BALLAST-HEAVERS AT WORK IN THE POOL.
[From a Sketch.]
After these two cases came one who said,—“I have been three years a ballast-heaver. Just before that I came to this country. When I came I got to be a lodger with a foreman to a publican. I paid him 2s. 6d. a-week. My family, a wife and two children, came over when I had got work as a ballast-heaver. I couldn’t take them to the lodgings I then had; they were all for single men: so I had to take another place, and there I went to live with my family; but to keep my work I had to pay the foreman of the publican—him that lets these lodgings to the ballast-heaver—2s. 6d. a-week all the same as if I had been living there. That I had, and I had to do it for two years. Yes, indeed. I didn’t earn enough to pay for two lodgings, so two or three months back I refused to pay the 2s. 6d. a-week for a place I hadn’t set my foot in for two years, and so I lost my work under that foreman and his publican. If me and my children was starving for want of a bite of bread, neither of them would give me a farthing. There’s plenty as bad as them, too, and plenty used like me, and it’s a murdering shame to tax poor men’s labour for nothing.”
This man reiterated the constant story of being compelled to drink against his will, hating the stuff supplied to him, being kept for hours waiting before he was paid, and being forced to get drunk, whether he would or no. The man also informed me that he now works under a butcher, who pays 8s. a score to the hands he employs, he (the butcher) receiving from the captain 10s.
“Suppose,” he said, “I have a 60-ton job, I’d be entitled to 7s. 6d. without beer, or such-like; but under this butcher I get only 5s. 3d., and out of that 5s. 3d.—that’s all I get in hard money—I’m expected to spend 4s. or thereabouts in meat, such as he chooses to give. I have no choice; he gives what he likes, and charges me 6½d. a-pound for what I could buy at 4d. in a regular way. Very inferior stuff he keeps. Working under a butcher, we must all live on this poor meat. We can’t afford bread or vegetables to it.”
This same butcher, I was afterwards informed, had been twice fined for using false weights to customers, such as the man whose statement I have given; he even used wooden weights made to look like lead.
The following is an instance of the injustice done to the men by those who contract to whip rather than to heave the ballast on board.
“I now work,” said the man, whom I was referred to as an exponent of the wrong, “for Mr. ——, a publican who contracts to supply ships with ballast by the lump. He’ll contract to supply a ship with all the ballast she’ll want by the lump—that is, so much money for all she wants, instead of so much by the ton; or he may contract with a ship at 2s. 6d. a-ton. We—that is a gang of eight men—may put two loads or 120 tons on board in the course of a day. For those 120 tons he will receive 120 half-crowns, that’s 15l. For putting in those 120 tons we—that is, the eight ballast-heavers employed—receive 2s. 6d. a-day of 12 or 14 hours; that is 8 half-crowns or 20 shillings, with 3s. 6d. a-day for a basket-man, in addition to the eight, so leaving the publican a profit of 13l. 16s. 6d.” I could hardly believe in the existence of such a system—yielding a mere pittance to the labourer, and such an enormous profit to the contractor, and I inquired further into the matter. I found the statement fully corroborated by many persons present; but that was not all I learned. When the men, by incessant exertion, get in 120 tons in a day, as they often do, nothing is charged them for the beer they have had, four or five pints a-day each; but if only 60 tons be got in, as sometimes happens, through the weather and other circumstances, then the men employed on the half-a-crown a-day must pay for their own beer and pay their private scores for treating a friend, or the like. “There’s no chance of a job,” said my informant; “not a bit of it.” He continued: “Very bad drink it is—the worst—it makes me as sick as a dog. There’s two brothers there what they call blood-hounds; they’re called so because they hunt up the poor men to get them to work, and to see that they spend their money at their employer’s public-house when work’s done. If you don’t spend something, no bread to cut the next morning—not a bit of it—and no chance of another job there. He employs us ballast-heavers, when we are not at the ballast, in backing coals into the steamers.”
I have given the statement of a ballast-heaver as to the system pursued by those whom he called basket-men. The employer here alluded to is one of that class, the difference being, that the ballast-heavers shovel the ballast out of the lighter on to the stage, and from the stage through a port-hole into the hold. Four men are thus employed, two on the lighter, and two on the stage. With a large ship five men are employed, and two stages. When the basket-man or the man contracting by the lump is employed, this process is observed:—There are two men in the lighter alongside the vessel to be ballasted, whose business it is to fill five baskets. There are five men at the winch aboard ship employed heaving up these baskets, and a basket-man to turn them over and empty out their contents.