Part 35

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.

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.