Worktable

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wage carries all the worker's obligations outside the shop; it carries all that is necessary in the way of service and management inside the shop. The day's productive work is the most valuable mine of wealth that has ever been opened. Certainly it ought to bear not less than all the worker's outside obligations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You, who have but few dependents, or, perhaps, but one drudge dependent upon you, whether as servant, apprentice, or hired labourer, do not think that you have not an ample opportunity for exercising the duties of an employer of labour. Do not suppose that these duties belong to the great manufacturer with the population of a small town in his own factory, or to the landlord with vast territorial possessions, and that you have nothing to do with them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All hands together we'll make our demand;
When you and I, Bill, lay down our tools, Bill,
Fold up your arms, Bill, and walk off the job.
Why does a short work day and a long pay always go together? ”

“ No more truly in the Labor category are the services of “wage-workers” than are those of farmers, of manufacturers, of merchants, of brokers, of bankers, of architects, of lawyers, of physicians, of engineers, of authors, publishers, teachers, or the services of any other useful workers who participate in the intricate processes of Economic production. All are within the Labor category. ”

“ Shall I tell them of great towns in which one half at least of the juvenile population is growing up without education of any kind whatever? Shall I show that working people are often permitted to pass their labour time, the half of their lives, in mines, workshops, and manufactories, where an atmosphere of a deleterious kind prevails: and this, too, not from any invincible evil in the nature of the employment, but from a careless or penurious neglect on the part of their employers? ”

“ The three kinds of labor are combined in some proportion in every life, but the best and most productive life his most room for hard thinking and self-control.
Operative, executive, speculative labor.—In the advancing complexity of society a still more important classification of labor is apparent. If a man's effort of any kind is simply to follow directions in an established routine, it is called operative labor, and the laborer becomes an operative. He works usually by the day, hour or piece, under a foreman or overseer. ”

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

“ I have frequently asked employers of labour in England whether they were satisfied with the work done for them by their day labourers, and while they readily allowed for exceptions, yet they spoke strongly of such men as “doing as little as possible for their pay.” Every branch of work that it is possible to give out as piece-work is nowadays so arranged. ”

“ The writer has found, for example, after making many mistakes above and below the proper mark, that to get the maximum output for ordinary shop work requiring neither especial brains, very close application, skill, nor extra hard work, such, for instance, as the more ordinary kinds of routine machine shop work, it is necessary to pay about 30 per cent. more than the average. For ordinary day labor requiring little brains or special skill, but calling for strength, severe bodily exertion, and fatigue, it is necessary to pay from 50 per cent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we come to questions between labor and its employers, more than this is true. The employers of labor as a class are closely in sympathy with the honest desire of their men to better themselves, and the constant increase in the employment of arbitration to settle difficulties, the experiments in co-operation and profit-sharing, and the furnishing of cheap and good houses to the workers are all evidences of this fact. ”

“ Each wage earner, on entering the employment of an enterprise, establishment or institution employing paid labor, shall present his labor booklet to the management thereof, or on entering the employment of a private individual—to the latter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The wage worker, who entered into the manufacturing premises of the employer full of the pride of his calling and often with his own tools, became then a small cog in a gigantic, relentless piece of working machinery. ”

“ Then, for certain hours he works between the dawning and the dark,
And delivers one day's work for one day's pay.
This industrial arrangement has advantages for both,
If employer and employed are honest men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What in the whole might an average labourer, obtaining an average amount of employment, both in day-work and in piece-work, expect to earn in a year, including harvest work, and the whole of all his advantages and means of living? ”

“ 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 dress factory job was like another world compared with candy, brass, and the laundry. In each of those places I had worked on one floor of a big plant, doing one subdivided piece of labor among equally low-paid workers busy at the same sort of job as myself. ”

“ There are hundreds of thousands of small masters who are obliged on Saturday to run about for hours in order to borrow the week's pay for their workers and who are happy if their profit is equal to the wages of a factory laborer. ”

“ To take first the maintenance in the workhouse, any attempt to restrict, either in quantity or quality, the food, warmth, accommodation, leisure or rest afforded by the workhouse down to the standard in practice attained by the lowest grade of independent wage-earners has long since been abandoned. ”

“ Working rules are rules governing employers and workmen at work, such as the establishment of a minimum rate of wages to be paid practical bricklayers and stonemasons per hour, and of a uniform pay-day, to determine the number of hours to be worked per day, the time of starting and quitting work, the remuneration to be paid for work done overtime and Sundays, and other questions of like nature. ”

“ The principal points dealt with were superannuation schemes; training of youth schemes and technical classes; wages and hours of labour; discipline; piecework, etc., of female employees; conditions of workrooms, costumes, baths, dining facilities, etc., of female employees; wages, hours, and working conditions of men employees and their relation to trade unions; social activities in factories; bands, athletic clubs, holidays and holiday arrangements; and housing schemes; each member of the deputation being responsible for a paper on one of the groups of subjects. ”

“ We are not insisting, be it understood, on a four-hour or eight-hour system of labor. No industry or occupation will be hampered or meddled with by doing justice to the laborer in the way proposed. The railroad employee, printer, baker, factory hand, etc., can work on as now, but they must be compensated with just wages for the labor done. ”

“ A bulletin of the office for June 25 states:
"Unskilled work is plentiful. Jobs in foundries and steel mills, in building and construction work, in light factories and packing houses, keep up a steady demand for semi-skilled laborers." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ XII. Laborers shall render to their employer, between daylight and dark, ten hours in summer, and nine hours in winter, of respectful, honest, faithful labor, and receive therefor, in addition to just treatment, healthy rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children, wages per month as follows, payment of one-half of which, at least, shall be reserved until the end of the year:--
Engineers and foremen, when faithful in the discharge of their duties, will be paid $2 per month extra. ”

“ All the overseers leaped up 50 per cent., a few 70 or 80 per cent. All the skilled workmen, the industrial specialists, leaped up in the same way from 30 to 60 per cent. Everything that implied the higher type of work, brain-work, the exercise of thought, judgment, and originality, participated in the rapid rise. Then, without waiting, I took the unskilled, or almost unskilled, workmen and workwomen. I should pay men and women who did the same work precisely the same wages, I said, and I ranked off the divisions before I stated the rise I was prepared to give. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is scarcely another condition of any portion of our working population thus free from external control. The factory operative is not only mulcted of his wages for absence, but, if of frequent occurrence, discharged altogether from his employment. The bricklayer, the carpenter, the painter, the joiner, the stonemason, the outdoor labourer, have each their appointed daily hours of labour, a disregard of which would lead to the same result. ”

“ The benefits of the Act, if doles of work can be called benefits, have gone mainly to the casual labourer. The practical impossibility of finding work which "will not compete with the work of those already in employment" has been proved up to the hilt. ”