Questions for Analysis
 
 

1. How did the work process itself change as a result of rapid industrialization? What do the documents reveal about the impact of those alterations on workers? 

2. What was the meaning of the terms craft and domestic system? How were they affected by the acceleration of industrial change? What was the relationship between work responsibilities and worker self-image?

3. How did the relationship between capitalist/managers and labor/workers change as a result of industrialization? What was the position of labor in the economic
structure by the end of the nineteenth century?

4. How did workers respond to the altered work environment? What do the documents reveal about workers' perceptions of the machine system and its future implications?

5. Dr. John B. Whitaker, Carroll D. Wright, and E. Levasseur were all observers of industrialism's impact on laborers. None of them was himself an industrial worker. In what ways did their assessments differ? How would you explain the conflicting interpretations? Which account is most credible? Why?

       Q. Is there any difference between the conditions under which machinery is made now and those which existed ten years ago?
       A. A great deal of difference.
       Q. State the differences as well as you can.
       A. Well, the trade has been subdivided and those subdivisions have been again subdivided, so that a man never learns the machinist's trade now. Ten years ago he learned, not the whole of the trade, but a fair portion of it. Also, there is more machinery used in the business, which again makes machinery. In the case of making the sewing machine, for in
stance, you find that the trade is so subdivided that a man is not considered a machinist at all. Hence, it is merely laborers' work and it is laborers that work at that branch of our trade. The different branches of the trade are divided and subdivided so that one man
may make just a particular part of a machine and may not know anything whatever about another part of the same machine. In that way machinery is produced a great deal cheaper than it used to be formerly, and in fact, through this system of work, 100 men are able to do now what it took 300 or 400 men to do fifteen years ago. By the use of machinery and the subdivision of the trade they so simplify the work that it is made a great deal easier and put together a great deal faster. There is no system of apprenticeship, I may say, in the business. You simply go in and learn whatever branch you are put at, and you stay at that unless you are changed to another. ...
       Q. Have you noticed the effect upon the intellect of this plan of keeping a man at one particular branch? 
       A. Yes. It has a very demoralizing effect upon the mind throughout. The man thinks of nothing else but that particular branch; he knows that he cannot leave that particular branch and go to any other; he has got no chance whatever to learn anything else because he is kept steadily and constantly at that particular thing, and of course his intellect must be narrowed by it.
       Q. And does he not finally acquire so much skill in the manipulation of his particular part of the business that he does it without any mental effort?
        A. Almost. In fact he becomes almost a part of the machinery. ...
       Q. What is the prospect for a man now working in one of these machine shops, a man who is temperate and economical and thrifty to become a boss or a manufacturer of machinery himself from his own savings? Could a man do it without getting aid from some relative who might die and leave him a fortune, or without drawing a lottery prize, or something of that sort?
       A. Well, speaking generally, there is no chance. They have lost all desire to become bosses now.
       Q. Why have they lost that desire?
       A. Why, because the trade has become demoralized. First they earn so small wages; and, next, it takes so much capital to become a boss now that they cannot think of it, because it takes all they can earn to live. ...
       Q. I am requested to ask you this question: Dividing the public, as is commonly done, into the upper, middle, and lower classes, to which class would you assign the average workingman of your trade at the time when you entered it, and to which class would you assign him now?
       A. I now assign them to the lower class. At the time I entered the trade I should assign them as merely hanging on to the middle class, ready to drop out at any time.

       Q. What is the present condition of your trade now in reference to work and wages? 
       A. As to work, very good; as to wages, poor. 
       Q. How much less than they have been? 
       A. Well, that would be a difficult question to answer, more or less based upon opinion. I might go over $15, and probably my wage would run nearer $12. That is based upon the experience of others that I know in the same kind of work. And another thing; where a man at that time would likely get eight or nine months' good work in a year, at the present time the season is shorter. Machinery is more largely used and of a more improved type. The manufacturers equip themselves to turn out their product in a shorter time, and the seasons of employment are that shorter and more uncertain. ...I would like to state one instance of the development of machinery. In respect to the operation of nailing the heel on to the boot or shoe, fastening the heel in with nails, about fifteen years ago I remember working at a factory where that operation was done by hand in the original way. A man stood up with a hammer and nailed those heels on, and 100 to 125 pairs of that grade of work was considered a good day's work. Five years later it is done by what they call the National nailing machine, where a man and a boy did five times as much. That man and the boy did the work that would require five men to do. ...
        Q. Taking the material as it is prepared for the shoemaker, how many hands does a gentleman's finished shoe pass through in the process of manufacture? 
       A. To answer that question in another way, there are about one hundred subdivisions of labor in the manufacture of a shoe, varying more or less according to the factory and methods and the kind of shoe made. There are different combinations of these subdivisions. 
       Q. Now, let me ask, in connection with that, what effect has that specializing, if it might be so back in my own experience as a workman at the bench. Eleven years ago I used to be able to earn myself, lasting shoes, from $18 to $35 in a week, according to how hard I wanted to work; that is, in the city of Lynn. Today, on the same class of work, I
 would not be able, on any job in the city, to make termed, upon the workman? Has it a beneficial effect or otherwise?
        A. Oh, it has been detrimental to the workman.
        Q. The workman only knows how to perform the labor of one department?
       A. That is all, and he becomes a mere machine. You know we have the piecework system almost entirely, and if we work for a week price, there is a stint comes with it that makes it virtually a piece work system, and it has come to be a race with a man. Now, take the proposition of a man operating a machine to nail on forty to sixty pairs cases of heels in a day. That is 2,400 pairs, 4,800 shoes, in a day. One not accustomed to it would wonder how a man could pick up and lay down 4,800 shoes in a day, to say nothing of putting them on a jack into a machine and having them nailed on. That is the driving method of the manufacture of shoes under these minute subdivisions.
         Q. Under that system of special work, has the general worker of today the same opportunity to go out into the world and make a living as you think he had before this method was introduced?
       A. No.
       Q. Are there many workmen in the factory who can make a whole shoe?
       A. No, the art of shoemaking, so far as the individual is concerned, has got to be a thing of the past. About all the actual shoemakers you can find today are located in small cobbling and custom shops oldtime workmen; and almost invariably you will find that they are old men. 

3. A Union Leader Sees Worker Regimentation, 1883
 

       Q. Can you give us some instances of the obnoxious rules of which you speak? 
       A. Yes; one instance was on the part of a large firm of carriage manufacturers at Rochester, N. Y. James Cunningham, Sons & Co. Just a year ago this month their men rebelled against certain rules that they had established in their works -- rules degrading to human nature. For instance, the faucets in the water sinks were locked up, and when an employee wanted a drink of water he had to go to the foreman of his department and ask for a drink; the foreman went and unlocked the faucet and gave him a cupful of water, and whether that was enough to satisfy his thirst or not, it was all he got. When the men entered in the morning they were numbered by checks. A man lost his identity as a man and took a number like a prisoner in a penitentiary. ...Another obnoxious rule was that if a man was half or even a quarter of a minute late he was shut out. They had a gate and it would be shut down upon a man even when he was going in, sometimes so quickly that he would hardly have time to draw his foot back to keep it from being crushed by the gate, and that man would be kept out until nine o'clock, so that he would make only three quarters of a day's work. The rule was that the men had to be in the works before the whistle blew.

5. A French Economist Notes the Machine's Impact on American Workers, 1897

       The pay here is good, but the labor is hard, said an Alsatian blacksmith employed in a large [American] factory. I could verify nearly everywhere the truth of this remark, for I have seen such activity both in the small industry, where the tailors in the sweating shops in New York worked with feverish rapidity, and in the great industry, where the butchers of the Armour packing house prepared 5800 hogs a day, where the cotton weavers tended as many as eight looms, or where the rolling mill in Chicago turned out 1000 tons of rails in a day. Everywhere the machine goes very rapidly, and it commands; the workman has to follow. An English manufacturer, having read in one of Mr. (Jacob) Schoenhof's books that a silk spinner of New Jersey had renewed his machinery in order to obtain 7500 turns a minute, instead of 5000, told him that should he establish such machinery in his workshop all his workers would leave him.  And, yet, in America, at the present time, the rapidity is from 10,000 to 13,000 turns. ... Several French laborers, delegates to the 
Exposition at Chicago, have brought back from their trip the notion that the laborer has to work hard and that he cannot loaf or chatter. In the machine shops, said one of them, there is no movement, no going from place to place on the part of workmen, each one remains at his post without the discipline being more severe than in France. ...
       The laboring classes … reproach the machine with exhausting the physical powers of the laborer; but this can only apply to a very small number of cases to those where the workman is at the same time the motive power, as in certain sewing machines. They reproach it with demanding such continued attention that it enervates, and of leaving no respite to the laborer, through the continuity of its movement. This second complaint may be applicable in a much larger number of cases, particularly in the spinning industries and in weaving, where the workman manages more than four looms. They reproach the machine with degrading man by transforming him into a machine, which knows how to make but one movement, and that always the same. They reproach it with diminishing the number of skilled laborers, permitting in many cases the substitution of unskilled workers and lowering the average level of wages. They reproach it with depriving, momentarily at
least, every time that an invention modifies the work of the factory, a certain number of workmen of their means of subsistence, thus rendering the condition of all uncertain. They reproach it, finally, with reducing absolutely and permanently the number of persons employed for wages, and thus being indirectly injurious to all wage-earners who make among themselves a more disastrous competition, the more the opportunities for labor are restricted.

       1. Accidents and casualties are very numerous, partly owing to the exposed machinery and partly owing to carelessness. ... It is really painful to go round among the operatives and find the hands and fingers mutilated, in consequence of accidents. 2. Unnatural or monotonous working positions. ..in some cases (make the worker) round-shouldered, in other cases producing curvature of the spine and bowlegs. 3. Exhaustion from overwork. In consequence of the long hours of labor, the great speed the machinery is run at, the large number of looms the weavers tend, and the general overtasking, so much exhaustion is produced, in most cases, that immediately after taking supper, the tired operatives drop to sleep in their chairs. ... 4. Work by artificial light. It is very injurious to the eyes. The affections consist principally in conjunctivitis, opacity of cornea, granulations of the lids, &c. 5. The inhalation of foreign articles. ... I have been called to cases where I suspected this to be the cause of trouble in the stomach. After giving an emetic, they have in some cases vomited little balls of cotton. ... 10. Predisposition to pelvic diseases. .. among the female factory operatives produces difficulty in parturition. The necessity for instrumental delivery has very much increased within a few years, owing to the females working in the mills while they are pregnant and in consequence of deformed pelvis. 11. ... Predisposition to sexual abuse. There is no doubt that this is very much increased, the passions being excited by contact and loose conversation. ... They are, also, as a general thing, ignorant at least to the extent that they do not know how to control ... their passions nor to realize the consequences. ... 12. Predisposition to depression of spirits. ... Factory life predisposes very much to depression of spirits.

       The usual mistake is to consider the factory system as the creator of evils, and not only evils, but of evil disposed persons. This can hardly be shown to be true, although it is [true] that the system may congregate evils or evil disposed persons, and thus give the appearance of creating that which already existed. ... The spasmodic nature of work under the domestic system caused much disturbance, for handworking is always more or less discontinuous from the caprice of the operative, while much time must be in lost in gathering and returning materials. For these and obvious reasons a hand weaver could very seldom turn off in a week much more than one half what his loom could produce if kept continuously in action during the working hours of the day at the rate which the weaver in his working paroxysms impelled it. The regular order maintained in the factory cures this evil of the old system and enables the operative to know with reasonable certainty the wages he is to receive at the next payday. His life and habits become more orderly, and he finds, too, that as he has left the closeness of his home shop for the usually clean and well-lighted factory, he imbibes more freely of the health giving tonic of the atmosphere. The regularity required in mills is such as to render persons who are in the habit of getting intoxicated unfit to be employed there, and many manufacturers object to employing persons guilty of the vice; yet, notwithstanding all the efforts which have been made to stop the habit, the beer-drinking operatives of factory towns still constitute a most serious drawback to the success of industrial enterprises, but its effects are not so ruinous under the new as under the old system. ...
       What is the truth as to wages? The vast influence of wages upon social life need not be considered here, but the question whether the factory system has increased them may be. I am constantly obliged, in my everyday labors, to refute the assertion that wages under the factory system are growing lower and lower. The reverse is the truth, which is easily demonstrated; the progress of improvement in machinery may have reduced the price paid for a single article, yard, or pound of product, or for the services of a skilled and intelligent operative, but the same improvement has enabled the workman to produce a greater proportion and always with a less expenditure of muscular labor and in less time, and it has enabled a low grade of labor to increase its earnings.
       At the same time, a greater number have been benefited, either in consumption or production, by the improvement. Experience has not only evolved but proven a law in this respect, which is, the more the factory system is perfected, the better will it reward those engaged in it, if not in increased wages to skill, certainly in higher wages to less skill. Better morals, better sanitary conditions, better health, better wages, these are the practical results of the factory system, as compared with that which preceded it, and the results of all these have been a keener intelligence. ... Industry and poverty are not handmaidens, and, as poverty is lessened, good morals thrive. If labor, employment of the mind, is an essential to good morals, then the highest kind of employment, that requiring the most application and the best intellectual effort, means the best morals. This condition, I take courage to assert, is super-induced eventually by the factory system, for by it the operative is usually employed in a higher grade of labor than that which occupied him in his previous condition. For this reason the present system of productive industry is constantly narrowing the limits of the class that occupies the bottom step of social order.