Workplace

“ Work in the factory or in the office, work which brings us into contact with the outside world, calls for the exercise of qualities and attainments which we had no need of before, for the abandonment of habits and ideas which can only hamper our progress in our changed surroundings. ”

“ Some twelve or fifteen work in this establishment, and the people sustain them in their operations. Those engaged in the various branches of labor feel confident that the people will patronize them, and carry out what they have agreed in this particular, and they do not trouble themselves about any other employment, or business. ”

“ The employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or another. Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control. ”

“ The factory employee, the shop assistant, the office clerk, the most typical members of modern industrial society, find an oppressive burden of uninteresting order, of mechanism, in their working day. ”

“ The rank and, file, too, get the splendid training that is conferred when persons actually and not merely nominally work together for a common end. Their introduction to the great problems of labor is through their practical understanding and handling of those problems as they encounter them in the everyday difficulties of the shop and the factory and as dealt with when they come up before the union meeting or have to be settled in bargaining with an employer. ”

“ Employer and employee will learn to understand each other better. The success of all of these methods of organization, when they are adopted, will cause their spread throughout the industrial world, and thus gradually, but surely, we shall approach that ideal organization where every employee is looked upon as a bundle of limitless latent possibilities; where training, education, and development along lines of constructive thought and feeling are held to be of far more importance than the invention of new machinery, the discovery of new methods, or the opening of new markets. ”

“ Office relations are pleasant as well as profitable. The demands are exacting; labor at the typewriter, the proof-sheets, or the bookkeeper's desk is tiresome, but the society of the office is congenial, working conditions are healthful and cheerful in most cases, and there are many opportunities for increasing efficiency and promotion. ”

“ He understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work, clean work, finished work: feeble work, slack work, sham work—these words express an identical contrast in many different departments of activity. ”

“ These workers are gathered in a variety of ways—by volunteer applications, by newspaper advertisements (in New York and outside of it) , by outside free [Pg 206] employment agencies, by circular appeals generally to educational institutions, and, best of all, through the solicitation of its regular employees. There is no appeal for a worker that, in my opinion, can compare with the suggestion made by an employee that the place of his or her employment is a good place for his or her friends, as well. ”

“ And a 'labor organization' means any organization of any kind or any agency or employee representation committee or plan which exists for the purpose in whole or in part of dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours of employment or conditions of work. ”

“ So that, after you join the Industrial Workers, when you go to your work in the morning, you will not be tied to your task blindly; you will have a thought about your relation to your fellow-workingmen in all other departments. You will understand your part in the enterprise, and your connection with and relation to the whole. You will help to fit your fellows for the new function, so that when the hour strikes you will be perfectly trained and ready to take control of industry and operate the productive enterprises in the interests of the people. ”

“ By all the kinds of labor we do not mean merely all the crafts, but in addition factors which have been overlooked in the organization of crafts—factors which appear at each end of the productive apparatus—at the one end, clerks, salesmen, stenographers, telephone operators, telegraphers, and all the non-handworking staff which is essential to the practical handling of a great business, and at the other end the unskilled laborers who are equally essential but so far unorganized and unrecognized. ”

“ What will the American workman do to express his American temperament through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." ”

“ And it is work in the mill, the factory, the office that is teaching us the lesson of public spirit, of combination for a common purpose—a lesson that was never taught us in the home where we once lived narrowly apart. ”

“ Make haste and get to the point where you can feel that everything connected with the shop in which you work, or in the office, or in the stable, is under your care, and that you alone are responsible for it. ”

“ Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one great workroom—one great factory in the form of a globe—would have been in by this time, if it had in the least understood this duty, or been capable of it. ”

“ There, without any deceiving veils falling between, we come close up to the real point at issue between the employer and the employed, between the employé and the community, the standard of living that is possible, as measured by the employé's share of the product of labor. ”

“ Business Employees.—The business ethics that are most open to criticism are those that govern the relations of the merchant and his employees. Here the system of employment is much the same as in the factory. The merchant deals with his employees through superintendents of departments. The employment manager hires the persons who seem best qualified for the position, and they are assigned to a department. ”

“ The workers, the cooks and the waitresses, have their separate, allotted tasks; they also have opportunities of even closer association than the factory operatives. These opportunities, which may be used among the young folks to exchange views on the latest nickel show, to compare the last boss with the present one, may also, among the older ones, mean talking over better wages and hours and how to get them, and here may spring up the beginnings of organization. ”

“ And yet, my boy, there are many in the world, with larger responsibilities than yours are at present; think, for instance, of a great employer of labour who has to decide great things, affecting, perhaps, the welfare of both his employés and his business. ”

“ On the other hand, the labor organization, recognizing the strength and fair dealing of the employers’ association, is from time to time so modifying its plans and methods as to make it possible to work in harmony with the employer, and together secure results for both that have heretofore been impossible. ”

“ Every employe who studies how much he can do is a help to an employer. Every employe who sees how little he can do is a hold-back to the institution.
Employes should remember that prosperity goes in cycles, that it is but three generations from shirt sleeve to shirt sleeve. ”

“ It is only when the workshop has grown to the enormous size familiar in modern industrial plants that this relation of employer and employee has to be supplemented through the mediating offices of the home visitor. ”

“ To the employers of operatives, and to all of wealth and influence amongst us, this example ought to manifest that a strict and diligent performance of daily duties, in work prolonged as much as in our own factories, is no impediment to the exercise of those faculties, and the gratification of those tastes, which, whatever the world may have thought, can no longer be held to be limited by station. ”

“ Under it each one, male or female, can choose what work he will try to do and what employer he will try to serve; if he does not like his job or his employer, he can leave it or him and try to get another. ”

“ The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century business world. ”

“ The employer put every one of them to work, each in a different room, with the idea of choosing the two best ones at the end of the day and engaging them for permanent work—thus assuring herself of securing one worker. ”

“ The truth of the matter is that they have everything in common. Every employer—almost without exception—was once a workman. He was a successful workman, therefore he became more than a workman—he became an employer. ”

“ Before the issue of working rules, or of supplements to the same, opportunity shall be given to the workers of full age, employed in the factory or in the departments of the business, to which the rules in question apply, to express their opinion on the contents of the same. ”

“ The employer is bound merely to the exercise of reasonable care in providing his employee with a safe place in which to work, with proper and adequate tools, appliances and machinery, and with fellow-employees competent for the tasks to which they are assigned. ”

“ A little book which a workman is compelled to keep and exhibit to each employer, in order that the latter may know who have employed him before, the new employer in turn signing his name in the book when the laborer enters his service and when he leaves it, and expressing his opinion of the laborer’s conduct. ”

“ B, an employer of limited means, with a natural gift for cooking considered as a fine art, takes an inexperienced girl from Castle Garden and teaches her after long training something of her own skill. She pays fair wages, which are considered entirely satisfactory by the employee in view of the instruction she has received. ”

“ Employers derive their knowledge of how much of a given class of work can be done in a day from either their own experience, which has frequently grown hazy with age, from casual and unsystematic observation of their men, or at best from records which are kept, showing the quickest time in which each job has been done. ”

“ The employers' cry has consistently been: 'We claim to manage our business in our own way, and we will allow no outside interference.' Very well, we examine these industries, solely managed by the employing class, and discover what an appalling state exists in practically every industry. ”

“ The men in the employ of a great establishment can be taught a new interest in their task as they learn to understand its processes and the relation of these processes to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures, etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can best furnish. ”

“ The labourer is worthy of his hire. But three or four times a year, and always unexpectedly, swoop down upon them like the Last Judgment; examine every corner and recess; make a noise like thunder, and strike right and left at the fitting moment—this clears the house for many weeks! ”

“ Workmen's compensation, hours and conditions of labor are cold, consolations, if there be no employment. ”

“ I was called upon at a very early age to perform many offices which, in richer families, are discharged exclusively by servants—to go on errands, to help in cleaning, arranging, and even repairing, and, in short, to do any sort of work that lay within my power. ”

“ As a factory girl working at her job—with all that, we determined to peek out of the corner of our eyes, and keep both ears to the wind, lest we miss anything from start to finish. Artificial, of course. ”

“ You haven't got the get-up an' nerve to rustle a job. You go to a boss an' tell him: 'You've no experience, but you'll do your best.' An American boy says: 'I can do anything. Give me the job an' I'll just show you.' Who's goin' to be hired? Well, I think I can get you a job helpin' a gardener out Alameda way. ”

“ Meantime the employment managers take an active interest in him, in his health, his home conditions, his friends. He is made to feel that he has friends in the management who are eager to help him make the right start to the right kind of life. ”

“ Work, but not too much work, is the motto of the establishment. The "workhouse step" is an institution that must be observed on the island, in order to draw any comparison between it and the snail's pace that shall do justice to the snail. ”

“ In the great majority of cases the work is so miscellaneous in its nature as to call for the employment of workmen varying greatly in their natural ability and attainments, all the way, for instance, from the ordinary laborer, through the trained laborer, helper, rough machinist, fitter, machine hand, to the highly skilled special or all-round mechanic. ”

“ The field of work is a large one, including settlement leaders and assistants, workers in social and community centers and recreation centers, vacation playgrounds, public and private charities, district nurses and visiting nurses sent out by various agencies, deaconesses and other church visitors, Young Women's Christian Association leaders and helpers, missionaries, welfare workers in large manufacturing or mercantile establishments, probation officers, and many others. ”