ball, or the dinner of an excellent sociological society are the
occasions of increased hotel entertainment and a lavish use of beautiful
table linen, to be dried and mangled and folded next day by the laundry
girls underground.

"All this pressure of extra work in the hotels here is produced, not by
ill-willed persons who are consciously oppressive,--indeed, as will be
seen, much of it was produced by sheer social good will and persons of
most progessive intent,--but simply by the unregulated conditions of the
laundries."

IV

Such, then, is the account of what women workers give and what they
receive in their industry in the commercial, hotel, and hospital
laundries of New York.

It cannot be said that the unfortunate features of the laundry conditions
observed are due to the greed of employers. These features seem to be due
rather to lack of system and regulation. Financial failures in the New
York laundry business are frequent. Even in the short time elapsing
between the Department of Labor's inspection of laundry machinery, early
in February, and a reinspection of the twenty-six establishments that had
improperly guarded machinery, made in August by Miss Westwood, two out of
these twenty-six firms had collapsed. Miss Westwood found some of the
same unfortunate features that characterized commercial and hotel
laundries in existence in hospital laundries, which are quite outside
trade.

After the New York City Consumers' League had received the inquirers'
report, it determined that the wisest and most effective course it could
take for securing fairer terms for the laundry workers would be an effort
for the passage of the following legislation:[37]--

First: That an appropriation be made for additional factory
inspectors.

Second: That no woman be employed in any mechanical
establishment, or factory, or laundry in this State for more
than ten hours during any one day.

Third: That the laundries of hotels and hospitals be placed
under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor.

A New York State law now exists providing for proper sanitation and
plumbing and clean drinking water for employees in factories and
laundries.[38] A law exists requiring that work-rooms where steam is
generated be so ventilated as to render the steam harmless, so far as is
practicable.[39]

A law exists requiring the provision of suitable seats for the use of
female employees in factories