I have tried to put down the record of the whole of my life, as I lived
it, and the whole of my environment, as I saw and felt it, among the
steel-workers in 1919. To me the book is the story of certain obscure
personalities, and the record of certain crude and vital experiences we
passed through together. I think it may be read as a story of men and
things.
Many people, however, have asked me the questions: What were the
conditions in steel and what is your opinion of them? What do you think
of the twelve-hour day? or, How bad was the heat? and the like. And,
What do you suggest? Since no man who has worked in an American steel
mill, whatever his sympathies or his indifference, can fail to have
opinions on these points, I have decided to set down mine, for what they
are worth, as simply and informally as I can.
There is a proper apology, I think, that can be made for the presumption
of conclusions based upon an individual experience. An intimate and
detailed record of processes and methods and the physical and mental
environment of the workers in any basic industry is rare enough, I
believe, except when it is heightened or foreshortened for a political
purpose. No industrial reform can rest upon a single narrative of
personal experience; but such a narrative, if genuine, can supply its
portion of data, and possibly point where scientific research or public
action can follow.
Let me state my bias in the matter as well as I can. I was by no means
indifferent to economic and social values when I began my job; in fact,
I confess to being interested keenly in most of them. But I never sought
information as an "investigator." Most of my energy of mind and body was
spent upon doing the job in hand; and what impressions I received came
unsought in the course of a day's work. I began my job with an almost
equal interest in the process of steel-making, the administration of
business, and the problem of industrial relations.
Some apology I owe to the several hundred steel-workers with whom I
worked, and the many thousands in other mills, since most of them know
from a far longer and deeper experience the conditions and policies of
which I speak. My sole reason for raising my own voice in the presence
of this multitude of authorities is that the Hunkies, who constitute the
major part, are unable either to find an audience or to be understood if
they find one. Again, they are like Pete, who, when I asked him what
were the duties of a third-helper, which I have described to the length
of several pages in this book, replied: "He has a hell of a lot to do."
And as to the American workers and bosses, most of them lack the
opportunity of any speaking that will be heard beyond their own
furnaces; and, again, they are too close to their environment to see
what is in it. They are natives, while I am more nearly a foreigner,
and can see their steel country with something of the freshness and
perspective that a foreigner brings.
I want to add that the management of the mill where I worked was a body
of men exceedingly efficient and fair-minded, it appeared to me; and any
remarks upon the twelve-hour day, or other conditions, are critical of
an arrangement typical of American steel-management as a whole, and not
of individuals or a locality.
The twelve-hour day makes the life of the steel-worker different in a
far-reaching manner from the life of the majority of his fellow workers.
It makes the industry different in its fundamental organization and
temper from an eight-hour or a ten-hour industry.
It transforms the community where men live whose day is twelve hours
long.
"What is it really like? How much of the time do you actually work? Are
you 'all in' when you wash up in the morning after the shift, and go
home?"
To tell it exactly, if I can: You go into the mill, a little before six,
and get into your mill clothes. There may be the call for a front-wall
while you're buttoning your shirt. You pick up a shovel and run into a
spell of fairly hot work for three quarters of an hour. On another day
you may loaf for fifteen minutes before anything starts. After
front-wall, you take a drink from the water fountain behind your
furnace, and wash your arms, which have got burned a little, and your
face, in a trough of water. A "clean-up" job follows in front of the
furnace, which means shoveling slag--still hot--down the slag-hole for
ten minutes, and loading cold pieces of scrap, which have fallen on the
floor, into a box. Pieces weigh twenty, forty, one hundred pounds;
anything over, you hook up with a chain and let the overhead crane move
it. This for a half-hour.
Suddenly someone says, "Back-wall!" Lasts say thirty or forty minutes.
It's hot--temperature, 150 deg. or 160 deg. when you throw your shovelful
in--and lively work for back and legs. Everybody douses his face and
hands with water to cool off, and sits down for twenty minutes. Making
back-wall has affinities with stoking, only it's hotter while it lasts.
The day is made up of jobs like these--shoveling manganese at tap-time,
"making bottom," bringing up mud and dolomite in wheelbarrows for fixing
the spout, hauling fallen bricks out of the furnace.
They vary in arduousness: all would be marked "heavy work" in a job
specification. They are all "hard-handed" jobs, and some of them done in
high heat. Between, run intervals from a few minutes to two or three
hours. From some of the jobs it is imperative to catch your breath for a
spell. Sledging a hard spout, making a hot back-wall, knocks a gang out
temporarily--for fifteen or twenty minutes; no man could do those things
steadily without interruption. It is like the crew resting on their oars
after a sprint. Again, some of the spells between are just leisure; the
furnace doesn't need attention, that's all; you're on guard, waiting for
action. Furnace work has similarities with cooking; any cook tends his
stove part of the time by watching to see that nothing burns up.
I have had two or three hours' sleep on a "good" night-shift; two or
three "easy" days will follow one another. Then there will come steady
labor for nearly the whole fourteen hours, for a week.
So, briefly, you don't work every minute of those twelve hours. Besides
the delays that arise out of the necessities of furnace work, men
automatically scale down their pace when they know there are twelve or
fourteen hours ahead of them: seven or eight hours of actual swinging of
sledge or shovel. But some of the extra time is utterly necessary for
immediate recuperation after a heavy job or a hot one. And none of the
spells, it should be noticed, are "your own time." You're under strain
for twelve hours. Nerves and will are the Company's the whole
shift--whether the muscles in your hands and feet move or are still. And
the existence of the long day makes possible unrelieved labor, hard and
hot, the whole turn of fourteen hours, if there is need for it.
Inseparable from the twelve-hour day in the open-hearth where I worked
were the twenty-four-hour shift, and the seven-day week.
What does it mean to make steel twenty-four hours a day? to your
muscles, to your thoughts, to the production of steel? Sunday morning,
at 7.00, you begin work. There is an hour off at 5.00 P.M. Front-wall,
fix spout, tap, back-wall, front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall--the
second half is something of a game between time and fatigue. For a hot
back-wall, or sledging out a bad tap-hole, may as easily come upon you
at 5.00 or 6.00 of the second morning as at noon of the first day.
I've worked "long turns" that I didn't mind overmuch, and others that
ground my soul. If you are young and fit, you can work a steady
twenty-four hours at a hot and heavy job and "get away." But in my
judgment even the strongest of the Czechoslovaks, Serbs, and Croats who
work the American steel-furnaces cannot keep it up, twice a month, year
after year, without substantial physical injury. "A man got to watch
himself, this job, tear himself down," the second-helper on Seven told
me. He had worked at it six years, and was feeling the effects in nerves
and weight. Let me make an exception: one Hunky, a helper on Number 4,
was famed for having "a back like a mule." He could, I am sure, work
seven twenty-four-hour shifts _a week_ with comfort. But for all other
men, with the exception of Joe, the long turn is an unreasonable
overtaxing of human strength. Lastly, the effort of will, the "nerve"
that the thing calls for in the last hours before that second morning,
is too heavy a demand, for any wages whatever. The third-helper on
Number 8 took, I think, a reasonable attitude when he said: "To hell
with the money, no can live!"
The "long turn" leaves a man thoroughly tired, "shot," for several
shifts following. As I said in the first part of this book, it is hardly
before Friday that the gang makes up sleep and comes into the mill in
normal temper. Here is the condition. You have ten hours for
recuperation after twenty-four hours' work. Washing up in a hurry,
getting breakfast, and walking home gets you in bed by 8.00. Eight
hours' sleep is the best you can get. At 4.00 o'clock you must dress,
eat, and walk to the mill. Men who live an hour or more from the mill,
as some do, must, of course, subtract that time as well from sleep.
After the ten hours off, you return to the mill at 5.00, to begin
another fourteen-hours' steel-making. That night is unquestionably the
worst of the two-weeks' cycle. The nervous excitement that helps any man
through the twenty-four turn has gone--quite. The seven or eight hours
of day sleep seem to have taken that away without substituting rest; and
what you have on your hands is an overfatigued body, refusing to be
goaded further. My observation was that, on this Monday after, men made
mistakes; there were arguments, bad temper, and fights, and a much
higher frequency of collision with the foreman. Efficiency, quality,
discipline dropped.
The other accompaniment of the twelve-hour shift, the averaging of seven
working-days per week, has, I am convinced, an equally bad physiological
effect upon the healthiest of men. As I have said earlier, "the
twenty-four hours off," which comes once a fortnight on alternate weeks
to the twenty-four-hour shift, is a curiously contracted holiday. It
comes at the conclusion of fourteen hours' work on the night-shift, and
is immediately followed by ten hours' work on the day-shift. As far as I
could observe, men went on a long debauch for twenty-four hours, or, if
the week had been particularly heavy, slept the entire twenty-four. In
the first instance they deprived themselves of any sleep, and went to
work Monday in an extraordinarily jaded condition. In the second, they
forfeited their only holiday for two weeks.
Another feature that impresses you when you actually work under the
system is that the sleep you get is troubled, at best. You are compelled
to go to bed one week by day, and the next by night. By about Friday, I
found my body getting itself adjusted to day sleep; but the change, of
course, was due again Monday. And yet, by comparing my sleeping hours
with those of my fellow workers, I found my day rest was averaging
better than theirs. Many of them, I found, went to bed at 9.00 in the
morning and got up about 2.00. They complained of being unable to sleep
properly by day. The body will adjust itself to continued day sleeping,
I know; but apparently not to the weekly shifts, from day sleep to night
sleep, customary in steel.
The "long turn" of twenty-four hours and the "seven-day week" I have
never heard defended, either in the mill by any foreman or workman, or
outside by any member of the management, or even in a public statement.
If, by an arrangement of extra workers, it were possible to eliminate
these features and still keep the twelve-hour work-day for six days a
week, there would, I think, be a certain number of men ready enough to
work under that arrangement. I met one man, for example, who said: "Good
job, work all time, no spend, good job save." There are a few foreign
workers whose plan is to work steadily for ten or fifteen years, and
then carry the money back to the old country. These men are willing to
spend the maximum time within mill walls, since they have no intention
of marrying, settling down, and becoming Americans. But their numbers
are small, and the desirability of their type is questionable. It is
unwise, at any rate, to build the labor policy of a great industry in
their interest.
On those first night-shifts I wondered if my feelings on the arrangement
of hours were not solely those of a sensitive novice. I'd "get used to
it," perhaps. But I found that first-helpers, melters, foremen, "old
timers," and "Company men" were for the most part against the long day.
They were all looking forward, with varying degrees of hope, to the time
when the daily toll of hours would be reduced.
The twelve-hour day gives a special character to the industry itself as
well as to the men. I remember noticing the difference in pace, in
tempo, from that of a machine shop or a cotton mill. Men learn to
cultivate deliberate movement, with a view to the fourteen-hour stretch
they have before them. When I began work with a pickaxe on some hot
slag, on my first night, I was reproached at once: "Tak' it eas', lotza
time before seven o'clock." And the foremen fell in with the men. They
winked at sleeping, for they did it themselves.
Another kind of inefficiency that flowed quite naturally from excessive
hours was "absenteeism," and a high "turnover" of labor. Men kept at
the job as long as they could stick it, and then relaxed into a two or
three weeks' drunk. Or they quit the Company and moved to another mill,
for the sake of change and a break in the drudgery. I remember an
Austrian with whom I worked in the "pit," who said he was going to get
drunk in Pittsburgh, go to the movies, and move to Johnstown the
following Monday. He had been on the job three weeks. New faces appeared
on the gangs constantly, and dropped out as quickly. I achieved my
promotion from common labor in the pit to the floor of the furnace by
supplying on a twenty-four-hour shift, when absentees are apt to be
numerous, and it is hard fully to man the furnaces. The company kept a
large number of extra men on its pay roll because of the number of
absentees, and the turnover percentage ran high.
It is impossible to live under this loose regime--with high turnover,
and the work-pace necessarily keyed low because of the excessive burden
of hours spent under the roof of the mill--and not wonder if there isn't
an engineering problem in it. The impression was of a vast wastage of
man-hours. The question suggested itself: "Is it in the long run, good
business--an efficient thing?" An exhaustive investigation by engineers
and economists could surely be made to answer this question.
People ask: "Is there any mechanical or metallurgical reason for the
twelve-hour day?" The answer is: No. There are several plants of
independent steel companies that run on a three-shift, eight-hour
basis; and the steel mills in England, France, Germany, and Italy
operate with three eight-hour shifts. The long day is not a
metallurgical _necessity_, therefore. The metallurgical _explanation_ of
the twelve-hour day, however, is this. The process of making iron or
steel is necessarily a continuous one, because the heat of the furnaces
must be conserved by keeping up the fires twenty-four hours a day. So
the division into either two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of
eight becomes imperative. Other industries might reduce their hours
gradually from twelve to ten, and then to nine. With steel the full jump
from twelve to eight must be made. Without doubt, this metallurgical
factor accounts in some measure for the conservatism of the steel
companies in making the change.
It is none of my business, in summing up a personal experience, to
review the story of steel mills which have undertaken a three-shift plan
of operation, of eight hours each, in place of the two shifts of twelve.
But the study has been made by engineers and economists, who have
collected figures as to the cost of operation on an eight-hour basis as
contrasted with a twelve. The increased cost in product which such a
change would entail is between three and five per cent.[3]
The community of workers takes on a special character, where men live
whose day is twelve hours long. "We haven't any Sundays," the men said;
and "There isn't time enough at home." This is the most far-reaching
effect of "hours" in steel, I think, and easily transcends the others.
"What do you do when you leave the mill?" people ask. "On my
night-week," I answer, "I wash up, go home, eat, and go to bed."
Anything that happens in your home or city that week is blotted out, as
if it occurred upon a distant continent; for every hour of the
twenty-four is accountable, in sleep, work, or food, for seven days;
unless a man prefers, as he often does, to cheat his sleep-time and have
his shoes tapped, or take a drink with a friend.
The day-week is decidedly better. You work only ten hours, from seven to
five. Those evenings men spend with their families, or at the movies, or
going to bed early to rest up for the "long turn." It is not, however,
as if it were a "ten-hour industry." Some of the wear and tear of the
seven fourteen-hour shifts of the night-week protracts itself into the
day-week, and you hear men saying: "This ten-hour day seems to tire me
more than the fourteen; funny thing." However the week may be divided
up, it is impossible to keep the human body from recording the fact that
it averages seven twelve-hour days, or eighty-four hours of work, in the
week.
For the men who did a straight twelve hours, "six to six," for seven
days, the sense of "no time off" was very strong. I worked these hours
for a time on the blast-furnace, and remember that the complaint was,
not so much that there wasn't some bit of an evening before you, but
that there was no _untired_ time when you were good for anything--work
or play. When you had sat about for perhaps an hour after supper, you
recovered enough to crave recreation. A movie was the very peak to which
you could stir yourself. There were men who went further. I knew a young
Croat in Pittsburgh who attended night-school after a twelve-hour day.
But he is the only one of all the steel-workers I met who attempted such
heroism. And he had to stop after a few weeks.
Now it should be mentioned that some of the social life that most
workers find outside the mill gets squeezed somehow into it. In the
spells between front-walls we used to talk everything, from scandal
about the foreman to the presidential election. The daily news, labor
troubles, the late war, the second-helper's queer ways passed back and
forth when you washed up, or ate out of your bucket, or paused between
stunts. Then there was kidding, comradely boxing, and such playfulness
as hitching the crane-hooks to a man's belt. One first-helper remarked:
"I like the game because there's so much hell-raisin' in it."
But this is hardly a substitute for a man's time to himself, for seeing
his wife, knowing his own children, and participating in the life of
larger groups. Soldiers have a faculty for taking so good-humoredly the
worst rigors of a campaign, that some people have made the mistake of
turning their admirable adaptability into a justification for war.
The twelve-hour day, I believe, tends to discourage a man from marrying
and settling into a regular home life. Men complained that they didn't
see their wives, or get to know their children, since the schedule of
hours shrunk matters at home to food, sleep, and the necessities. "My
wife is always after me to leave this game," Jock used to say, the
first-helper on Seven. Mathematically, it figures something like this:
twelve hours of work, an hour going to and from the mill, an hour for
eating, eight hours of sleep--which leaves two hours for all the rest,
shaving, mowing the lawn, and the "civilizing influence of children."
I have no brief to offer for the eight-hour day as a general panacea for
evils in industry. I merely bear witness to the fact that the
twelve-hour day, as I observed it, tended either to destroy, or to make
unreasonably difficult, that normal recreation and participation in the
doings of the family group, the church, or the community, which we
ordinarily suppose is reasonable and part of the American inheritance.
Steel has often been described by its old timers as a "he-man's game."
That has even figured as an argument against any innovation that might
lighten the load of the workers in it, and against any change in the
twelve-hour day itself. The industry has certainly a rough-and-tumble
quality and a dangerous streak in it, that will always call for men with
some toughness of fibre. But I question whether the quality of the men
it attracts, and the type it moulds within its own ranks, will ever be
improved by the twelve-hour day. The excessive hours, I know, operate as
a check against many younger men, who would otherwise enter the
industry. The inherent fascination of making steel is, I think, very
great. It was for me. But the appeal is the mechanical achievement of
the industry, its size, power, and importance, even its dangers. The
twelve-hour day, on the other hand, tends to place a premium on
time-serving and drudgery, in lieu of the more masculine qualities of
adventure and initiative.