"Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.
Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.
What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a nutshell the logic of low wages.
The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced without a strike by a trainload of five hundred raw Italians brought in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another trainload from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians follow the American miners "down the road." No wonder that the estimate of government experts as to the number of our floating casual laborers ranges up to five millions!
IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK
"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions he ought to spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss in the same works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer a dollar a month for "interpreter." The "bird of passage," who comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts, the seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big earnings blind him to the physiological cost of overwork. It is the American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the eighty-four-hour schedule.