and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to
break any day. Only a month after Marija had become a
beef-trimmer the canning-factory that she had left posted
a cut that would divide the girls' earnings almost squarely
in half; and so great was the indignation at this that they
marched out without even a parley, and organized in the
street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that
a red flag was the proper symbol for oppressed workers,
and so they mounted one, and paraded all about the yards,
yelling with rage. A new union was the result of this
outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in three
days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it
the girl who had carried the red flag went down-town and
got a position in a great department store, at a salary of
two dollars and a half a week.

Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for
there was no telling when their own time might come.
Once or twice there had been rumors that one of the big
houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen cents
an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn
would come soon. He had learned by this time that
Packingtown was really not a number of firms at all, but
one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every week the
managers of it got together and compared notes, and
there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and
one standard of efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also
fixed the price they would pay for beef on the hoof and
the price of all dressed meat in the country; but that was
something he did not understand or care about.

The only one who was not afraid of a cut was Marija,
who congratulated herself, somewhat naïvely, that there
had been one in her place only a short time before she
came. Marija was getting to be a skilled beef-trimmer,
and was mounting to the heights again. During the sum-
mer and fall Jurgis and Ona managed to pay her back the
last penny they owed her, and so she began to have a bank
account. Tamoszius had a bank account also, and they ran
a race, and began to figure upon household expenses once
more.

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