o occur in laundries where only mangle work is done. These laundries do
not tend to work late at night, but they more frequently violate the
sixty-hour law than the others do. Work is almost absolutely steady. The
women stand on their feet ten and twelve hours, with just half an hour or
an hour for lunch, and work with extreme speed.

"If your job is shaking the wrinkles out of towels and sheets, this in
itself is violent exercise. The air is hot and damp because you stand
near the washers. You are hurried at a furious rate. When you finish one
lot, you have to roll heavy baskets, and dump them upon your table, and
then go on shaking and shaking again, only to do more heavy loading and
dumping. One girl always had a headache late in the afternoon. After
standing ten or twelve hours, there are few whose feet or backs do not
ache. The effect on the feet is perhaps the chief ground of complaint.
Some merely wear rags about their feet, others put on old shoes or
slippers, which they slit up in front and at the sides. The girls who
press skirts by machine and those who do the body ironing have to press
down on pedals in order to accomplish their tasks, and find this, as a
rule, harder than standing still. An occasional worker, however,
pronounces it a relief. But several I met had serious internal trouble
which they claimed began after they had started laundry work. Few
laundries give holidays with pay. Some give half a day on the legal
holidays. In the others, 'shaking' and 'body ironing' and all the hard,
heavy processes of laundry work continue straight through Christmas day,
straight through New Year's day, straight through the Fourth of July,
just as at other times.

"In recompense for these long hours of standing, the piece-worker often
has fairly high payment financially. But the opposite is true of the week
worker. In the down-town laundries, where the wage scale runs lower, the
amount is usually inadequate for the barest need.

"The payment in laundries is extremely varied. The wages of the majority
of women I talked to in laundries amounted to between $8 and $4.50 a
week. But wages ranged from the highest exceptional instances in
piece-work, in hand starching and in hand ironing, at $25 a week, for a
few weeks in the year, down to $3 a week.

"High wages generally involved long hours. For instance, in one laundry,
young American women between twenty and thirty were employed as hand
starchers at piece-work. They