Working man

“ In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing—partly by competition and partly by combination and by experience—employers who are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours, the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. ”

“ I have borne these things in mind since I became an employer, and I can feel for poor fellows who are clamouring for work; for man must eat, and, if he is willing to work, he will have work, or some one will suffer. ”

“ The Secret of Work.—Men will employ you if you mean business. When you find men working, work with them. Lend a hand. Every employer{16} would rather employ a busy man than an idle man. When he sees you working, he will watch you. If he likes you, he will make you an offer. A glazier, being refused work at a place where a church was being erected, put down his kit of tools, picked up the broken pieces of glass which the workmen had thrown away, and, laboring just as if he had been hired to work, fashioned the finest church window in the world, and became rich and famous. ”

“ With a flood of words, carefully prepared to appeal to men in your position, and with stories that are supposed to illustrate the points he wants to make, the man on the street-corner will try to persuade you that labor is the sole factor in wealth production—that the workers produce all the wealth of the world—and that this wealth belongs rightfully to those who made it. ”

“ And the same remark is applicable to labourers with the head as with the hand; for in these days we must extend the phrase, "working men," far beyond the comparatively narrow region of the industrial arts. ”

“ Tap the bell for eight hours work; treat the boys like men,
And fifty thousand lumberjacks may come to work again.
Men who work should be well paid. "A man's a man for a' that."
Many a man has a home to keep same as yourself, Old Fat. ”

“ With our worker, just as sure as the sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will rise to earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to own his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as he once was himself. ”

“ Before I've done I shall have the best carters, the best dairy-women, the best bailiff, and the best plowman and the most successful farm in the country. You don't know how men can work who are working for themselves and not just for a master. ”

“ And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man’s capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor ”

“ On a day a party of visitors would come to the little shop and the owner would pick up a hand-forged hammer and say, 'See what John made!' But, in our modern industry, no one man ever completes a task. Each task is subdivided into twenty, forty, a hundred or more portions, and a workingman is given just one to work on, day by day, year after year, for a working generation. ”

“ Who would beg for work or truckle and fawn and curry favor of an employer for the mere sake of retaining a situation and help that same man to make money, when he could shoulder pick, shovel, and rocker, go down to the river’s edge and make his two or three dollars per day? ”

“ From this it will be seen that the necessity of labor is something at which we should rather rejoice than complain, and that habits of industry are the great helpers to virtue, happiness, and usefulness.
Industry is now as important to the woman as to the man. ”

“ The wiser man, the labourer, begins at his corner of the wood, and makes out a task for himself for each day. Let not our imaginations be employed on one side only. Think, that large as may appear the work to be done—so too the result of any endeavour, however small in itself, may be of infinite extent in the future. ”

“ I am speaking, of course, of that class of people of our race who depend mainly upon a day's work—working by the day, as we call it—for their living. These men with whom I talked gave several illustrations of this tendency. In the first place, I think they mentioned, without exception, this fact—that if the coloured people are employed in a factory, they work well and steadily for a few days, say until Saturday night comes, and they are paid their week's wages. ”

“ But now, you see," said he, leading me on a little, "we have learned the trick of handicraft, and have added the utmost refinement of workmanship to the freedom of fancy and imagination."
I looked, and wondered indeed at the deftness and abundance of beauty of the work of men who had at last learned to accept life itself as a pleasure, and the satisfaction of the common needs of mankind and the preparation for them, as work fit for the best of the race. ”

“ All then who are acquainted with sedentary trades, might, one would think, be properly so employed, and also instruct others at the work, or such parts of it in which their assistance might be rendered useful.
When a man finds himself restored to the exercise of accustomed employment, his cheerfulness, we find, returns, and his captivity sits more lightly. ”

“ If the man who plants vegetables, and carries his corn to town on market-days, is not more usefully employed than I am, then let me work ten years longer at the galleys to which I am now chained.
Oh, the brilliant wretchedness, the weariness, that one is doomed to witness among the silly people whom we meet in society here! The ambition of rank! How they watch, how they toil, to gain precedence! ”

“ The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. ”

“ Labor does not engender dirt. Never say of a laborer coming from his work, “He is filthy.” You should say, “He has on his garments the signs, the traces, of his toil.” Remember this. And you must love the little mason, first, because he is your comrade; and next, because he is the son of a workingman.
Thy Father.
[60] ”

“ By many of the labourers this is still felt as it ought to be felt, and they take a pride and a pleasure in working year after year for the same master, and try to obtain his approbation by industry and good conduct. ”

“ You're daft about the working-class and have no use for any other. But what in the name of goodness do you know about working-men?... I come out of them myself, and have lived next door to them all my days. ”

“ It's the small employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.
Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin'man—the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter—has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is working it for all he is worth. ”

“ Let us do all we can to help labor. Give it a square deal—an honest and generous wage for an honest day's work. Labor is neither a commodity or a chapel; it's human. Let us inject more of the human element into our dealings with labor and with those of others. ”

“ For this reason, that the Colored man is not faithful to his promises, he has been discounted in the field of manual labor. The more important the job of the employer, the more important the fidelity of the employee. No employer wishes to undertake an extensive and costly piece of work and be dependent on a class of labor that may fail him at the place where he needs steady, persistent work. ”

“ This fact which seems to be true of employers and employees, of capital and labor in general, brings out and illustrates another general principle in making the necessary excavations in one's own mind and other people's for new brain tracks—another working principle of technique for a man or a group in a nation to use in getting and deserving to get its way. ”

“ Personal labour is clearly meant: it is in the sweat [72] of his brow that the farmer is to thrive. Such is the ordinance of the gods. Man is meant to resemble [73] the worker bee, not the worthless drone. ”

“ You will see now, my dear son, why I have been so earnest to have you establish in early life a habit of industry, and to cultivate a taste for daily, honest labor. No matter what employment you have, if it is honorable employment. ”

“ So he never was able to "take his ease, eat, drink, and be merry." And if he had spent as much labor in useful work (say building, or ploughing, or sandal-making) , what a good workman he might have become! ”

“ The workmen in both these classes spend the prime of their health and strength in working for others, and after suffering with perhaps wives and families incredible hardships from cold and hunger, which cannot be kept away by insufficient wages, have nothing to look forward to in their declining years but the tender mercies of their parish workhouse, or the precarious charity of their former masters. ”

“ To the brain-working captain of industry, maintaining himself and his family on thousands a year, the manual-working wage-earner seems to belong to another species, having mental faculties and bodily needs altogether different from his own. ”

“ Many a strong man have we known in our days begging for work, no matter what, to save him from starving. The will to work, plain enough, is not all: Archimedes must have his ποῦ στῶ: the workman his somewhat to work at: man labours not ‘as one that beateth the air.’ Who was it then, who, when your father or father’s father asked for work, gave it him? ”

“ The fact is, I am, and have been, any time these thirty years, a man who works with his hands--a handicraftsman. I do not say this in the broadly metaphorical sense in which fine gentlemen, with all the delicacy of Agag about them, trip to the hustings about election time, and protest that they too are working men. ”

“ If duty calls you to work, work as he worked—not merely for your own advantage, but for the benefit of others. While labouring at any profitable employment, never forget the poor and destitute, whose wants may be alleviated by your diligence. ”

“ 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.
2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. ”

“ The man who saves a little from his income has given the surest indication of the very qualities that every employer is seeking for.
“The great successes of life are made by concentration. Do not think you have done your full duty when you have performed the work assigned you. You will never rise if you only do this. ”

“ Study your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not in simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a larger salary.
When out of work, take the first respectable job that offers, heeding not the disproportion between your faculties and your task. If you put your manhood into your labor, you will soon be given something better to do. ”

“ But to you, to the man who has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent and action and industry, whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a State in which talent and action and industry are a certain capital,—why, Messrs. ”

“ The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The other is his employer. ”

“ With so many other laborers in the field, and considering their task, we scarcely dare think of the miserably small pay they must receive for their labor. We wonder how they can live. And yet they have a certain wholesome, thrifty appearance—their clothes, although coarse, are not ragged; they look well and strong, and they work with an energy which would imply a certain satisfaction in their task well done. ”

“ As I read and observe I think workingmen hear much indiscriminate denunciation of the alleged selfishness, injustice and heartlessness of employers of labor, and but very little, if indeed anything, in the way of admonition or advice to themselves to do faithful, intelligent and efficient work, and in that way to command desirable positions and adequate pay. ”

“ The craftsman, the artist, the scientist, the professional man, and to some extent the business man make new experience the basis of organized activity, of work, and produce thereby social values. The division of labor which removes the problematical from the various operations of the work makes the task totally unstimulating. ”