The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective in his management. Most of the work of his department, as in all the departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands, attended to the odds and ends of jobs.

In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts of mowers—a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself. I was sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.

There were mowers to be shipped to foreign markets, and these had all to be done up in boxes. Three or four of us would be employed for days together in bringing the mowers up the run-way from the warehouse and further separating them into their parts and packing them in large boxes and nailing down the covers, upon which afterward appeared directions to distant ports, some to Russia, and others as far off even as Australian and New Zealand towns. A paint-shop was also connected with this department of the factory, where painting was done in the wholesale fashion employed for the binders, and from it I often carted the portions of the machines which were ready for the warehouse.

Some of the jobs held steadily for days together, and the foreman was never without work to give me. I could but feel a growing liking for him, for, although I was far from being an efficient workman, he was patient with my awkward efforts, and he accepted my mere dogged perseverance as evidence of a willingness on my part which reconciled him to me as a hand.

A like consideration had been shown me by the men at the boarding-house. They accepted me unhesitatingly as a workingman, but still I felt that I had my way to make among them, and very justly, for they were piece-workers all of them, earning fifteen dollars a week at the very least, some of them much more, while I was merely a common laborer at a dollar and a half a day. Their superiority to me was only the more apparent when there came among us, a few days after my arrival, a young Englishman from Jamaica, who had secured a job at common labor in the factory; for he, too, was far ahead of me, and it was not long before he was promoted to piece-work in one of the better-paid departments.

There was no discrimination against me. The men were perfectly friendly, but for the most part they had been associated for some time in their work and in their life in the boarding-house, and I was simply not of their set. The barriers which prevented entire freedom of intercourse were my own limitations and were never of their making, for they made the most generous advances when we had lived together for a time, and no doubt I could eventually have risen to be one of them on equal terms.

They were nearly all young Americans. Clarence and Albert were representative of the lot. Ned, the hunchback operative, was older than most of us, but he, too, was a native, of public-school education and decent antecedents, and he made a very good wage as a piece-worker in some department of the factory. Nothing that I saw among the men charmed me more than their treatment of Ned. He had an ungovernable temper and a crabbed, sullen disposition, which had been fostered by much suffering and an intense mortification due to his deformity, which he rarely forgot, apparently. At times he was as exasperating as a spoiled, petulant child, but the men endured him always with an evenness of buoyant good-humor so genuine that it never chafed him, and it sometimes transported him, in spite of himself, to a mood in sympathy with their own, in which he could be one of the best fellows of the lot.

It was not long before I knew that the man who was held in highest regard by the others was Dennis. The reasons for this did not appear at first. Dennis was of about the average age among us, a man of between twenty-five and thirty, an Irish-American of good appearance and a gentlemanlike reserve. The men looked up to him and paid a certain deference to his views in a way which puzzled me, for he never played the rôle of leader, being far less outspoken than some of the others, and moving among them always in a quiet, unassuming manner which laid no claim to distinction.

By chance I learned that he was the best-paid operative in the house, having a position of some importance in a machine-shop of the factory, and I noticed that he spent much of his leisure in the study of mechanical problems. He did not hold himself aloof from the evening game of cards, but he would quit it early and would soon be absorbed in his book in one corner of the room, where the noise seemed never to disturb him. Moreover, I came to realize that in certain important social matters Dennis was an authority. He would leave his work as black as the blackest man from the shops, but on Saturday afternoon, when we got off at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, he would come out after supper ready for the evening’s gayety, dressed in what was unhesitatingly accepted as the height of the fashion. Saturday evenings were always devoted to pleasure, and none of the men was better informed than was Dennis as to the public balls which were available and which performance at the theatres (always spoken of as a “show”) was best worth a visit. As a workman of high grade and as a man of fashion and a social mentor with much occult knowledge of social form, he was yielded the first place. There was, moreover, a certain punctiliousness about him which only served to heighten his standing. It mattered not how late he had been out on Saturday night, I always found Dennis at his place for a seven o’clock breakfast on Sunday morning, and saw him start promptly for mass.

He was very evidently a favorite with Mrs. Schulz, and with small wonder, for he was always most considerately kind to her and to her children; but I thought that her liking for him grew quite as much out of her admiration for his strict regard to his church duties. She went to early mass herself, but she never failed to have breakfast ready for Dennis at exactly seven o’clock.