320 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
work and each week's work to a specified number of hours. There is no time at night set when employees must be dismissed, pro- vided they are not detained more than the maximum number of hours. The hardships of the holiday trade are recognized by reducing to ten hours, during December, the inhumane Pennsyl- vania working-day of twelve hours for women and children.
This direct method of restricting the hours of labor during December, which has been admirably enforced in Massachusetts, is clearly the most effective check upon a deplorable abuse. The indirect method of New York, where the older employees are automatically benefited by the law prohibiting employment of girls under twenty-one years after 10 p. M., is at best uncertain. Those establishments which employ no minors under twenty-one years may detain their older saleswomen until any hour of the night, and for as many hours in the day or in the week as they may see fit.
Women in stores, The shortened workday is as greatly needed by the employees of mercantile establishments as it is by factory workers. The increased activity of the modern depart- ment store, with its long hours of standing, especially at the rush seasons, adds to the strain of such employment, as the improved machinery does to the modern factory. Moreover, the very general legal provision requiring seats for employees is most difficult to enforce. The existence of the seats is easily secured; liberty to use them may as easily be denied. The comparative leisure for their use is at best short; but the curtailed working- day, such as the best shops now approximate, would be a definite and enforceable protection.
Sweat-shops. As the agitation against child-labor has brought to light numbers of child workers until recently ignored by any protecting legislation (the little newsboys, the peddlers, the lads in the messenger service, and other street workers), so a renewed interest in legislation for women reveals the army of nondescript women workers unprotected by any law. The thousands upon thousands of women in the tenements of large cities who carry on tenement industries who sew by hand or on foot-power machines, who make every variety of women's wear
