Page:The Girl Who Earns Her Own Living (1909).djvu/205

 phia is noted, the girls start at three dollars a week in what is known as the finishing department, stamping and packing the stockings. The knitters are the highest-priced workers, their minimum earnings being ten dollars a week. The piece-worker is always a law unto herself, but often the rapid workers pay the price of their big records with nervous prostration or other ailments peculiar to abnormal concentration.

In Pittsburgh, the center of the cheap cigar or stogy industry, girls work by the thousands at this trade alone, earning six dollars per week. In the cotton mills of New England you will find as many thousand more weavers working for an average of a dollar and a half a day or nine dollars per week. Yet there have been cases in all these factories where girls have doubled the average wages.

Operators in suit and waist factories do piece-work principally, and as a rule make twelve dollars per week. In underwear factories the inexperienced worker is first employed at sewing on buttons, running ribbon through beading, pressing, etc., and makes not more than two or three dollars per week. Tucking, joining tucking to insertion, sewing on lace, etc., are all done by machine and paid for by the yard. At first a girl earns no more at this than by sewing on buttons, but very soon she works up to six dol-