Underpaid Women Workers in Chicago
The condition of working women in Chicago has stirred the country. Acting Governor Barrett O'Hara, of Illinois, has taken the initiative and sent an appeal to the governors and legislatures of forty-seven states to join Illinois to stamp out the slavery. He declared: “There are 50,000 women and girls working in factories and department stores for less than $5.00 a week.” Of these women he says that they are absolutely underfed, and the majority of them since they became wage-earners do not know what a full meal means. Half of them are living on two meals a day, and these meals of the ten- or fifteen-cent variety, and many of them have to depend for clothes on what more successful friends are willing to give them of cast-off garments. He found on investigation that much of this despicable traffic in white slave labor is interstate; rings existing in Chicago worked hand in hand with similar rings in all the other states. He pleads for the cooperation of the other governors. We hope it may be granted.