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Newspaper Page Text
STARVATION AND FREEZING FACE THESE 5,000 STRIKERS, BUT THEY STAND FIRM By a Staff Correspondent. Philadelphia, Nov. 28. For 19 weeks now 5,000 men and women- here have been holding out agairist hunger and privation in one of the most remarkable industrial fights this country has even known. , They are members of the Ladies' Garment Workers', Union, on strike in this city. And they face at least 10 weeks more of suffering from cold and starvation, of violence at the hands of the police. Yet there is not one trace of wavering in their atti tude. "How long can you stand it?" I asked Isadore Neibauer, 20, chair man of his shop, a lad who earned an average of $9 a week last year, and who has a wife and child! "Two years, ' he replied. "You must have money." "I have pawned everything." "Suppose'it conies to starvation would you let your baby starve rather than go back as a strikebreaker?" "Yes," he answered grimly. "I have 5,000 babies They are, you know, 5,000 of us on strike." "You think I not care for family?" he continued, mistaking my-silence. ' "Look!" He pulled up his sleeve,, showing a long, deep scar in the crook of his el bow. "My mothersick," be said. "She near death. The doctors say she need blood. I let my mother have no blood but mine. She get well, I get well. Now Ihave a little brother born after that." Mrs. Louis Donievski is the mother of six children; the oldest is 12. Her husband, a skirt maker, earns $8 a week on an average She said to me: "We have every day one loaf at 5 cents, one loaf at 4 cents, a little sugar, a little tea, sometimes two pounds of potatoes for 3 cents. That is all. Never in 19 we,eks have we aten meat. Twice in a week we have a bucket of coal. I sell the bed -guilts to buy shoes for the children ft. At night I cover them with rags. "' They shiver. He have never had enough to eat never." "Don't you want your husband to go to work?" "As a 'scab'? No! We starve and freeze first." Little smiling Celia Rodin, a Rus sian revolutionist, paused in her picketing. She had had no break- fast. Her clothes were threadbare. "Six times here the police arrest me for picketing," she told me. "It is nothing. I am used to arrest. Four times in Russia have I been in prison. "When I was 15, six of us tunneled into a prison" to rescue a friend. A gendarme interfered. He died quick. They caught me, and charg ed me with murder. I escaped, and the great Tolstoi took me into his house. Two weeks I was there. Then he Bent me to friends at Frankfort.- At Paris I went to school. I am here one year. Look here is Tolstoi's photograph that he gave me. Under it Leo Tolstoi, the famous Russian novelist, had written, in Rus sian: "So long as you live, you will be a socialist; and if need be, you will give your life for the cause." "Would you give ytfur life for this strike?" I asked. "Sure!" she smiled. "What is life?" And the spirit of ihese is the spirit of all. It is a fight against the sweatshop, chiefly. There are demands of bet ter wages, shorter hours, cleanliness, recognition of the union, etc., but the abolition of the vicious contracting system is paramount HgaafiBfijfiBI totmtu.,.