Work gang

“ The actual spoken threat of an individual employer who makes his laborer stay at work against his will by fear of the chain gang, and the threat of the State to send him to the chain gang whenever his employer chooses to have him arrested, are the same in result and do not seem to me very different in any other way. ”

“ At the head is the gang-master, always an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savior faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him, not under the farmer. He generally arranges with the latter for piece-work, and his income, which on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, [109] depends almost entirely upon the dexterity with which he manages to extract within the shortest time the greatest possible amount of labour from his gang. ”

“ He makes it his business to collect a number of women, young persons, and children, sometimes as many as forty, and form them into a gang, which he leads out day by day to those parts of the fen where he has engaged to work. ”

“ The overseer usually goes with the gang to the place of work, and returns home with them when they leave off for the day."
The system is said to be productive of the worst consequences, which will be readily admitted, when it is considered that the gangs are generally composed of the lower orders from the towns, yoked together without regard to age, sex or character, and crowded together at night when the distance compels them to lodge on the farm. There is a complete disseverment between the farmer and the laborer ”

“ Generally little [Pg 24] gangs associate together and work in company; but it is rare that they do so on communistic principles. More often, each member of the gang works entirely for his own hand, though they may have food and so on in common. ”

“ There were about fifty persons in the gang--the majority females--under two inspectors or superintendents, men who take the place of the quondam drivers, though their province is totally different. They merely direct the laborers in their work, employing with the loiterers the stimulus of persuasion, or at farthest, no more than the violence of the tongue. ”

“ Such a segregation is not being thought of.
"Men who work together in mixed gangs of white and colored workers believe their trade union ought to be organized just like the work gang," said A. K. Foote, a colored man whose craft is that of hog killer and who is secretary of local 651 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. ”

“ It is known as the "miscellaneous" local, taking in as members the common laborers and all workers not qualifying for membership in a skilled craft union. One advantage for colored workers, according to organizers, is that the seniority rights of such workers are now accorded. If the head of a work gang quits for any reason and a colored man is the oldest in point of service in the gang or department, he is automatically advanced. ”

“ Thirteen and sixpence a week! Would English navvies work for that? You are getting the labour at starvation prices, and even then you bully the men. They work in gangs, each with a ganger swearing at them in the most offensive and outrageous way. See that gang over there. You can hear the ganger shouting and swearing even at this distance. The poor men are treated like dogs, and even then they can hardly keep body and soul together. They have to come miles and miles to the work, and some live so far away that they can only return home once a week. ”

“ The gang demands fair play and fidelity among its members, and it usually gets these. The gang demands devotion and self-sacrifice of its members, and the boy who cannot show these qualities becomes more effectually ostracized than any defaulting bank official or corrupt politician. These fine virtues, then—loyalty, honor, devotion—are cultivated by the gang just at the time when the instincts for them are strongest, and at a time when no other agency is prepared to do the work. ”

“ Only when absolutely necessary was the work of two men measured up together and the price divided between them, and then care was taken to select two men of as nearly as possible the same capacity. Only on few occasions, and then upon special permission, signed by the writer, were more than two men allowed to work on gang work, dividing their earnings between them. Gang work almost invariably results in a falling off in earnings and consequent dissatisfaction.
An interesting illustration of the desirability of individual piece work instead of gang work came to our attention at Bethlehem. ”

“ The men work in gangs, which relieve each other every six hours, and when the hour of relief comes, a steward or foreman attends the dressing- room to see the men change their dresses as they come up one by one out of the mine. The clothes are examined by the steward to see that no black-lead is concealed in them; and when the men have dressed they leave the mine, making room for another gang, who change their clothes, enter the mine, and are fastened in for six hours. ”

“ Under the old system the workmen were kept day after day in comparatively large gangs, each under a single foreman, and the gang was apt to remain of pretty nearly the same size whether there was much or little of the particular kind of work on hand which this foreman had under his charge, since each gang had to be kept large enough to handle whatever work in its special line was likely to come along. ”

“ Apparently, then, a boy joins a gang and a girl does not for precisely the same reason that he throws stones while his sister tends lovingly the dolls that are beneath his contempt. Each is doing instinctively, as a child, for play, what grown men and women have been doing these thousand years for work. ”

“ Some had work to do at ironmongers, lead-factories, engineers, soap-boilers, and so on, and some had no work to do and was good boys still. After we came out of school at nine o’clock at night, some of the bad boys would go a thieving, perhaps half-a-dozen and from that to eight would go out in a gang together. ”

“ A driver, with a boy to set the stakes, I was told, would accurately lay out forty acres a day, in half-acre tasks. The only instrument used is a five-foot measuring rod. When the gang comes to the field, he points out to each person his or her duty for the day, and then walks about among them, looking out that each proceeds properly. If, after a hard day’s labour, he sees that the gang has been overtasked, owing to a miscalculation of the difficulty of the work, he may excuse the completion of the tasks ”

“ To go a little farther in my ambition, it also seemed possible to pick and select the best of these men instead of taking them at random. For instance in the present gang there were at least a half dozen who stood out as more intelligent and stronger physically than all the others. Why couldn't a man in time gather about him say a hundred such men and by better treatment, possibly better pay, possibly a guarantee of continuous work, make of them a loyal, hard working machine with a capacity for double the work of the ordinary gang? ”

“ If anything, he makes more out of the men than the butcher; for if any man goes a score (which he always encourages) he stops the whole out the man’s earnings, and often leaves him without a penny after the job is done. When the publican, grocer, butcher, or lodging-house keeper has a contract for ballast, he directs the foreman working under him to get together the gang that regularly work from his house. This gang are men who always deal at the shop, and the contractor would dismiss me if I was to engage any other men than those who were his regular customers. ”

“ In the morning we are ordered into the new section of the prison. The old bums go [Pg 49] to the workhouse, and we await our turn to be placed in the shops, according to our sentences and our work or profession. The distribution of labor among us is strange and mysterious. A butcher, for instance, is sent to work in the stone quarry, a smuggler into the kitchen gang, a lawyer in the "skin gang," a "sissy" into the coal gang, a waiter into the garden; a burglar is sent to make socks, and I am sent into the tailor shop. ”

“ The Societies are registered and work in small gangs. As elsewhere, experiment has shown that discipline becomes too difficult with larger numbers. One often finds the coöperative store affiliated with this working plan. The profits of each gang go to no outsider, but automatically to themselves when the job is done. ”

“ I come up from New York myself on a freighter and dropped off here two days ago. It's too far to walk; you carry heavy things. Besides, there's a good job here mending the road. I've just been taken on. A mile up the road you'll see a waggon; ask there, they're making up a gang. The work's a bit rough but the pay good."
Then I came on a gang of Wops and Huns loading bridge-props and ribbons and guard-rails on to an electric trolley, and the boss again applied to me.
"No, thanks!"
A man with an asphalt and coal-oil scatterer came past. His was a dirty job. ”

“ The people on most estates are divided into three gangs; first, the great gang, composed of the principal effective men and women; second, the weeding gang, consisting of younger and weekly persons; and third, the grass gang, which embraces all the children able to work. ”

“ When I joined them I believe we counted in all two hundred and sixty-three; but of these only one hundred and seventy went to the field to work. The others were children, too small to be of any service as laborers; old and blind persons, or incurably diseased. Ten or twelve were kept about the mansion-house and garden, chosen from the most handsome and sprightly of the gang.
I think about one hundred and sixty-eight assembled this morning, at the sound of the horn — two or three being sick, sent word to the overseer that they could not come. ”

“ Father and son were at work near each other, but not in the same gang - the passages out of which the ore was dug, they called gangs - for when the lode, or vein of ore, was small, one miner would have to dig away alone in a passage no bigger than gave him just room to work - sometimes in uncomfortable cramped positions. ”

“ By discharging workers, lowering the wages of the more stubborn men who refused to make any improvement, lowering the piece-work rate, and by other such methods, he (the writer) succeeded in very materially increasing the output of the machines, in some cases doubling the output, and had been promoted from one gang boss-ship to another until he became the foreman of the shop.... For any right-minded man, however, this success is in no sense a recompense for the bitter relations which he is forced to maintain with all those around him. ”

“ Well, what were you saying about Ramon Martinez gang? You haven’t come across one of ’em, have you?” [Pg 18]
“No,” said Bill, with a slight blinking of his eye, as he ostentatiously lifted his glass to the light.
“And you won’t,” added the Superintendent, leisurely sipping his liquor. “For the fact is, the gang is about played out. Not from want of a job now and then, but from the difficulty of disposing of the results of their work. Since the new instructions to the agents to identify and trace all dust and bullion offered to them went into force, you see, they can’t get rid of their swag. ”

“ At the end of the season the gang leaders are paid a gratificación, or bonus, the size of which depends upon the amount of rubber collected, and this in turn depends upon the size of the gang and the degree of willingness to work. ”

“ A careful analysis had demonstrated the fact that when workmen are herded together in gangs, each man in the gang becomes far less efficient than when his personal ambition is stimulated; that when men work in gangs, their individual efficiency falls almost invariably down to or below the level of the worst man in the gang ”

“ He is prepared to "rake in" a thousand dollars a night, and would not hesitate to strip any man of his fortune. The professional is found at county fairs, on railway trains, in gilded dens, and at public resorts. Being a professional outlaw, and subject at any time to arrest and imprisonment, usually he has an accomplice. Sometimes a gang work together, so that it is with perfect ease they may relieve any unwary novice of his money. They know human nature on its low, mercenary side, and soon can find their man in a crowd. ”

“ We work in gangs of six or seven, with a master at the head of the gang; the logs are got out of the hold with a purchase and a jigger, and heaved ashore by a crane on to a truck, and we drag the truck to the place to stow the timber. In the wood-yards a machine lifts the timber up, by us men turning handles to work the machine, and puts it into its place in the warehouse. We are paid 2s. 6d. a-day, working from eight to four. If only employed for four hours—and we’re not [295] set to work for less than four hours—we have 1s. 4d. ”

“ I've got two hundred men workin' there. So they won't get in each other's way I've divided 'em up in four gangs, fifty men to the gang. There's all kinds of men in that two hundred, Conniston, and about the [175] biggest part of your day's work will be to sort of size your men up. ”

“ In many cases the efficiency will not fall off at all, provided the gang knows that its daily progress is being recorded, and that prompt discharge will follow laziness. Indeed, one of the authors has more than once had the efficiency increased by leaving a small gang to themselves in command of one of the workers who was required to punch a hole in a card for every batch.
To reduce the cost of superintendence there is no surer method than to work two gangs of 18 to 20 men, side by side, each gang under a separate foreman who is striving to make a better showing than his competitor. ”