Post-World War I inflation exerted upward pressure on wages during October, November, and December 1920, the three months under consideration, and many of the Tirocchi workers achieved handsome raises. Between April 1919 and October 1920, Theresa Marianetti's weekly rate increased from $9 to $15, Rosina Pecora's from $10 to $19, and Veronica's from $9.50 to $21.60. Impressive gains by any standards, these increases far outstripped the rate of inflation, estimated by the Women's Bureau to be at most twenty-six percent between December 1918 and December 1920. Most raises came just after the New Year or in the weeks following the summer break, but they appear to have been negotiated individually rather than offered across the board. In the fall of 1919, for example, four out of nine workers received a raise one week, two the next week, and one each in the two following weeks: thus eight of the nine women received raises within a four-week period. Whether the healthy raises recognized the seamstresses' skill or resulted from favoritism, they do show the Tirocchi sisters' efforts to retain their skilled workers at a time when wages in general were on the rise.(31)

This overall picture suggests that workers did not gravitate toward the Tirocchi workshop because of favorable hours and pay: they could clearly have done better in both respects in a variety of other jobs. The time books offer tantalizing glimpses of the attractions of work at 514 Broadway and of the ways it may have fit into women's lives beyond the job. Medians and averages homogenize the work force, but the time books reveal notable differences among the seamstresses and suggest some of the small dramas of daily life in the Tirocchi workshop. One of the most obvious divisions was the length of time women had spent working for the Tirocchi sisters. Just as the customers generally fit the prevailing pattern for women of their class, ethnicity, and race in that few were employed for pay, the workers generally fit what was by the 1910s a dominant pattern for women of the white immigrant working class. Mostly born in the United States, these immigrant daughters typically held jobs after leaving school and before either marrying, becoming pregnant, or having their first child. Mary Riccitelli Basilico appeared in the employee books off and on between 1921 and 1933, but her husband Panfilo Basilico remembered that she left the Tirocchis' employ when she became pregnant immediately after their marriage in 1936. Mary Rosa Traverso noted that "once they got married, they didn't go back. The husbands didn't want them to." As we shall see, however, women's wage-earning didn't necessarily end after marriage, although its visibility decreased.(32)

Because of the episodic quality of the employee books, it is difficult to know with certainty how long women worked for the Tirocchi sisters, and of course they may well have labored for other employers before or after they sewed at 514 Broadway. The data, however, suggests that of the thirty-nine women who could be traced in public records through the 1920s and 1930s, seven may be placed in a "career" category because they appear in the employee books over at least a ten-year span. To these might be added an eighth (Anna Del Matto) who probably worked that long. By contrast, twenty-two seamstresses appear to have been employed by the Tirocchis for three years or less. The result was a segmented work force with a relatively stable long-term component and a larger, more transient group of short-termers. This is precisely the pattern of labor that many late-twentieth-century corporations intentionally created, but in the case of the Tirocchi shop it is not clear whether the sisters desired such a distribution or whether it evolved because of the goals and desires of the workers themselves.