Poetry Archives

(”Three bills known as the Thompson-Bewley cannery bills have been
advanced to third reading in the Senate and Assembly at Albany. One
permits the canners to work their employés seven days a week, a second
allows them to work women after 9 p.m. and a third removes every
restriction upon the hours of labor of women and minors.”—Zenas L.
Potter, former chief cannery investigator for New York State Factory
Investigating Commission.)


Let us not to an unrestricted day
Impediments admit. Work is not work
To our employés, but a merry play;
They do not ask the law’s excuse to shirk.
Ah, no, the canning season is at hand,
When summer scents are on the air distilled,
When golden fruits are ripening in the land,
And silvery tins are gaping to be filled.
Now to the cannery with jocund mien
Before the dawn come women, girls and boys,
Whose weekly hours (a hundred and nineteen)
Seem all too short for their industrious joys.
  If this be error and be proved, alas
  The Thompson-Bewley bills may fail to pass!