The women in the Tirocchi shop worked far longer hours than those surveyed by the Women's Bureau. Tirocchi employees were ten times more likely than the latter to work fifty-four hours a week, then the legal maximum in the state. "General mercantile," the Women's Bureau category with the longest hours worked, required only about twenty-five percent of its female employees to work fifty-four hours, while more than forty percent of the Tirocchi employees' weeks were that long. As in many occupations, overtime at night and on weekends was common. This would have been the case particularly when the shop had to respond to customer-imposed deadlines or when big projects like weddings were underway. The time books never record over fifty-four hours a week for a given worker or any Sunday work, but Sofia Johnson's letter reports that she worked three hours on a Sunday. Like many employers of the time, the Tirocchis may have required their employees to work unpaid overtime, or they may have paid overtime off the books, allowed employees compensatory time off, or given them gifts to compensate them for overtime.(28)

The Tirocchi workers did escape one practice pervasive in Rhode Island: they were not required to take work home. Wage-earners in the clothing, textiles, jewelry, and artificial flower industries were frequently expected to complete unfinished work at home, making their residences into adjuncts of the factories. Anna and Laura Tirocchi prohibited this practice, but more out of concern for the fine fabrics than for the workers. Emily Valcarenghi Martinelli explained, "You couldn't take that material out of the house! Because if you ever put it on a table and it was dirty, it would spoil, or something would happen. No, no! She never sent nothing out."(29)

Although Tirocchi workers avoided the abysmal pay rates associated with work taken home, their longer hours did not earn them fatter pay packets than those surveyed by the Women's Bureau. None of the Tirocchi seamstresses earned $20 or more per week, but nearly a third of the female employees in the Women's Bureau survey did. Nearly two-thirds of the Tirocchi workers earned less than $12 per week, while the Women's Bureau recorded only fifteen percent with such lean pay envelopes. Tirocchi employees more closely matched the Women's Bureau statistics in the middle pay ranges, where just under forty percent of the former and over fifty percent of the latter earned between $12 and $19.99 per week. The Tirocchi median weekly wage of $9 was just over half of that found for all workers by the Women's Bureau, and only three-quarters that of the lowest-paid group (five-and-dime-store employees). The Women's Bureau tabulated its data in a way that makes broad comparisons of hourly wage rates difficult, but it is possible to compare Tirocchi workers to those women who worked fifty-four-hour weeks. The median hourly rate for those surveyed by the Women's Bureau was well over one-and-a-half times the rate for Tirocchi employees.(30)