The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Nothing was said to me about leaving; Martha's brother became her assistant as a dishwasher, and learned to lend a generally useful hand in the kitchen.

And so I had fairly won my place, and had open before me a way of promotion. Experience alone could disclose the value of the opening; but the "—— House" is a winter as well as a summer resort, and a porter's services are therefore in demand through the year. If efficient, intelligent labor could not eventually win higher and more responsible position in such an enterprise, and possibly gain, at last, an interest in the business, the case is surely exceptional.

It is the change in external conditions and its bearing upon me as a human worker which have most impressed me, in contrast with my first experience.

I worked for nine hours and a quarter at West Point, and had, at the end of the day's labor, if the weather had been good, eighty-five cents above actual living expenses. Here I have usually worked from five o'clock in the morning until eleven at night, at all manner of menial drudgery, and have gone to bed in the comfortable assurance that, in addition to food and shelter, I have earned twenty-six cents and a fraction. And yet, as a matter of choice, purely with reference to the conditions under which the work is done, I should infinitely prefer a week of my present duties to a single day at such labor as that at West Point.

The work here is specific, and it is mine, to be done as I best can. Responsibility and initiative and personal pride enter here, and render the eighteen hours of this work incomparably shorter than the nine hours of my last. It is true that it partakes of the character of much household service, in that it is ever doing and is never done; but there is a feeling of accomplishment in the fact of getting my quarters clean and the grounds in order, and in keeping them so, although it be at the cost of labor always repeated and never ended.

Perhaps it is because I am still haunted by the thought of the cruel bondage of unskilled labor, under which men exhaust their powers of body and mind and soul at work that, in the very conditions of its doing, seems to harden them into slaves, instead of strengthening them into men, that I fail to feel keenly the want of time that I can call my own. I have an independence of vastly better sort in having work which I can call my own, and which I can do with some human pleasure and interest and profit in its performance, however hard it may be.

Slender as is my acquaintance with either, I yet see, with perfect certainty, that the standard of character is higher in this company of servants than among the gang of unskilled laborers. Other causes may have a share in this result, but the efficient cause is clear in the better moral atmosphere in which the work is done. I do not know how conscious is the feeling of unity of interest with their employer, or of copartnery with one another in labor, or of personal responsibility; but all these motives must play a part in effecting the successful accomplishment of the house-work, with its intricacies and interdependencies which render constant personal oversight impossible. Of course the proprietor has much trouble with the "help," and there are frequent changes among them; but the body of the company remains the same, and some of the servants have been here for several seasons.

Certainly one is obliged to look elsewhere than to wages for a cause of better work as showing a finer moral fibre, if I may judge from my twenty-six cents a day. I dare say that mine is the minimum wage. The chef told me that he gets sixty dollars a month, and I fancy that his is the maximum sum. It is purely a guess, but I venture it, that the average among us would not exceed five dollars a week. Five dollars a week above the necessaries of life will buy much among the commonest proletariat. Under certain conditions that, or even a less sum, might buy industrious and almost continuous effort for fourteen or eighteen hours a day, but not, I fancy, in the present economic condition of household servants in this country. There must be other causes to account for that.

The want of time which is at one's own command is the commonest objection urged against domestic service as accounting for the ready choice of harder work with far less of creature comfort, but with definite limits and entire disposing of the rest of one's day. Stronger than this, I fancy, as an objection, is a social disability which attaches to service, and under the sway of which a house-maid has not the prospect of so good a marriage, socially considered, as a factory girl, who earns a scanty living, but is subject to no one's command outside of the factory gates.