Kazi

“ Let pupils visit some factory and tell what they saw. A shoe shop, a tailor's shop, a blacksmith shop, are simple factories. Discuss other occupations, and let pupils bring pictures of people at work in any of the loading industries.
Most people earn their living by doing some kind of work. We call people's work their occupation. Let us see what are the great occupations of the world.
We all eat food made from plants, and from plants we get cotton and linen for clothes. ”

“ Work was the foundation of the Organization—the work day, the work hour, the work minute. This was the basic commodity, the medium of exchange, the measure of social status. Work to pay off your tax debt. Work to climb the rungs on the ladder that led to freedom. ”

“ Work in the factory or in the office, work which brings us into contact with the outside world, calls for the exercise of qualities and attainments which we had no need of before, for the abandonment of habits and ideas which can only hamper our progress in our changed surroundings. ”

“ The wages of labor vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honorableness or dishonorableness of the employment. A journeyman blacksmith, though an artificer, seldom earns so much in twelve hours as a collier, who is only a laborer, does in eight. ”

“ It is the high born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our minds with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.... Now that labor has been dignified and cherished we want it to be recognized in our schools and colleges.... ”

“ That labor is best, in which the laborer knows that he will derive the profits of his industry, that his employment depends upon his diligence, and his reward upon this assiduity. He then has every motive to excite him to exertion, and to animate him in perseverance. He knows that if he is treated badly he can exchange his employer, for one who will better estimate his service ”

“ By all the kinds of labor we do not mean merely all the crafts, but in addition factors which have been overlooked in the organization of crafts—factors which appear at each end of the productive apparatus—at the one end, clerks, salesmen, stenographers, telephone operators, telegraphers, and all the non-handworking staff which is essential to the practical handling of a great business, and at the other end the unskilled laborers who are equally essential but so far unorganized and unrecognized. ”

“ When such phrases as 'the laboring class,' 'the labor problem,' 'the labor movement,' 'labor laws,' etc., are used, reference is made to the wage-earning class, whose rise to its present prominence dates from the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. ”

“ It is, therefore, the last subject in the world to be approached academically. Yet most of the approach to the problems of labor is academic. Men in sanctuaries forever far removed from the endless hum and buzz and roar of machinery, with an intellectual background and individual ambitions forever far removed from the interests and desires of those who labor in factory and mill, theorize—and another volume is added to the study of labor.
But, points out some one, there are books on labor written by bona-fide workers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the servant girl is not the only one. Some farmer's hand works to raise the wheat, the potatoes that you eat. What is he paid? What are his hours? Fifty cents a day, twelve or fourteen hours of work. And your bootmaker in the factory, and the sweat-shop slave who makes your coat, and the long list of other poor devils who work for about one-tenth of your salary. Do you know why you are comparatively well off? ”

“ The employment of these different sorts of labour power, an employment which is, in its turn, made necessary by the mode of production, makes a great difference in the cost of maintaining the family of the labourer, and in the value of the labour-power of the adult male. ”

“ The third great principle of employment is, that whenever there is pressure of poverty to be met, all enforced occupation should be directed to the production of useful articles only; that is to say, of food, of simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means of conveying, distributing, and preserving these. ”

“ I have frequently asked employers of labour in England whether they were satisfied with the work done for them by their day labourers, and while they readily allowed for exceptions, yet they spoke strongly of such men as “doing as little as possible for their pay.” Every branch of work that it is possible to give out as piece-work is nowadays so arranged. ”

“ Every one is a laborer who is not a person of leisure. Public men, or other workers, if any, who labor but receive no pay, might be excluded from the category, and we should immediately pass, by such a restriction, from a broad and philosophical to a technical definition of the labor class. But merchants, bankers, professional men, and all whose labor is, to an important degree, mental as well as manual, are excluded from this third use of the term labor. ”

“ In the most common tasks one has to watch the average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job. Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely uninterested—having no more heart than brains back of the hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with little pride in doing it well, and little ambition to be continually doing it better.
2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. ”

“ Some twelve or fifteen work in this establishment, and the people sustain them in their operations. Those engaged in the various branches of labor feel confident that the people will patronize them, and carry out what they have agreed in this particular, and they do not trouble themselves about any other employment, or business. ”

“ The whole field, indeed, was thus soon made to exhibit the animated but singular spectacle of men, engaged in a wholly voluntary labor, putting forth all the unstinted applications of strength and displaying all the alertness and zeal of men at work for a wager. ”

“ Labor builds our meeting-houses, temples, court houses, fine halls for music and fine school houses; it is labor that teaches our children, and makes them acquainted with the various branches of education, that makes them proficient in their own language and in other languages, and in every branch of knowledge understood by the children of men; and all this enhances the wealth and the glory and the comfort of any people on the earth. 16:66.
We say to the-Latter-day Saints, work for these capitalists, and work honestly and faithfully, and they will pay you faithfully. ”

“ No more truly in the Labor category are the services of “wage-workers” than are those of farmers, of manufacturers, of merchants, of brokers, of bankers, of architects, of lawyers, of physicians, of engineers, of authors, publishers, teachers, or the services of any other useful workers who participate in the intricate processes of Economic production. All are within the Labor category. ”

“ One job done—done now and forever. A definite piece of work put behind you—and no one coming along in six months with documents or discoveries or new theories or practices to upset all your labors. I say it is blessed to pack chocolates when one has been studying labor problems for some years. Every professor ought to have a fling at packing chocolates.
Folks wonder why a girl slaves in a factory when she could be earning good money and a home thrown in doing housework. I think of that as I watch Annie. ”

“ What is needed for the workers in this class of occupations and for those in the skilled trades, is that more attention be given to adequate training, that more facilities be offered and that a more sympathetic attitude be shown them in their efforts for better pay and better positions. ”

“ Here and now we are getting ready for the great workshop yonder; learning the trick of the tools, and how to use our fingers and our powers, and, when the schooling is done, we shall be set to nobler work, and receive ample wages for the years here. Because that great 'to-morrow will be as this day' of earthly life, 'and much more abundant,' therefore it is no trifle to work amongst the trifles ”

“ As labor is the divinely appointed lot of man, in this degree the rewards of industry are set forth in emblematic forms, and the recipient is taught the exercise of diligence and industry, that by the faithful performance of his task he may, in due time, be entitled to the wages for which he has wrought. ”

“ To the brain-working captain of industry, maintaining himself and his family on thousands a year, the manual-working wage-earner seems to belong to another species, having mental faculties and bodily needs altogether different from his own. ”

“ I am speaking, of course, of that class of people of our race who depend mainly upon a day's work—working by the day, as we call it—for their living. These men with whom I talked gave several illustrations of this tendency. In the first place, I think they mentioned, without exception, this fact—that if the coloured people are employed in a factory, they work well and steadily for a few days, say until Saturday night comes, and they are paid their week's wages. ”

“ One of the cardinal principles, we must remember, is that all the members of a gens stand on an equal footing. In keeping with this we have seen that all were trained as warriors; yet the great principle of the division of labor was at work. Some filled in their leisure during times of peace by acting as traders; others became proficient in some branch of work, such as feather work, or making gold and silver ornaments. ”

“ From this example, eked out with a little thought of his own, the reader may estimate the wisdom and credit of those who tell factory hands that it is their labour which produces all the wealth of their employer, and that, in the day when every man shall receive his due, the employer shall be made a workmen like themselves, and his wealth shall go to the increase of their common wages. ”

“ There are hundreds of thousands of small masters who are obliged on Saturday to run about for hours in order to borrow the week's pay for their workers and who are happy if their profit is equal to the wages of a factory laborer. ”

“ Let us call them (in brief general terms) laborers on the one hand, employers of labor on the other; including, however, along with employers of labor not only retired capitalists and the possessors of inherited wealth, but all that highly paid description of laborers (such as the professions) whose education and way of life assimilate them with the rich, and whose prospect and ambition it is to raise themselves into that class. ”

“ 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 secret of providing occupation for this class is to buy as little material and hire as little labor as possible; let the women make the clothes, and the men do the farm-work without the aid of machinery. ”

“ The unskilled laborers referred to are those who do the rough work of the world; who work hard where opportunity for work is afforded; who fill the contract camps and mines, harvest the grain and perform the thousand and one tasks upon which we are dependent, and who form the definite and indispensable substratum of every industry. ”

“ But the labourers can still work, and the capital which previously employed them will, either in the same hands, or by being lent to others, employ either those labourers or an equivalent number in some other occupation. ”

“ And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man’s capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor ”

“ Modern view of labor. It is only in the most recent times, and imperfectly as yet, that labor has been recognized as a blessing, or, at worst, as a necessity which has great moral and social compensations, and which, if rightly understood and 162wisely used, brings joy and satisfaction. This can only be true, however, when labor is crowned by achievement, and that is when it is productive of wealth. ”

“ Shall we take material work—work of hand, as a class distinction among men? We hear often the term laboring classes—men, namely, who live by work of hand; but are not those who work with their brains, workers also? There are a thousand kinds of work, and it is not absolutely necessary one should work with his hands to be a worker. ”

“ Whenever possible a man is set to the trade or occupation which he has been accustomed to follow. For farm labourers and gardeners, for example, there is always a place. Where inmates have had no particular training, the occupation in which they are likeliest to be most productive is allotted to them. Thus I noticed at work: smiths, wheelwrights, cabinet-makers, straw-plaiters, tailors, shoe makers, sempstresses, chair makers, wicker workers, bakers, paper bag makers, etc. ”