Phone Workers' Strike

Striking has been in style so long among laboring men that it no longer excites much comment except when it affects some industry in which the public is intimately concerned. But a strike of women exclusively is a novelty. That is what made unusually interesting the operators' strike in the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company

The reasons why women do not strike more are common knowledge: 1) Women's work is mainly unskilled, and therefore women workers are usually easy to replace. 2) Many women workers get free board at home or are otherwise not entirely self-dependent, so that wages are not as vital a concern to them as to most male workers. 3) Many women workers enter industry for only a short time in their youth, so that there is a large turnover in their ranks which hinders thorough organization.

But the Telephone Operators' Department of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is in a unique position. Telephone operators are trained, not born; what is more, according to the statement of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, its labor turnover is less than 16% a year. In these circumstances a strike was possible--and the telephone girls struck. They had been working eight hours a day with rest periods, reducing the actual work period to seven hours and a half. The pay ranged from $9 a week for student operators to $22 a week maximum after five-and a half years' service. The operators demanded an hour's less work and pay ranging from $15 a week for student operators to $27 a week maximum at the end of four years' service.

The first day found the strike ineffective in Northern New England and only partly effective in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Thereafter the situation eased off in those two states, except in Providence. The telephone Company published advertisements asking the public to bear such inconveniences as might occur and declaring that operators' wages had not been reduced from the war-time peak, that they received two weeks' vacation with full pay each year and other perquisites. The strike appeared to have been broken.