THE WORKINGMEN'S LEAGUE 191the police had to be called to stop the rioting which resulted. In
May, 1850, the Laborers' Union of New York City, which in
cluded only the unskilled, demanded a rate of $1.12½ a day.
Among all the workers who complained of the economic and
social maladjustments from which they were suffering, the lot of
the seamstresses was perhaps the most pitiful. A tailoress in New
York received eighteen cents apiece for making summer vests,
twenty cents for pantaloons, eighteen cents for light coats, and
from four to eight cents for shirts. For the finest shirts, which re
quired two days to make, they were paid but fifty cents. Parasol
stitchers, who covered the ribs of umbrellas with silk, received
four cents per umbrella. It is apparent from such figures that a
seamstress might earn a maximum of twenty-four cents a day by
working twelve hours and producing three shirts a day. The num
ber of seamstresses employed under such pitiful conditions was
estimated at 40,000 in New York alone. Many worked in hot,
miserable quarters in the worst tenement areas of the city. When
the shirt sewers finally organized in 1851, they had little difficulty
in enlisting the support of many public-spirited citizens, and
Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher pledged one hundred
dollars each to their union funds.^4 In 1855, a committee of workers
petitioned the City Council of New York to appropriate $500,-
000 for the erection of tenements on lots belonging to the city,
partly to make work for the unemployed and partly to provide
cheaper housing.
Such conditions produced an epidemic of strikes which reached
a climax just at the time Weitling landed in New York. The New
York papers for 1850 contain many notices of labor meetings and
in addition to the more common trades, list organizations of hat
finishers, porters, "baggage smashers," milliners, marble polishers,
sculptors, paper hangers, jewelers, brushmakers, "segar makers,"
and members of other trades. Because of the newly established
Croton water system the plumbers of New York for the first time
became important enough to justify a separate organization. Some
(^4) New York Tribune, June 8, 1853.