I felt Rose dig me in the ribs.
“Late on your first day and argumentative too? Dear me, that’s not a good sign, Miss Murphy. I’ll have to dock you twenty cents so that you learn to keep your trap shut. Now get to your machines, all of you!”
As Rose and I made our way down the line of machines she whispered to me, “I should have warned you—if you oppose him, he fines you, so it’s not worth it.”
“But I’m sure we weren’t late. How can we have taken eight minutes to cross one street?”
“We weren’t late. He puts the hands forward on the clock. He does it all the time. And he turns the hands back when we aren’t looking so that we work later at night.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. That’s disgusting. Does the owner know?”
“Oh, I’m sure the owner knows all about it,” Rose said. “He turns a blind eye, if he didn’t order it in the first place.”
“It’s terrible. We should do something. They can’t treat us like that. It’s just not fair.”
Rose smiled and shook her head. “You’re new,” she said. “You’ll learn that a lot of things aren’t fair.” She leaned closer to me. “Oh, and another word of warning—don’t let Katz get you into the backroom alone. He’ll claim there is something wrong with your work, or pretend he needs to give you a talking-to. All he wants to do is to force himself on you. He’s tried it with a lot of girls.”
“I still hear talking!” Katz’s voice shouted. “Someone want no pay this week?”
We got down to work. I watched the clock carefully all evening to make sure that Mr. Katz didn’t try to move the hands backward. I was dying to catch him at it. But he didn’t go near it.
It was raining and a cold wind was blowing as we staggered up into the fresh air at seven o’clock.
“I’ll see you bright and early then,” Rose said. “He likes us in our seats at six thirty, although our day officially starts at seven.”
“If that was one day, I don’t know how I’ll manage a whole week,” I said. “My back is so stiff from that broken chair. I pointed it out to Katz and he told me I could bring my own if I wanted.”
Rose waited for a group of girls to go past, then pulled me closer to her, under an awning out of the rain. “If you really want to help change things, some of us are trying to get a union going. There’s a meeting on Wednesday night.”
I had promised myself I wouldn’t get involved. I shook my head. “I’d really like to, but . . .”
She nodded. “I understand. It’s a big risk. If someone snitches on us and the bosses find out, nobody would hire us again, but I’m willing to take the risk. I’m educated. I can think for myself. If someone doesn’t speak out for these girls, nothing will ever change.”
“You’re very brave.”
She laughed. “Maybe I’m just stupid. Me and my big mouth, huh? But I feel it’s up to me—most of these girls are peasants, they can’t even read and write. They don’t speak English well, and their families are desperate for money. So they shut up and put up with all of this. We won’t get nothing unless we unionize. My brother was with the Bund in Poland.”
“The Bund?”
“It’s a radical socialist group, working to change the old order—justice, freedom, equality for all people. Many Jewish boys were involved, even though it meant possible prison or even death. My brother had to keep his work secret from my father—my father would never have approved.”
“What does your brother do now?”
“He lies in an unmarked grave. He was executed when one of their group betrayed them to the secret police.”
I touched her arm. “I’m so sorry. So many tragedies in the world.”
“That’s why I’m doing this work with the union. Someone has to make sure my Motl didn’t die for nothing. Someone has to make sure this country is better than the last one.” She draped her shawl over her head. “Think about it and let me know if you change your mind. You’d be a real help, because you speak good English.”
“So do you.”
“Ya, but I sound like a foreigner—a newnik. Nobody’s going to take me seriously. The union loves English-speaking girls. There was this English girl who came a few times. You should have heard her talk—oy, but she talked real pretty. Just like the queen of England. ‘We’re going to make these petty tyrants sit up and listen to us,’ she said.” Rose did a fair imitation of upper-class English speech. Then she laughed. “Real hoity-toity, she was. I got a kick out of her.”
“She’s not there anymore?”
Rose shook her head. “Nah. She only came for a few weeks, then she didn’t show up no more. I expect she’d found something better—a girl like her from good family. I don’t know what she was doing working in no lousy sweatshop to start with.”
I was getting a chill up my spine and it wasn’t from the drips that were falling on us from the awning.