The Territory of Hawaii has as yet no labor laws, and therefore the hours during which men, women and children work are governed entirely by the will of employers, the workers’ own wishes or economic necessities, and in the case of children by the act providing that they shall attend school during ten months in the year until they are fifteen, when they may be released to go to work.

Employment in the canneries is by the hour, each employe being given a time card which is punched on coming to work in the morning, on resuming work at noon, and on leaving at night.

While the cannery season is short, it is also exacting. In addition to a regular eleven-hour day for four months in the year, a maximum of sixty hours overtime night work and thirty hours of Sunday work was reported by one cannery. Two others report less amounts. One employer said he worked his employes all they would stand for. Weekly pay envelopes show from seventy to eighty hours of work per week, in some cases running as high as eighty-four hours. In California, where the season extended over fourteen weeks, averaging sixty-three hours each, two cannery officials, each in a different cannery, are reported by the investigator of the Department of Commerce and Labor as volunteering the opinion that “cannery work was so much of a strain that workers were unfit to do other work when the cannery season was over.”^[7]

Perhaps the women employes in the small Chinese and Japanese shops have the longest hours continuously, as these shops open at seven o’clock in the morning and do not close until nine o’clock or later in the evening.

The workers in the laundries, who have a regular ten-hour day, perform overtime work until eight or nine o’clock at least twice a week, and during the winter season, when the tourists are most numerous, one laundry manager reported eighty-seven hours overtime in one month. Saturday is a half holiday unless there is a special rush of work.

Household servants, here as elsewhere, are among the least considered sufferers from the long day, and although Honolulu mistresses of households call to one’s attention the fact that no servants are on duty in the evening, that may be regarded rather as a mitigation of one of the greatest hardships borne by domestic servants, rather than as having a bearing on the general question of a normal working day.

Honolulu is an early riser, and servants come on duty at half-past six. Dinner is not over at the earliest until seven o’clock, which means that the work of the maid who waits on the table continues for at least twelve and one-half hours, and longer if she has any duties after dinner.

There are few women cooks, the domestic servants being almost exclusively housemaids, waitresses and nursemaids. Where several maids are employed, each of them has an hour or two of leisure through the day; but in the case of the cook-and-one-maid menage, which is by far the most common, Sunday afternoon, and occasionally,—but by no means universally,—an afternoon during the week is given. The long day is a potent factor in the servant problem; and yet the Japanese women, like their sisters in other communities, prefer to go to work at the machines in the little shops. I have talked with as many of them as could understand English, and none would consider going back to housework. On having their attention called to the fact that they were working just as long in the shops they smiled and nodded, saying: “Bimeby not work so long,” which may forecast a similar situation to that brought about by certain of the Chinese huis, who have, notably among the tailors, succeeded in securing an eleven-hour day. It is an undoubted fact that rather than become a household servant at a minimum wage of $4.00 a week and her food,—in many cases all her living expense,—the women work twelve and fourteen hours in the shop for from $2.00 to $5.00.

Clerks and stenographers have an eight-hour day. Shop girls are on duty from seven-forty-five until five o’clock, with an hour at noon and a Saturday half holiday three months in the year. One shop closes on Saturday at one o’clock four months in the year.

The shop girls have two weeks’ vacation with pay, and all the stores provide seats.

Stenographers also have two weeks’ vacation with pay, in a great many cases being allowed a three months’ vacation every three years.

Teachers are on duty from eight-forty-five in the morning until two-fifteen in the afternoon—almost an hour and a half less than the regulation time for this work. They have a somewhat longer vacation, too, than elsewhere.

In her consideration of hours of work, in “Women and the Trades,”^[8] Miss Butler questions the length of the working day which may be considered “long.” “At present (even) ten hours as the limit of the working day is far from universal,” she says. “Should ten hours, however, be set as a permissive standard? Or should we seek rather to work out, on the basis of health, a lower maximum beyond which no employe may go, and below this maximum set others corresponding to the degree of strain in different industries?... Hours are ‘long,’ whether the day is eight hours or ten, if the work is continued so long that it causes ill health or interferes with the employes’ capacity for recreation.”

This latter statement is especially interesting in the light of a conversation with the manager of one of the Honolulu canneries. He was asked his opinion of the degree of danger to the cannery women employes from being obliged to go through Iwilei, especially on their way from work in the evening. He said: “After the girls have worked ten or twelve hours a day there is not much danger that they will skylark. They are only too glad to get home and to bed.”

But even though they are too tired to “skylark” they do not go to bed. Here as elsewhere the large majority of women workers have household tasks—cooking, washing and ironing—to perform both before and after working hours; and many have children to care for. This is especially true of the Hawaiian, Chinese and Japanese, and I have seen the women standing on first one foot and then the other to relieve the strain as early as nine o’clock in the morning, after a stretch of long hours.

Managers of the canneries say that the workers are at liberty to stop work at any hour of the day they wish, as the pay is by the hour. In common practice, however, it is made as difficult as possible to secure an accounting for time excepting at regular periods; and when work is pressing permission to leave before closing time is refused.

Managers themselves say that the habit of going home before closing time or at noon is more common among the younger girls who are working during their school vacation,—which occurs almost identically with the canning season,—than among the regular workers.

The Hawaiian enjoys her work, as she enjoys most of the things she does, and she is as yet too new to industry to show superficially any ill effects of labor. It was not possible, in the three and one-half months of the investigation, to make any study of the effects of work on her health.

The experience of the world, however, is more than likely to be the experience of Hawaii.

Hours of work and the resulting fatigue strains have been made the subject of a close, scientific investigation, covering a period of five years, by Miss Josephine Goldmark, publication secretary of the National Consumers’ League, which has now been published in book form under the title of “Fatigue and Efficiency,” and gives the results of the experience of both Europe and America concerning the effects of long hours, night work and occupational strains on women workers. Miss Goldmark also gives the substance of four briefs prepared by her under the direction of Mr. Louis D. Brandeis in his successful defense of various State laws limiting women’s hours of labor.

Her investigation shows that long hours of work by women, especially if performed in a standing position, mean to the community heightened infant mortality, a falling birth rate, and race degeneration, while to the workers themselves they mean every sort of disorder. In speaking of general injuries to health, Miss Goldmark says: “The fatigue which follows excessive working hours becomes chronic, and results in general deterioration of health. While it may not result in immediate disease, it undermines the whole system by weakness and anaemia.”

On the other hand the good effect of short hours is shown by the growth of temperance, and “wherever sufficient time has elapsed since the establishment of the shorter working day, the succeeding generation has shown extraordinary improvement in physique and morals.”^[9]

Several pages of testimony from all over the world are submitted in support of the statement that “even the lightest work becomes totally exhausting when carried on for an excessive length of time.” She quotes from Dr. Ludwig Hirt’s “The Disease of Working People”: “No attitude of the body is harmful in itself; only in prolonging it until it produces harmful results; all the well-known disturbances, such as varicose veins, etc., etc., arise not through sitting or standing, but through excessively prolonged sitting or standing.”^[10]

For the protection of their women workers more than thirty American States have enacted laws limiting the hours of employment for women; but only three States,—Massachusetts, Indiana and Nebraska,—have passed a law in such form as to make it enforcible. Miss Goldmark defines “the rigid law, which prohibits overtime and night work,” as “one which provides fixed boundaries for working hours. It protects women from working after a specified hour at night, and more than a given number of hours by the day or week. The best exemplar of this kind of law in the United States is the Massachusetts statute which prohibits the employment of women in textile mills more than ten hours in one day, or more than fifty-four hours in one week, or before six o’clock in the morning or after six o’clock in the evening.... The law is final. Its provisions are clear cut. Employers, employes and inspectors know without disagreement or argument what constitutes a violation. Work continued after the specified closing hour is conclusive evidence of violation.”

As showing the beneficial effect of shorter hours on output, Miss Goldmark quotes at length from the testimony of various Massachusetts employers of labor. The Treasurer of the Atlantic Mills, in Lawrence, stated: “We saw an improvement in the operatives directly after adopting ten hours.... We have had more continuous and uninterrupted work throughout the year than before.” The Report of the Massachusetts District Police states: “One manufacturer stated to me a short time ago that he had run his mill sixty-six hours per week, supposing that by so doing he increased the production nearly one-eleventh, but was persuaded... to reduce his running time to sixty hours per week, and at the end of six months found that the production of his mill had increased nearly ten per cent, while the quality of work done was more perfect.”

The entire question of the long day is as yet in its incipiency in Hawaii, and the closing paragraph of Miss Goldmark’s preface is peculiarly pertinent. She says:

“In the main opposition to laws protecting working women and children has come from the unenlightened employer, who has been blind to his own larger interests and who has always seen in every attempt to protect the workers an interference with business and dividends. To this day it is the short-sighted and narrow-minded spirit of money-making that is the most persistent enemy of measures designed to save the workers from exhaustion and to conserve their working capacities. Regular, continuous labor and exertion is as necessary for the worker’s health as it is for subsistence, and if legislation regulating the workday had sought to invade legitimate work, it would long ago have defeated its own end....

“First the new industry, then exploitation, then the demand for some measure of protection—such is the universal story. Nor is this a chance sequence. It is the relentless record of history, the more impressive for its unconscious testimony to a waste of human effort and experience, in retrospect scarcely credible among a thinking people, yet in our very midst persisting steadily to this day.”

Hawaiian employers, most of whom are kamaainas, sincerely interested in the welfare of the Hawaiian girls and women, have not given adequate thought to the broader social problems of their employes. Kind treatment, good air and light do much to mitigate matters, but no woman or girl can work standing continuously for ten or more hours a day and retain her health. Nor will she in this way become a homemaker, and an intelligent mother and member of the community.

AN ACT

Section 1. The term “establishment” where used in this Act shall mean any place within this Territory other than where domestic or agricultural labor is employed; where men, women or children are engaged and paid a salary or wages by any person, firm or corporation, and where such men, women or children are employes in the general acceptance of that term.

Section 2. No minor under the age of sixteen years, and no female shall be employed in any establishment for a longer period than sixty (60) hours in any one week nor for a longer period than ten (10) hours in any one day.

Section 3. No minor under sixteen years and no female shall be employed or suffered to work in any establishment before the hour of six in the morning, or after the hour of six in the evening.

Section 4. Retail mercantile establishments shall be exempt from the provisions of Sections 2 and 3 hereof during a period of ten days beginning with the fifteenth day of December and ending with the twenty-fourth day of the same month.

Section 5. Any person, firm or corporation violating any provision of this Act shall, upon conviction, be fined in a sum not less than One Hundred Dollars ($100.00) or more than Five Hundred Dollars ($500.00) for each day any person is employed, permitted or suffered to work in violation of this Act.

Section 6. This Act shall be in force and effect from and after the date of its approval.