Workers - An Experiment in Reality: The West — Chapter 4 - Part III - A Hand-Truckman in a Factory

One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms.

And when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they revealed.

Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather.

The long, monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a holiday.

Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home.

One was reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the accord of the overture.

The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense, had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service.

The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in their appeals for their mother’s intervention.

Mrs. Schulz, at her wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl, and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a toothache.

The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror, and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak.

There was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end the storm would spend its fury and pass.

And the marvel of it was in the completeness of the clearing.

The unrestrained vent of ill-temper would be followed by no harboring of malice.

It was as though the men, who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association.

The secret of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms.

The distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life.

At bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking and respect.

The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of temper.

Not that they were strictly periodic in the home.

Mondays were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their occurrence, for they might crop out at any time.

But Monday mornings in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence.

You could not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of the men and in the progress of their work.

But nothing could have been more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than the routine of factory labor.

The very doing of what had become to them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life.

I have often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in high spirits that were finely attune.

There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the quality of a maddening horror.

I can bear no personal testimony to it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker.

The phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages.

Among the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the present ordering of such labor.

The attitude is that of irresponsible school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks.

But among the laborers it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious business of their lives.

Interest in their work?

Not the faintest.

Sense of responsibility for it?

Not the dimmest.

Any day you could see the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand, with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in school-hours.

The piece-system lifts the labor instantly from this plane to one where the motive of self-interest conspicuously enters.

A man is insured from the first of at least the wage of day’s labor; his own industry and deftness are then the factors in determining his earnings up to a certain limit.

For I soon found that a hand was not free to employ his utmost skill when he became an expert.

There seemed to be a tacit agreement in each department of the factory as to what should constitute the maximum of day’s labor.

Below that a man might fall if he chose, but beyond it he was not at liberty to go.

And the reason was very obvious.

Even a few men in continually passing, by any considerable margin, the accepted daily average would inevitably produce the result of a cut in the _pro rata_ price until wages were down again to the accustomed level.

The system gives a man an incentive to work and to develop his skill, but, in its practical operation, it holds him rigorously to the level of mediocre attainment.

Barry incidentally pointed this out to me with striking clearness one day while we were carting tongues.

Two of the varnishers were missing from the paint-shop when we went up for our first loads.

Barry remarked on their absence, with the comment that they were certain to be on hand at half-past nine o’clock.

It appears that if an employee misses the open factory-gate in the early morning by ever so little, he may not enter then until the end of two hours and a half, which marks the close of the first quarter of the day’s work.

True to Barry’s prediction, we presently found both varnishers at their places, and when, in the late afternoon, he asked them, with the frankness of working-people in such matters, as to how much they had done, he again found himself verified, since each had achieved the prescribed amount, and so had earned full pay.

They had simply worked at a greater speed than usual; and they might, so far as the time was concerned, have accomplished this every day, except that a man would soon gain a bad name by being habitually late, and his promptness at seven o’clock would be quickly insured by a cut in the rate paid for his form of labor.

It was a very limited view of the factory as a whole that I could get from the post of an unskilled worker in one of its departments, but what growing familiarity was possible served to increase the sense of wonder at the possibilities of such highly organized methods of production.

There were the great, substantial buildings themselves with their ingenious adjustments of parts, so related as to facilitate to the utmost the processes of manufacture and shipment at the lowest cost and with the least friction.

There were the lines of railway which entered the grounds, by means of which the machines, loaded into cars from the platforms of the factory, could be forwarded without change to every quarter of the continent.

All needed materials, to the smallest detail, entered the factory in their raw forms, and passed out as finished product, delicately adjusted machines ready for immediate use.

The imagination bounds to the conception of the miraculous ingenuity of instruments, and the trained skill of operatives, and the shrewd co-ordination of labor, and, above all, the marvellous captaincy by which all this differentiation is systematized and is ordered and directed to the effective achievement of its ends.

The large, well-ventilated rooms, comfortably warmed in winter and admirably supplied with the means of light and air, are a part of the general efficacy of the system, and the untiring dexterity of the men gives to it its strongly human interest.

There is a fascination in their movements which determines the quality of the attractiveness of the whole.

You see no feverish haste in the speed with which they work, but rather the even, smooth, unfaltering sureness which is the charm of mastery, and which must be attended by its satisfaction as well.

I witnessed this with delight among the men with whom I lived.

Conversation at our meals was nearly always of shop; at dinner and supper especially we discussed the details of the day’s work.

Several of us were employed at constructing binders.

Albert was of that number.

He was making but little more than the wage of common labor when I first knew him, but his income began to increase with his increasing efficiency, and it was a matter of great, vital interest to us all to hear his reports each day, as he told of a fraction of a binder and then of a whole one in advance upon his previous work, until his daily earnings rose to two dollars and a half, which was accepted in his department as the normal sum.

Besides these elements of personal interest in piece-work as a scheme of labor and the gratification of the sense of effective workmanship, there entered here the stimulus of ambition based upon excellent chances of promotion.

The factory system of production creates strong demand for manual skill, and stronger still for the capacity of administration and control.

Why the realization of these facts did not possess more thoroughly the minds of the common laborers, I could not understand.

They were strangely impervious to their force, for nothing could have been more noticeable than the alertness of the managing staff in watching for evidences of unusual ability among the men.

It was not at all uncommon for a hand who had been taken on as a day-laborer to be promoted, as a result of his intelligence and industry, to some department of piece-work.

Nearly every foreman in the factory is said to have begun far down the scale, and Barry’s account of the career of the assistant manager I have heard confirmed.

During my short stay I was actually witness to the progress of two men who came in as day-laborers, the young Englishman from Jamaica and a stalwart, handsome Swede who secured a job and joined us at the boarding-house about a fortnight ago.

Clarence earned a promotion and got it at the time of my coming to the factory, and I have seen Albert’s rise from a position removed by very little from that of unskilled labor to that of a workman whose skill commands the sum of fifteen dollars a week.

Dennis is a type of craftsman whose future it is not difficult to predict.

Conscientious and industrious and persevering, endowed with rare ability and real capacity for work, his progress seems assured, and a well-paid, authoritative position an ultimate logical certainty.

All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to know.

There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of them have their representatives about our table.

Men, for example, who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency.

But sadder far than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion, and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their careless living.

They know no interest in their work nor pleasure in its doing.

To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires.

With sullen perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call life.

The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield to ruling passions.

From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I knew personally seemed to be entirely free.

There is no improvidence like the improvidence of the poor.

Doubtless there is no thrift like theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling nature.

Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match with the wastefulness of the worst.

They were not a drinking set in any sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and to their prospects in the world.

A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds.

“We’ll never be young but once,” they would say, “and if we don’t have a good time now, we never will.

” A good time was often secured at enormous cost.

I do not know whether it is the habitual dissipation, or whether it happens to be the vogue for this winter, but it is very certain that to the men here the fancy-dress ball is now the incomparable attraction.

One or more such functions within their range falls on nearly every Saturday night.

They are given for the most part by certain “Brotherhoods” and labor organizations, and they are free, apparently, to all who come dressed in a manner sufficiently “fancy” to meet the views of “the committee,” and pay the price of a ticket, which admits “self and lady.

” As the men saw the night approaching, their talk would turn more and more to the absorbing subjects of costume and the girls whom they meant to take with them.

There are shops which do business at letting out ready-made disguises for such occasions, and I have repeatedly seen these hard-working industrious fellows go deep into their pockets, to the extent even of half a week’s pay, for the use for a few hours of some tawdry make-up of velvet and spangles and lace, which reeked with promiscuous wear.

And the outlay did not end with dress, for there remained tickets of admission, and the cost of at least two suppers for each and of not a little drinking.

It was exceptional for any one of them to come home drunk, and the man who did was sure of a course of steady bantering for days, but some drinking was the rule for the Saturday nights that were given to masquerade.

When a play would fall in place in the order of amusement, the men were sure to return by midnight, and there was always then less evidence of drink.

All forms of public gayety seemed scrupulously confined to Saturday nights and Sundays.

The men could not have been more punctual at their work, and the habitual week-day evening was the far from exciting one in Mrs. Schulz’s sitting-room, which I have described.

There they regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with the children, and played cards, and read.

I was usually off for bed by eight o’clock, for nothing less than ten hours of sleep would fit me for the ten hours of labor in the factory, and the others would follow an hour or two later.

[Illustration: MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE.

There we regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with the children, and played cards, and read.

] The morning brought the unwelcome summons to get up in what seemed the dead of night and but an hour or two after the time of going to bed.

Cold water would have its rousing effect, as, also, a breakfast by lamplight with an anxious eye on the clock, and then a rush through the sharp air of the morning twilight until you were caught in the living stream which poured through the factory-gate.

Work was begun on the minute, and your ear caught the sharp metallic clink of the mowers as the workmen pushed the frames down the loading-platforms to the cars.

Even within the brick enclosures and in the stinging cold of the winter air, there arose inevitably with the sound the association of meadows fragrant with the perfume of new-mown timothy and clover drying in the hazy warmth of a long summer afternoon.

Within the buildings, almost in a moment, would rise the turmoil of production.

You heard the deafening uproar of far-reaching machinery, as, with wheels whirling in dizzy motion and the straps humming in their flight, it beat time in deep, low throbs to the remorseless measures of a tireless energy.

Cleaving the tumult of the sounding air you heard at frequent intervals the buzz-saws as they bit hard with flying teeth into multiple layers of wood, rising to piercing crescendo and then dying away in a sob.

There was the din of many hammers, and over the wooden floors and along the run-ways, and through the dark, damp passages of the warehouses, and down the deep vistas of the covered platforms, was the almost constant rumble of hand-trucks pushed by men and boys.

All this unceasingly for five continuous hours, which always seem unending, and then the abrupt signal for twelve o’clock, and the sound of the machinery running down while the men are hastening to their mid-day meal.

About the factory-gate are always at this hour groups of women and young children who have brought in pails and baskets hot dinners for their men.

On brighter days you can see long lines of operatives sitting along the curbs or with their backs against the high board fence, basking in the sunlight, as they eat their dinners in the open air and converse among themselves and with their wives or children.

[Illustration: THE NOON HOUR.

] Then back to your place in the afternoon while the machinery is slowly working up to its accustomed pace and the men about you reassembling to take up again, on the stroke of the hour, the work of the afternoon.

Five more hours of the thundering rush of factory labor follow, and you leave the gate at night almost too tired to walk.

A wash is first in your recovery, and it rests you more than would sleep.

Then supper brings its deep satisfaction and a smoke its peaceful content, and you go to bed better off by a day’s wages.

CHAPTER V