Suddenly someone says, "Back-wall!" Lasts say thirty or forty minutes. It's hot—temperature, 150° or 160° when you throw your shovelful in—and lively work for back and legs. Everybody douses his face and hands with water to cool off, and sits down for twenty minutes. Making back-wall has affinities with stoking, only it's hotter while it lasts. The day is made up of jobs like these—shoveling manganese at tap-time, "making bottom," bringing up mud and dolomite in wheelbarrows for fixing the spout, hauling fallen bricks out of the furnace.
They vary in arduousness: all would be marked "heavy work" in a job specification. They are all "hard-handed" jobs, and some of them done in high heat. Between, run intervals from a few minutes to two or three hours. From some of the jobs it is imperative to catch your breath for a spell. Sledging a hard spout, making a hot back-wall, knocks a gang out temporarily—for fifteen or twenty minutes; no man could do those things steadily without interruption. It is like the crew resting on their oars after a sprint. Again, some of the spells between are just leisure; the furnace doesn't need attention, that's all; you're on guard, waiting for action. Furnace work has similarities with cooking; any cook tends his stove part of the time by watching to see that nothing burns up.
I have had two or three hours' sleep on a "good" night-shift; two or three "easy" days will follow one another. Then there will come steady labor for nearly the whole fourteen hours, for a week.
So, briefly, you don't work every minute of those twelve hours. Besides the delays that arise out of the necessities of furnace work, men automatically scale down their pace when they know there are twelve or fourteen hours ahead of them: seven or eight hours of actual swinging of sledge or shovel. But some of the extra time is utterly necessary for immediate recuperation after a heavy job or a hot one. And none of the spells, it should be noticed, are "your own time." You're under strain for twelve hours. Nerves and will are the Company's the whole shift—whether the muscles in your hands and feet move or are still. And the existence of the long day makes possible unrelieved labor, hard and hot, the whole turn of fourteen hours, if there is need for it.
Inseparable from the twelve-hour day in the open-hearth where I worked were the twenty-four-hour shift, and the seven-day week.
What does it mean to make steel twenty-four hours a day? to your muscles, to your thoughts, to the production of steel? Sunday morning, at 7.00, you begin work. There is an hour off at 5.00 P.M. Front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall, front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall—the second half is something of a game between time and fatigue. For a hot back-wall, or sledging out a bad tap-hole, may as easily come upon you at 5.00 or 6.00 of the second morning as at noon of the first day.
I've worked "long turns" that I didn't mind overmuch, and others that ground my soul. If you are young and fit, you can work a steady twenty-four hours at a hot and heavy job and "get away." But in my judgment even the strongest of the Czechoslovaks, Serbs, and Croats who work the American steel-furnaces cannot keep it up, twice a month, year after year, without substantial physical injury. "A man got to watch himself, this job, tear himself down," the second-helper on Seven told me. He had worked at it six years, and was feeling the effects in nerves and weight. Let me make an exception: one Hunky, a helper on Number 4, was famed for having "a back like a mule." He could, I am sure, work seven twenty-four-hour shifts a week with comfort. But for all other men, with the exception of Joe, the long turn is an unreasonable overtaxing of human strength. Lastly, the effort of will, the "nerve" that the thing calls for in the last hours before that second morning, is too heavy a demand, for any wages whatever. The third-helper on Number 8 took, I think, a reasonable attitude when he said: "To hell with the money, no can live!"
The "long turn" leaves a man thoroughly tired, "shot," for several shifts following. As I said in the first part of this book, it is hardly before Friday that the gang makes up sleep and comes into the mill in normal temper. Here is the condition. You have ten hours for recuperation after twenty-four hours' work. Washing up in a hurry, getting breakfast, and walking home gets you in bed by 8.00. Eight hours' sleep is the best you can get. At 4.00 o'clock you must dress, eat, and walk to the mill. Men who live an hour or more from the mill, as some do, must, of course, subtract that time as well from sleep. After the ten hours off, you return to the mill at 5.00, to begin another fourteen-hours' steel-making. That night is unquestionably the worst of the two-weeks' cycle. The nervous excitement that helps any man through the twenty-four turn has gone—quite. The seven or eight hours of day sleep seem to have taken that away without substituting rest; and what you have on your hands is an overfatigued body, refusing to be goaded further. My observation was that, on this Monday after, men made mistakes; there were arguments, bad temper, and fights, and a much higher frequency of collision with the foreman. Efficiency, quality, discipline dropped.
The other accompaniment of the twelve-hour shift, the averaging of seven working-days per week, has, I am convinced, an equally bad physiological effect upon the healthiest of men. As I have said earlier, "the twenty-four hours off," which comes once a fortnight on alternate weeks to the twenty-four-hour shift, is a curiously contracted holiday. It comes at the conclusion of fourteen hours' work on the night-shift, and is immediately followed by ten hours' work on the day-shift. As far as I could observe, men went on a long debauch for twenty-four hours, or, if the week had been particularly heavy, slept the entire twenty-four. In the first instance they deprived themselves of any sleep, and went to work Monday in an extraordinarily jaded condition. In the second, they forfeited their only holiday for two weeks.
Another feature that impresses you when you actually work under the system is that the sleep you get is troubled, at best. You are compelled to go to bed one week by day, and the next by night. By about Friday, I found my body getting itself adjusted to day sleep; but the change, of course, was due again Monday. And yet, by comparing my sleeping hours with those of my fellow workers, I found my day rest was averaging better than theirs. Many of them, I found, went to bed at 9.00 in the morning and got up about 2.00. They complained of being unable to sleep properly by day. The body will adjust itself to continued day sleeping, I know; but apparently not to the weekly shifts, from day sleep to night sleep, customary in steel.