There was much to occupy David’s mind in addition to his traumatic homelife. Industrial strife was affecting the garment trade no less than others and though Salaman’s was still not a union shop, some of the newer employees thought it should be.
David was unaware of this until he found them conducting a heated discussion in the pressing room, during the morning tea break. Abraham was drinking his tea with Eli and the agitators had the room to themselves. They stopped talking when David entered.
“So what’s going on in here you don’t want me to know about?” he joked, but sensed that whatever was afoot might not be a joking matter.
The three youths exchanged a glance. Jake and Mendel were machiners. Maxie was one of the underpressers.
“We’ll tell you when there’s something to tell, Mr. Sandberg,” Mendel said brusquely.
David was taken aback by his antagonistic expression. He knew Mendel had been to high school like himself, that his education had been cut short for the same economic reasons, but boys to whom this happened were not rarities in Strangeways. He glanced at the book Mendel had in his hand with the instinctive interest books always aroused in him. “What’s that you’re reading?”
The lad handed it to him defiantly, as if the question was a challenge; it was a copy of Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England.
“I see,” David said pleasantly, handing it back. But he felt that some kind of gauntlet had been thrown down and that Mendel was waiting for him to pick it up.
Jake and Maxie had dropped their eyes, sheepishly, but Mendel met David’s gaze steadily. Is he trying to get my back up? David thought. The lad’s lips had a downward curl at the corners and he seemed to be eaten up by an inner fire. It was there in the aggressive thrust of his chin, the way his sharp nose looked pinched at the tip.
“I’d like to read that book sometime,” David told him.
“Be a good idea if you did, Mr. Sandberg.”
David glanced at his watch to put an end to the conversation, which felt like a confrontation, and the youths left the room. Mendel’s receding back was as defiant as his face had been.
It was the first time David had experienced tension when talking to his workers and a feeling of disquiet assailed him. It was soon replaced by anger that they had made him feel that way. There was no shortage of machiners and pressers looking for jobs and his first impulse was to dismiss the three of them. Then his innate sense of justice prevailed. What had they done to deserve dismissal? Make him think trouble was in the air, and prevention was easier than cure. He stood beside his father’s ironing board thinking it over.
“You’ve found something wrong with my work?” Abraham asked when he returned and found him staring down at a half-pressed coat which was draped on the board.
David turned on him hotly. “How could you be in here all day with Maxie and not know something’s going on?”
“What’s going on?” Abraham parried.
“You tell me! Nobody talks to me anymore it seems. I’m only the boss.”
Abraham lit the gas jets to heat his irons, avoiding David’s eye. “So some of them want to join the union, maybe,” he said casually.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You haven’t got enough on your plate right now? With Bessie and everything? I should worry you more?”
David stormed back to the office cubicle he had had erected in a corner of the workroom. Immediately after returning from his honeymoon, he had engaged a firm of builders to reconstruct the factory layout. Salaman now slept downstairs and the bedrooms he and Bessie had occupied were part of the extended workspace.
Neat rails of samples, which buyers could examine when they called, stood at one end of the room in the uncluttered area where the cutting bench was situated. The sewing machines had been rearranged symmetrically in rows and David was able to supervise the machiners through a pane of glass in his office wall. It was not the factory he intended to have eventually, but a vast improvement on the chaos over which his father-in-law had reigned and would do to be going on with.
Abraham came to eat lunch with him in the office that day, though he usually ate with the lonely Salaman. He was apprehensive about the effect of the latest anxiety upon his son.
“Look at those troublemakers!” David pointed his pickled cucumber at the three youths who sat munching their food with their heads together, in a corner.
Abraham separated two slabs of black bread to see what was inside them. “Cream cheese again, your mother thinks it’s good for me. Why do you call them troublemakers?” he said tentatively.
David’s reply was caustic. “What would you call them?”
Abraham thought carefully, no better equipped for mental concentration than he had ever been.
“Well?” David barked.
But his father was not to be hurried into saying what perhaps he did not really mean. “Boys who are sticking up for their rights,” he pronounced.
David was outraged. “Since when do they need to? With me for a boss?”
Abraham eyed him warily. “You’ll think I’m a communist if I say anymore to you.” He ate some of his sandwich, with a faraway look on his face. “Times are changing, David. There could be a Labour Government in England soon, like never happened before.”
David glared through the glass panel at Mendel and his two henchmen, which was how he had begun to think of them. “Is that what’s making them so cocky?”
“Listen, Ramsay MacDonald, he’s a godsend to the workers. He could do great things for them.”
“If I didn’t know you can’t read English, I’d think you’d been borrowing Mendel’s books, Father!”
Abraham chuckled. “So I didn’t go to night school like your mother. She can do the reading for both of us.”
David turned his back on the glass panel and ate some of his lunch, though he was not hungry.
His father studied him surreptitiously, noting the new shadows beneath his eyes and the deep groove above the bridge of his nose, put there by anxiety and tension. His resemblance to his mother was more striking then ever, she too had begun to look older than her years at David’s age. It was what responsibility did to some people.
“Even when you were a lad you were a boss, David,” he said wryly. “Coming in here straight from school and telling Salaman what to do!”
“He needed telling.”
“Such a chutzpah you had! You never thought like a worker. Me, that’s what I’ve been all my life. And before I found this job, I saw conditions elsewhere to make your hair stand on end. This place, even in the old days, was a Buckingham Palace compared to how some factories still are.”
“There aren’t enough factory inspectors to cope with the job, Father.”
“With you they don’t need any.”
David thought of all he had done to improve conditions for the staff; yet it seemed there were some who were not satisfied! In addition to the structural alterations, the whole place had been thoroughly cleaned and a new lavatory installed with a handbasin beside it. The whole hour for lunch was also one of his innovations. Contented workers meant better output, as he’d told Salaman when he protested about the capital outlay, but David had turned a deaf ear to his father-in-law’s grumbles. He’d learnt from Bessie that her father was not just a tenant, but owned the house and also those on either side of it and the revelation had excited him. Sooner or later he would acquire the adjoining property and extend the factory further. After that would come a brand new building. His mind had galloped ahead, plotting and planning. What Abraham had just said made him think of it again. His father was right, he had always thought like a boss. From the day he entered the factory at the age of fourteen. Never like a worker.
He bit into the apple which Auntie Rivka said a healthy man must eat for his bowels every day. “I look after my workers, don’t I, Father?”
“And the ones who’ve been here for a long time and known you since you were a boy trust you, David. For the others it’s different, they don’t trust bosses. How do they know you won’t change? Or maybe sell the factory some day? To someone not like yourself, who will exploit them like they saw happen to their fathers? Like is still happening, believe me. And for the coal miners, Maxie my underpresser says it’s terrible.”
“To hell with what Maxie says!”
David had never sworn in Abraham’s presence before and his father looked shocked.
“What’ve the coal miners got to do with machiners and pressers, Father?”
The question was beyond Abraham. He knew what he was trying to tell David, but was unable to express it. “A worker is a worker,” he shrugged. It was the best he could do.
And a boss is a boss, David thought glancing at the clock to make sure the lunch break had not over run the allotted hour. There were still ten minutes left. “All right, Father. So maybe they have to band together to get better conditions and wages sometimes,” he conceded.
Abraham looked relieved. It was what he had been trying to say.
“But not in my factory,” David added emphatically.
“Of course not in your factory,” his father echoed, hoping there would be no trouble with those who thought otherwise.
After Abraham had returned to the pressing room, David could not concentrate on the designs he was making for a new range. Moishe had interested buyers as far south as Cheltenham and this was keeping the factory going, boosting the flagging local trade. Though David was no artist, he had a keen eye for the subtle detail which lifted a garment from the run-of-the-mill and his rough sketches were usually easy for Eli to follow through. Today they were hopeless and he flung down his pencil in disgust.
He could see Mendel and Jake busy at the machines. Ought he to dismiss them, or not? Times were changing as his father had said and a Labour government would lend strength to the unions. If he sacked his three troublemakers it would not stop the snowball from rolling, others would come in their place.
What had he got against the unions? He agreed with what they were fighting for, but other manufacturers, with union shops, had told him what this meant in effect. Rules and regulations which had to be strictly observed. Everyone going on strike if just one worker had a grievance, because grievances were taken to the shop steward instead of directly to the boss. A union shop would mean the end of the family feeling which even in bad times had always been present in the Salaman workroom. And delegation of authority to hostile hands.
A few days later the matter came to a head. A representative of the Tailors and Garment Workers’ Union, which had been formed in 1920 and was the strongest organisation the trade had ever had, called and asked permission to hold a meeting in the workroom. David saw Mendel’s satisfied smile when the man entered the office and guessed it was his doing, but did not refuse the request.
“Don’t worry, David. I’ll tell you everything that goes on,” Abraham assured him.
“How can you attend it? You’re the boss’s father.”
His father looked as if he had been deprived of a privilege and David had to laugh. “You joined the enemy when I married Bessie!”
“But we were both workers before then and easy for us it wasn’t,” Abraham reminded him. “Even though one of us thought like a boss.”
The meeting was held during the lunch hour and they went downstairs to eat with Salaman, whose sister Rivka sent food for him every day as Bessie had previously done. The overbearing woman was still in residence cosseting her niece, thought it was now three months since the dead child was born.
David sat listening to his father-in-law upbraid him for what was taking place upstairs, but could not make the effort to defend himself.
“Give the workers an inch and they want a mile!” Salaman told Abraham adapting the cliché to his own exaggerated requirements. “Before my son-in-law showed them the way, what did they know from better conditions? Tea breaks? Higher wages and excuse me, new lavatories? Mr. Ramsay MacDonald should God forbid be the next prime minister they’ll soon take over the building!” He cast a baleful glance at David, as though the prospect of a Labour government had been brought about by him personally. “What kind of lavatories, excuse me, do they have at home? And newspaper they, excuse me, wipe their behinds on, not like the luxury we give them here!” David’s purchase of toilet rolls had been the final straw to him and he had still not reconciled himself to good money being flushed down the drain.
The tirade continued, but washed over David. His father’s reminder that they had once been working class had lodged in his brain. He had never really thought about class as such before. Of how it set people on either side of a barrier. Made them enemies. Did he feel different from the people he employed? Most of whom he’d known for years and years. When he was a boy, there’d just been the Jews and the Gentiles, the former struggling to establish themselves in the latter’s country. That had been the difference between himself and Jim Forrest. But suddenly there were two kinds of Jews and the realisation shocked him. Those who were not his kind would never need to arm themselves against him, but now he was able to understand why some of them thought they must and did not blame them. The unions were their insurance for the future, as the acquisition of wealth would be his.
“If they want a union shop they’re entitled to it,” he said cutting into something Salaman was saying and watched him turn blue in the face.
For several days the workroom seethed with debate, but David shut his eyes and ears to it. He had come to terms with himself and the situation and would make the best of it as he had done with everything else.
It was Eli who brought him the workers’ decision. He looked up from some statements he was preparing and saw the cutter standing in the office doorway with his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his shiny serge waistcoat.
“I’ve got good news for you, David,” he said without bothering to step inside. Wasting time and breath was not his nature and in his view plenty had been wasted upon all this. “We’re not going to be a union shop. Who needs trouble?”
He returned to his bench without further ado, but not before David had noted the gleam of triumph in his eyes. Eli was as pleased about the outcome as he was.
David had expected Mendel to be the spokesman; he would surely have been the shop steward had the vote gone the other way. Eli telling him informally warmed his heart and he realised how much the family feeling among them all meant to him, that he’d dreaded the inevitable loss of it more than anything else.
At the end of the week Mendel gave in his notice.
“I’ve got nothing against you, you’re entitled to your opinions,” David told him. “What’ve you got against me?”
The intense youth looked at him contemptuously, but did not reply. Later, Jake and Maxie left, too, and David learned that all three had got jobs in a big factory which was a union shop. He put them from his mind, but something told him it would not be the last he would hear of Mendel.