The eight "career" women might be considered a core group of Tirocchi employees, an interpretation strengthened by the testimony of oral history. In addition to their longevity at the Tirocchi firm, Anna and Ida del Matto, Mary Riccitelli Basilico, Patricia Scalera, Emily Valcarenghi Martinelli, Grace Venagro, Theresa Marianetti, and Rosina Pecora were all Italian, and all of those who are known to have married wedded Italian men. In this, they were distinct from the short-term employees. The latter were still predominantly Italian (nineteen), but eleven did not have Italian last names. Two each had Irish and Jewish last names, one French, and five were of uncertain but clearly non-Italian ethnicity, while the eleventh was born in the Azores. This ethnic pattern fits into the larger picture for young wage-earning women in the United States at the time. Although workplaces often had a dominant ethnic character, hiring and job-seeking practices were imperfect segregation devices. As a result, workers usually encountered people of different ethnicities, religions, and cultural backgrounds on the job. Despite the heterogeneity of the early Tirocchi work force, its predominant character was Italian and became more so over time. By the late 1930s, all were Italian. Even more telling is the fact that Italian women were listed in the time books by first name or, more rarely, by first and last names, but women with obviously non-Italian last names - Larkin, Morey, and Remus - were referred to as "Mrs."

As the longest-term workers, this group of eight Italian women formed the core of the labor force. They were the best paid and presumably the most skilled seamstresses in a group with varying degrees of experience and ability. Skill differences were reflected in widely varying pay scales. The Tirocchi workers during those last three months of 1920 fell into three categories. Six women at the top of the pay scale earned from twenty-eight to forty cents an hour. Four in the middle range earned about seventeen cents an hour, and three at the bottom earned from nine to eleven cents per hour. This stratification persisted through the 1920s and well into the 1930s, but the differences between the highest and lowest paid narrowed sharply. In 1919-20, the lowest-paid worker earned about eleven percent of what the highest-paid earned. In 1926 the ratio was fourteen percent, and it grew to forty-two percent in 1934 and to seventy-four percent in 1937-38. The narrower spread in wages was probably linked to the decline in custom work, which required much low-skilled work such as basting.

Some women came to the shop without a great deal of sewing experience and started at the bottom of the ladder. Emily Valcarenghi Martinelli, who herself was to become one of the career workers, remembered this hierarchy. When she began working at the Tirocchi workshop in 1920, she looked up to four of the other career workers: Anna and Ida del Matto, Grace Venagro, and Mary Riccitelli Basilico. As Martinelli put it: "They were the oldest girls that would do all the best. We would sew too, but they would do the better work." Mary Rosa Traverso recalled starting in 1934 as an unpaid "apprentice" who basted the clothing together and overcast the seams inside the garments to finish them. By this time, however, the ancient system of apprenticeship had decayed, and Traverso's "apprenticeship" was more of a dead-end entry-level position than one that guaranteed her a mastery of the entire range of the craft. By the time she left, after three years, she had learned little more than her initial tasks of basting and overcasting. In this respect, Traverso's history was typical of young and inexperienced women: she worked briefly and learned some limited skills, but not an entire craft.