THE WORLD OF SEASONAL LABOR AND THE CASUAL WORKERS
“Why is it that those who produce food are hungry, and that those who
make clothes are ragged? Why, moreover, is it that those who build
palaces are homeless, and that those who do the nation’s work are
forced to choose between beggary, crime, or suicide in a nation that
has fertile soil enough to feed and clothe the world; material enough
to build homes to house all peoples, an enormous productive capacity
through labor-saving machinery of forty thousand million man-power;
and where there are only sixty-five million souls to feed, clothe, and
shelter?”
The foregoing questions were put into the platform and issued by the
Industrial Army of 1894 which was known as Coxey’s army. That year was
one of great depression all over the United States. The causes for the
depression were discussed very widely at the time. It was the year
following the great World’s Fair in Chicago and hundreds of thousands
of men were out of employment. There was suffering and deprivation in
all the cities of the United States. Charitable institutions were taxed
to their limit by the new responsibilities put upon them. The idea of
having all the unemployed form themselves into a great army of peace,
and march to Washington for the purpose of presenting to the President
and Congress a petition for the right to labor, developed in the mind
of a man named Coxey who lived at Masillon, Ohio. He gathered together
the first army numbering several thousand men. These men were organized
into companies, and officers were appointed after the fashion of the
regular military customs.
Similar armies mobilized in other parts of the country. One at Los
Angeles, another at San Francisco, one in Boston, and one in the
Northwest, started towards Washington at one time. There were about
10,000 men on the march. They were ridiculed, persecuted, and feared.
When the army that started from San Francisco reached Sacramento, it
encamped outside the city. On Sunday night this curious army marched
down into the center of the town, halted before the first church it
came to, then the men filed in and in an orderly fashion filled up
every pew. The remainder of the army marched on to the next church and
did the same thing. This was repeated until every church in the city
was filled to its capacity. This was the first and probably the last
time in the history of that city when church pews were at a premium on
Sunday night.
The men of this army were harmless for the most part. A great many
of them were worthless fellows, but the vast majority were honest
workingmen who had been thrown out of employment, and owing to the
circumstances of the times were unable to find anything to do, and,
consequently, were in despair. Their plan was to go quietly across the
country and when they arrived in Washington simply to fold their arms
and ask the government what it was going to do for them. Only a few of
the men of Coxey’s army reached Washington and the spectacular scheme
failed. It, however, emphasized the need of the time and showed up the
extreme danger in the situation.
=The Unemployed.= The unemployed man presents a real problem to
society. Carlyle said, “A man willing to work, and unable to find work
is, perhaps, the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under
the sun.” Many well-to-do people living in comfortable circumstances,
with position and income assured, assert that if a man wants work he
can always find it, and that the only men unemployed are the shiftless
and the lazy. Right now the war has absorbed all the surplus labor,
and a condition exists different from any that we have previously
known in the history of America. Immigration has been cut off and the
demands for new enterprises have called for hundreds of thousands of
new workers, so that at the present time there is no reason why any
man should be out of work. In fact, so serious has the need for men
become that the latest interpretation put upon the draft law amounts
practically to a conscription of labor for all men of draft age.
=The Banana Boat.= A whistle sounded on the Mississippi river just
below New Orleans early one afternoon last summer. It was a dismal,
rainy day, and as the long screech died away the sound seemed almost
prophetic of some coming disaster. Soon a huge steamship painted
drab-gray, with a red diamond upon its smoke-stack, nosed its way from
out of the mist and crowded in close to the pier. Scarcely were the
ropes fast when there began to appear on the dock men black and white,
ragged, unkempt fellows who had hurried from the near-by saloons,
poolrooms, and other lounging places. This boat was just in from
Central America loaded down with bananas. Two enormous unloaders were
set up alongside of the vessel. The machinery of these started and an
endless belt, which traveled to the bottom of the hold and out again,
came up loaded with bunches of bananas. The fruit was brought down and
thrown upon a table. Here two men, standing one on either side of the
traveling belt, would take hold of a bunch of bananas and place it upon
the shoulders of a third man, who in turn carried it off to the waiting
freight-car. Fifty men went to work almost immediately; twenty an hour
later in the afternoon; and at nine o’clock that night, under the glare
of the electric lights, ninety-two men were busily engaged in carrying
the fruit and storing it in the freight-cars.
All night long the men worked at a feverish pace. They were organized
so that they formed an endless chain. The first two continuously placed
the fruit upon the third man’s shoulder, and he in turn stepped along
as fast as those ahead of him would allow. When he was relieved of his
bunch of bananas at the car door by two men on the inside who stowed
the fruit away, he would take his place in the line of men returning
for more fruit. Round after round this group of men passed, until in
less than seventeen hours of constant work every banana was taken off
the boat. When we realize that this boat carried nearly ten thousand
tons, we get some idea of the activity of the workers.
I said to one of the men in the line, “How often do you get a job of
this kind?”
“That depends,” he replied. “A banana boat comes in about every three
weeks and then I have about two days’ work.”
“What do you do between times?” I asked.
“Well, not much of anything. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another.
Just kind of live along between the trips of these boats.”
=Millinery and Dresses.= A little girl in Chicago wanted to learn the
millinery business. She easily found a position. It only paid four
dollars a week, but she was learning, so she was willing to begin at
that price. Just before Easter the shop where she worked was crowded
with orders, and she was forced to work from early in the morning
until late at night. When Easter was over she said, “All I know about
making hats is how to sew wire together and line frames.” The girls in
this shop who had been so busy were now thrown out of employment. They
either had to find other employment or else live on what little money
had been saved during the rush time. “I can never get ahead,” said one
of the workers in the shop. “Last year I was able to make just enough
to carry me through the dull season.” What is true of the millinery
trade is also true of some lines of garment trades, especially the
makers of evening gowns. At one period they are rushed to the limit of
their endurance: at another there is nothing to do. Business demands
cannot be regulated perfectly. The clerks in the stores at Christmas
time must expect to do extra work.
=The Vagabond Workers.= One night in Seattle I saw a large group of men
gathered on a street corner and singing at the top of their voices.
The strange chorus was led by a young fellow who was standing on a
soap box. The song he was teaching was mere doggerel; the refrain of
it being “Oh, Mr. Block, you take the cake. You make me ache.” The
leader would pronounce a line, then say, “Now, fellow workingmen, all
sing and sing with all your might. Let us show them what we can do.”
And the motley crowd shouted out the words of the song which told the
story of a poor “blanket stiff”--a fellow who has to carry his blankets
when he goes looking for a job--who got through work in one place, went
into an employment agency to ask for a new job and was told that if he
would put up the money he could get the job. He paid two dollars and
was sent out into the woods. When he got off the train there was no
job in sight. He came back and made his complaint, but nothing could
be done because that was the method by which the employment agency
made its money. He then applied to Samuel Gompers of the Federation
of Labor, but all he got from Gompers was “sympathy.” This man’s name
was “Block,” and to accentuate the significance of the name the leader
would hold up his hand, stop the crowd from singing, and then tapping
on his head would say, “What was his name?” and they would reply
“Block.” “What was it made of?” and they shouted “wood.”
It was amusing to listen to this crowd but in the midst of the
grotesquery of the leader and the raucous howling of the song there
was a moral quality and a spiritual earnestness that even a casual
listener could feel. These men had just come in from the woods. They
were laborers who had been lumbering all through the winter, and now
at the end of the season were thrown on the city with nothing to do.
The Industrial Workers of the World, that revolutionary organization
that was formed in Colorado early in this century, had found a fertile
soil in the minds of these men and had not been slow to sow the seed. I
stood with one of the group and listened. My friend was an elderly man
who had just reached the city from the mines in Alaska. In his youth he
had been a miner in Wales. Said he, “This carries me back to the days
of my boyhood. The Welsh sang as these men do, and the discontent of
the miners in our district gathered headway under the leadership of the
local Methodist preacher. The men sang and from their singing began an
enthusiasm that rolled throughout the whole region in a wave of protest
against the bitter conditions under which we were forced to work. We
got results. If these men keep on singing, some day they are going to
make their message heard.” The main reason for the I. W. W. and similar
organizations is that nothing has been done for the laborer who is at
the bottom of the industrial ladder. He is considered a tramp, pushed
into the out-of-the-way places, forced to do the hardest, most perilous
work, and society forgets him. He is a bum, a tramp, or hobo. No one
has a good word for him. Every effort to improve his condition is
looked upon with disfavor. This little poem expresses the feeling of
many of these men:
“The world is housed, and homed, and wived,
It takes no note as I pass by.
Nobody shared in the life I lived,
Nobody’ll share in the death I die.
“East, west, north, and south I’ve hiked,
Seen more things than I’d care to tell;
Part of the world that I’ve seen I liked--
None of it liked me overwell.
“I cheated once--or twice--in my time,
But the joy of crime I never could see,
So I never went the way of crime--
No pull-and-haul with the cops for me.
“I never was low like the hobo crew,
Though I’ve begged my bread on many a day,
But I always worked when they asked me to,
To pay for a meal or a bed in the hay.”
There has never been any great success in the attempts to organize
the vagabond workers. The membership in the I. W. W. and similar
organizations rises or declines so rapidly that it is almost impossible
to quote any figures that are dependable. Professor Parker reported
the results of a careful study made in California in 1915 and which
showed that there were at that time 4,500 affiliated members in that
state. The membership fluctuates, however, because when trouble arises
in any industry in the West the membership in the I. W. W. always
doubles or trebles. In one strike in Washington the organization
claimed membership of 3,000, but there were about 7,000 on strike.
The organization of these workers and the explosive quality of their
teachings form a real menace to society. The philosophy of the I. W. W.
is expressed in the words of one of the leaders who explained that
according to their code there is no such thing as right or wrong. He
said, “We know what people mean when they discuss these questions but
they have no significance in our lives. The only principle that we
acknowledge is the principle of expediency. It is better not to break
windows because it will get us into trouble with the authorities, but
the abstract principle of breaking windows and destroying property
being wrong makes no appeal to us whatever.” The man who gave utterance
to this statement was formerly a Presbyterian minister. He was in
charge of a church in a steel city and his contact with the workers
gained for him a clear understanding of the poverty and despair that
grow out of their conditions. This vision and the sight of the people
on the other side of the social gulf, who were living most recklessly
in the midst of their luxuries, led him to become one of the leading
radicals in the labor world. The philosophy of the I. W. W., and the
power of this organization are increasing just in proportion as we fail
to correct the abuses that now destroy the lives of men.
=Causes.= In this country we have made little effort to prevent the
consequences which are certain to follow the operation of the law of
supply and demand. We have acted upon the theory that all we need
to do is to allow natural law to have a chance for its operation.
Individualism is praised as being the means of saving the worker. The
result is that there is a shockingly large amount of labor turn-over
each year--that is, each job has two or three men working on it. We
have presented to us also the spectacle of thousands of men who form an
army of migratory laborers. In one part of the United States there will
be a labor shortage and in another there will be a shortage of work to
be done.
If we would know what makes the tramp and the vagabond we must become
acquainted with some man who tramps the highway with his pack on his
back. His wife and his children were left years ago in some Eastern
city when he went out West to find a job. The job which he secured did
not keep him long enough for him to become a resident or even to feel
settled in the community. The place in which he slept and lived was a
bunk-house, dirty, filthy, and filled with vermin; and the food he had
to eat was of such poor quality and so wretchedly cooked that he would
not have eaten it at all except that he was almost famished and it was
all that he could get.
The communities in which this wanderer of the road finds himself have
always been against him. The children in the homes are told that if
they are not good the tramps will get them. He looks upon the law as
being framed especially to cause him inconvenience, and the officers
of the law are his special enemies. The only places that are open to
him are the saloons, the low dives, and the cheap rooming house. The
work he does pays him fairly good wages for a short period; but when
he is paid off, with the money in his pocket, there is nothing for
him to do but to get drunk, and this he proceeds to do; nor does he
sober up until every cent is gone. Then he turns to another job if he
can find one. Of course, if he would save his money and try to live a
decent life he might be able to get on. But as the pastor of a church
in southern Washington said: “Down in my parish, which is in the woods,
I have in the winter-time about 1,500 men to look after. They are a
rough, hard set who have been gathered together through the employment
agencies in Seattle and Tacoma. They believe in nothing and in no one.
They are made victims of every possible tyranny. All that they have is
their job, and their roll of blankets. The bunk-houses in which they
live are so bad that a self-respecting dog would not stay in them. The
food they eat is absolutely rotten. They are treated like cattle, with
the exception that a valuable steer will receive greater protection,
for it is not as easy to get another good working steer as it is to
get another hobo to take the place of the worker that is lost. When
these drifters are paid off the forces that ruin men get hold of them
immediately, and for the next few days they spend their time carousing
and getting drunk. The lumber companies in our community are making
money fast, but they are destroying men, and scattering dynamite all
over the Northwest that threatens to explode in a social upheaval that
will shake the whole western part of the United States.” These are the
words of a sober-minded Presbyterian pastor and one who has no sympathy
for dangerous social doctrines. He is simply speaking out of his heart
and from his experience.
In another district one of the officials of a mining company said in
his annual report: “This last year was one of unprecedented success. We
were able to work continuously and with little difficulty because we
had at all times an average of three men available for each job. This
gave us workers always ready to our hand.” As was said before, the war
changed this situation very largely, and for the time being the old
causes which operated to increase the number of the unemployed have
been removed. There is more work than possibly can be done, and every
worker has his job cut out for him. In a letter I have just received
the writer says, “The war offers the right-minded people of America
the greatest opportunity in history. We can correct ancient wrongs
and right old abuses if we will only put our minds to this task.” But
there are certain considerations that must be taken into account if we
would remove the causes which make for unemployment and discontent that
accompany it. The community’s responsibility for the man out of work
does not end with securing a job for him, nor with the regularizing of
industry, nor in supporting labor exchanges. We are all creatures of
circumstances and influenced strongly by our environment. Therefore,
every community ought to provide adequate means for recreation, and
decent places where men and women can gather under wholesome conditions.
[Illustration: The casual workers are the true servants of humanity.]
=A Man and His Job.= One of the slogans of the French Revolution was
“The right to work.” Man has a proprietary right in his job and it is
the only property that most men possess; when he loses it he is losing
everything. Some years ago the Idaho legislature passed a law which
guarantees to every citizen resident in the state for six months,
ninety days public work a year at ninety per cent. of the usual wage
if married or having a dependent, and seventy-five per cent. of the
usual wage if he is single. Industry has never been organized so as
to include the best interests of the worker. There are hundreds of
thousands more workers needed in the good years than in the bad years.
In every business special calls arise for more workers to be used for
a few weeks or a few days at a time. The reserves of labor necessary
to meet these seasonal or casual demands can be reduced to a minimum,
providing that industry is regularized. As it is, the individual worker
suffers in the machine, or system, that he has helped to create. The
modern plan of organization provides for managers, superintendents,
foremen, clerks, and skilled men--all dependent for their position
upon the group of unskilled men or semi-skilled workers at the bottom.
It is obvious that we cannot legislate so that lumber can be taken out
of the forests all the year round, nor can the casual workers--farm
laborers, fruit-, and hop-pickers and others--have continual
employment. What we can do, however, is to mobilize the labor forces of
the country with the same care and ability that we have mobilized our
national army. Through a chain of labor exchanges extending throughout
the whole nation we can bring the man and the job together. When the
lumber employees in the woods of Washington finish with their season
they could be brought down into California to work on the farms and in
the fields; and then farther down as the fruit ripens, following on
straight through the state. In the autumn they could be brought back
again to take their places in the woods.
Another thing that will be required is a changed attitude toward the
men at work. Just as long as we assume that the workers employed at
these tasks are worthless, just so long will they try to live down to
their reputation. A Methodist minister in Seattle believed that the
average “blanket stiff” had enough good in him to respond to right
treatment. He formed a cooperative company and bought up a number of
mills in the state. He hired a lot of the commonest workers and sent
them out to the woods to work in these mills. Instead of attempting to
make a big profit on the labor of the men, he allowed the men to share
in the management and profits of the concern. The result was that when
all the other mills were having labor troubles he was able to work
right straight along, and where others failed he made a big success.
The reason was that he faced the issues squarely and fairly, and
treated the men as he would himself like to be treated.
=Sin and Inefficiency.= If every individual was normal you could lay
the full responsibility upon him and feel that when he failed it was
perfectly just that he should suffer, and we would not need to worry
about the conditions under which people labor. But sin enters in and
with depravity comes inefficiency. Business cannot be conducted as a
benevolent enterprise. A man or woman’s wage must be earned by the
worker or else it cannot be continued. When a man by drink or other
excesses destroys his efficiency it is impossible for him to maintain
himself in a position that pays a large wage and which offers steady
employment; so he drifts into the ranks of the casual workers. He is
unfit for regular work by temperament and habit; but he is willing to
work for a short time, even though he works extremely hard. In dealing
with the problem of the casual worker then, we have two things to take
into account: First, we must regularize industry as far as possible,
doing away with the extraordinary demands for certain periods that are
always followed by long periods of idleness. In the second place, we
must in some way lay hold of the individual man, and by surrounding him
with the best influences, make it possible for him to live a life of
righteousness and sobriety. In other words, we must reduce the amount
of seasonal work to the minimum and increase the efficiency of the
worker to the maximum.
We should never lose sight of the fact that personal qualities enter
in to complicate this question and make its solution more difficult.
The drunkenness and vice of the individual man keep him in a position
where it is almost impossible for him to be helped or for him to help
himself. The man out of work degenerates. His moral fiber is weakened;
he becomes susceptible to every evil. The process by which many a
criminal has been made was begun in the hour that the man found himself
thrown out of employment. Perhaps it was not his own fault in the first
place, but having once been faced with the grim alternative of seeing
his family suffer or of yielding to some criminal act, he accepted the
latter as the easiest solution of the problem and a way out of his
difficulties.
As long as a person is able to provide the necessities of life and to
keep himself and his family in a fair degree of efficiency through the
use of an adequate amount of food, shelter, and clothing, the chances
are that he will develop a new and stronger interest in the things that
have to do with the moral and social side of his life. On the other
hand, when the means of livelihood are taken away, and a man finds
himself denied the opportunity of work--which means that the things
that are necessary to satisfy the most fundamental needs of himself
and his family cannot be secured--the moral effect on this man, his
family, and society can hardly be exaggerated. The whole structure of
our life is dependent upon and presupposes regularity of employment.
Not only does the fact of being out of a job cut off a man’s means
of livelihood, but the psychological effect of being forced to live
without working, taken together with the breaking of habits acquired by
years of industry, puts a severe strain on the standards of morality
which have been built up by long and painful processes. The unemployed
man may react in one of two ways: he will become an anarchist and spend
himself in fighting the system under whose injustice he suffers, or he
will give up the struggle and become a drifter upon the tides of life,
a social outcast.
=The Jungle.= The best thing in Upton Sinclair’s story of the
conditions in the stock-yards in Chicago is the little picture he gives
of the man who finally in despair gave up the struggle for a living,
got on a train, and went out as far west as the train would carry him.
When he left the railroad track he wandered into a field and lay down
beside a stream. Feeling hungry after a while he arose and went to a
near-by house and asked for something to eat. This was the first time
he had ever begged but the woman at the door was considerate of him and
he got his food. Then he returned and lay down again in the rich grass
and went to sleep. When he awoke he took off his clothes and had a bath
in the creek, then getting out of the water he dressed himself and
again lay down; put his hands behind his head and looked up into the
blue sky. All of a sudden it occurred to him that he was now getting
more out of life than he ever had before. He had worked and worried and
all he ever got was just barely enough to eat. Now he had all he wanted
to eat, a good place to lie and dream, the pure air of heaven fanning
his face, the blue sky over his head, and no work to do. “Why should a
man work, anyway? What’s the use?” he said. This philosophy made him a
tramp.
Unemployment must be recognized as an evil in and of itself. For the
man out of work meals and lodging should be secured. The church has
done much in this regard. The soup-kitchens have been so much an
adjunct of so many churches that some of our evangelists have come to
refer to the soup-kitchen type of Christianity as being a recognized
type. The church knows the methods for charity and relief. We must go
further than this. The church’s program for the casual laborer should
include the education of the community regarding the necessity of
regularized industry, bringing it about so that, for instance, hats
will be made not only when hats are needed but ahead of time. And, too,
there should be public exchanges for employment covering the country
and a systematized distribution of public work.
The forming of a comprehensive plan for unemployment insurance is
another step forward. Other countries have found this kind of insurance
a wise provision. Insurance against every form of disaster is common.
We insure a perfect day for a parade. We insure the ships and their
cargoes. We insure our lives. Why not insure men against the greatest
of all disasters that can befall them, the loss of their jobs? We
need not worry about the probability that unemployment insurance is
likely to take away the initiative of the men. The danger of moral
deterioration in such a case is much less than that which actually
grows out of the periods of unemployment.
The church is involved in the whole situation. The men dependent on
their wages for a living find their means of livelihood cut off and
they naturally turn to the church. A year before the war broke out the
unemployed in several cities marched into the churches and demanded
help. Some of the churches felt that they were being encroached upon.
A committee in one church forced the janitor to sweep the entire
building with a solution of formaldehyde, for, as the chairman of
the committee said, “You never know what diseases these dreadful
people have.” It is undoubtedly true that the churches are always
expected to do more than it is possible for them to do. At the same
time the unemployed man has the right to feel that if the church is
a fundamental institution for the salvation of individuals, for the
remaking of society, and the reconstruction of industrial life, it
cannot evade the issue nor fail to shoulder its responsibility. To open
the church as a sleeping place and to feed the hungry is not enough.
=The War and the Future.= The world war has brought us face to face
with a new task. The United States and Canada are at present the
producing nations of the world. The Anti-Loafer laws now being carried
through are cleaning out the cabarets, the poolrooms, the theaters,
and other places where idle men congregate. It will be years before
we are faced with the same serious situation that has faced us in
the past. However, when our huge armies are demobilized and “Johnny
comes marching home,” there will be a new problem which will have to
be considered. How can these men be fitted back into industrial life
without increasing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers
to such a degree that we will again be faced with a huge army of
unemployed?
In periods of unemployment it is the common laborer who suffers most.
We have failed to realize this. And yet he makes a big contribution
to all progress. You cannot build a bridge without him and, in fact,
he is used in every enterprise. Because of his lack of skill, and
also because of his too common habits of living, we call these men
tramps and hobos, and refer to them in the mass as common laborers.
As a matter of fact no man who does any work is a common man. They
are ignorant for the most part; vicious in many cases; some are lazy,
drunken, shiftless--all of these things; but at the same time they are
the men who are cutting down the trees, sawing up the logs, forming
them into rafts, floating them down the river, and putting them through
the mills. They are the men who are loading the ships at our docks, the
men who pick hops and work in the harvest fields; pick the fruit and
do the thousand other things that have to be done when the season is
right. Besides these, there are the thousands of women who are driven
at top speed at certain periods of the year through the unusual demands
of industry, and then are thrown out of employment for long periods.
Ignorant, unknown, friendless, and made the victims of industrial
conditions over which they have no control, they seem of so little
importance in the vast system--as merely the lesser cogs in the lesser
wheels--that very few know of their existence except when something
goes wrong with the cogs, and the whole machine is shut down because of
the break. But without them the machine could not run at all.
The casual workers are the true servants of humanity, and yet they are
the ones that are passed by unnoticed; the ones that rarely if ever are
influenced by the church. They constitute a great army of neglected men
and women, a challenge to the church, a menace to society, and a danger
to our commonwealth; and all because they are neglected and unknown.