Family Life of the Slavs

This text was taken from pages 171-172, from the chapter titled "THE MILL AND THE HOUSEHOLD"

THROUGHOUT this study I have referred frequently to the ways in which the one industry in the town through wages, hours and conditions of work limits the fulfillment of the family ideals. This is not because the industry sprang up like a wicked ogre to carry on depredations among the townspeople, but because the employment it offers is the economic basis both of the household life and the town life; it makes both possible; and the terms and conditions on which it offers this employment must directly affect the everyday living of both.

It may be well, therefore, to sum up this discussion in a more definite fashion; first, by defining the limitations due to hours and conditions of work in the Homestead mills (interpreting somewhat the attitude of the men toward this problem); and second, by drawing from our budget study of what can be secured for a given weekly expenditure, some more general conclusions about wages. It is the workman himself who feels the first of these limitations; through him the routine and hazards of the day's work affect the family. The second acts more directly upon the family; to the household no less than to the man, the mill determines the livelihood; it is the housekeeper's purse strings that are tugged with every wage cut and loosened with every advance a man makes in the mill from the pay of common labor to the higher tonnage rates.

The first of these reactions of the mill on the town is subtle and hard to demonstrate. Yet no one who has lived in Homestead can fail to realize how definitely the conditions under which they work influence the mental as well as the physical development of the men.

In an earlier chapter I spoke of the twelve-hour day spent in tumult and in heat, the heavy work, the periodic intensity of labor at the rolls and the furnaces for the skilled steel workers. The onlooker, fascinated by the picturesqueness of it all, sees in the great dim sheds a wonderful revelation of the creative powers of man. To the worker this fascination is gone; heat and grime, noise and effort are his part in the play. The spectacular features may serve only to heighten the over-strain which accompanies continuous processes whenever, as here, the full twenty four hours is split between two shifts. In the open-hearth department in Homestead in October, 1907, 1517 men worked a twelve-hour day, as against 93 who worked ten. In the Bessemer department, there were nine men who worked an eight-hour day, 19 who worked eleven; the remaining 153 worked the full twelve. In the rolling mills some common laborers were employed eleven hours, but the men in the processes were dividing the twenty-four hours of the day and night between two shifts. (The normal day of the yard laborer was ten hours.) These long hours restrict the development of the individual. They give the men in the two shifts little time for outside interests. The week that a man works on the night turn, from 5.30 p. m. to 7.30 a. m., he has plainly small time to do anything but eat and get such sleep as he can. The other week he has, of course, such leisure as falls to any ten-hour worker. This alternation of shifts lets the men out of consecutive night work, but it interferes with that regularity of meals and of sleep which physicians tell us is essential to health. When a man sleeps in the daytime alternate weeks, it means continual change and adjustment. One week he has supper at 4.30 p. m., works all night, has breakfast at 8 a. m., and has a more or less broken sleep during the day. The alternate week he has supper at 6 p. m., breakfast at 6.30, and a good night's sleep between. Sometimes when sons who are in the mill are on the opposite shift from the father, the family cannot even meet for meals. The irregularity in hours not only adds in the long run to the fatigue of the work and breaks into the family life, but also makes weekly engagements, such as lodge meetings, impossible, and prevents the men from taking much part in other activities.