RESTRICT THE HOURS OF TOIL
to ten, as they claim that bosses don’t look at the number of hours worked, but at the money earned. The hours of the literary staff of a morning paper are fitful and uncertain, but the general rule is that when you are awake you had better go to work. The stereotypers get to their cauldrons of boiling lead shortly after midnight, and the pressmen are at their post about 3.30—just when the typo is washing his hands and preparing to leave. The mailing clerks are the next to put in an appearance, and almost simultaneously the little route-boy slips through the door, prepared for his morning tramp.
About sixty-five policemen hold watch over the sleeping city by night. Their work varies in winter and summer. Just now they remain on beat eight hours at a stretch. In winter they are on three hours, off three hours, and on again for the same length of time. Their work and its incidents will form the topic of another of these sketches.
The next most important body of men, and probably more numerous, is the bakers. It is calculated that about 300 persons find employment in supplying our citizens with their bread. All of these, however, do not work at night. Their labor begins about three o’clock, and they may be seen about that hour in their floury garments hieing them to their shops. Their work is performed in very hot rooms, and is on the whole
LABORIOUS AND MONOTONOUS.
On their skill depends one of the greatest luxuries of the table—a well baked loaf of bread—and to their credit be it said, success very frequently crowns their efforts.
The telegraph operators who work at night do not average over a dozen men. This staff is lessened or increased very much in sympathy with the quantity of dispatches which are coming in to the morning papers. When any great event is transpiring in another land or another part of this country, and long messages are coming in concerning it, the staff has to be increased, and for this purpose men are drafted from the day staff. It is an unhealthy business. In most mortality-tables, the life of the operator shows the shortest average. Not long ago they struck for higher wages and made a plucky fight, but monopoly was too much for them. Ever since they have had the screws put on them pretty tightly. Reductions in the staff and reductions in the salaries have been the order of the day. In view of these facts some of them think that it is a good thing they don’t live too long.
These are briefly the main facts connected with the toilers of the night, men who work while the rest of the world are asleep—asleep feeling assured that the telegrapher is gathering in for them the news of the world, and that the newspaper men are printing it for them, that the baker is preparing for them the breakfast roll, and that the policeman is watching over their lives and their property, and keeping his weather eye on those other people of the night, whom we are pleased to designate the Hawks.