Farm laborer

“ Their relation with the farm laborers and the ... [seasonal] character of their employment should serve as the key to open the field for the organizing of the farm wage slaves. In the summer months most of the lumbermen work as farm hands or in the saw-mills, and many a blacklisted mechanic from industrial centers seeks as a last refuge from the master's persecution employment as constantly shifting farm laborer and lumberman. The Industrial Workers of the World have organized and are organizing with astonishing success the lumbermen in different parts of the country.... ”

“ Somebody should be there always to go through the fields, not a mere hired laborer, but a regular farmer, a master who understood the business and would take an interest in the farm. A lone woman could not manage the farming, watch the price of corn and direct the sale and purchase of cattle. ”

“ Each farm is provided with an adequate number of cottages, having small gardens adjoining, and every man who is engaged by the year has one of these cottages; his family commonly find employment, more or less, but one female laborer he is bound to have always in readiness to answer the master's call for assistance, and to work at stipulated wages. ”

“ Well, ain't it a curious circumstance how many fellers starting in at a new job just naturally work their heads off and wind up at the end of the second week loafing? Strikes me that's particularly the case with the farm laborers round here. ”

“ The existence of the compound family enables some of its workers to carry on farming, while others are employed outside. [136] With the division of the family, which, as we know, is only a question of time, a number of householders will be compelled to stop farming. Such are in the first place those employed yearly or during the [120] summer as farm laborers. At present they number as follows:
The “single” householders permanently employed as farm laborers have in most cases stopped working on their plots. ”

“ A man who has regular employment at wages finds an immense advantage in a good garden allotment beside his cottage, and that is vastly increased when that cottage is on the farm, away from the temptation of the beer-shop, and where, as part of his wages, he receives the keep of a cow. This is the system in the border counties, where agriculture is in the most prosperous state, and the agricultural labourer the best fed and clothed, the most educated and intelligent of his class in any part of the three kingdoms. ”

“ In all of this activity of cultivation, the rush of harvest, and regularity of day-to-day chores, the farmer worked, not alone, but in conjunction with his family. Unlike the industrial worker, whose employment was discrete and separate from his home life, the farmer's home was his workshop, and his labor directly connected to his sustenance. ”

“ It was not like the making of one tenth of a pin, which has a strong tendency to reduce the worker to one tenth of a man.
On the farm one usually begins and finishes a piece of work whether it be a hay-rack or a barn; he sees it through—the whole of it receives expression in him. ”

“ Uninterested labor leaves a load of hay in the field to be injured, just because the hour for quitting has come, while interested labor hurries the hay into the barn to make it safe, knowing that the extra half-hour will be made up to it in some other way.
It pays the farmer to take his help into a kind of partnership, not always in his farm, but always in his consideration. That is why my farm-house was filled with papers and magazines of interest to the men ”

“ And often the agricultural labourer, having tramped to town, may find no work ready to his hands. I read in the reports of the Société Nationale d’Agriculture of a certain farm in Brie, which has been bought by the Assistance Publique, in order to give work to those unhappy labouring men who have fallen into beggary among the unfriendly streets. Here, on the fields and furrows of La Chalmelle, they touch their mother earth again, like Antæus; thence they repair, sadder and wiser men, to such glebes or vineyards as are short of hire. ”

“ If, then, besides these duties that are the normal work of the homemaker, she is able to add such work in the farmstead as belongs to the farming business, such as the care of the cream and butter, providing meals for the farm hands, care of stock, chickens, bees, lambs, or the garden, she takes the part of a farm hand or a farmworker, she is a unit in the farm business as well as a partner, and should have the value of the service she performs paid to her in wages. ”

“ At the next step we find ourselves in the little community, of which the owner of this farm constitutes a portion; and here we find the farmer exchanging his wheat with one neighbour for a day's labour—the use of his wagon and his horse for other days of labour—his potatoes with a third for the shoeing of his horse, and with a fourth for the shoeing of himself and his children, or the making of his coat. ”

“ For a well-to-do, middle-aged man who was obliged to give up his profession, it offered change, recreation, employment, and profit. My ability to earn money by my profession ceased in 1895, and I must needs live at ease on my income, or adopt some congenial and remunerative employment, if such could be found. The vision of a factory farm had flitted through my brain so often that I was glad of the opportunity to test my theories by putting them into practice. ”

“ I ain't afraid of work, and there isn't much that I can't do on a farm. What wages do you pay?"
I told him my plan of an increasing wage scale, and he did not object. "That includes horse keep, I suppose?" said he.
"I do not know what you mean by 'horse keep.'"
"Why, most of the men on farms around here own a horse and buggy, to use nights, Sundays, and holidays, and we expect the boss to keep the horse. This is my rig. It is about the best in the township; cost me $280 for the outfit."
"See here, young man, this is another specimen of farm economics, and it is one of the worst in the lot. ”

“ Such a farm must be hand-tilled, and, if skilfully hand-tilled, would certainly produce as much food as a market-garden. It would employ an enormous amount of labour, and would at least pay its labour bill. I am not advocating that such [87] a farm should be used as a playground for the semi-criminal, semi-imbecile, and generally incompetent class who go to form the 'unemployed'; for the trade of agriculture, to be successful, demands both skill and energy. ”

“ It will next, we think, be quite clear to the reader that the nearer the grist-mill is to the farm, the less will be the labour required for converting the wheat into flour, the more will be the labour that may be given to the improvement of the farm, and the greater will be the power of the farmer to purchase shoes, hats, coats, ploughs, or harrows, and thus to create a demand for labour. ”

“ The labor question of factory and town crowds in upon the farm on every side—in the price of almost everything the farmer buys, in the freight he pays, in the higher wages and shorter hours he must bid against for help. This book gives us the labor movement as it actually is, and what it proposes, as it affects especially the farmer. ”

“ When we understand better the importance of concentrating labor, instead of scattering it,—when we shall come to estimate duly the superior profit of “a little farm, well tilled,” over a great farm, half cultivated and half manured, overrun with weeds, and scourged with exhausting crops,—we shall then fill our barns, and double the winter fodder for our cattle and sheep by the products of these waste meadows. ”

“ Why, my boy, all farming is made up of odd jobs. When Mr. Spangler gets through with planting potatoes, don't he say, 'Well, that job's done.' Didn't I hear you say yesterday,Pg 94 when you had hauled out the last load of manure from the barn-yard,—it was pretty wet and muddy at the bottom, you remember,—'There's a dirty job done!' And so it is, Tony, with everything about a farm,—it is all jobbing; and as long as one continues to farm, so long will there be jobs to do. The great point is to finish each one up exactly at the time when it ought to be done. ”

“ To go upon a sheep station and work as a labourer or overseer was very obnoxious to C——. With his home experience of farming he expected too much all at once, and naturally I was guided by him. Farming on a small scale, even if we had sufficient money to buy and work a farm, would not pay. ”

“ The multiplication of resident working farm-owners may afford remunerative and permanent occupation to numerous agricultural laborers for whom there now offers only an intermittent and precarious employment. ”

“ That is the basic industry of all civilized life, farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. ”

“ Then landlords were appealed to in a quiet friendly spirit to let allotments and cow land, and even under some favourable conditions a co-operative farm to the labourers. The consequence has been that gradually and without any serious ill-feeling a comfortable and satisfactory relation between employers and employed has been established; the men have not taken advantage of the farmers at the harvest, and the wages have been satisfactorily settled without any pressure. ”

“ The produce of the ground, generally potatoes and grain, makes a considerable addition to his income, but the human aspect of the system and the contentment produced, with the attachment and interest in the soil, in what is most striking in the result, and the time snatched perhaps from the public-house and the zeal and care called forth in the labourer elevating him as a man and improving him as a workman. ”

“ I think that's a fair showing for the three years, don't you?"
"Possibly it is; but what a lot of money you pay for wages. It's the largest item."
"Yes, and it always will be. I don't claim that a factory farm can be run like a grazing or a grain farm. ”

“ Notwithstanding these weighty authorities, we do not hesitate to assert, that in farming on such a scale as will remunerate a person in the middling rank, his devoting himself to constant bodily labour is not only unnecessary, but decidedly injurious. It is admitted, we suppose, that, in our country, upon an extent of 150 to 200 acres, the tasks of planning, arranging, inspecting, and finding a proper market for the produce, afford very full occupation to a single individual. But in a Canadian farm, all these occupations are much more arduous and difficult. ”

“ In the agricultural group the unit is the farmstead. By that term is meant the whole complex organization of the farm, including the land and its products, the stock, the barns and the sheds, the whole family together with whatever houses it, the corps of workers, farmer, farmer's wife, sons, daughters, maiden aunts, working people unhired and hired—in fact, everything "animal, vegetable or mineral," as the children say when they play "Forty Questions," that ministers in any way to the success of the farm as a business and to its ultimate object, the happiness of the family living thereon. ”

“ If it be conceded, as it must, that the position of the farm-labourer in some parts is one of comparative comfort, that is to say compared with the unskilled labourer in towns and elsewhere, it must be also asserted that his position in other parts, especially in the south of England, is capable of and does require great amelioration. ”

“ There is no place like the farm for those unfortunates whose ability to perform crude manual labor is their chief asset. The farmer who must exercise a never failing forbearance in the management of horses and cattle often extends his sympathetic supervision over the mentally defective ones who can be utilized in providing the necessary hand labor. ”

“ By-and-by, it will be generally realized that few men live or have lived who cannot find scope and profitable employment for all their intellect on a two-hundred-acre farm. And then the farmer will select the brightest of his sons to follow him in the management and cultivation of the paternal acres, leaving those of inferior ability to seek fortune in pursuits for which a limited and special capacity will serve, if not suffice. And then we shall have an Agriculture worthy of our country and the age. ”

“ Some of my readers will have had experience in the difficult and doubtful process of trying to "run a farm" at long range by means of ordinary hired help: the residence is uninhabitable; the tools are old and out of date, and some of them cannot be found; the well water is not good; the poultry is of the wrong breed, and the hens will not sit; the horses are not adapted to the work; the wagons must be painted and the harnesses replaced; the absolutely essential supplies are interminable; there must be more day labor. Now let this hired man come into the ownership of the farm: presto! ”

“ Though born to city life and work I dearly loved the country and a farm, but did not know its duties, nor had I the strength for heavy labor, so I assisted in work in and about the houses in the early hours of the day, and in some of the lighter farming, as planting, hoeing, weeding and driving the oxen, horses and cows; in fact, taking a lad's place in the farm and house employments.
Owing to the amount of labor and the disproportion of female help, some of the young men under age oftentimes assisted after meals in wiping dishes and supplying hot and cold water. ”