The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The West

by Walter A. Wyckoff

True to Barry’s prediction, we presently found both varnishers at their places, and when, in the late afternoon, he asked them, with the frankness of working-people in such matters, as to how much they had done, he again found himself verified, since each had achieved the prescribed amount, and so had earned full pay. They had simply worked at a greater speed than usual; and they might, so far as the time was concerned, have accomplished this every day, except that a man would soon gain a bad name by being habitually late, and his promptness at seven o’clock would be quickly insured by a cut in the rate paid for his form of labor.

It was a very limited view of the factory as a whole that I could get from the post of an unskilled worker in one of its departments, but what growing familiarity was possible served to increase the sense of wonder at the possibilities of such highly organized methods of production.

There were the great, substantial buildings themselves with their ingenious adjustments of parts, so related as to facilitate to the utmost the processes of manufacture and shipment at the lowest cost and with the least friction. There were the lines of railway which entered the grounds, by means of which the machines, loaded into cars from the platforms of the factory, could be forwarded without change to every quarter of the continent. All needed materials, to the smallest detail, entered the factory in their raw forms, and passed out as finished product, delicately adjusted machines ready for immediate use. The imagination bounds to the conception of the miraculous ingenuity of instruments, and the trained skill of operatives, and the shrewd co-ordination of labor, and, above all, the marvellous captaincy by which all this differentiation is systematized and is ordered and directed to the effective achievement of its ends.

The large, well-ventilated rooms, comfortably warmed in winter and admirably supplied with the means of light and air, are a part of the general efficacy of the system, and the untiring dexterity of the men gives to it its strongly human interest. There is a fascination in their movements which determines the quality of the attractiveness of the whole. You see no feverish haste in the speed with which they work, but rather the even, smooth, unfaltering sureness which is the charm of mastery, and which must be attended by its satisfaction as well.

I witnessed this with delight among the men with whom I lived. Conversation at our meals was nearly always of shop; at dinner and supper especially we discussed the details of the day’s work. Several of us were employed at constructing binders. Albert was of that number. He was making but little more than the wage of common labor when I first knew him, but his income began to increase with his increasing efficiency, and it was a matter of great, vital interest to us all to hear his reports each day, as he told of a fraction of a binder and then of a whole one in advance upon his previous work, until his daily earnings rose to two dollars and a half, which was accepted in his department as the normal sum.

Besides these elements of personal interest in piece-work as a scheme of labor and the gratification of the sense of effective workmanship, there entered here the stimulus of ambition based upon excellent chances of promotion. The factory system of production creates strong demand for manual skill, and stronger still for the capacity of administration and control. Why the realization of these facts did not possess more thoroughly the minds of the common laborers, I could not understand. They were strangely impervious to their force, for nothing could have been more noticeable than the alertness of the managing staff in watching for evidences of unusual ability among the men. It was not at all uncommon for a hand who had been taken on as a day-laborer to be promoted, as a result of his intelligence and industry, to some department of piece-work. Nearly every foreman in the factory is said to have begun far down the scale, and Barry’s account of the career of the assistant manager I have heard confirmed.

During my short stay I was actually witness to the progress of two men who came in as day-laborers, the young Englishman from Jamaica and a stalwart, handsome Swede who secured a job and joined us at the boarding-house about a fortnight ago. Clarence earned a promotion and got it at the time of my coming to the factory, and I have seen Albert’s rise from a position removed by very little from that of unskilled labor to that of a workman whose skill commands the sum of fifteen dollars a week. Dennis is a type of craftsman whose future it is not difficult to predict. Conscientious and industrious and persevering, endowed with rare ability and real capacity for work, his progress seems assured, and a well-paid, authoritative position an ultimate logical certainty.

All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to know. There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of them have their representatives about our table. Men, for example, who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency. But sadder far than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion, and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their careless living. They know no interest in their work nor pleasure in its doing. To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires. With sullen perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call life. The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield to ruling passions.

From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I knew personally seemed to be entirely free. There is no improvidence like the improvidence of the poor. Doubtless there is no thrift like theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling nature. Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match with the wastefulness of the worst. They were not a drinking set in any sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and to their prospects in the world.

A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds.