Manual labor

“ The best way to understand the labor movement and to help it, they say, is first to become a manual worker and to join a union as a member of the rank and file.
A small number of intellectuals have done this with great profit to themselves and have subsequently been able to interpret labor's attitude with much more sympathy than they could otherwise have done. Manual labor is salutary for anybody, whether he is to work with the labor movement or not; and any intellectual worker will derive benefit from an occasional vacation from his desk and typewriter. ”

“ With a single further quotation from the prospectus of the second great manual training school in the United States, on the subject of labor, we close this too brief notice:
“One great object of the school is to foster a higher appreciation of the value and dignity of intelligent labor, and the worth and respectability of laboring men. A boy who sees nothing in manual labor but mere brute force despises both labor and the laborer. ”

“ Manual labor, too is undergoing change. It is changing from unskilled to skilled labor. Automation replaces men with machines, but it also creates new jobs. For example, ditch-diggers are unnecessary in an industrialized society. ”

“ There is no question that the cost of production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work as much as possible from the manual labor. When this is done, however, it is evident that the brain workers must be given sufficient work to keep them fully busy all the time. They must not be allowed to stand around for a considerable part of their time waiting for their particular kind of work to come along, as is so frequently the case. ”

“ The Solution of Labor Problems.—Finally, I claim that the manual-training school furnishes the solution of the problem of labor vs. capital. The new education will give more compete development, versatility, and adaptability to circumstance, No liberally trained workman can be a slave to a method, or depend upon the demand for a particular article or kind of labor. It is only the uneducated, unintelligent mechanic who suffers from the invention of a new tool. ”

“ If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune. I have said this much about the elements of labor generally, as introductory to the consideration of a new phase which that element is in process of assuming. The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. ”

“ The taste for manual work is imbibed at a very early age, and there is not wanting evidence to prove most distinctly that even a very small amount of manual labor introduced into the elementary school serves to keep alive the capacity for active employment, and the manipulative skill of the fingers. ”

“ The other sort of improvements, those which diminish labor, but without increasing the capacity of the land to produce, are such as the improved construction of tools; the introduction of new instruments which spare manual labor, as the winnowing and thrashing machines. ”

“ Machinery has come to do a vast amount of work which manual labor used to do; yet, by a happy compensation in the economic condition of things, human labor, far from being left in the lurch by mechanical introduction and ever increasing efficiency, is in greater demand than before. ”

“ A young fellow from the East who has been brought up on a farm, or who has done hard manual labor as a machinist, need not go through a novitiate of manual labor in order to get accustomed to the roughness that such labor implies ”

“ For this reason, that the Colored man is not faithful to his promises, he has been discounted in the field of manual labor. The more important the job of the employer, the more important the fidelity of the employee. No employer wishes to undertake an extensive and costly piece of work and be dependent on a class of labor that may fail him at the place where he needs steady, persistent work. ”

“ But there are circumstances, which have been already noticed, with another view, that materially diminish everywhere the effect of a scarcity of hands. These circumstances are the great use which can be made of women and children, on which point a very pregnant and instructive fact has been mentioned—the vast extension given by late improvements to the employment of machines—which, substituting the agency of fire and water, has prodigiously lessened the necessity for manual labor ”

“ A machine by which ten men can do the work that has been done by thirty, disengages the twenty for new modes of productive labor, and thus augments the products of industry and the comfort of the community. A good [pg 086] habit is a labor-saving instrument. The cultivating of any specific virtue to such a degree that it shall become an inseparable and enduring element of the character demands, at the outset, vigilance, self-discipline, and, not infrequently, strenuous effort. ”

“ Second, all the labor-saving machinery in the world will but slightly reduce the output of time and energy in the household work unless the worker will apply her mind to the problem, adapt herself to new ways of performing a piece of work, and be willing to think. ”

“ This tendency is promoted by advances in technique, in consequence of which productive activity is constantly acquiring a more mechanical and objective character. Evolution in many departments of industry, particularly in connection with the transition from hand labor to machine labor, has followed this scheme. ”

“ The writer has found, for example, after making many mistakes above and below the proper mark, that to get the maximum output for ordinary shop work requiring neither especial brains, very close application, skill, nor extra hard work, such, for instance, as the more ordinary kinds of routine machine shop work, it is necessary to pay about 30 per cent. more than the average. For ordinary day labor requiring little brains or special skill, but calling for strength, severe bodily exertion, and fatigue, it is necessary to pay from 50 per cent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, when through all of this teaching and this minute instruction the work is apparently made so smooth and easy for the workman, the first impression is that this all tends to make him a mere automaton, a wooden man. As the workmen frequently say when they first come under this system, "Why, I am not allowed to think or move without some one interfering or doing it for me!" The same criticism and objection, however, can be raised against all other modern subdivision of labor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This crossing and intertwining of the abstract and practical sciences, the mechanic skill and the manual labour, which are so striking in the manufacture of a piece of calico, prevail throughout every department of industry in a highly-civilized community. Every one who labours at all profitably labours for the production of utility, and sets in motion the labour of others. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Making money and getting soft snaps seem to be the objectives of most human beings. [Pg 120]
The labor-saving devices take away exercise. The machine does the work. The artisan simply feeds the hopper, puts in a new roll, or drops in the material. He sits down and watches the wheels go around, likely smoking a cigarette the meanwhile, and more than likely reading the sporting sheet of a yellow newspaper.
Possibly few of my readers have given the matter serious thought, and they will be astounded at the changed work conditions which have come into our modern life. ”

“ But as ideas persist for a longer time they can be employed to effect an actual transformation of conditions—a process that almost always requires the intervention of tools, or the use of intervening appliances.
There seems to be no better name for the acts of using intermediate means, or appliances, to reach ends than work. When employed in this way, however, work must be distinguished from labor and from toil and drudgery. Labor means a form of work in which the direct result accomplished is of value only as a means of exchange for something else. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is the net tendency of machinery to make labour more monotonous or less, to educate the worker or to brutalise him? Does labour become more intellectual under the machine? Professor Marshall, who has thoughtfully discussed this question, inclines in favour of machinery. It takes away manual skill, but it substitutes higher or more intellectual forms of skill. ”

“ Modern invention has gone so deeply into the details of mechanical operations, and division of labor has rendered the part which any one man performs so simple, that it is an easy matter to substitute the actions of a machine for the mechanical, standardized work of an unskilled or often of a semi-skilled laborer. Hence modern machinery ”

“ And while the unexampled and almost incredible use of machinery would seem to supply the place of labor, labor still finds its occupation and its reward; so wisely has Providence adjusted men's wants and desires to their condition and their capacity. ”

“ The increased efficiency of machine tool work will inevitably make possible a great reduction in hours of labor, when the workers themselves control industry for their own benefit rather than for that of a class bent on still further increasing its own wealth and power. ”

“ For a time those whirring machines, which had been evolved in the first place from the brains of men, and partook in a manner of both the spirit and the grosser elements of existence, its higher qualities and its sordid mechanism, like man himself, had the best of it. The swart arms of the workmen flew at their appointed tasks, they fed those unsatisfied maws, the factory vibrated with the heavy thud of the cutting-machines like a pulse, the racks with shoes in different stages of completion trundled from one department to another, propelled by men with tense arms and doggedly bent heads. ”

“ For a proper understanding of the division of labour in manufacture, it is essential that the following points be firmly grasped, First, the decomposition of a process of production into its various successive steps coincides, here, strictly with the resolution of a handicraft into its successive manual operations. Whether complex or simple, each operation has to be done by hand, retains the character of a handicraft, and is therefore dependent on the strength, skill, quickness, and sureness, of the individual workman in handling his tools. ”

“ Yet, it is not so very difficult, after all, to understand that the years devoted to learning his trade, by a mechanical engineer, for instance, during all of which years he must be provided with the necessities of life, must be reckoned somewhere and somehow; and that when they are so reckoned, his day's labor may be found to contain, concentrated, so to speak, an amount of labor time equivalent to two or even many days' simple unskilled labor time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ a machine for saving work, is it? He'd invent that, I'll be bound; let a nigger alone for that, any time. They are all labor-saving machines themselves, every one of 'em. No, he shall tramp!" ”

“ We have manual labour of a given kind and quality, which assists in producing what is wanted or not wanted—what is so much wealth or simply so much refuse, in accordance with the manner in which all this labour is directed by faculties specifically different from those exercised by the manual labourers themselves. ”

“ They have learned, that the remedy indicated is a change to an industrial system, that will secure to the laborer an equitable share of the benefits, which follow the introduction of labor-saving machinery. Under such conditions, the laborer himself, having more leisure and unexpended vitality, will be stimulated to increase his available resources by cultivating his brain capacity for invention, thereby largely increasing his power to produce. ”

“ Take the advance in quantity of products for ten years only, and by the aid of machinery, and more intelligent labor, we have gained more than two hours. Why should not labor get its due proportion? We are fast turning the drudgery of labor to pleasure. ”

“ The cost of manual labour, and that skilled labour of the highest kind, in working iron, very easily led the way to the use of machine-tools, while the softer material, wood, was left to the skill of the workman. ”