Part 11

“Satisfactory if watched.”

“I have been able to get only one girl, who is entirely untrained, though willing.”

“Competent for plain sewing and mending.”

“Competent for plain work.”

“For very plain sewing and mending her work is very neat.”

“Qualified for plain sewing; not to cut or fit.”

“I do not employ any at present, as I have found all I have tried incapable or unreliable.”

Forty-eight report paying from $2.00 to $3.00 a day, which always includes lunch, and often breakfast and carfare. The remainder paying $1.00, $1.50 and $1.75 a day. There is an opportunity in this field for a number—perhaps fifty—competent workers.

The day is as a rule eight and a half hours long, beginning at eight in the morning and ending at five in the afternoon. No one nationality can be said to give more satisfactory service than another, although the Portuguese are by far the most numerous. The reports cover:

57 Portuguese 15 Hawaiians or part Hawaiians 2 Negresses 2 Norwegians 1 Russian 1 American — 78

Five dressmakers employ about 30 girls, whom they pay from $3.00 to $15.00 a week, the lower amount stated in each case as being paid to apprentices. The dressmakers report eight and one-half hours a day, and one states that she gives a half holiday on Saturday and extra pay for overtime. The majority of the dressmakers’ assistants are Portuguese, and these are considered the most efficient workers. A Japanese girl in one shop is also giving satisfaction, but Hawaiians and half-Chinese are not reported on favorably.

Japanese maids are in some instances being trained by their mistresses as seamstresses, and several Japanese women are now going out by the day, but none were reported in the investigation and no definite information could be secured concerning them.

Girls working in other establishments, however, report ten and eleven hours’ work, at low wages; and a shop manager who employs girls for alterations states he has had complaints from dressmakers’ employes that they did not receive their pay. In other instances they complained of not being paid promptly.

This charge is a common one in the dressmaking business, the proprietors of certain New York establishments saying their bills were neglected for so long a period—some customers, usually women of wealth, paying their bills only once in six months—that their own capital became exhausted.

Each of the department stores employs from one to three alteration hands, who are paid from $10 to $15 a week, the former being the amount paid two Hawaiian girls, who were considered by their employers to be slower and less energetic than the Portuguese woman who received $15 a week.

In the millinery shops the girls in the work rooms would be considerably benefitted by a preliminary course in sewing. They now begin their apprenticeship with no salary at all in two shops; a salary of from $1.00 to $2.00 is paid where the apprentice also delivers parcels and runs errands.

There are only a dozen or fifteen workers in the millinery shops, and it does not seem worth while in this community to give a millinery course for trade purposes.

There is a large demand for needlework, and the shops taking orders for it and also having articles on sale, report a thriving business. The workers earn very little, however, the average among a dozen women talked with being from fifty to sixty cents a day, while some earn only thirty cents. This is the usual state of affairs among the makers of hand work, as indeed in most home industries. The shopkeepers say they are handicapped by the fact that the same women who work for them also work for private customers, and underbid them. One shop maintains that it earns only a 10% commission and its stamping charges. Another shop employs Portuguese women on plantations and says it not only pays their fare into town when they come for work, but that work is often taken out to the plantations at the shop’s expense. It was not possible to visit any of these plantation workers and learn what they earn.

The work offered for sale in most of the shops indicates that training in the designing and selecting of patterns would be desirable; and none of the shops show the pillow laces, so well made as by the girls of the Industrial School.

LEI MAKING AND LAUHALA WEAVING

The makers of leis—the beautiful garlands of carnations, ilima, ginger or hydrangea interwoven with maile, forming the hat and neck-encircling masses of fragrance and color which speed departing friends, or bedeck luau and poi luncheon guests—enliven the street corners of the shopping district at all times, sitting in the shade of nearby buildings with their ti-leaf covered baskets by their sides, busily making the more durable leis of paper, shell or seeds, and almost invariably discussing suffrage. On steamer days the downtown districts and piers are alive with men and women vendors of this most characteristic native ornament.

Usually the women of the family make the leis, the men cultivating the flowers for their manufacture in the home garden patches. There are perhaps two dozen of these women in Honolulu, each of whom has her regular stand on one street corner or another. But the leis themselves are made everywhere. A trip through a tenement block at eleven o’clock at night disclosed an entire family, men, women, half-grown girls and children,—eight in all,—asleep on the floor, while an older woman, an aunt, sat on the floor in the farthest corner making yellow paper leis for a suffrage meeting, by the light of an oil lamp. It is the most general home occupation of the Hawaiian woman, and the lei itself in one form or another, usually of red or yellow paper, decorate picture frames and mantels at least in every other home one enters. It was found even on the occasion of a visit to the high-perched cottage of a Black Forest German iron-worker, married to a French woman from the Pyranees, who owns a homestead at the head of one of the beautiful valleys, with an outlook sweeping from the crest of one hill to the next, the sound of a nearby waterfall always accompanying the soughing of the trade wind. The crescent moon, accompanied by Venus, topped one of the hills as our host settled himself back in his veranda chair and grunted comfortably: “I think I don’t know any better place as Honolulu for a working man.—No?”

Lei making is evidently a profitable occupation. The vendors say that the usual receipts are $9.00 a day on steamer days, and from $2.00 to $3.00 or $4.00 on other days. It is taught by the older Hawaiian women to the next generation, and I fancy any newcomer to the ranks would have much the same sort of fight for place as would a newsboy on a rival’s route.

The garlands sell at twenty-five cents each, and the blossoms are either gathered up in the hills or are raised at home. Only one lei-maker talked with purchased any of her flowers. She said she bought about half her supply from a Japanese gardener.

* * * * *

Lauhala weaving is a passing native industry, and while mats, fans and pillow-covers are found in the curio shops, dealers and some of the older Hawaiians say that the rush to turn land into pineapple and sugar cultivation has eradicated the lauhala until it is not now obtainable in any quantity sufficient for commercial uses, from every island but Molokai.

The mats, of a soft, light tan color, are the ideal covering for bungalow floors. They are woven in inch or two-inch squares, and have a dull, satiny finish that is very attractive. They are scrubbed with soap and water, and the lauhala fiber may be preserved indefinitely for mending purposes, if moistened with water occasionally.

There is undoubtedly a good local market for these mats, and their beauty and durability ought to make them popular elsewhere if a sufficient supply of raw material were guaranteed. Most of those in use here are made to order, although a few of the shops have a small stock for sale.