Julius K. Ehrlich (glove table cutter): It seems that as near as I can say from my point of view, the reason for this strike and why I am out on strike is this, that it seems that ever since I can remember in the glove business, in the 24 years that I have worked at it, it has been a continual strife for a living, and up to 1897, being a young man then as you could see, I did not take much notice of strikes or works, but in 1897 we went out on a ten weeks strike and there we practically got a ten percent increase at that time, and from then until 1903 and 1904 there have been little reductions and little increases from that time, but in 1903 and 1904, I think it was the 19th day of December 1903, a strike was called. That was an open shop strike practically. For six months we struck, and lost. There is no use going into that detail but from then on, 1904 until practically Aug. 21st 1914, there has been to my knowledge three or four times that we have made a request for an increase in wages, claiming each time that the work was getting more and more difficult and that they were more exacting and our conditions of living were being altered, prices around us were soaring, and in that time we have not received any increase. Each time, the manufacturers, I mean, had told us to continue to work and when the time came they would consider giving us an increase in wages. We have waited ten years for that until the 21st day of August of this year. We thought perhaps that the right time had come to again ask for an increase of wages. At that time I didn't know much about it. I went to the mass meeting to hear this discussion as to the advisability of making the request - - not ordering a strike but making the request. It was finally voted by a mass of men that they thought the time was right to make the request for an increase of wages of 25 cents on mens and boys and 20 cents on ladies gloves for all styles and all grades of cutting. A resolution, or an ultimatum as one side seems to call it, to the manufacturers was made asking for this with a 48 hour notice - an answer in 48 hours. At the end of that time we had received no answer, and it was on Friday then I think we had a meeting again and brought up the question of enforcing our demands by calling a strike. . . .
I am speaking of seventeen years this time for this reason. In seventeen years, and here is the schedule, there has been practically no increase per cutting in the glove business. A few years ago they granted us - I think it was in 1910 - now I would not say that positively but I think it was in 1910, they granted us two cents on suedes and kids; six cents and a half on mochos; in other words from 88 to 90 cents and from 932 cents to a dollar, but at that time for the dollar work we had what are known as rag mochos, pieces, that they paid at the rate of 30 cents an hour for, or if you cut them by the dozen ten cents extra. Just as soon as we had received that two cents on these grades and six cents and a half on the other we were immediately reduced five cents a dozen on what is termed in our trade a silk lined glove, a glove that has a silk lining. It makes extra work because there is extra stamping, there is extra trimming and extra work to it in fact. They reduced that five cents. Some of the shops brought in vogue at that time, which I believe is practiced throughout the state now - not every glove, but some of them - a cutting that had a special binding and they reduced that five cents a dozen, making that two cent raise a three cent cut. Since that time they have added a class of gloves that require instead of the regulation binding of about twenty inches for a pair, ten inches on each glove, they make them now where you cut practically thirty inches in some factories and twenty-eight to thirty inches in some factories, that you don't get anything for, just the regular price, ninety cents a dozen with this thirty inches of binding, where the old schedule for 1897 calls for extra binding five cents. . . . .
Now the glove cutter, being the expert man in this line of business, the first man after the foreman, he does the sorting. Some firms have taxers. Some call them sorters - different name by the thing is the same. He hands out these skins and a certain number of skins to cut a certain number of gloves. That cutter gets those skins. 992 percent are conscientious workmen. They get their living by it and they try to get the best they can, and then it goes to the man that sorts them after they are slit, sometimes before they are slit. By the slitter I mean the man who works on the press and presses out the exact form of a glove in that shape. Then it goes back to a man that sorts the tranks. He throws out some that he thinks are too poor for that glove or too good for it. Sometimes they throw out four assortments and some times two, the good and the bad. Then the manufacturer figures up and only from them does he know that barring reasonable accidents in the course of manufacture of a glove, he knows from that minute whether that dozen of skins has produced a profit or a loss, and for that skill of the table cutter we average up somewhere hear that wages, and for that reason I am out on a strike. . . .
Now my personal reasons for being out on strike are these, that in the last ten years, as every other man knows, in the business, skins have got so that they are poorer. There has been more work exacted from us. Our taxation system has been so that it seems at times that even the sanest man of us would go crazy trying to figure out how he was going to get them of the quality that was required. I have worked as a pretty steady man. I am not the fastest man. I am not the slowest man. I am an average man. I have worked I can truthfully say, on the average, for the last ten years, nine hour and a half a day when I have had the work to do, and in that time - - I don't bring up the question of my average wage in that time now - that will be perhaps later - but I have seen that with all these exacting things that I have had to do additional caused by higher taxing, poorer grade of leather, the new styles and kinds of gloves, which demanded more leather for that glove that came in vogue, that all of this was being taken out of my little wage, and for that reason I could see around me my living growing up, so that I could not keep up my family decently on the wage that I was getting, and I thought that it was time to make a request and if necessary a forcible demand - by that I mean strike for an increase - and I have struck for six weeks. My conditions are not quite as good as they were six weeks ago, because I have been out of work, but we have struggled, I have sacrificed and there is no doubt that all of the fourteen or fifteen hundred cutters have sacrificed greatly in order to get what we think is a just increase, and to our minds, or to my mind rather, for I am speaking as one now, I think that we have tried to be fair with every proposition, and there has not been any but one that they called a proposition to give it any consideration. We would be and we will give any proposition consideration whereby I can be assured that I can better my conditions - better than they have been in the last seventeen years.
In this industry here it seems we do not strike every five minutes over nothing. It has been 17 years since we have an increase worth mentioning, outside of those two cents and then the five cents off, and now it seems that we have not been out on a strike only as I say in 1903 and 1904 and then went out practically on an open-shop strike. Then we were all in the union, perhaps 98 percent of us were, and we were out six months and loss on that phase. We have not been out on a wage strike, for more wages, since 1897. More