Manual laborer

“ The work which is now done by one sewing machine, intricate in its appearance, was formerly done by a number of women with no apparatus beyond a simple needle and thread.
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. ”

“ In the great majority of cases the work is so miscellaneous in its nature as to call for the employment of workmen varying greatly in their natural ability and attainments, all the way, for instance, from the ordinary laborer, through the trained laborer, helper, rough machinist, fitter, machine hand, to the highly skilled special or all-round mechanic. ”

“ Displacement of Labour.--But the result of machinery which has drawn most attention is the displacement of labour. In every branch of productive work, agriculture as well as manufacture, the conflict between manual skill and machine skill has been waged incessantly during the last century. Step by step all along the line the machine has ousted the skilled manual worker, either rendering his office superfluous, or retaining him to play the part of servant to the new machine. A good deal of thoughtless rhetoric has been consumed upon the subject of this new serfdom of the worker to machinery. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The rate of wages which has been noticed as in part the cause of the scarcity of domestic servants, gives rise generally to a multitude of inventions for replacing manual labour by machinery. And this again tends to raise the condition of the labouring man. From being himself a machine, or, in the expressive phrase, a hand, he becomes the skilled manager of a machine. As these American inventions find their way to Europe, the same effect will, in some measure, be produced here. ”

“ 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. ”

“ During a period of 150 years industry has gone from the home to the factory, involving in the transition the minute subdivisions of labor which must necessarily accompany work on a large scale. The operations requiring skill are performed by skilled persons, and those which are purely mechanical are performed by an unskilled laborer until a machine is invented to replace him. ”

“ We are not insisting, be it understood, on a four-hour or eight-hour system of labor. No industry or occupation will be hampered or meddled with by doing justice to the laborer in the way proposed. The railroad employee, printer, baker, factory hand, etc., can work on as now, but they must be compensated with just wages for the labor done. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true, for instance, that the planning room, and functional foremanship, render it possible for an intelligent laborer or helper in time to do much of the work now done by a machinist. Is not this a good thing for the laborer and helper? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 laborer who before was unable to do anything beyond, perhaps, shoveling and wheeling dirt from place to place, or carrying the work from one part of the shop to another, is in many cases taught to do the more elementary machinist's work, accompanied by the agreeable surroundings and the interesting variety and higher wages which go with the machinist's trade. ”

“ But such is not the case. There never was a time when the laborer toiled less or enjoyed more than in these days of machinery; and the laborer's condition is best where the machinery is best and most used. ”

“ Even while it is clear, however, that manual labour, or the application of the bodily forces—with or without mechanical aid—to personal maintenance and the production of goods, remains the common lot of the majority of citizens of the most developed modern communities, still there is much risk of confusion if modern technical terms such as “labour,” “employer,” “labour legislation” are freely applied to conditions in bygone civilizations with wholly different industrial organization and social relationships. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In urging the adoption of machinery in aid of manual labour, one main object I have had in view has ever been the creation of an aristocracy among the labourers themselves; the substitution of a given amount of skilled labour for a larger amount of unskilled. My hope is, that we may thus engender a healthy emulation among the labourers, a desire to obtain situations of eminence and mark among their fellows, and also to push their children forwards in the same career. ”

“ Wherever it can be introduced as a substitute for manual labour, it is universally and willingly resorted to; of this the facts stated in my report contain many conclusive proofs, but I may here specially refer, as examples, to plough making, where eight men are able to finish thirty per day; to door making, where twenty men make 100 panelled doors per day; to last making, the process of which is completed in 11⁄2 minutes; to sewing by machinery, where one woman does the work of twenty; to net making, where one woman does the work of 100. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, the so-called workers do not consist of a homogeneous group with complete identity of interests. There may be no difference141 in economic situation between manual labor and mental labor; yet there is a traditional difference in point of view which keeps these two groups far apart. Again, the narrower field of manual labor, the group represented by the American Federation of Labor, is frequently opposed in sympathies and interests to the group of Industrial Workers of the World. Even in the American Federation of Labor there are component units. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He is given a higher class of work, which tends to develop him and gives him better wages. In the sympathy for the machinist the case of the laborer is overlooked. This sympathy for the machinist is, however, wasted, since the machinist, with the aid of the new system, will rise to a higher class of work which he was unable to do in the past, and in addition, divided or functional foremanship will call for a larger number of men in this class, so that men, who must otherwise have remained machinists all their lives, will have the opportunity of rising to a foremanship. ”

“ And one of these—nor that the least—when superadded to the increasing purposes and enlarged principles of the times—will be found, I believe, in the necessity arising from the general use of complicated machines, which is compelling the mechanic and hand-laborer to educate his head as well as to harden his hands; to develop his soul as well as his sinews, and to become himself head-worker no less than handy-craftsman. ”

“ The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual workmanship,—muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This discipline touches238 first, and most intimately and coercively, the classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote. ”

“ Machinery has been called "labour-saving," but the immediate result of its introduction has been to throw people out of work—labour-saving in the sense of taking their work from them, or the bread out of their mouths. ”

“ After the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, by interpretations of the Wage and Hour Administrator, it was held that certain preparatory activities such as sharpening the tools, oiling the machinery, preparing his machinery for work, were so closely related to his productive activity that the employer must compensate the employee for it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The unskilled day laborers were not organized, and machinery had not yet progressed far enough so that automatic processes had replaced the skilled mechanic with workers who are sometimes called "semi-skilled," due to the fact that they do not require a long period of apprenticeship to learn their trade. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In working on the hide alone there are nine positions, at eight different rates of pay. A 20-cent man pulls off the tail, a 221⁄2-cent man pounds off another part where the hide separates readily, and the knife of the 40-cent [Pg 33] man cuts a different texture and has a different ‘feel’ from that of the 50-cent man. Skill has become specialized to fit the anatomy.”
Usually, however, when the division of labor becomes as minute as that described, the routine-like process is handed over to a machine. ”