Industrial worker

“ If we instruct the prospective industrial mechanical worker not only in the mechanical-technical part of his trade but likewise introduce him into the mysteries of social and economic conditions, not only of industrial life but with equal interest into the social and economic life of the community and nation of which he is a citizen ”

“ The constantly growing specialization of machinery is the most striking industrial phenomenon of modern times. Since the worker is more and more the attendant of machinery, does not this mean a corresponding specialization of the worker? ”

“ So that, after you join the Industrial Workers, when you go to your work in the morning, you will not be tied to your task blindly; you will have a thought about your relation to your fellow-workingmen in all other departments. You will understand your part in the enterprise, and your connection with and relation to the whole. You will help to fit your fellows for the new function, so that when the hour strikes you will be perfectly trained and ready to take control of industry and operate the productive enterprises in the interests of the people. ”

“ But day by day you are increasing the sum of your revolutionary knowledge. You are becoming wiser by experience. The Industrial Workers would not have been possible a few years ago. It is an outgrowth of the very conditions I have described. It has become an imperative necessity. The workers everywhere are beginning to recognize it, and that is why they are flocking to its standard. ”

“ I believe that under modern industrial conditions it is often necessary, and even where not necessary it is yet often wise, that there should be organization of labor in order better to secure the rights of the individual wage-worker. ”

“ In the final analysis, the problem of industrial training narrows down to the skilled industrial trades. Approximately 22 per cent of the total number of American workers in the city are employed in skilled manual occupations. ”

“ The wage worker, who entered into the manufacturing premises of the employer full of the pride of his calling and often with his own tools, became then a small cog in a gigantic, relentless piece of working machinery. ”

“ That's the kernel of the industrial question. Industry has passed out of the alluvial stage into the reefing. We must have machinery to work with or we may all starve in the midst of mountains of gold. ”

“ In our modern industrial system, a very considerable part of the personnel of our factories, shops, and stores consists of this class of untrained workers. They try their hands at many things and fail in most. ”

“ The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of [181] the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. ”

“ While commemorating the labours and honouring the names of those who have striven to elevate man above the material and mechanical, the labours of the important industrial class to whom society owes so much of its comfort and well-being are also entitled to consideration. ”

“ It would embrace all workers in piano factories, planing mills, furniture factories, hotel and bar fixture factories; all workers in cooperage shops, in reed and rattan factories, box factories, etc. Of course, the workers of each of these industries would form a branch organization, embracing all the workers of one or more plants in which a given article is manufactured, for instance, in an industrial union of piano workers would be organized not only the wood workers, but also the metal workers, tuners, polishers, piano movers, etc., employed in that industry. ”

“ In such industries as those of watchmaking the factory worker, though upon the average his work requires less manual dexterity than the handworker in the older method, may get more intellectual exercise in the course of his work. ”

“ Labor in the Old and the New Industrial Order.—So long as the system of hand-industry was in existence there was no sharp division of employers and laborers into two separate classes. The employer was himself a workman at the loom, the bench, or the forge. He might have as helpers a couple of apprentices who were learning the trade, and perhaps a journeyman or two; but rarely were there more than a half dozen men or women employed in a single establishment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The workers specified in §§ 115 to 119a include also such persons as are employed by certain specified industrial employers, outside the work places of the latter, in the preparation of industrial products, even if the raw materials and accessories are furnished by the workers themselves. ”

“ The Working Grind.—There are many manufacturing towns and small cities that are built on one industry. Thousands of workers, young and old, answer the morning summons of the whistle and pour into the factory for a day's labor at the machine. ”

“ Toward the close of the era the masters were, typically, employers of skilled labour and foremen in their own shop, except in the frequent case where they altogether ceased to work at the trade and gave their whole attention to the business side of the industry. ”

“ If labor in answer to these appeals gains the confidence that it is competent to carry industrial responsibility, or rather that common labor, together with the trained technicians in mechanics and industrial organization are competent as a producing group to carry the responsibility, one need we may be sure will be eliminated which, has been an irritating and an unproductive element in industrial life; I mean the need the workers have had for the cultivation of class isolation. ”

“ The substitution of machinery for unaided human labor was the great industrial achievement of the nineteenth century. The new achievement to which Dr. Taylor points the way consists in elevating human labor itself to a higher plane of efficiency and of earning power. ”

“ The inscriptions which the trades guilds have left us record many occupations which are not mentioned here, but in them and in these lists we miss any reference to large groups of men who hold a prominent place in our modern industrial reports—I mean men working in printing-offices, factories, foundries, and machine-shops, and employed by transportation companies. Nothing in the document suggests the application of power to the manufacture of articles, the assembling of men in a common workshop, or the use of any other machine than the hand loom and the mill for the grinding of corn. ”

“ What is said of hand labor applies also, though to a slighter extent, to homework and hand-work done in the factory. The division of labor in the production of a single article among innumerable working-men paves the way for the introduction of machinery. ”

“ Unable to compete with the low prices of European or Indian manual labor, we leave it to our machinery, and expect our workingman to enable us to enhance the value of our articles by the helping presence of industrial brains and knowledge, so important and generally better paid than manual labor alone, and for that result we look to industrial training as a means. ”

“ All workers in blast furnaces, steel mills, rolling mills, tin plate mills, wire mills, nail mills, rail mills, including all workers in plants where by-products are manufactured. All workers engaged in the building of engines and machinery, such as pattern makers, core makers, molders of iron, and other metals, machinists, all other workers in all these plants, including the workers in the power departments of such plants, machinery movers and teamsters, etc. ”

“ So long as industrial efficiency is chiefly a matter of the handicraftsman's skill, dexterity, and diligence, the attention of men in looking to the industrial process is met by the figure of the workman, as the chief and characteristic factor; and thereby it comes to run on the personal element in industry. ”

“ A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his personality has passed into the machine which has met the requirements of mass production.
The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete coördination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power and devices. The most important auxiliary factor is human labor. A worker is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to the time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning ”

“ Almost all other forms of economic occupation have subsequently taken on the main characteristics of the factory system, in utilizing improved machinery, in the extensive scale on which they are administered, in the use of large capital, and in the organization of employees in large bodies. ”

“ While preparing that work he frequently came across the tracks of celebrated inventors, mechanics, and iron-workers—the founders, in a great measure, of the modern industry of Britain—whose labours seemed to him well worthy of being traced out and placed on record, and the more so as their lives presented many points of curious and original interest. ”

“ All these various industries would require a considerable engineering plant, and a body of trained workers, while a staff of joiners, cabinet-makers, plumbers, painters, and paper-makers, and in smaller numbers, compositors, printers, and book-binders, with store-keepers, clerks, and porters, would find constant or occasional work; and there would be comparatively few workers of any kind who would not be able to learn some one or other of these occupations, even if their own special skill in some less familiar industry was not called for. ”

“ A bulletin of the office for June 25 states:
"Unskilled work is plentiful. Jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, in light factories and packing houses, keep up a steady demand for semi-skilled laborers." ”

“ The common claim of the wage-worker that machinery displaces labor and increases the number of the involuntary idle, is met by our author with illustrations of how much invention, as in electricity and rubber manufacture, increases the demand for labor, and with statistics showing that while the population increased 62.41 per cent, from 1870 to 1890, the number of persons in all occupations increased 81.8 per cent. ”

“ The workmen, labourers, operatives, technologists,—whatever term may best designate that general category of human material through which the community’s technological proficiency functions directly to an industrial effect,—these have to do with the work, whereby they get their livelihood, and their interest as well as the discipline of their workday life converges, in effect on a technologically competent apprehension of material facts. ”

“ Presumably in all these cases the worker toiled by himself, usually as a repairer or a jobber rather than as a maker of new wares. All the other manufacturing concerns, 512,675 in number, employed on an average only 10.36 persons each. ”

“ All of these things are done by the factory worker at the pace set by the machine and under its direction and command. A worker's indulgence in his personal desires or impulses hinders the machine and lowers his attachment value. ”

“ Just as there is a way of turning all the energy of the play instinct into school work, so there is a way of interesting the factory and office worker in his job. However mechanical work may be, there is always the interest in becoming the most efficient worker in a room or a trade. ”

“ There are no men in that factory except a handful of skilled engineers who are kept employed on tool-making and setting, sharpening cutters, erecting machinery, and other work that only skilled men can do. ”

“ Equally significant is the recent development of organisation among the industrial technicians, whether engineers, electricians, chemists, or merely foremen and managers; among the workers in scientific laboratories, whether for research, medical, teaching, or administrative purposes ”

“ The hand worker with his old tools was more and more at a disadvantage compared with the workman who produced commodities by machinery. The result was inevitable, namely, that domestic industry was supplanted by the factory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus employed, the workman learned little or nothing of the process of the manufacture at which he assisted, or of other departments of the work than the particular one in which he was engaged, and his only opportunity of acquiring such knowledge was outside the workshop or factory in a technical school. The economy effected by the division of labour led to the extension of the principle to other industries than those in which machinery is largely employed. ”

“ The history of industry is uniform in the character of its illustrations. Industry enables the poorest man to achieve honour, if not distinction. The greatest names in the history of art, literature, and science, are those of labouring men. A working instrument-maker gave us the steam-engine; a barber, the spinning-machine; a weaver, the mule; a pitman perfected the locomotive;—and working men of all grades have, one after another, added to the triumphs of mechanical skill. ”