Overwork

“ Instead of watching till his employer's back was turned, and saying, "Come, boys, let's go home; we've done enough for one day," and sauntering off with a cigar in his mouth, his cry was, "Let's do a little overwork."
That overwork which frightens boys nowadays out of good places, and sends them out West, on shipboard, anywhere, eating husks, in search of a spot where money can be had without work, laid the foundation of the apprentice boy's future greatness. ”

“ But the life of the ordinary hand who has not ability enough to rise is, like that of the great majority who depend on the needle, whether machine or hand, filled with hardship, uncertainty, overwork, under-pay. ”

“ Honest labor, continued through reasonable hours, paid at a rate which assures a wholesome support, is ennobling; but overwork, that is hopeless of comfortable reward, is degrading in the extreme. On the continent of Europe, where men and women work in the factories for fourteen and sixteen hours in a day, the laborers are reduced simply to machines. ”

“ Toil is necessary, labor is necessary for our happiness, as well as our prosperity. But [Pg 90] I do not want you to overwork, and I believe you do wrong when you do. Just for a little while, while you are getting this knowledge, you must be willing perhaps to overwork; do not overwork, do not overstrain yourself. You can break your brains as easily as you can your back, and every now and then you hear of some young fellow who breaks his back. ”

“ Moreover, some work practically requires an over effort for its accomplishment; and no man of mettle will begrudge his very life-blood when necessary. Overwork is "the last infirmity of noble minds." Yet when not really necessary, it must be ranked as a sin, and not too generously condoned. The intense competition of modern industry, the complexity of our economic machinery, the colossal accumulation of facts which must be mastered for success, bring heavy pressure to bear upon those who have their way to make in the world. ”

“ Of course I can't persuade people of this, and they will have it that it is overwork. I have come to the conviction, however, that steady work hurts nobody, the real destroyer of hardworking men being not their work, but dinners, late hours, and the universal humbug and excitement of society.
I mean to get out of all that and keep out of it.
Ever yours faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
[The other contribution to the general question was his Working Men's Lectures for 1862. As he writes to Darwin on October 10—] "I can't find anything to talk to the working men about this year but your book. ”

“ If so many branches of useful work are so reluctantly done now, it is merely because they mean overwork, or they are improperly organized. But we know—old Franklin knew it—that four hours of useful work every day would be more than sufficient for supplying everybody with the comfort of a moderately well-to-do middle-class house, if we all gave ourselves to productive work, and if we did not waste our productive powers as we do waste them now. ”

“ Further, very little account is taken of the evil effects of the overwork of men on the well-being of the next generation.... When the hours and the general conditions of labour are such as to cause great wear-and-tear of body or mind or both, and to lead to a low standard of living; when there has been a want of that leisure, rest, and repose which are among the necessaries for efficiency, then the labour has been extravagant from the point of view of society at large.... ”

“ Everybody who has any settled business is overworked. Voices of men crying for relaxation are heard from every quarter, yet none dare to pause in this race which they so madly run, in which happiness and mental and bodily health are among the least of their considerations. ”

“ Though every student of social phenomena admitted the fact that society was, under the present condition of overwork, almost retrograding and the masses sinking into degradation, still their demands have been refused. ”

“ Almost every labor union has made, or is contemplating making, rules which have for their object curtailing the output of their members, and those men who have the greatest influence with the working-people, the labor leaders as well as many people with philanthropic feelings who are helping them, are daily spreading this fallacy and at the same time telling them that they are overworked. ”

“ In a large proportion of other cases we satisfied ourselves that overwork meant not only mental strain, but the anxiety and harass which arose out of the work in which a student or literary man was engaged. The overwork connected with business, also largely associated with anxiety, proved a very tangible factor of insanity. Indeed it is always sure to be a more tangible factor of mental disease than overwork from study, because of the much greater liability to its invasion during the business period of brain-life than the study period. ”

“ Under the strain incident to overwork, a man may break down at forty and be discharged because he is physically or nervously unable to continue with his duties. Modern industry is run at a terrific speed which leads inevitably to a shortened working life, or decreased efficiency. ”

“ For every individual, however, who is overworked, there are a hundred who intentionally underwork—greatly underwork—every day of their lives, and who for this reason deliberately aid in establishing those conditions which in the end inevitably result in low wages. ”

“ Clearly she is the product of a highly-artificial mode of life, found in the midst of modern civilization. She is certainly not suffering from mental strain; at the same time she is the outcome of the progress from barbarism and the hardy forms of early national life to our present complex social condition. We have particularly inquired into cases coming under our own observation in regard to the alleged influence of overwork, and have found it a most difficult thing to distinguish between it and other maleficent agents which, on close observation, were often found to be associated with it. ”

“ In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; ”

“ Overworked mechanical employers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the problem of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean, resentful, temporary way.
And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides. I will not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical men. ”

“ But over and along with this I place. the proposition that a man will grow and develop in body and brain only when employed at work that gives him some high degree of pleasure. I believe in "obstacles," but I say that a system such as the capitalist system, putting such obstacles as starvation, underfeeding, overwork, bad housing, and perpetual uncertainty of work in the lives of human beings, is a pitiless, ignorant, blind, reckless, cruel mockery of a system. ”

“ Having seen how the pressure of the market forces factory owners to overwork their employees and to dismiss all who are not able to earn the wages they receive; how casual employment creates and keeps alive a class of labor such as is described by Mr. ”

“ and I find that, as on the one hand, infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the other hand, no small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. ”

“ He said to you: ‘Go on! without truce or rest—and your labor shall be vain—and every evening, throwing yourself on the hard ground, you shall be no nearer to the end of your eternal course!’—And so, for centuries, men without pity have said to the artisan: ‘Work! work! work! without truce or rest—and your labor shall be fruitful for all others, but fruitless for yourself—and every evening, throwing yourself on the hard ground, you shall be no nearer to happiness and repose; and your wages shall only suffice to keep you alive in pain, privation, and poverty!’”
“Alas! ”

“ And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks. ”

“ Do you get the best work out of the most skilled men in your employ by squeezing them down to half pay? Do you or I do our best work when he for whom we do it tries to get off with only partly paying for it? Is or is not the workman "worthy of his hire"? And will you name men whose lives are fuller of more important and more exacting, never-ceasing labor than our judiciary? When the fate of vast railroad properties, or of a mighty city even, hangs trembling in the hands of a mob ”

“ And the workman must keep silent and bend the knee, and clench his fist under his frock: for the employer has the work, and only too happy is he who can obtain the favor of his swindles. And because society has not yet found a way to prevent, repress, and punish this odious grinding process, so spontaneous, so ingenuous, so disengaged from all superior impulse, it is attributed to social constraint. ”

“ Cannot the laborers understand that by over-working themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of their progeny, that they are used up and long before their time come to be incapable of any work at all, that absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive and flourishing except the furious madness for work? Like Arcadian parrots, they repeat the lesson of the economist: "Let us work, let us work to increase the national wealth." ”

“ In our present society, for instance, an exploited wage worker, who catches a glimpse of what life and work ought to be, finds the toilsome routine and the squalor of his existence almost intolerable; and even when he has the resolution and courage to continue steadily working his best, and waiting until new ideas have so permeated society as to pave the way for better times, the mere fact that he has such ideas and tries to spread them, brings him into difficulties with his employers. ”

“ Did competition really demand, that one should defraud his neighbor, grind his laborers, sweat his debtors and snatch the bread from others? Were the majority of the men of your time swindlers and Shylocks? Were the laborers all slaves, working each day until completely exhausted? I remember distinctly, that the wage-workers of your time struck frequently for eight hours, declining to work nine or ten hours per diem for good pay. ”

“ And nevertheless, in spite of the over-production of goods, in spite of the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself, thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out on the pavement with no more [Pg 44] food for their vice. ”

“ To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of manna. ”

“ Still, with all possible reduction of the quantity of such work to be done, and with all the mechanical genius brought to bear upon it, we may freely concede that, for a long time to come, there must be some work quite dangerous, altogether disagreeable and repellent, and a great difference in the degree of attractiveness of some occupations as compared with some others. But an occupation repellent in itself might be made attractive, if the hours of labor were relatively few as compared with other occupations. ”

“ I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human development. ”

“ Those are the things that make an employer a nervous wreck. He’s got to keep it going. I tell you there’s advantages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming—”
“But, Mr. Fein, if it’s just as hard on the employers as it is on the employees, then the whole system is bad.” ”

“ Crying for it and not getting it, seeking for labour as lost treasure and finding it not, until at last, all spirit and vigour worn out in the weary quest, the once willing worker becomes a broken-down drudge, sodden with wretchedness and despairing of all help in this world or in that which is to come. ”

“ Work is--is play! Labour is--is the Devil! What beats me is this. Why, instead of slaving and dawdling, shouldn't the good workman, classed together, of course, be allowed to work, say, four hours, and then go their way? ”