Making Both Ends Meet Part 20

The general good will of the firm, the picturesque factory site, the pleasant work-rooms, and the attractive living conditions of the Delaware workers gave them an extraordinary opportunity to pursue their labor healthfully. But because of its incomplete adoption, Scientific Management, though it had shortened hours, and in most cases had raised wages, had proven of less potential value to the workers than to those in the more difficult industrial situation obtaining in the cotton mill.

VI

In general, then, Scientific Management for women workers in this country may be said as far as it has been applied to have increased wages, to have shortened hours, and to have resulted fortunately for the health of women workers in some instances and unfortunately in others.

Wherever a process presented a difficulty which remained unremedied, if the task were multiplied, the difficulty, of course, was multiplied. No matter how greatly the weight of a wagon is lightened, if there is a hole in the road of its pa.s.sage, and the road is now to be travelled sixty times a day, instead of twenty times, as before, the physical difficulty from this hole is not only trebled, but while it may be endured with patience twenty times, is not only a muscular, but a nervous strain at the sixtieth. This was the situation in regard to all unrelieved heavy lifting wherever cloth was manipulated, the situation in regard to the stooping for the spool tenders, the stamping at the winding machine, and the stooping and breakages at the sewing-machine. But these points, instead of being ignored by the management, were seriously regarded by the employers as inimical to their own best interests in combination with those of their employees, and in all the establishments were in process of adjustment.

In the present writer's judgment this adjustment would have been inaugurated earlier in several processes and would have been more rapid and effective for both the employer's interest and that of the women workers if the women workers' difficulties had been fairly and clearly specified through trade organization. Such an organization would also be of value in preventing danger of injury for workers whose attention under Scientific Management should be concentrated on their tasks, and of value in supporting the tendency of Scientific Management to pay work absolutely according to the amount accomplished by the worker, and not under a certain specified rate for this amount.

Scientific Management as applied to women's work in this country is, of course, very recent. This synthesis of its short history is collected from the statements made by about eighty of the women workers, by Mr.

Gantt, and by the owner, superintendent, and head of the planning department of the cotton mill, by the superintendent and one of the owners of the Cloth Finishing factory, and the superintendent and one of the owners of the Bleachery. The account should be supplemented by several general observations.

The first is that it is difficult to determine where the health of a worker has been strained by industry and where by other causes. Quite outside any of the narratives mentioned were those of two young women employed under Scientific Management whose health was hopelessly broken.

Both of these poor girls were subject to wrong and oppressive maltreatment at home. Indeed, from oppression at home, one of the girls had repeatedly found refuge and protection in the consideration shown to her by the establishment where she worked. It was not she who blamed the new way of management for her breakdown, but people whose impression of her situation was vague and lacked knowledge.

The whole tendency of Scientific Management toward truth about industry, toward justice, toward a clear personal record of work, established without fear or favor, had inspired something really new and revolutionary in the minds of both the managers and the women workers where the system had been inaugurated. Nearly all of them wished to tell and to obtain, as far as they could, the actual truth about the experiment everywhere. Almost no one wished to "make out a case." This expressed sense of candor and cooperation on both sides seemed to the present writer more stirring and vital than the gains in wages and hours, far more serious even than the occasional strain on health which the imperfect installation of Scientific Management had sometimes caused.

These strains on women's health in industry in America--stooping and monotony in all the needle trades, jumping on pedals in machine tending, dampness and heat in cotton production, the standing without pause for many hours a day throughout the month, the lifting of heavy weights in packing and in distribution--all these industrial strains for women const.i.tute grave public questions affecting the good fortune of the whole nation and not to be answered in four years, nor by one firm. It is undoubtedly the tendency of Scientific Management to relieve all these strains.

No one can see even in part the complications of contemporary factory work, the hundred operations of human hands and muscles required for placing a single yard of cotton cloth on the market, the thousand threads spinning and twisting, the thousand shuttles flying, the manifold folding and refolding and wrapping and tying, the innumerable girls working, standing, walking by these whirring wheels and twisting threads and high piled folding tables, without feeling strongly that ours is indeed an industrial civilization, and that the conditions of industry not only completely control the lives of uncounted mult.i.tudes, but affect in some measure every life in this country to-day.

No finer dream was ever dreamed than that the industry by which the nation lives should be so managed as to secure for the men and women engaged in it their real prosperity, their best use of their highest powers. By and large, the great task of common daily work our country does to-day is surely not so managed, either by intent or by result, either for the workers or for the most "successful" owners of dividends.

How far Scientific Management will go toward realizing its magnificent dream in the future will be determined by the greatness of spirit and the executive genius with which its principles are sustained by all the people interested in its inauguration, the employers, the workers, and the engineers.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 43: Brief on behalf of Traffic Committee of Commercial Organizations of Atlantic Seaboard, p. 70. Louis D. Brandeis.]

[Footnote 44: Fourteen years ago Scientific Management was applied to women's work in a Rolling Machine Company in Ma.s.sachusetts. Here the women's hours were reduced from 10-1/2 day to 8-1/2; their wages were increased about 100 per cent; and their output about 300 per cent. All the women had two days' rest a month with pay. The work consisted in inspecting ball-bearings for bicycles. Their department of the business, however, closed twelve years ago. Accurate facts other than those listed concerning the workers' experience as to hours, wages, and general health under Scientific Management are at this date too few to be valuable.]

[Footnote 45: "Academic and Industrial Efficiency," by F.W. Taylor and Morris Llewellyn Cook.]

[Footnote 46: The specialistic and detailed care necessary for practical and exact time-study may be indicated by the reproduction below of a method of record used by Mr. Sanford E. Thompson in timing wheelbarrow excavations. (Explanation. The letters _a_, _b_, _c_, etc., indicate elementary units of the operation: "Filling barrow" = (_a_); "starting" = (_b_); "wheeling full" = (_c_), etc.)]

[Footnote 47: "Efficiency." Harrington Emerson.]

[Footnote 48: "Work, Wages and Profits," pp. 110 to 111. H.L. Gantt.]

[Footnote 49: While the bonus system as a means of compensation has been used very often in connection with the Scientific Management, it must not, however, be supposed that this method of compensation is alone and in itself Scientific Management. In fact, as employed without Scientific Management, it is to be regarded with some apprehension.]

[Footnote 50: The work in this department was, besides, rather slack at the time of year when I visited the factory, and wages for some of these workers were $6 a week, as low as they had been before the bonus was introduced.]

[Footnote 51: The girl who directs them and issues the orders receives a bonus for every stamper earning a bonus and earns on full time from $12 to $15.]

[Footnote 52: These girls are not employed under the bonus and task system. But it is interesting to observe that they may either sit or stand to iron, as they prefer.]

[Footnote 53: The men folders at the heaviest work here now receive with the bonus from $14 to $17 a week.]

[Footnote 54: A worker does not lose her regular wage if she is stopped by a breakage. Her time-card is altered. And she has credit on a time basis for the period while the machine is not running. A breakage in the first machine of a tandem pair stops both sewers. But a breakage in the second means that work piles up for the second sewer, and unless she makes it up, she will prevent her companion from earning a bonus, though not a time wage.]

[Footnote 55: The management, on learning of this, said the practice would be stopped at once.]

[Footnote 56: "The cotton as it grows in the field becomes more or less filled with blown dust.... Lint is given off in all processes up to and including spinning.... The only practical way to keep down the dust in all of these operations is by frequent sweeping and mopping the floor and wiping off the machinery." Report on Condition of Women and Child Wage-earners in the United States. Vol. I, p. 365.

"What degree of moisture is safely permissible from the standpoint of the operatives' health is an unsettled question.... When the operative after a day's work in a humid and relaxing atmosphere goes into one relatively drier, the a.s.sault on the delicate membrane of the air-pa.s.sages is sharp.

The effect of these changes is greatly to lower the vital resistance and make the worker especially susceptible to pulmonary, bronchial, or catarrhal affections. It is very possible that the dust and lint present in the mill have been credited with effects which are due in part to these atmospheric conditions." Report on Condition of Women and Child Wage-earners in the United States. Vol. I, p. 362.]

[Footnote 57: Besides, work had lately been slack, and this had further decreased the wages.]

[Footnote 58: Since visiting the New Jersey cotton mill, the present writer has seen spool tenders at work at a machine requiring no stooping, and provided with a board below the bobbins, placed at such a height, that the worker can relieve her position while standing by resting her weight against the board, above one knee and then above the other.]

[Footnote 59: At the same time work was slack so that week wages had dropped to $3 and $4.]

[Footnote 60: One of the girls issues batches of tickets. Another girl unfolds one end of certain of the packages, and inserts a ticket and stamps an outside label, to accord with the invoice system of some of the purchasers. These girls had received before $5.40 and $4.84 a week, respectively, and now receive, the one $5.73, and the other between $5 and $6.]

[Footnote 61: All the firms have rest rooms for the girls. The Delaware firm and the New Jersey cotton mill have pleasant lunch-rooms, where an excellent lunch is provided at cost.]

BY SCOTT NEARING, PH.D.

Of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

_Social Adjustment_

"It is a good book, and will help any one interested in the study of present social problems."--_Christian Standard._

"A clear, sane gathering together of the sociological dicta of to-day. Its range is wide--education, wages, distribution and housing of population, conditions of women, home decadence, tenure of working life and causes of distress, child labor, unemployment, and remedial methods. A capital reading book for the million, a text-book for church and school, and a companion for the economist of the study desk." --_Book News Monthly._

_Wages in the United States_

This work represents an examination of statistics offered by various states and industries in an effort to determine the average wage in the United States. As a scholarly and yet simple statement it is a valuable contribution to the study of one side of our social organization.

_Economics_

By SCOTT NEARING and FRANK D. WATSON, both Instructors in Political Economy in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania

The book discusses the whole subject of prosperity of the factors which enter into the complex economic life of the nation. A young man who wishes to read even the daily paper with full intelligence would find time spent in reading this book well employed for the help which it would give him in understanding current discussions of such topics as the standard of living; the natural resources of the country and their conservation; the relations of labor and immigration; of the labor of women and children to industrial progress; of organization in business and its tendencies; of the growth and functions of large corporations; of public ownership; of the various experiments which have been tried at different times, or the programmes which social leaders are now proposing for the remedy or the prevention of economic injustice.