these miserable shop clerks. In Canton, after a long strike, the hours of clerks in the big department stores were limited to 10 per day. In the small stores hours are still 13 to 16 per day. In some of the tea houses the hours are 12, because they keep open night and day and the Union will no longer permit the 24-hour shift that used to prevail, when the workers slept at odd moments when there were no customers but had to be present at all times ready for work. Almost all of them live and eat in the shops, their lodgings usually consisting of a shelf under a counter, or beneath a staircase, and their food the inevitable bowl of rice, with a bit of pork on feast days. They begin work as apprentices, with no wages, which only start with the fourth year. Wages in the small and poorer shops average average $10 per month; in the big stores and the richer establishments, the average is $15 per month.
Women and child labor is even more exploited than that of men. Generally their wages are from 30% to 60% of that of men. Besides ordinary coolie labor, they are found principally in the small factories (matches, hosiery, silk, food preparation, etc.). There are 16,000 women members in the trade unions of Canton, which the union leaders claim is 80% of the women workers. The hosiery workers are 100% organized, the match factories 70%. Women and children have relatively made the greatest gains from trade union organization.
Hygienic conditions are indescribably bad. That is, of course, true for the entire population, including employers, for sanitation in a modern sense is only in its beginnings. Only in the modern industries, the Government plants, big department stores, is there a begining of sanitation and hygiene. These also have dispensaries with modern medical attendance for the workers.
16. Conditions in the Interior
The conditions described above are in Canton, a great city, the most modern in China aside from Shanghai and Hankow, where the trade unions had been able to work openly for several years. What then must the conditions
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