Factory worker

“ This means that 90 per cent. of the work in the factories is done by machinery, or that one man, with the help of machines, is enabled to produce ten times more than he needs; in other words, to satisfy the wants of one man for one day, a factory worker requires only one hour, instead of ten, as he is working now. ”

“ Without organization, the helpless workers were compelled to labor sixteen hours a day.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century factory workers a to be on the job at 4 A. M. and work until dark for a wage that was a mere pittance. A first class mechanic got 50c a day. Laborers worked for three and four dollars a month and board. Women toiled in the cotton mills from dawn till dark for $1.50 a week. ”

“ And labor in the factories and workshops is not at all the terrible thing you make it out to be. Even if there are some abuses in factories, the government and the public are taking steps to obviate them and to make the labor of the factory workers much easier, and even agreeable. ”

“ He does not consider that factory-labor in itself operates prejudicially, and reports the mills to be more healthy to work in now than they were in years past. The prime cause producing the bad physical condition of the factory-population is, in his opinion, the intemperate habits of the factory-workers. ”

“ They endeavoured to introduce a number of laws which regulated the relations between the factory owners and the factory workers. In this, the reformers have been increasingly successful in all countries. To-day, the majority of the labourers are well protected; their hours are being reduced to the excellent average of eight, and their children are sent to the schools instead of to the mine pit and to the carding-room of the cotton mills. ”

“ The reality is, however, that when we compare the miserable conditions of the workers in the petty trades with the conditions of the wage workers in the factories, in the same regions and in the same trades, we see that the very same misery -prevails among the factory workers. ”

“ Considerably more skill, knowledge, and human feeling are also required on the part of the carter, cowman, and shepherd in dealing with their teams, flocks, and herds, than in the case of those who merely superintend mechanical processes and have to do with lifeless blocks of iron and steel, yet the countrymen are more or less despised by the factory workers and are greatly deficient in wages. Low wages are given on the farm simply because it is the custom so to do ”

“ In the large factory towns, a great proportion of the poor persons selling oranges, nuts, &c. in the streets, are worn out factory workers;—thus in Manchester, of 37 hawkers of nuts, &c., 32 were factory hands ”

“ In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through the steel machine he works with—through its being a new, good, fair machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a foreman pacing down the aisles.
The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. ”

“ The factory hand spends his working day in a great, dingy shop, with the maddening din of machinery in his ears. His associates are strangers, with whom he has little or nothing in common besides his work. He labors for an indefinite, far-away consumer whose manner of life is unknown to him. ”

“ A robust woman might go into a factory and earn more; but factory-work is unintermitted, twelve hours daily, week in and out, in the same movement, in close air, amid the clatter of machinery; and a person delicately organized [Pg 571] soon sinks under it. It takes a stolid, enduring temperament to bear factory-labor. Now look at Marianne's house and family, and see what is insured to your protégée there. ”

“ Here also is the reason why factory labor, and, in short, all mechanical occupation in which one does but a part of the work, gives meagre satisfaction, and why an artisan who completes his work, or an agricultural laborer, is, as a rule, much more contented than factory operatives, among whom the social discontent of the modern world first uttered itself. The factory workman sees little of the outcome of his work. ”

“ The manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties. ”

“ Factory Operatives.—There is a class of laborers, consisting of men, women and children, whom we never contemplate but with regret—we see them, at least, in imagination, subsiding, in spite of all their care, into utter dependence and poverty. Hence, we never look upon a factory or large manufacturing establishment with unmingled pleasure. The men and women, who ply its machinery, are too apt to become identified with such establishments in an improper degree. ”

“ He must, then, to finish the work, employ one more man and two more women, or else lengthen the working day. After a week or two the amount of work falls off and he receives but 500 vests. He may keep the sixteen workers with- out keeping them busy the usual number of hours, but he is more likely to dismiss one of the men and three or four of the girls. In a factory supplied with power there cannot be these sudden and frequent changes in the labor force without too great a loss to the employer. ”

“ Men used to working at home were generally not inclined to go to work in a factory. So there was an assortment of unskilled factory labor, such as country people driven from their villages by the growth of large estates, disbanded soldiers, and paupers. ”

“ To-day the laborer has eight hours a day of work in a factory well ventilated and well lighted, protected from danger and accident, insured by law, better wages than he has ever had, better opportunities for life and the pursuit of happiness, better fed, better clothed, and better housed than ever before in the history of the world. ”

“ The workers in that factory were not simply slaves to their employer, but to merciless machines. And that is only a sample of what you can find in any industry that has been perfected along modern lines. In the factories work has none of the charm it had for the old-time artisan who performed every operation himself. It is simply machine-driven drudgery, and the man who thinks that kind of work preferable to work on a farm deserves no better employment. ”

“ I wonder how men and women bear the monotony of the workshop and of the factory, in which the division of labor is carried to its utmost, and in which they must work year in and year out, only on some small part of a fabric or an implement, never becoming capable of making the whole fabric or of constructing the whole machine. ”

“ I am not aware that any one else who has published upon the factory system can make a similar assertion. I have not only toiled, but have been a sufferer from protracted mill labor to a painful extent. My experience, therefore, of the factory system has been dear-bought experience. I can speak feelingly, and I trust temperately. I have endeavored to avoid to the uttermost, every unguarded expression, every word which it would not become an humble operative to use; and I can add with truth, that I am not conscious of one unkindly or resentful feeling towards any human being. ”

“ The interest of anyone who starts a factory is in production i.e. running the factory. Everyone connected with the business knows that salary will be paid if the business works. If this is known to all then why is it that common methods of showing strength by the workers and management in industrial relations. tend to stop or reduce production? As an answer to strike by the workers the employer resorts to lock-out. ”

“ Hand workers sought employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturing [Pg 59] towns. And, augmenting this great supply of labor, came thousands of children—for an eight-year-old child was capable of operating a spinning-frame, in which, for this very reason, the spindles were set near to the floor. With an unlimited supply of labor, the cotton masters had only the cost of production to consider, and so it came about that they thought only of their profits and forgot the human hands which operated the machinery. ”

“ On the publication of the notice a workman of the shed put forward a brilliant and original idea in respect of a complex job upon which he was engaged, but the foreman promptly cut him short and told him he was a — — fool, and there the matter ended.
[302] Bonuses are paid to firemen and engine-drivers on the line for economy in fuel. The same plan might profitably be adopted in the factory. It is well-known that certain men invariably produce the best work. One furnaceman will waste as much again fuel as another. One machineman breaks no end of drills and tools. ”

“ For a time after the factory system came into vogue there were small shops where the employer busied himself among his men and personally superintended them, but the large factory tends to displace the small workshop, the corporation takes the place of the individual employer, and the employee becomes as impersonal a cog in the labor system as is any part of the machine at which he works. ”

“ It appears to us that the public are under great obligations to the National Association of Factory Occupiers, for undertaking the important but difficult task of ascertaining,—first, what the law is, as between factory employers and their workers ”

“ A factory that turns out a completed product is like a watch. You know that unless every wheel of the watch turns; unless every minute rivet and screw is in its place and doing its part we get no perfect result. It is just as important a service to be a wee screw in that organism as to be something larger and more conspicuous. So it is with each workman in a factory. He performs his part—often, alas, a small and dull one too, I am afraid; but viewed from the standpoint of the completed product that man with his humdrum task is as worthy our respect as is any other member of the working staff. ”

“ The reduction in the numbers of those employed is easily accounted for, the trade suffers as all manual labour must do from the factory products made with labour and time-saving machinery; Hand workers find it difficult to stand such competetion. ”

“ They are the packers in glass factories, the riveters and foot-press operators in lamp works. They have a hundred miscellaneous things to do, no one of which is a trade, or can be a trade so long as a shifting group of women, women with muscular strength and the readiness to do disagreeable things, is at hand for the odd jobs about a factory. They learn to operate one machine, but they are not among the hands who know the ways of the shop, and work up to better occupations. ”

“ That is to say, it tended to become more and more an affair of large capital and large workshops, and, instead of the industrial individualism of small masters and independent “manufacturers,” who were still “hand”-workers, there was appearing the industrial collectivism of the factory system, where manufacture was nothing without its machinery, its colossal division of labour and its strict technical discipline and drill. There was a short period in England when employers were allowed to draw advantage from the change without any hindrance from the state. ”

“ Now, it is not to be denied that on the first introduction into any factory, or class of factories, of any new labor-saving machine, by which perhaps one man is enabled to perform the work of a dozen or twenty, a large number of hands must necessarily be thrown out of work, and more or less immediate distress arise therefrom ”

“ A real growth of skill or efficiency will enable an increased amount of machinery to be tended with no greater subjective effort than a smaller amount formerly required. But while allowance should be made for this, the history of the factory system, both in England and in other countries, clearly indicates that factory labour is more intense than formerly, not, perhaps, in its tax upon the muscles, but in the growing strain it imposes upon the nervous system of the operatives. ”

“ The sudden and extensive introduction of machinery at the close of the eighteenth century drove hand labor out of employment, and, for a time, caused great suffering among the masses; but in the end it created an ever increasing demand for labor—a new labor more skillful than the old. ”

“ The Manufacturer, seeing that he could get no labour for a long time and finding the times pretty hard anyhow, burned down his shoe factory for the insurance, and when the strikers wanted to resume work there was no work to resume. ”

“ There is scarcely another condition of any portion of our working population thus free from external control. The factory operative is not only mulcted of his wages for absence, but, if of frequent occurrence, discharged altogether from his employment. The bricklayer, the carpenter, the painter, the joiner, the stonemason, the outdoor labourer, have each their appointed daily hours of labour, a disregard of which would lead to the same result. ”

“ Every factory shows us to-day how few are its workingmen, still engaged at a work that they have been apprenticed in. The employes are of the most varied, heterogeneous trades; a short time suffices to train them in any sub-department of work, at which, in accord with the ruling system of exploitation, they are then kept at work longer hours, without change or regard to their inclinations, and, lashed to the machine, become themselves a machine. ”