being
laid off repeatedly and the same girls chosen to work repeatedly instead
of in alternation.

In the further processes of folding, some of the work and the lifting to
the piles of the sheer, book-folded stuff is light, but requires great
deftness; other parts of the work and the lifting to the piles are
heavier.[53] The wage before the bonus was introduced was $7.50 a week,
and with the bonus rose to $11 a week, in full time. As with the
inspectors, the work was now brought to the folders, and the hours were
shortened by 45 minutes. Here there was great variation in the account of
the system.

One of the folders on light work, a wonderfully skilful young woman, who
had folded 155 pieces a day before, and now folded 887, could run far
beyond her task without exhaustion and earn as much as $15 a week. She
and some of the expert workers paused in the middle of the morning for 10
or 15 minutes' rest and ate some fruit or other light refreshment, and
sometimes took another such rest in the afternoon.

Another strong worker, employed on heavy material, though she liked the
bonus system, and said "it couldn't be better," had remained at work at
about the same wages as before, because she was a little ahead of the
others before and earned $8 a week; and now, as there was hardly more
than enough of her kind of work to occupy her for more than four days a
week, she still earned about $8.

One folder was made very nervous by a constant fear that she would not
earn her bonus. She always did complete the necessary amount; but when
the system was first introduced, she had been sleepless night after
night. Though this sleeplessness had passed away, she still took a nerve
tonic to brace her through her work; and this was the case with another
folder. The mothers of both these girls urged them to return to week
work. But this was of poor quality--odds and ends--and the girls disliked
it, and persisted in the new system.

In tying ribbons around the bolts of material, the girls sit at work.
Their wages had been $1 a day for tying ribbons around 600 pieces; and
now, on a bonus for 1200 pieces, is at times for quick workers, as high
as $11. But the ribbon tying was not steady work. It is applied to only
some of the material, and the task and bonus here are intermittent. The
girls who knot, or run silk threads through the selvages, paste on tinsel
ribbon, and wrap are younger than the other workers. Their wages before
had been fr