The Outlook,Vol. 106, No. 17. pp. 912-915Apr. 25, 1914

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Who is Responsible for the Immigrant?

Miss Kellor is known to all sociologists as a practical worker. Her experience as Chief Investigator of the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration has given her special opportunities for studying the conditions here described.

—THE EDITORS.

The question of the low standard of living among immigrants in the labor camps of the country is profoundly agitating the American people. The feeling is growing that if this is the best America can do, the immigrants are better off in their home country.

The immigrant laborer reaches the camp usually by way of a padrone. From the time he arrives until he goes to work in the remote camp he is in the hands of his "friends"—countrymen who house him and feed him and entertain him, certain that they will get their share of the fee for his job and of the profit the "commissary" makes off housing and feeding him when he is "on the job." He has no chance to see America through contact with Americans, and is as subject to industrial routine as a checked piece of baggage is to transportation rules. Furthermore, whenever he protests or makes inquiries, he is told that this is America and that to object means the loss of his job.

Now add to this environment and threat the facts that he cannot speak English, that he has little money though plenty of strength, that he has dependents who look to him for their daily bread, that he is probably in debt for his passage over and for his railway ticket to the camp, and that he will be deported if he fails to find work and applies for public help, and we have a fair illustration of an immigrant choosing his occupation.

When the laborer arrives at the camp, he is initiated into the routine of American industrial life. By whom? By the railway officials whose railway he is building? By the Government whose roads he is laying? By the millionaire whose estate he is laying out? By the mine-owner whose ore he is extracting? Not at all. By the padrone or sub-contractor, who, on the one hand, convinces the employer that he can keep his men only by letting them live the way they do in Italy, and, on the other hand, convinces the workmen that they can hold their job only by living the way they live in America.

Once at the camp, the laborer must fit into a ready-made, inflexible scheme of life arranged by the padrone and tolerated by the employer in the hope that he can keep a steady labor supply. The padrone supplies all the laborers needed at any time and any place, without cost to the company, in compensation for being allowed to house and feed the laborers, and in return the company agrees to get men only from him. As the company's agent, the padrone naturally can dismiss the man who objects to his dispensations, or can bully him into accepting them. He can also prevent his being employed by other padroni. The padrone's profit comes from two sources—from the fee he charges each man for his job, and from what he can make off the housing and supplies furnished to these men. He is also frequently the intermediary through whom they do their banking and communicate with their families and friends.

The immigrant, with a hundred of his fellows, is ushered by the padrone into his new American home—an old shack, or a dismounted or ditched box car alongside the track. The company gives these cars free to the padrone, and he in turn charges each man one dollar a month for a bunk. Where the men are working in shifts, two men use a bunk in turn. The workman prepares his meals out of doors in all kinds of weather, after a long day's work, and then sleeps in his dirty bunk, full of vermin, in the crowded, unsanitary, unvequilated box car. (I have been in one shack where one hundred men slept in tiers of bunks, with no ventilation but one hole, covered by a board.) He washes in public, in a near-by stream, and has no sanitary convenience of any kind, though he lives along a public highway.

He has to buy his food from the padrone, who in many camps is allowed to deduct a fixed amount from the laborer's wages every month, whether the man buys that much or not. Sometimes the food is so stale and worthless that the man throws half of it away and buys more somewhere else. He has no place but his bunk in which to keep his food. No matter how little he uses, he pays five cents a week for salt and kerosene—which amounts to two dollars a month for ten men in a shack—a tidy little sum where a padrone has a whole railway division.

The conditions in the highway camps are as bad, if, indeed, not worse. When the State of New York lets a road contract—and it is letting millions of dollars' worth of these contracts—it specifies such mechanical things as grade of materials and hires engineers to see that the work is well done. But to the men who actually do the work the State pays not the slightest attention. It makes no specifications about their housing or food.

When Americans roll over a beautiful piece of macadam in a motor, I wonder how many know that the men who built the road were housed in stables and slept in horse stalls, two or three deep, and paid one dollar a month apiece for the privilege; or that they lived in old disused farm-houses where the rain beat in on them at night, or slept in church pews. In one such house the men slept upstairs because the ground floor was so rotten that it was unsafe. The employer protected himself by posting a notice that whoever used the stairs did so at his own risk, although there was no other way for a man to reach his dollar-a-month cot. In another place the men were housed in an old brick house without light or beds, and they had to sleep in straw two feet thick. Where old houses or barns cannot be rented, new shacks are built, which are so crowded and unventilated that they soon become infected and full of vermin because of lack of care. Then the men build themselves huts out of old boards or ties, or else sleep out of doors, still paying, however, for their shacks. I have rarely seen a highway camp with sanitary or bathing facilities of any kind. The American foremen, the teamsters, and others who have no padrone to boss them are provided with decent sleeping shacks, a messroom, and sanitary conveniences. For the mules there are decent stables or tents.

Is it any wonder that when these men come back to the city in the winter to crowd together in the tenements, waiting for work in the spring, they bring with them disease and a disregard for health laws, modesty, and decency, or that they return to their home country with broken bodies and with hard hearts toward America?

We establish an eight-hour day on public works, with leisure to be used under such conditions! We say to the men, "You may not work more than eight hours," but at the same time we permit living conditions so that the wives of these men (in such camps as those on the Aqueduct), with many little children, live in two to four rooms, taking as many boarders as they see fit. These women sometimes cook for three shifts of men each day and work eighteen hours. One reason for the overcrowding is that the contractor will not put up more houses, and the greed of the employer, when applied to the necessities of the people, sets the standard of morality as well as of living.

Now let an American workman put himself in the immigrant's place in a foreign country. If he were penniless, ignorant of the language, and with no family or proved friends, or in debt for his passage to a man who made it his business to get men in his control and find them jobs, and if he had a family that he knew would suffer if he didn't send them money once a month, what would he do? Stay on the job and support his family and bear the ignominy and suffer the taunts and isolation and bear the discomforts, or would he throw up his job and wander from place to place looking for better conditions, and he awake nights thinking how hungry his children were?

If he were met at the port and taken with a number of his fellows directly to a dismounted or ditched box car alongside the railway tracks, and had to prepare his meals out of doors in all kinds of weather, after a long day's work, and had to sleep in a dirty bunk filled with vermin, and keep his food in his bed; and wash in a near-by stream, and have no sanitary conveniences of any kind, though he lived along a public highway, the railway track, what would he do and where would he go? And if he tried too often to find another job, his padrone friend on one road contract would tell his padrone friend on another, and pretty soon he couldn't find any other job at all, and would have to beg or steal.

And if there were truth in the statement that the immigrant prefers this, is it not time that America said to him: "When you come here, you must live as we do. Your half-nutritious foreign food, your half-cooked meals, the stale, cast-off supplies furnished you, your overcrowding in unsanitary box cars with no ventilation, your drinking of stream waters of all kinds and polluting the soil with excreta, are no longer your concern alone or the railways' concern or Italy's concern or Austria's concern—they are America's, for the protection of her citizens as well as of you. It does not pay your country nor ours to have you go back tuberculosis-infected, maimed, or rendered useless by our unguarded machinery or carelessness, or to have you stay here isolated from your family, living under conditions that you pray God daily your family may never hear about. It is not for your happiness nor ours that you sit in a ditch alongside a hot, dirty railway and write them about the wonderful country America is and say in defense of the lie, My family must never know I have no decent life; the wife she weep to see me so dirty, the children not kiss me—so rough."

Now is not this system poor economy and bad Americanism of the kind that breeds anarchy? The question naturally arises, Why does not the immigrant leave— why does he come here? The supply of men has been so great that it has been possible to get new men each year who knew nothing of conditions. The power of the padrone is so absolute that, once here, he can prevent their getting other jobs. Immigrants are now going to South America and to Canada in large numbers, and, once the stimulation and misrepresentations of the agents of those who profit off them are stopped, America will have a famine of unskilled laborers. America is reaping in discontent and disorder and loss of property and life, in proportion as it has failed to sow in the hearts of these trusting men and women who come here to work a sense of justice and fairness and mercy. The Government has had little thought for their protection, the trade union little interest in bettering their condition; the average citizen has not held out a friendly, helping hand, and the civic organization has not yet extended its help. This is true, in face of the fact that the remedies are comparatively simple. If we admit aliens, it follows that we must provide some sure, efficient process of assimilation, as effective as our system of admission and exclusion, and not leave it to hope and chance. We must unite our good forces of government and citizenship against the combinations which regard the alien not as of citizenship material but only as a pawn in the industrial game.

To begin with, the padrone must go. He is the survival of a political structure not countenanced to-day, when newer political ideals are fast coming into action. The padrone has no place in American life. His very existence is sufficient explanation of some kinds of social unrest, for robbery, extortion, and injustice practiced on helpless men lead them toward anarchy. Keeping the padrone in power will more and more surely widen the breach between employers and employees. The padrone is obviously a bad business investment. If employers will stop dealing through the padrone and hire and house their own men or leave it to the men themselves, permitting them to buy what they want where they will, or boarding them as it does Americans, it would pave the way for securing contented and steady workmen. One road has abolished padroni and has built neat houses for its men, which they keep in good condition and orderly. Another road has an Italian foreman who has no difficulty in hiring men. Another road has introduced an accounting system which curtailed the graft so much that some of the padroni gave up the business. These employers have no difficulty in getting employees and keeping them. I wonder how many employers know that these padroni move gangs of men from one job to another weekly or monthly, collecting additional fees, unsettling the labor market, and making the men dissatisfied and restless—engendering the "hobo" spirit in men who have been steady peasant workers in their home country. This elimination of the padroni is the employers' task.

The industrial labor market must be organized. It is incredible that business men should tolerate the present methods. No other country can afford to do so, and we are competing with other countries in production. Private employment agencies charging fees must be replaced by municipal and State agencies with central registries and daily bulletins of unemployment and opportunities, all welded together through a Federal bureau of distribution. We have no knowledge, nor means of getting it, of the movement of unskilled labor. In this connection there should be a study of casual and seasonable labor and efforts made to dovetail employments or so organize industry that these evils will be reduced. One illustration will show our wastefulness: A railway knows that on December 1 it will discharge one hundred men at Binghamton, New York. A lumber camp in Essex County wants these men. They are simply turned out by the railway and come all of the way to New York City, spend their savings, and are demoralized by days of non-employment, wandering about at agencies and among padroni, and then, if they find the agent to whom the lumber camp has applied, they are sent all the way back across the State or. remain to crowd the tenements. Men can no longer find jobs at little cost and effort through our cumbersome, disorganized, unrelated, and wholly haphazard way of handling our labor supply, and should no longer be expected to do so. This is the business of the Government.

Under present conditions the carrying of the American message to the immigrant is a large task. He has much to learn. We know that he does not spend his wages wisely, that he does not eat the right food nor wear the right clothes for this climate, and that, as he lives now, he is cut off from Americanizing influences. He needs to be taught how Americans live, that no man can do good work under conditions now existing in average labor camps, that he must have fair wages, and that America is the place to spend them. The immigrant as he stands to-day is a producer, but a small consumer—an unwise combination for the country in which he lives. Too large a part of his savings and investments leaves America. The labor unions must do their share. It is for them to make the immigrant see how he ought to live now that he is an American workman. They should organize the immigrants so as to enable them to resist the padrone's extortions and to obtain fair conditions. These men want to know about this new count.y, about its duties, rights, and privileges. Classes in English and civics, the insistence on provisions for recreation, meet with a warm response, but are not enough to set things right unless connected with the labor conditions. Workmen can bring-to each other what no others can supply. This should be done before grievances have come to bear so heavily that men can respond only in passion and not in understanding.

We must establish a minimum standard of living in such camps, covering living quarters, outbuildings, drainage, water supply, and refuse and garbage. No temporary camp should be established along the line of any public works without the approval of the health commissioner. New York State is the first State to take this matter up; its new health law provides for a council with power to adopt a sanitary code for all such camps.

It would be better if employers did not rely wholly upon law. For the section hands who are permanent employees the solution is the small section house with a room for sleeping, another for eating and cooking, with bathing and laundry facilities and sanitary provisions. For the construction gang, which consists of temporary men and has to cover considerable territory, there should be separate cars used only for sleeping, with proper ventilation, with steel bunks which are easily cleaned, and a car for dining and cooking purposes. Where there is more than one car—and they range as high as ten—I am convinced that such an arrangement will produce better labor results. Model section houses and cars for laborers have already been designed by those interested in housing conditions. I was much impressed, in a camp inspection, to find an old-time passenger and baggage car combined, which had been given to the men, set aside for recreation. It was used for dancing, cardplaying, and smoking, was scrupulously neat, and, though the men were herded in the other cars, no one slept in it. For the public work gangs portable houses will answer every purpose. For the small industrial camp in which families live adequate provision should be made for separating the boarders from the family.

The increased cost will to some extent be offset by the increased ability to get or keep labor, avoidance of delay in completing work, and prevention of accidents due to faulty work by employees. Furthermore, the men will be found willing to pay for such accommodations. My experience in these camps does not lead me to agree with the people who excuse Americans on the ground that the immigrant will not be appreciative of decencies and comfort. In one labor camp, where the tunnel work on the aqueduct was exceptionally dirty, shower-baths were urged, and the contractor protested, not on the ground of cost, but because they would not be used. A month after their installation they were so popular that he had to put in an extra tank to get a sufficient water supply, and complained that his meal-bags were disappearing because the men in search for clean linen were making their shirts out of them.

The question facing America to-day is: Shall we leave the fixing of living standards to the Industrial Workers of the World to be worked out in terms of war, or shall we Americans work it out in terms of peace, utilizing to the full for American progress the splendid vitality, courage, loyalty, and intelligence which these men and women workers from abroad come here prepared to give to America?