White-collar worker

“ The million menial workers among us include 300,000 upper servants,—skilled men and women of character, like hotel waiters, Pullman porters, janitors, and cooks, who, had they been white, could have called on the great labor movement to lift their work out of slavery, to standardize their hours, to define their duties, and to substitute a living, regular wage for personal largess in the shape of tips, old clothes, and cold leavings of food. ”

“ The swift incoming of these Old World tides has very close relation to the wages of laboring people. Large numbers of the alien laborers who are coming now, are little better than "slaves of contractors, steamship lines, and the professional European jobbers in pauper labor. ”

“ Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was augmented considerably, the new-comers made up of those who had deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor white and black alike. ”

“ Into the hands of these men the Southern laborers, white and black, have fallen; and this to their sorrow. For the laborers as such there is in these new captains of industry neither love nor hate, neither sympathy nor romance ”

“ As a class they looked more like normal college students than factory hands. Compared with overworked, nerve-strained, anxious-faced girls in the sweat-shops, and indeed in most shops and factories, these trim, tidy-looking, cheerful and contented women seemed to me the very noblesse of the industrial world. ”

“ The labor and the exposure very naturally brought its reward in a sharp dose of fever, but White-Man's-Trouble attended to that after the manner of the heathen, and he emerged from it little the worse, and bore with composure the derision of the other Europeans at the factory when they saw his whitened eyesockets. ”

“ Leaving upon one side the class of skilled labor, a large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously inefficient. 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. ”

“ The London workman has only the alternative—such labour as has been described, the workhouse, or starvation. The negro slave seldom has such grinding toil, is provided for whether he performs it or not, and can look forward to an old age of comfort and repose. The London workman may leave his shop, but he will be either consigned to the prison of a workhouse or starved. ”

“ Mills and Elliot they go on working all the night as well as day. I believe them to have done so for the last year and a half; they have left it off about a week. (A respectable female here entered with a petition against negro-slavery; after she was gone, Mr. Fortesque continued.) I think home slavery as bad as it can be abroad; worst of anywhere in the factories. The hours we work are much too long for young people. Twelve hours' work is enough for young or old, confined in a close place. The work is light, but it's standing so long that tires them. ”

“ A smattering of education has made labor dissatisfied. The laboring people are trying to get out of their place, and as a result we have strikes and lawlessness and disrespect for courts, and men going around and making trouble in industry by ‘doing something for labor.’”
“Yes,” she replied, “that is very true.”
But her eyes–her big, liquid, animal eyes were saying, “How handsome you are–you man–you great, strong, masterful man with your brown ulster and brown hat and brown tie, and silken, black mustache.” ”

“ But whatever Fate may have in store for my dear little Georgie and her chosen co-worker, of one thing I am sure,—that, fare as they may with worldly fortune, they will never be content, having tasted of the salt of work, to feed again on the honey-bread of idleness, or become drones in the working-hive, but will persevere to the end in the principles and practices of what in the best sense of the word may be called their Labor Union. ”

“ Listen to this description of the slaves of the sweat-shop in New York, given by the New York Herald: "In the lower portion of the great east side of this city, are hundreds of tall, ill-appearing tenement houses, in which thousands of half-starved, sunken-eyed men and women are crowded into small, foul, over-heated rooms, working day and night for just enough to keep body and soul together. Scattered among the workers are dirty children, and sometimes cats and dogs. Everything in these places has to stand aside for work. It is work, work, work, day and night, year in and year out. ”

“ They are the most wretched-looking, miserably-paid class of workers in America. They are foreigners, and come chiefly from Russia and Poland. No sunshine enters into their lives. Their existence is one hard, deep, grinding toil. They have no hope of brighter days to come. As they have worked for years, so they expect to work in the future. But the sweater does not care. He has his contracts with the manufacturers. Every day great bundles of clothing are dumped into these dens, and then the slaves are driven at full speed to make them up. Competition is keen, but the sweater makes money. ”

“ The average wages of 1880 indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-world proletariat is thus seen to be stealing upon our shores. It is for specialists in political economy to study this problem in the light of the large social forces that are working such an alarming change in our American society. ”

“ No slaves work like we do. At some of the strapping shops the foreman keeps continually walking about with his eyes on all the men at once. At others the foreman is perched high up, so that he can have the whole of the men under his eye together. I suppose since I knew the trade that a man does four times the work that he did formerly. I know a man that's done four pairs of sashes in a day, and one is considered to be a good day's labour. What's worse than all, the men are every one striving one against the other. Each is trying to get through the work quicker than his neighbours. ”

“ I’ve got Harvey–the men in the mines and smelter, I mean, fairly well unionized, but the unions are nothing–nothing ultimate–they are only temporary.”
“Well,” returned the woman, soberly, “that’s something.”
The man made no answer. With his free hand he was ruffling his red hair, and she could see the muscles of his jaw working, and she felt his great mouth harden as he flashed his blue eyes upon her. “Laura,” he cried, “they may whip us this year. ”

“ Or, to put it in another light, these slop-women, by being compelled, in order to live, to work such over-hours as inflict lasting injury on the health, supplant, by their over-work and over-hours, the labour of 500 hands, working the regular hours. ”

“ As regards the London mantuamakers, I said:—'The workwomen for good shops that give fair, or tolerably fair wages, and expect good work, can make six average-sized mantles in a week, working from ten to twelve hours a day; but the slop-workers by toiling from thirteen to sixteen hours a day, will make nine such sized mantles in a week. In a season of twelve weeks, 1000 workers for the slop-houses and warehouses would at this rate make 108,000 mantles, or 36,000 more than workers for the fair trade. ”

“ Piece-work also shows that in the wage-earning world there is a group of men somewhat analogous to the retail shopkeepers, possessing the confidence of the employer, and not belonging to the proletariat class. ”

“ Work like negro slaves, indeed! There is no such work in America, even among the slaves; all day long, from Monday morning till Saturday night, week after week, and year after year, till the machine is worn out. ”

“ There are thousands of factory operatives, day laborers, domestic servants, mechanics, sewing women, clerks, apprentices, and such like, whose cry for justice against oppression goes up to heaven by day and by night. ”

“ Despite their lack of skill, lower level white-collar personnel hold a higher position on the social scale than other unskilled persons, principally because of the prestige attached to nonmanual work. ”

“ It may be said that, exhausting as this labour certainly is, it is not slavery; for the workman has a will of his own, and need not work if he does not choose to do it. Besides, he is not held by law; he may leave the shop ”

“ I have stated before that it is the labor question, more than any other, which causes the Colored people to suffer greater indignities than any other class of Americans in this country, and I believe it is not on account of their color, so much as it is the desire of white laborers to do the work and to receive pay which might go to him. It is an admitted fact that these same laborers or mechanics in search of a job, will go South, where the Colored men have charge of such work, or nearly so, and will not only work with them, but hire to them and be bossed by them. ”

“ So scant are the earnings of those who labour day and night in the cities and towns, that they may become paupers if thrown out of work for a single week. Many from town and country are driven by the fear of starvation to labour in the mines, the horrors of which species of slavery shall be duly illustrated farther on in this work. ”

“ We see thousands upon thousands of white men, chiefly foreigners. There was a time when the larger portion of railroad laborers was Colored men. There are two or three reasons for this which are obvious. One is that the foreigner will work for a cheaper wage and will live on less than the Colored man. He is willing to undergo certain hardships and privations that the Colored man does not undergo. I am not willing to concede that he is a better workman than the Colored man, for the Colored man has proven his ability as a laborer along every line of work. ”

“ The subdivision of labor gives him now only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for he makes nothing. He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands. ”

“ It was in the character of a workingman and not as a tramp, that I began, in the summer of 1891, a casual experiment, by which I hoped to gain some personal acquaintance with the conditions of life of unskilled laborers in America. Having no skill, I could count on employment only in the rudest forms of labor, and I maintained consistently the character of a laborer—a very indifferent one, I am bound to own—yet finding it possible everywhere to live by the work of my hands. ”

“ Where the workers can all join the fight;
So now on the soap box boldly he stands,
A singing with all of his might:
CHORUS:
There are but two nationalities, a nation of Masters, and a nation of Slaves.
One active agitating worker in the industry, is worth a dozen in the jungle.
One Big Union, One Enemy—The Boss. ”

“ The indolence of the agricultural labourer arises, perhaps, principally from his labour being almost always day-work, and in a great measure a mere payment of debt—a mere mode of working out his rent. That of the occupier may be attributed to a combination of causes. In the first place, a man must be master of himself to a degree not common even among the educated classes, before he can be trusted to be his own task-master. ”

“ The strength gradually wasting, the collier, who has hitherto continued at his employment, finds that he is unable to work six days in the week, and goes under ground perhaps only two or three days in that time; in the course of time, he finds an occasional half-day's employment as much as he can manage, and when only a few weeks' or months' journey from the grave, ultimately takes a final leave of his labour. ”

“ The larder is stocked with good food, good books are on the shelves, each day starts and ends with a joyous feeling about the heart.
And I, this sunburnt, carefree person, pretend to have been as a worker among workers. Again some one says, “The artificiality of it!”
Back in that hot New York the girls I labored among are still packing chocolates, cutting wick holes for brass lamp cones, ironing “family,” beading in the crowded dress factory. Up at the Falls they are hemming sheets and ticketing pillow cases. ”

“ Drinkwater, of the Factory Commission, found that great cruelty was practised upon the children employed in some of the factories, by the workmen called "slubbers," for whom the young creatures act as piecers. ”

“ They do not want to work by the side of the black man. This, however [Pg 168] is but a good excuse in the mouth of the white man for it is accepted as satisfactory by the white employer. An examination into labor conditions in our Northern cities reveals a deplorable condition so far as the Colored man is concerned. He cannot get a job calling for the skilled artisan however skilled he may be. The Union will not permit him to win his bread by the sweat of his brow. He cannot work because he is not allowed to work. ”