Parenting & Family Quote by Rose Schneiderman

There is nothing abstract or misty about Schneiderman's politics: she names the enemy ("the bosses"), the method ("gradually"), and the replacements ("child labor and raw immigrant girls"). The sentence works because it refuses the comforting myth that exploitation is accidental. "Of course" signals that this is not paranoia but pattern recognition, the hard-earned literacy of people who have watched management recycle the same playbook: weaken collective power by engineering a more disposable workforce.

The specific intent is strategic as much as moral. By framing union-busting as a demographic swap, Schneiderman translates a procedural decision into an existential threat. "Attack on the union" isn't just about dues or rules; it's about the annihilation of leverage. The subtext is a critique of how capitalism manufactures vulnerability: children and newly arrived girls are not inherently "cheap" workers; they are made cheap by legal precarity, social marginalization, and the absence of bargaining power. "Raw" does quiet work here, implying both innocence and manipulability, a workforce not yet toughened by organizing.

Context matters: Schneiderman emerged from the garment industry's inferno - the Triangle Shirtwaist era, strike waves, and the contested birth of modern labor rights. Her language is plain because the stakes were plain. She also threads a needle that still feels contemporary: she can indict bosses without scapegoating immigrants. The villains are not the girls who "would work for next to nothing", but the system that forces "next to nothing" to count as an offer. The line is a warning and a recruitment pitch: solidarity or replacement.