Unskilled laborer

“ And, last of all, are the unskilled laborers, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the ditch-diggers, the men of pick and shovel, the helpers, lumpers, roustabouts. If trade is slack on a seacoast of two thousand miles, or the harvests are light in a great interior valley, myriads of these laborers lie idle, or make life miserable for their fellows in kindred unskilled employments. ”

“ But with the great mass of workers, the wages had, from many causes, fallen below the point of subsistence, or kept so near it that advance was impossible, and the worker, even when fairly well trained, faced a practically hopeless future.
The search began with a bias against rather than for the worker, and the determination to do strictest justice to employer as well as employed. Long experience had taught what was to be expected from untrained, unskilled laborers, with no ambition or power to rise. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A third difficulty is the fact that employers are so often obliged to engage for skilled labor the assistance of unskilled laborers. Many who seek employment as servants do not know even the names of the household tools they are obliged to use—still less are they acquainted with their uses. A part of this ignorance and lack of skill is due to the prevalence of the old idea that anybody can do everything—a theory abandoned in most occupations but still dominating the household. ”

“ They are not gaining higher wages through class conscious efforts, although every struggle is a breeder of class consciousness, even though it be only in a negative way.
Modern machinery is eliminating the need of skilled labor and unskilled labor with ever increasing speed. Skilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unskilled and unskilled workers are thrown into the ranks of the unemployed. And gradually all workers are being more and more forced to compete with each other for jobs upon a common level. ”

“ In Chapter V, again, he points out the chronic distress of unskilled men and that unemployment is largely due to lack of organization. It stands to reason that whereas a factory owner thinks twice before dismissing a skilled workman he will not hesitate to dismiss an unskilled workman whom he can replace at any time. ”

“ The temptation to quit the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go out to the more hospitable country, was then strong at times; but I could but realize that, in yielding, I should be abandoning a very real phase of the experience of unskilled labor, that of unemployment, and that I should miss the chance of some contact with bodies of organized skilled workmen as well as with the revolutionaries who can be easiest found in our larger towns. ”

“ On the other hand, look at him, who "eats his bread in the sweat of his brow," look at the laborer who works for wages. If he is skillful, industrious and strong, and if he is lucky enough to find employment, he may even be able to save a little. But the large majority of laborers cannot even think of that, in spite of all hardships they undergo, When they have to stop work, they are as poor as when they began it. ”

“ The importance of these movements for us consists in their firm but tacit recognition of the fact, that an excessive supply of unskilled labour lies at the root of the industrial disease of "sweating." ”

“ Now, if you will ask that old cooper, who was a skilled man and belonged to a union that represented skilled labor a few years ago—if you will ask him who the skilled man is, I think he can give you a satisfactory answer to your question. The skill of the trade is being gradually eliminated, and we are taking cognizance of that fact. We Industrial Workers recognize no aristocracy of skill. If any partiality were to be shown, however, I would give the unskilled man the benefit of it, because he needs it most. But there is no such discrimination in the Industrial Workers. ”

“ There was no attempt to set all the unemployed to work, and no desire to confine to them the staff that was engaged. As a matter of fact, about a third of the men taken on were workmen skilled in the particular work to be done, and these do not appear to have been drawn from the unemployed class at all. But for the mere unskilled manual work volunteers were (in some, but not all the cases) asked for among the distressed cotton operatives, from amongst whom the necessary number of labourers were selected, to be engaged at labourers' rates of pay. ”

“ On the other hand, the reports of the Royal Poor Law Commission of 1909 reveal to us a vast mass of casual, under-employed, unskilled, low grade labour, in depths, some of it, of profound misfortune. These contra-indicants are alike genuine. As the author of Life and Labour in London remarked years ago, "The cleavage between the higher and lower grades of manual labour has become more marked industrially." He who does not realise that fact firmly is apt to lose himself on this stricken battlefield of thought. ”

“ The low income of unskilled labor seems to fall short of its social service. This does not refer to the feeble-minded or utterly inefficient, but rather to honest, industrious, "day-laborers," and to the low-paid manual workers in field, on railroad, and in factory. Their service is essential to the existence of society as it is, to all the higher arts, to the sciences, and to the amenities of life; their tasks are the roughest, most painful, most dangerous ”

“ The very success which attends the efforts of skilled workers to limit the effective supply of their labour by making it more difficult for unskilled workers to enter their ranks, increases the competition for low-skilled work, and makes effective combination among low-skilled workers more difficult. ”

“ Irregularities in the conduct of industry and in the method of employing labor are evident in dock work, in the unskilled work in iron and steel, and in slaughtering and meat packing; in the competitive conditions in industries which force employers to cut labor cost down to the utmost and to close down in order to save operating expenses ”

“ The constant influx of unskilled labour from the rural districts and from abroad, swollen by the numbers of skilled workmen whose skill has been robbed of its value by machinery, keeps a large continual margin of unemployed, able and willing to undertake any kind of unskilled or low-skilled labour, which will provide a minimum subsistence wage. ”

“ 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." ”

“ To-day the ordinary laborer is for the most part a cog in a wheel. He works with the tireless—he feeds the insatiable. When the monster stops, the man is out of employment, out of bread; He has not saved anything. The machine that he fed was not feeding him, was not working for him—the invention was not for his benefit. The other day I heard a man say that it was almost impossible for thousands of good mechanics to get employment, and that, in his judgment, the Government ought to furnish work for the people. ”

“ The mass of this immigration entered into the field of unskilled labor. The great majority of these workers because of the partly unavoidable handicap of their 75 strangeness, and their ignorance of American life, and because of their poor education, did not have equal chances with the older inhabitants to rise in the industrial scale. ”

“ In some cases it has been charged, although without definite proof, that irregularity of employment is due to a deliberate policy of employers in order to lessen the chance of organized movement, as well as to keep the level of wages down in unskilled occupations by continually hiring new individuals. ”

“ We must, however, bear in mind that this rule, in its strictest sense, applies only to unskilled labour. Qualified labourers are often highly valued and able to secure great advantage, because their number is limited. It is therefore that the helpless state of people destitute of material resources appears more clearly in agricultural than in manufacturing countries. ”

“ Though their employment is steadier than that of the migratory laborer, and though they often have ties of family and other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate restlessness. ”

“ It passes from master to master, as it passes, in countries of hired labor, from employer to employer. The mode in which the transfer is made differs in the two systems of labor. The slave-laborer is never compelled to hunt for work and starve till he finds it. Is this an evil to the laborer? Would it be thought an evil, by the hired man in Europe, that his employer should be obliged, by-law, to find him another employer before dismissing him from service? ”

“ The unskilled labour market suffers, again, from the depression of almost any branch of skilled labour; for whatever branch of labour be depressed, and men so be deprived of a sufficiency of employment, one especial result ensues—the unskilled labour market is glutted. The skilled labourer, a tailor, for instance, may be driven to work for the wretched pittance of an East end slop-tailor, but he cannot “turn his hand” to any other description of skilled labour. He cannot say, “I will make billiard-tables, or book-cases, or boots, or razors;” ”

“ The pauper labourers were unskilled. If these schemes had not broken down by their own weight, and workhouse manufactories had gone on producing a competition of unskilled labourers with skilled, the rate of wages would have been more and more deteriorated, and the amount of poor seeking workhouse employment as a last resource more and more increased. Experience has very satisfactorily demonstrated that these schemes for employing the poor ought to be strictly limited to the [Pg 390] production of articles of necessity for their own consumption. ”

“ The Unemployable (From “The Workers”)
By Walter A. Wyckoff
(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived for long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of industry at first hand)
Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity. ”

“ But, your poor agricultural labourer, who lives in poverty, and dirt, and misery—starving annually on a tenth portion of the wages that the skilled mechanic gets—he is no working-man; oh no! Nor the wretched London clerk; he, also, is no working-man ”

“ Prosperity and contentment can only be found where all industrial pursuits prove remunerative; where manual labor not only supports the laborer, but enables him to acquire a competence in process of time. That division of labor and capital which compels the laborer to toil daily to keep want from his door, and is so inflexible that the sickness of a single day entails the loss of necessaries to his family, is a species of slavery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even the poor classes of regular unskilled workmen have raised their standard of comfort.
It is in its bearing on the industrial condition of the very poor, and those who are unable to get regular work at decent wages, that the influence of machinery is most questionable. ”

“ Even the laborer who loses his employment by idleness or negligence has nothing worse to suffer, in the most unfavorable case, than the discipline of a workhouse, and if the desire to avoid this be a sufficient motive in the one system, it would be sufficient in the other. I am not undervaluing the strength of the incitement given to labor when the whole or a large share of the benefit of extra exertion belongs to the laborer. ”

“ In time he is rewarded. He may come to be a checker, a clerk, or an inspector; while the sterling fellow, the hard worker, the “sticker,” as he is called, may stop and work himself to death like a slave. Thus, deserving men, because they have proved themselves adepts at the work, have been kept on the ash-barrows for ten or twelve years, sweating their lives away for the sum of eighteen shillings a week. Several, however, disgusted with the business, have left the shed and gone back to work on the farms, in the pure surroundings of the fields and villages. ”

“ It is permitted to the clerk, the shopman, the street peddler—to all who live by the light employment of keeping the wolf from the door without eating him—to abandon their ignoble callings, seize the shovel, the axe and the sledge-hammer and lay about them right sturdily, to the ample gratification of their desire. And those who are engaged in more profitable vocations will find that with a part of their incomes they can purchase from their employers the right to work as hard as they like in even the dullest times.
Manual labor has nothing of dignity, nothing of beauty. ”

“ The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftmanship rendered useless, is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves. He sees his power of resistance broken by class divisions, perpetuated from outgrown industrial stages. His wages constantly grow less as his hours grow longer and monopolized prices grow higher. ”