An obscure group of women, calling themselves the Working Women's Society, came out with the announcement that they proposed to form the women clerks of the city into a labor union.
These women said that the girls in the department stores were receiving wages lower than the sweat-shop standard.

They said that a foreign woman in a downtown garment shop could earn seven dollars a week, whereas an American girl in a fashionable store received about four dollars and a half.
They also charged that the city ordinance providing seats for saleswomen was habitually violated, and that the girls were forced to stand from ten to fourteen hours a day.

They said that sanitary conditions in the cloak rooms and lunch rooms of some of the stores were such as to endanger health and life.

They said that the whole situation was so bad that no clerk endured it for a longer period than five years.

Mostly they were used up in two years.