were because I was 'green,' they replied that every one got
burned at that machine all the time. Each burn is due to 'carelessness,'
but if the girls were to be careful, they would have to focus their minds
on self-protection instead of the proper accomplishment of their task,
and would also have to work at a lower rate of speed than the usual
output of the laundries demands. A graver danger than that from hot
surfaces and from slightly protected gas flames is from unguarded belts
and gears.

"At mangles, too, the danger is grave. What the girls call 'millionaire
work'--work that has to come out straight--in contrast with
'boarding-house work," must be shoved up to within a quarter of an inch
of the cylinder. Fingers once caught in such mangles are crushed.
Consider, in connection with these two facts, the high rate of speed at
which the girls feed the work into the machine, and the precarious
character of their task will be realized. However, in many laundries,
good mangles for table and bed linen are in use, which either have a
stationary bar in front of the first cylinder, or else have the first
roll, whether connected or not with the power, attached to a lever, and
so constructed as to lift the pressure immediately from the finger,
should it be slipped underneath.[34]

"For the purpose of inspecting the machinery I visited with different
factory inspectors, through the courtesy extended by the Department of
Labor, all, so far as I was able to determine, of the commercial steam
laundries in the borough of Manhattan. Out of sixty laundries inspected,
I found that twenty-six had either unguarded or inadequa