The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

Mr. Schulz and she were devout Catholics, only I could but admire her devotion the more. It seemed to me to be put to so crucial a test. With but a raw Swedish girl to help her, she had the care of her five children besides all the cooking and other housework for a dozen boarders whose meals must be served on the minute. I am sure that I never saw her lose her temper, and I think that I never heard her complain, which is the greater wonder when one takes into account the fact that she was the sole bread-winner of the family. Mr. Schulz had had a job as a night watchman, but had lost it, and was now looking for work—not too conscientiously, I fear, for he impressed me as a weak man who found his wife’s support a welcome escape from a personal struggle for existence. He had, at least, the negative virtue of sobriety, and the positive one of loyalty to church duty, and in the house he perhaps could not have served his wife to better purpose than by taking care of the children as he did. He was certainly very proud of Mrs. Schulz. One day he confided to me the fact that she was a cook when he married her, and that in her day she had served in some of the palaces on Michigan Avenue. Such an experience explained the admirable cooking of the simple fare which she gave us, and the homelike management of her house; and her knowledge and skill in these domestic matters bore no small relation, I thought, to the spirit of contentment among the men, which held them to their quiet evenings in her sitting-room against the allurements of the town.

Her sheer physical endurance was a marvel. It was the unflinching courage of a brave soul, for she had little strength besides. Very tall and slight, emaciated almost to gauntness, she had a long, thin face with sunken cheeks and a dark complexion and jet-black hair, and round, soft, innocent eyes, which, matched with her indomitable spirit, were eloquent of the love which is “comrade to the lesser faith that sees the course of human things,” and seeing finds life worth living and is willing to endure.

The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there. There was nothing morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one another. Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly obedient to its control. You could lose in a measure the thought of self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force. Mrs. Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its native virtue. And the men were never awkward and constrained in their courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was, their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood.

One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms. And when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they revealed.

Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather. The long, monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a holiday. Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home. One was reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the accord of the overture. The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense, had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service. The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in their appeals for their mother’s intervention. Mrs. Schulz, at her wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl, and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a toothache. The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror, and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak. There was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end the storm would spend its fury and pass. And the marvel of it was in the completeness of the clearing. The unrestrained vent of ill-temper would be followed by no harboring of malice. It was as though the men, who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association. The secret of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms. The distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life. At bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking and respect.

The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of temper. Not that they were strictly periodic in the home. Mondays were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their occurrence, for they might crop out at any time. But Monday mornings in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence. You could not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of the men and in the progress of their work. But nothing could have been more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than the routine of factory labor. The very doing of what had become to them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life. I have often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in high spirits that were finely attune.

There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the quality of a maddening horror. I can bear no personal testimony to it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker. The phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages. Among the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the present ordering of such labor. The attitude is that of irresponsible school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks. But among the laborers it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious business of their lives. Interest in their work? Not the faintest. Sense of responsibility for it? Not the dimmest. Any day you could see the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand, with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in school-hours.

The piece-system lifts the labor instantly from this plane to one where the motive of self-interest conspicuously enters. A man is insured from the first of at least the wage of day’s labor; his own industry and deftness are then the factors in determining his earnings up to a certain limit. For I soon found that a hand was not free to employ his utmost skill when he became an expert. There seemed to be a tacit agreement in each department of the factory as to what should constitute the maximum of day’s labor. Below that a man might fall if he chose, but beyond it he was not at liberty to go. And the reason was very obvious. Even a few men in continually passing, by any considerable margin, the accepted daily average would inevitably produce the result of a cut in the pro rata price until wages were down again to the accustomed level. The system gives a man an incentive to work and to develop his skill, but, in its practical operation, it holds him rigorously to the level of mediocre attainment.

Barry incidentally pointed this out to me with striking clearness one day while we were carting tongues. Two of the varnishers were missing from the paint-shop when we went up for our first loads. Barry remarked on their absence, with the comment that they were certain to be on hand at half-past nine o’clock.

It appears that if an employee misses the open factory-gate in the early morning by ever so little, he may not enter then until the end of two hours and a half, which marks the close of the first quarter of the day’s work.