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in front of them. I looked around the room.
    The manager had told me there were six hundred seats in the place. But there were more than six hundred shipping clerks there already and the door kept opening and closing as new ones arrived. They were doubling up on the chairs, and plenty of them were standing. I tried to count them, but it was too much of a job. I made a rough estimate. Close to a thousand. Not bad.
    The air was heavy with smoke and there was a steady hum of low voices. But there was no shouting or pushing or laughing. And it wasn’t only that they were quiet because they seemed to be afraid of something. It was just that they’d never before been brought together in a mob where they could take a good look at themselves. Alone, in their shipping rooms, wearing their fancy clothes, they knew they were heels, but they could still feel superior. But here, jammed up together in a crowd, they could look at themselves multiplied by a thousand. It was a little too much shipping clerk. Even for me. I felt slightly embarrassed myself.
    Suddenly Tootsie stood up and rapped on the table with a ruler. The noise stopped immediately, as though it had been coming from another room and a heavy door had been closed suddenly to shut it out.
    “Fellows,” he said, looking around the room with a quiet smile, “before we go into the serious business of the evening, I want to congratulate you on your showing. I don’t mind admitting that we didn’t expect such a big turnout. If we had, we would have arranged for a larger place.” The hell we would! “But we’ll come to the point without wasting time and settle our business quickly. So please bear with us.”
    He was better than I expected. There was something about his fat face and long hair and serious-sounding voice that made him look the part. I couldn’t have done better myself.
    “I guess it’s no secret to you,” he said, “why we’ve assembled here to-night. Every one of you has, at some time during the last week, read one of the circulars that we have been distributing. Or, if you haven’t read it, you’ve been told about it. And what we have said on those circulars has interested you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
    One of the pots that sat at the table on the platform was writing away with a pencil, her head bent down over her work. The other one was just sitting there, listening. That was a good idea of Tootsie’s, having the dames along. It made the thing seem real. I’d noticed that a long time ago. A secretary adds importance to whatever you’re doing, no matter how stupid it may be.
    “I don’t think I’m overstating the case,” Tootsie said, “when I say that the shipping clerks of Seventh Avenue are probably the hardest-worked and poorest-paid class of workers in the country. I know, because I was a shipping clerk myself once.” Oh yes, he was! “And when the season rushes come along, I’d say they were the poorest-paid workers in the whole world. Now, there’s no reason for that. There’s nothing about the dress business that makes it impossible for shipping clerks to make a decent living wage. The operators and finishers and pressers have succeeded in getting minimum-wage and maximum-hour concessions from the employers’ groups. When that five-o’clock bell rings, those factory workers are on their way home. And when their envelopes come around on Wednesday, there’s something more in it than just plain cigarette money. But when the five-o’clock bell rings, where are the shipping clerks? They’re still chasing all over the damn city with bundles, or sweating blood wrapping packages, or doing the thousand and one jobs the shipping clerk is called on to do. And what does he get for it? I’ll bet if I called for a show of hands of all those here who were making over fifteen dollars a week, there wouldn’t be an even dozen. But I’ll bet, too, that if I called for all those who averaged more than sixty or seventy hours a