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Show THE WOMEN'S PROTECTIVE UNION. This society was established some sixteen years ago, to promote the interests of women who obtain a livelihood by other employments than household service, and especially to provide them with legal protection from the frauds and impositions of unscrupulous employers. In making shirts at fifty cents a dozen there may not seem to be scope for fraud; but little as some working-women are paid, it is diminished by a variety of tricks of the trade, and sometimes it is withheld altogether. There are employers who are never able to make the exact amount of change on pay-day, and who deduct a few cents from week to week, until the total loss to the unfortunate employee is many dollars. There are other employers who find no little profit in exacting a deposit from the women to whom they give work, ostensibly as security, but practically as a premium, the depositor never obtaining money again; and another way of still further impoverishing the fagged-out women as to deduct something on the ground that their work is not as good as the sample, or that it is delayed in delivery. The sewing-machine frauds are pretty familiar. Every woman who lives by sewing must have a machine, and a machine is a costly article. But there are hosts of accommodating agents who supply the desideratum on easy, even generous, terms. "Here is a silent, lock-stitch, fully-improved article. Take it home, madam, and pay for it in installments of five dollars a week. Nine fives are forty-five; in nine weeks it will be yours. More than this, I will give you work to the amount of five dollars a week, and you need not put your hand into your pocket once." Who can say that it is a bleak, faithless, and merciless world when such men as these abound? The woman signs a paper, almost invariably without reading it, as, the greater part of it being printed, it has every appearance of authenticity, and the machine, with all its improvements, is delivered to her. Not unlikely, unless she is shrewd, a worn-out article, regilt and reburnished (?), has been foisted upon her; and in this case she will be allowed to hold it when the installments are complete. But if it is a valuable machine, the intention of the agent is to eventually deprive her of it. Perhaps he assures her that he has the fullest confidence in her, that she need not be over-punctual with her installments, and she, perhaps, believing him, delays payments for two or three weeks, when she is within a few dollars of her last installment. On the pretext that she has not fulfilled her part of the contract she is dispossessed of the machine; and when the document she has unwittingly signed is examined, it is found to be so constructed that the seizure is legalized. In nearly all cases the price put upon the machine is more than its value, and the sum is increased if the woman pays for it by her own work, the employer deducting various amounts on the plea, before mentioned, that her work is not up to the standard. It is against such mean swindles as these that the Protective Union exerts itself, and to prevent which it was founded. Left to themselves, the women imposed upon are often too ignorant to know how to seek the recovery of their machines, or too poor to prosecute. They appeal in vain for consideration, scold the agent, and then subside in the sympathy of their neighbors, unless they find the Union, which is an implacable litigant for them, carrying their cases from court to court and employing the most capable counsel, if necessary, to secure justice. The mere fact of its existence represses much wrong, and it has contested its cases with such persistence that few defaulting employers are willing to defend a suit brought by it; but at the same time it should be said that it does not proceed to law until it is convinced of the validity of its cause, and it does not immediately take for granted all the ex parte testimony brought to it. Once a week a lawyer attends the rooms of the Union in Bleecker Street, and the persons complained of are summoned to meet the plaintiffs. If the former do not appear, and also ignore a second summons, the case is taken into court at once; but usually the employer presents himself to answer the charges made against him, and sometimes he proves that it is he who was been injured - sometimes - by no means often.-William H. Ridding, in Harper's Magazine. |