Workbasket

“ Here, for example, in one big shop, is a line of girls sitting idle for a quarter of an hour at their lathes, because the lusty labourer who lugs the heavy shell-bodies in his hand-bogey along their "street" is away sick for the half-day. Here, again, is a girl whose machine has been pulled up by the failure of a clutch, or, perhaps, for want of the tools which wear out quickly against the hard steel, and require frequent changing. In the tool-shop near by there are a hundred and fifty men, all skilled mechanics, having served seven years to their trade, and earning one-and-sixpence an hour. ”

“ But can anyone believe that a shoe factory worker, one of a hundred men, each doing a small part of the complete whole, standing before a machine for instance and listening to this ticktack all day long—that such a man has any joy in his work or any pride in the ultimate product? The silk worker for instance may make beautiful things, fine shimmering silk. ”

“ It is a factory for the making of the wooden boxes that carry the shells to the front. All the joiners are girls. They are working the hand-saw, the circular-saw, the hand-plane, the machine-plane, and are morticing and hammering the boxes into shape and splicing up their thick rope handles. Never was there a brighter scene. The girls seem to have a sense of doing big things with a blow and a swing—not tinkering with feminine trifles. They love their work. ”

“ The needle-pointers were misled, and suffered much hardship: and when they petitioned for work at the old wages, the employers imposed a new condition;—that they should honestly use the means provided for the preservation of their health. A fan-wheel in the midst of a group of grinding benches, each of which has its wheel covered so artfully as that the dust is whirled away from the workman’s face, conveys the whole collection of stone and steel particles out of the work-room, and blows it into some harmless place in the open air. ”

“ The first noon whistle—work dropped—a rush for the washroom. Let no one think his hands ever were dirty until he labors at a foot press in a brassworks. Such sticky, grimy, oily, rough blackness never was—and the factory supplies no soap nor towels. You are expected to bring your own—which is all right the second day when you have found it out and come prepared. ”

“ The introduction of steam has revolutionized industry.... While machinery has, in some senses, lightened the burden of human toil it has not diminished fatigue in man. While the machinery pursues its relentless course, and insensitive to fatigue, human beings are conscious, especially towards the end of the day, that the competition is unequal, for their muscles are becoming tired and their brains jaded. Present-day factory labor is too much a competition of sensitive human nerve and muscle against insensitive iron. ”

“ Ideas for labor-saving devices which cannot be bought upon the market present themselves now and then, and if there is a boy in the neighborhood to carry them out, the housekeeper will be only too glad to pay him for doing the work.
For general jobbing you will require a carpenter's carrying-box (Fig. 17, Chap. I) in which to carry your tools, and a nail-box (Fig. 18) for nails, screws, hinges, and such hardware as you will need upon the job. With these you will have a complete outfit. ”

“ The twelve-hour day makes the life of the steel-worker different in a far-reaching manner from the life of the majority of his fellow workers.
It makes the industry different in its fundamental organization and temper from an eight-hour or a ten-hour industry.
It transforms the community where men live whose day is twelve hours long.
"What is it really like? How much of the time do you actually work? Are you 'all in' when you wash up in the morning after the shift, and go home?"
To tell it exactly, if I can: You go into the mill, a little before six, and get into your mill clothes. ”

“ We must cut, saw, chop and carry enormous tree-trunks which are piled as high as a house.
Just as they come to hand a workman distributes saws, hatchets, crowbars to the hands stretched out for them. What are we going to do? At last here is our chance. They ask for six men to work without tools. With a jump we rush out of our ranks, all six of us. What luck! We follow our guard, who walks off. After having traversed the factory we arrive at a place which looks on the river. This is to be our workshop. A workman has joined us ”

“ Do you know of any tools that are not labor-saving? The mason's trowel is a labor-saving tool, invented to prevent him from using his hands to put on the mortar; the bolo or the knife is just as much a labor-saving tool as the planing machine; the sickle saves labor and so does the reaper. The difficulty is that some people do not stop to think that the saving of labor applies just as forcibly to a simple tool as to a complicated one. ”

“ These, with the primitive hammer, formed the principal stock-in-trade of the early mechanics, who were handicraftsmen in the literal sense of the word. But the work which the early craftsmen in wood, stone, brass, and iron, contrived to execute, sufficed to show how much expertness in the handling of tools will serve to compensate for their mechanical imperfections. Workmen then sought rather to aid muscular strength than to supersede it, and mainly to facilitate the efforts of manual skill. ”

“ I am perfectly satisfied, for example, that Boots and Shoes may be cut out and made up by machinery with less than one-fourth the labor now required—that this would require no absolutely new inventions, but only an adaptation of those already well known. So in other departments of Industry. There is no reason for continuing to sew plain seams on thick cloth by hand, when machinery can do the work even better and twenty times as fast. I shall be disappointed if this Exhibition be not speedily followed by immense advances in Labor-Saving Machinery, especially in this country. ”

“ Every person taken into the concern had to be trained and educated to mechanical work by the partners themselves. With indescribable patience they taught these labourers the use of the hammer, the file, the turning-lathe, and other tools, which the greater number of them had never before seen, and of whose uses they were entirely ignorant. The machinery of the workshop was got together with equal difficulty piece by piece, some of the parts from a great distance,—the mechanical arts being then at a very low ebb in Germany, which was still suffering from the effects of the long continental war. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The labour of using a hatchet, and the material which it wastes, are saved twenty times over by the saw. But when the more delicate operations of carpentry are required—when the workman uses his planes, his rabbet-planes, his fillisters, his bevels, and his centre-bits—what an infinitely greater quantity of labour is economized, and how beautifully that work is performed, which, without them, would be rough and imperfect! Every boy of mechanical ingenuity has tried with his knife to make a [Pg 180] boat; and with a knife only it is the work of weeks. ”

“ In another street it is interesting to watch the sacred money being made. Outside each shop a tree trunk is set up about six feet high; the top of it is carved to form a mould, the shape of a silver shoe. Into this the paper—made from bamboo or rice straw—is beaten into shape with a hammer by a man standing upon the counter in order to reach up to it. The basket-shops, too, are most enticing, and here they make the largest baskets I have ever seen, about four feet high and about two yards in diameter. ”

“ We also broke men in on drill presses and shapers, using same tactics and had very successful results. To give you an idea as to the class of men from which we have made machine operators, we have working in our shop to-day one bartender, piano tuner, street car conductor, bricklayer, coal miner and an artist—self made. The other unskilled men had had some previous experience on productive labor, either running punching presses, nailing machines, or work requiring a smattering of mechanical ability. ”

“ The Work-bench or Table.
Few work-benches or tables should be considered as absolutely satisfactory that do not permit the worker to do his work standing or sitting. Our ideas as to proper work-benches or tables, and as to the proper placing, height, etc., of machinery and tools have too often been prescribed to us by the manufacturers of the articles, who have thought more of what was convenient to manufacture than of what was least fatiguing to use. Such manufacturers are not to be blamed in the least for their attitude. They, naturally, have been guided by what would sell best. ”

“ In the little outside workshop, on the other hand, lengthy spells of enforced idleness are followed by short periods of most severe toil, during which the hours of daily labour are prolonged to an inhuman extent. At the same time, the workpeople employed in the ill-equipped workshop of the little master are competing with the much more efficient production of the factory provided with labour-saving machinery driven by steam or other mechanical power ”

“ We escape much of the hard work our mothers and grandmothers performed so energetically, and about which housekeepers of the present day hear so many disparaging comparisons; for machinery does better and far more expeditiously many things that in olden times could only be accomplished by hard labor.
The wool is no longer carded by hand. Our factories have banished the spinning-wheel from the good old kitchen fireside ”

“ Basket making is one of the principal employments engaged in by the blind. It requires some strength, but more skill and practice. A basket maker's tools can be bought for $5, and last a lifetime. On looking for women basket makers in Philadelphia, we found a German widow, who could not make herself understood in English, but my companion conversed with her in German, and learned that she had supported herself and son for six years, by making baskets for the trade. She buys the willow ready for use at seven cents a pound. ”

“ In shop after shop I moved about amongst these women, saw them pulling levers, turning hand-wheels, sliding cutters to and from their exact positions, handling complicated-looking lathes and presses and machines as if they had been born and reared to the job, although actually 99 per cent. had never had hand on any machine more intricate than a washhouse79 mangle. They are doing work, too, that a good many men would hesitate about tackling. ”

“ It was once remarked to us by a gentleman at the head of a great establishment of this kind, that there was something about the labour of skilled workmen in iron that impressed itself upon their countenances, and showed itself in their characters. Something of solidity, of determination, of careful forethought; and really after going over many shops of ironworkers, we are inclined to come to the same opinion. Machinery, while superseding, has created manual labour. In a steam-engine factory, machinery is called upon to do what no amount of manual labour could effect. ”

“ It is very easy work, and beginners soon become expert in it. It improves the effect, when the work is finished, if dark colour be painted into the depressions. Basket-work may be used for diaper ground. The American Indian basket-work, in flat strips from one-third of an inch to an inch in breadth, is easiest to imitate, and may be executed with a single V tool or firmer. ”

“ One of the most striking instances I know of the vast superiority of machinery over simple instruments used by hand, is in the manufacture of lace, when one man, with a machine, does the work of 8,000 lace makers on the cushion. In spinning fine numbers of yarn, a workman in a self-acting mule will do the work of 3,000 hand-spinners with the distaff and spindle.
298 "Comparatively few persons, perhaps, are aware of the increase of production in our life-time. Thirty years ago, the cost of labour for turning a surface of cast iron, by chipping and filing with the hand, was 12s. ”

“ The requirement of 400 cubic feet of space is an instance of the official brain working in a vacuum, and here again the administrative side is not to be blamed. How is a factory inspector to see that every person who works overtime gets his 400 feet? How can he calculate? Is he to set his calculation against that of the manufacturer who is anxious to keep all his hands [157] working extra hours, and who assures him that, after making due deduction for bench room, machinery, and the like, each person will enjoy his allotted share? ”

“ I saw a woman who merely colors willow. She could make a comfortable living at it, if she could give all her time to it; but she cannot, as she has two small children, and must give part of her time to them. In Williamsburg, I had a long talk with a basket maker. He says it is best for an [Pg 282] apprentice to learn basket making of a practical worker who has not many hands, and who will give instruction himself. He can give the more time to his learners. He spent seven years learning the trade in England. It requires knowledge of form to make the baskets of a handsome shape. ”