The housing plan varies slightly with the conditions of each case, but generally it permits employees to purchase or build a home on small initial payments, with installments running from ten to fifteen years, and with an interest rate of 5 per cent. on the unpaid balance.
How varied are the activities of the Corporation in regard to welfare work is illustrated by a list of the facilities constructed or installed for various purposes, as presented by Charles L. Close, manager of the Corporation’s Bureau of Safety, Sanitation, and Welfare, at a meeting of the American Iron & Steel Institute in New York in May, 1920. The list was made up as of January 1st of that year. The following are some of the principal items: Number of dwelling and boarding houses constructed and leased to employees at low rentals, 27,553; churches, 25; schools, 45; clubs, 19; restaurants and lunch rooms, 64; rest and waiting rooms, 210; playgrounds, 131; swimming pools, 11; athletic fields, 96; tennis courts, 107; sanitary drinking fountains, 3,077; pipe systems for drinking water, 369; protected wells and springs, 647; comfort stations (complete units, either bath or dry houses, closets, wash or locker rooms) 1,495; showers, 2,672; clothes lockers, 116,749; base hospitals, 25; emergency stations, 286; company surgeons, physicians and internes, 167; outside surgeons on salary, 107; nurses, 189; visiting nurses, 68; teachers and instructors, 222; safety inspectors (spending entire time on safety work) 101; employees who have served on safety committees, 25,948; employees now serving on safety committees, 5,500; employees who have been trained in first-aid or rescue work, 16,801; employees now in training, 801.
Many of the above statistics are concerned principally with strictly sanitation and welfare work. While on the topic of statistics, however, it might be well to give Mr. Close’s figures of the Corporation’s expenditures on those activities that come under the operation of the bureau which he heads. These expenditures, from 1912 up to the end of 1919, are: Welfare, $11,751,429; Sanitation, $11,732,666; Accident prevention, $6,530,706; Relief for injured men and families of men killed, $22,652,238; cost of employees’ stock subscription plan, $9,160,000; pension fund payments in excess of income, provided by permanent fund, $1,824,693; for creation of permanent fund, $8,000,000; total, $71,651,732.
A sum of $5,113,570 paid in pensions to employees, but derived from the fund originally established by Andrew Carnegie, is not included in the above total.
In organizing welfare activities the Corporation’s officials work on the theory that it is infinitely better to help people to help themselves than to give them something that savors more or less of charity.
One department of the work that has met with encouraging success is the development of home and community gardens. Practically every worker has in the front or rear of his home a small amount of vacant land, but unless he is offered some incentive to cultivate this, he is apt to let it remain bare and serve for the accumulation of rubbish.
Realizing that such a state of affairs was not only a waste economically, but was inimical to the physical and mental welfare of the worker, a plan was evolved to induce him to cultivate these vacant areas. The offering of small cash prizes was found sufficient to give the necessary impetus to this work, and the result is that a great many of the workers’ homes are now surrounded with flower or vegetable gardens to the cultivation of which the men and their families give much of their spare time. From a financial viewpoint these gardens are profitable to their cultivators, regardless of the prizes offered for the best-kept ones. The mental and spiritual benefit derived from them cannot be measured, but there is little question that it far exceeds the financial gain.
In many localities, where housing conditions do not permit gardens, the Corporation’s subsidiaries utilize unoccupied land in the mill district, plow the ground, plot it out, and then hand it over to the employees to cultivate, again with the incentive of cash prizes for the most successful results. Last summer more than 3,000 acres of land were thus utilized.
Many of these community gardens are made the especial care of the children, who take a great interest in the work and who often achieve results of which their elders might well be proud.
Children, in fact, occupy an important place in the welfare scheme. They are the workers of to-morrow, and every effort is made to permit them to develop healthy minds and sound bodies. Children’s playgrounds are equipped and maintained in a great many mill centres, and instructors are employed to devote their whole time to assisting the children to get the best possible benefits from these. Many of these playgrounds have swimming pools, in some cases one for the older and one for very small children, with swimming instructors in charge, and a visitor in the summer needs only the evidence of his eyes to convince him that the little ones make regular and excellent use of them.