HIS EMPLOYEES' WRETCHED WAGES.
In his wholesale and retail stores he employed not less than ten thousand men, women and children. He compelled them to work for wages which, in a large number of cases, were inadequate even for a bare subsistence. Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less. The female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day, making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable wages of $6.75 a week. Makers of socks and stockings were paid from $4.57 to $4.75 a week. The working hours consisted variously of from fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week. Field also manufactured his own furniture as well as many other articles. Furniture workers were paid: Machine workers, $11.02, and upholsterers $12.47 a week. All of Field's wage workers were paid by the hour; should they fall sick, or work become slack, their pay was proportionately reduced.
The wretchedness in which many of these workers lived, and in which they still live (for the same conditions obtain), was pitiful in the extreme. Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency. But in Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large city, their wages were notoriously scanty.
Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than could be had elsewhere. Every cent economized meant much. If an investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed them to their wretched homes after their day's work, he would have noted, or learned of, these conditions: Their food was circumscribed and