Full up and fed up : the worker's mind in crowded Britain

Foreword

Nobody could have been more surprised than myself to find that the months of 1919 spent in the labor gangs of America made almost unavoidable a few months of 1920 in the labor gangs of Great Britain.

In this wise:

Following the return to white-collared ways, the country gave surprising approval to the following ^^Big Four'' factors which lay, in my belief, at the bottom of the labor problem here in our own country:

I. The huge importance to the working man — ^and that means to us all — of that prayer of the industrial era: ^'Give us this day our daily Job !" The job it is which affords to each of us the platform upon which we stand as members of the modern industrial commonwealth. The job it is which connects each of us up with the doings of others in a way to make us important to them and so to ourselves. The job it is which serves as a crank-shaft by which we get the satisfaction of seeing the forces of our own hves geared up with the forces of others for turning the wheels of the world's work — and so for finding ourselves not altogether valueless. Job gone? — ^then the rightness of the rest of the circle of our interests gives us Httle satisfaction — in spite of such testimony as that of the hopeful wife who got out to inspect the rear tire and reported, ^^Well, John, it is quite flat at the bottom. But the rest of it is fine!"

II. The importance of the part played by our bodies, as the result of their effort to adapt themselves to the conditions of working and living imposed by the job. Especially the power for industrial and civic evil possessed and wielded by those unheavenly twins of ^^ Tiredness and vi FOREWORD

Temper ^^ — the TNT that causes so many explosions in the trenches of both the family and the factory life.

III. The importance of the mental conditions of the man on the job — the threat of wide-spread evil to be found in the huge volume of misunderstanding between modern y employer and modern employee.

IV. The vital importance of what can be called the spiritual conditions which all of us hope to find wrapped up in our job: the deep-down mainspring of our desire to ^^be somebody'^ and to ^^ count ^^ most of all by reason of the thing we do — to show ourselves men by virtue of showing ourselves work-men.

Something like these four factors, so it has appeared to me, furnish a means of breaking up the problem of industrial relations and so of locating the particular cause of the difficulty in any one case. When a man feels that his body, mind, and spirit are all connected up with each other and with that crank-shaft of the job, then he laughs the laugh of joy. Then, too, he laughs the laugh of scorn not only at the agitator but also at those who would try to persuade him that work is a cruel hang-over from the days when our common ancestor was thrust out of the Garden of Donothing for earning his bread with the sweat of his brow.

At least something like that, I am sure, is true for America and Americans.

But is that because we are Americans or because we are humans?

To answer the question required the rather reluctant donning of the overalls and the undergoing of the discomforts of the labor gang in some other country.

To what extent the experiences reported in these pages answer the question which carried me into them — and to what extent they appear to make it desirable to try to get the feelings of the workers of France or Germany, or Italy and Spain — the reader may decide.

Part I— With The Workers Chapteb Page

I. Into Steange Waters — from a London Dock ... 3

II. By the Smelters and Stoves of South Wales ... 26

III. "Back to the Mines'' and the "Bolshies''! ... 61

IV. ''What's the Matter with Glasgow?" ..... 123

V. With the 'Ands on Smelting Stage, Cinder Pit akd

Cast Bed 170

VI. Midst the Miners and Machinists of the Mild Midlands 205

VII. Living the Double Life in London 234

VIII. The Worst Job yet 275

PART n-ONE INTERPRETATION

IX. "Full Up!" 285

XI. How Many Jobs to a Nation? 301

XII. The Domestic Pay Envelope and "International

Creative Evolution" 308

XIII. Can We Get "the Air" to the "Working Faces" in

THE World Factory Mine? 318 vu

ILLUSTRATIONS

Over 200,000 of Britain's 1,200,000 coal-miners live in the

famous South Wales District Frontispiece

PACING PAGE

Dockers unloading copra or cocoanut-meat for making oil, cattle-food, and oleomargarine at a London dock 18 iC

They tells us as 'ow we should sive our money. So 'ere we are ! " . 18

Blast-furnaces of this hand-charged t3^e are now being replaced by

machine-charged furnaces of newer and larger type .... 28

Salt firemen of Northern England 94

f 'E been now," his wife said, *^as good a mon as 'e been bawd before — awnd no one could say more than thot ! " 94

f Dirty Dick's my name, but I'm not dirty-minded " .... 94

A saloon or "pub" in London's East End as a "neighborhood

centre " to which the babe in arms is becoming accustomed early 134

Children in a crowded Glasgow district . 134

Crowds listening to the smooth-tongued salesmen of "riot, racing, or religion — ^representatives of a better chance in either this world or the world to come " 168

The crowd waits as the bookies mark up their preferences at the

week-end whippet races . . . . . . . . . . . 168

Separating the "pigs" from the "sow" in a Middlesbrough "castbed" 182

The author as he is and as he was when in search of work in Britain 266

PART I WITH THE WORKERS

WITH THE WORKERS

Chapter I Into Strange Waters — From A London Dock

Whitechapel, East End, London; June 29, 1920.

The most surprising thing is the interest every one here shows in my plan, queer and strange though it seems to them. The head of a group of manufacturers has ah-eady given his expert approval of the idea to begin in the South Wales tin-plate and coal districts; go thence to the Clyde bank, near Glasgow, where the very nmnerous radical workers are taken much more seriously than their less active though louder-talking comrades among the Welsh workers; ending up with the more conservative and newer steel centre of the British Pittsburgh, Middlesbrough, near Newcastle, and finally the older Sheffield district. This adviser is a college man and seems to feel that the freemasonry of college men — evidently more marked over here — ^would require him to help me if nothing else. In that connection he said yesterday that the English worker is Ukely to be suspicious of me because:

"It will seem a bit odd to them, you know, that yoiu: friends are willing to let you go so low. That wouldn't be done over here. A decent job, you see, would be found for you by some one if for nothing else than to save a fellow member of one's own class.''

But he seemed to think that I might meet all that by letting on that I was a hard drinker !

Similarly the head of a big firm of engineers and equippers of steel plants was not at all of the suspicious sort that some friends at home had made me think I might encounter:

^'Your plan of first-hand study of this labor problem is odd enough, but it certainly has enormous possibihties, and I want to help every bit I can/^ Then he proceeded to ask if I wouldn't do him the favor of doing a few days' work among the bricklayers who are in his employ building a big glass plant, and who are said to represent one of the hardest trades to get along with in the empire. Inasmuch as the job is near by, in London, it seems a proper way of repaying the various courtesies he will extend during the summer.

In one sense this country seems to be in a very bad way in this matter of labor, in another not so bad. The subject does not seem on people's tongues to the same extent as in America. The fact that it is all put over into politics appears to give the man on the street the idea that it is by way of being worked out. Then the fact that the unions are so much on the job further supports the idea that it will somehow take care of itself without the ordinary citizen's bothering.

^^Practically every one of our workers is in some union or other," was the way an official of an iron and steel manufacturers' association put it. '^With every one of these unions where it is at all feasible we have had for the last thirty years an agreement to pay wages on the basis of tonnage, and also on a sliding scale according to the selling price of the product. In the case of the one solitary strike of any consequence in these thirty years, everything was settled by the estabhshment of this rule of sliding scale. This the makers had heretofore held out against in that particular connection. Since then there has been no trouble anywhere of any size — that is, with the steel men. We do have trouble occasionally with the special trades, like the steam-fitters, machinists, and others. You see, to them steel is only a side issue. Of the distinctly steel unions the representatives go over the company's sales books every three months. In that way they make sure that the selUng price for the three months' period has been as represented, and on the basis of any change of price the wage agreement is continued. In America I understand this sUding-scale arrangement is practised, at least so far as steel is concerned, only in the steel-sheet industry. I presume it is in operation there as the direct result of your importation of our Welsh 'sheet-workers.' ''

Among the workers in general labor matters appear far from quiet and contented. The Labor Party in its annual session at Scarborough has just now publicly stated that, in its opinion, ^'In spite of all kinds of conciliation machinery the relations between the workers and the owners were never worse." It intimates that all the idealism of the war has been completely lost, with nothing done in any way to make the war worth its prodigious cost. The party is apparently very strongly for nationahzation of coal and all sorts of things. In several of its proposals it is said to be doing a certain amount of pussyfooting, as befits an organization which must keep its eye on the votes — ^which, by the way, Mr. Gompers and Mr. J. P. Frye of our own A. F. of L. give as the reason why they oppose the Labor Party idea for America. The party also turns down government purchase of the liquor trade and eschews prohibition, but does go on record for local option, evidently having in mind that this is the way things began to happen with us. A well-known American official, by the way, remarked to-day that in his beUef this coimtry would go dry in five years — largely as the result of getting the wetand-dry issue into the field of good or bad industry here as at home.

But, even though the average citizen here doesn't seem as keen to talk about the labor problem as in 'Hhe States," still two things come strongly into the view of the newcomer. For one thing, the country is certainly having a great time with strikes — I should say at least quite as bad if not worse than we. The day we landed, the National Union of Gas- Workers was threatening strike in a very serious way. They wanted a forty-four-hour week (now forty-seven), double time for Sundays, week-ends, etc., with ten shillings a week immediate advance. Gas seem^ to sell already at ten or twelve shiUings for 1,000 cubic feet! The wireless men on the big liners were also preventing sailing because of a strike. The dockers have lately got a very successful award of two shilUngs an hour — quite high here — ^but are now wanting more work badly. In fact, my pet idea about the importance of the job was upheld before the end of my very first Enghsh newspaper page! There stood the words: ^'The dockers' great need is not for registration, not for government measures, not even for a rise in wages. The dockers' great need is regular work.^^

Even the notably happy workers of Lord Leverholme at Port Sunlight have been announced as having a dispute on. Of course, the strike of the munition workers in Ireland and the civil war in Londonderry have also been much in the papers. Besides the poUtical factors in the Irish mixup, it seems that much of the trouble has its roots in the economic problem. One correspondent says that serious trouble always starts when the sons of the Catholics have difficulty getting good jobs with the Ulstermen, who are reported at the head of most of the business concerns in ''Derry," and in many other factory cities. The small number of Irish factory cities, especially in the most unhappy part of Ireland, is given as one reason why so little interest seems to be taken in the whole Irish problem by the average business man here. The possibility of an Irish rail strike seems to be very much on the mind of J. H. Thomas, the conservative head of the Railway Men's Union.

The papers have also been carrying word of a threatened strike of the (unionized) bank clerks of Scotland and elsewhere. In near-by columns appears a statement of the Minister of Labor that '^Food in May was 146 per cent over pre-war; in June 155 per cent.'' (This is not quite the same as the cost of living, into which other items must be figured with appropriate ^^ weighting.") The same ministry also stated that the percentage of unemployed among workers covered by the insm^ance list was 2.68 on May 28 and 2.80 on April 30, with conditions good in most trades except boot and shoe and the weaving section of the cotton trade. Weekly wages of about 1,700,000 work-people showed a total increase 750,000 pounds sterUng. This represents those increases recently secured by the dock laborers, also others won by the building trades, dressmaking, and cotton and woollen operatives. About 250,- 000 workers also lessened their working week by about two and a half hours.

Altogether it would look as though labor matters were moving.

The second of these noticeable things is the general conviction in pubUc and business circles that the English worker is lying down on the job disgracefully — ^and that nothing can be done about it.

^'You'll find all our workers taking things jolly easy/' appears to be the universal testimony except when it is: ''Well, you'll find our men doing much less in a day than yours." Usually the blame is placed upon the union. ''We can't sell our furnaces on the basis of the men it will save, because the unions make everybody use so many men for so many furnaces, whether or no. So we can only talk the saving of coal," said a salesman from America.

How this will turn out to be in actuality it will be highly interesting to see.

Of one thing I am pretty sure — namely, that the roots of whatever loafing there is — and perhaps also of the apparently universal membership in the union — ^will be found very close to the same thing that is on the mind of the dock workers — the daily job, ^^ regular work.'^ That seems to be one reason why the unions are not apparently defending the government's Employment Exchanges, now under criticism as expensive. They pretty generally want to handle the getting of jobs for their men themselves as a fundamental service for their members.

^' We said to our bricklayers,'^ said my engineering friend, " * here we are paying you more than the union rate and yet you throw us down whenever you jolly please, or when some other local asks you to. Why don't you chuck the union ? ' They turned around on us at once and said : ' Can you guarantee us a job for every day in the year we need one?'^'

Well, we shall see what we shall see. I^m sure it's going to be worth while, anyway — ^whatever happens. Because from this set-up it is evident, surely, that the problem isn't so different as to prevent my experiences here from being useful in giving a better light into our problem back home.

And now good night to get ready for moseying nonchalantly around onto that bricklayer's helper's job to-morrow.

Later — June 30th.

Am told to-day that the imeasiness noticed in the current papers comes from a very distinct increase of unemployment within the last two or three weeks — since the period covered by the Labor Ministry's figures. People are evidently having much the same scare we had back home two months ago.

Should have mentioned last night, also, the doings on shipboard coming over. Though the boat was operating under American registry, most of the men were English and reflected EngUsh rather than American conditions. The stewards had a near-strike because they were being worked over ten hours per day with no extra pay whatever for overtime. The difficulty was narrowly averted by the steward's promising the extra pay. The second engineer was as black as coal when he took me down into the stoke-hole, but the thing that worried him most — ^it came to his lips time after time — ^was his beloved, though I must say, bedraggled-looking, engine:

^'We used to be able to get in a few coal-passers, and have every rod as clean as your face around here. But it can't be done now — ^against union rules to bring 'em in and the men themselves won't do it, not even when we're in port, and they've nothing else to do !"

Whitechapel, London, July 1, 1920.

A long and slow-moving, but very worth-while day. Like many others of its kind it has been a demonstration of the way men wear their hearts, if not on their sleeves, then at least much closer to the surface than we white-collared folk are apt to think.

In the morning I got again into my old clothes, with many misgivings, feeling myself very much a stranger in a far country, and even less able to guess what might happen to me in these parts than when the other start was made a year and a half ago. In the restaurant where I got eggs, bacon, a pot of tea, and bread and butter for the surprising price of one and ten pence — ^about thirty-five cents according to the present exchange which gives nearly five shillings to the dollar — I felt sure I was dressed too badly for the place, xmtil some others who looked still tougher and nearer the edge of things were good enough to com§ in, One of these asked the girl for tea and one egg, and then proceeded to unwrap some pieces of bread he had brought with him.

When I finally got to the bricklayer's helper's job, I was again pleased with the way the other unskilled workers who lined up waiting for a chance at similar jobs took me in without an instant's delay. The boss of the job, however, turned me down cold — ^nicely but firmly:

'^Matter of fact, I've got more men than I know what to do with now."

^^Yer see, it's the skilled men as is wanted — ^bricklayers and the likes o' that. So they cawn't take more of us," one of my fellow applicants explained.

There were so many kinds of workers all about the plant that was being erected for making bottles by machinery according to an American patent, that no one seemed to object to my loafing around to see and hear all possible. I must say that there seemed extremely little loafing by the bricklayers or their assistants who brought them the hod-loads of bricks and mortar up the ladders from below. Still there was a good deal of eating of an occasional sandwich and drinking from a tea or coffee can. The young American in charge of the installation of the patent process — he either didn't think I was an American or else was unwiUing to admit it for fear I'd strike him for a job — is quite sure that these workers do not get as much done in a day as ours. But they all kept on the job very well, except the carpenters, who would not work as long as it continued ''rainin' quite tidy, you know." One of the machinefitters was evidently loafing and ready to talk with a stranger in explanation of the furnace he was fixing for carrying the moulded bottles through on a continuous chain. His partner berated him for sitting there ^'like a bloomin' log," while he went in search of a stick long enough to make a measurement. ''For every one o' these things we got to go find a new stick. If only we'd save 'em we'd save ourselves, too. But what's the odds?'' About that time he made me feel as if I was back home on some factory job as he exclaimed: ^^Ah, there's the Mogul! I mustn't sit here like this !" Whereupon he caught up a handy wrench and went through the motions of tightening a bolt! Of course, to help him fool his boss I sauntered away.

The plans of the plant represent the last word in labor and time-saving machinery, but the contractors are certainly using many hand-wound or horse-drawn windlasses for clumsily raising all sorts of materials to the high platforms. The finished plant is expected to turn out something like 5,000 gross of all kinds of bottles every twenty-four hours — ^without a glass-blower in the place !

^^ There's nothin' in the wye of a job to be got outside, anywheres now, and that's the truth." That was the bin-- den of the conversation an hour later when I dropped into a cheap eating-place in Woolwich near the government shipyard, and about a mile from the arsenal.

*^Yes, I took a few days off — told the Colonel I was resignin' for a week, ye understand — and looked and looked everywhere and no good it was to me, so I came back," a red-haired man from *Hhe West of Ireland" put in with a bitter smile.

"Unemployment insurance? Yes, fifteen bob a week! That 'ardly pays for your fags ! What good does it do you, hi?" That was the way a serious-looking chap with an attractive fac6 and a linen duster of a clerk's coat put it. 1 "But no wonder there's the 'igh cost of livin' with all the money's bein' spent by the government — 3,000,000 pounds they're talkin' about now fer givin' the soldiers a bally lot o' scarlet dress uniforms that's no good to nobody."

"An' all the waste and the loafin' there in the shipyard ! Why, if I was asked to destriye all the stuff that many men's asked to destriye right over there — ^war stuff, you know, Uke the tables that was used by the German prisoners, and that's havin' their legs knocked off so they can pack 'em away nice and regular and miUtary like, you know — ^well, I'd fair tell 'em they could have my job ! W'y, we all spend hours in there movin' stuff from here over to there, and from there over to that place, and then, after we go along, a new gang moves 'em from there to back where they was when we found 'em. And even at that, not one of us does a decent and self-respectin^ day's work."

'^But when you 'ave your money," breaks in the clerk again, ^'your three-pound-fourteen a week, what 'ave you got ? If you 'ave childern, a man simply can't live."

When he added that, for one thing, there was too much class idea in it all, I expected to see it take a different turn from the Irishman's cut-in:

''You've said it ! W'y, let a man walk down street with his workin' clothes on, and out of a dozen girls he passes not two of 'em will give him so much as a look, to say nothing of answering his how do you do ! But when he's got some good clothes on as a clerk and rubs two shillings together then they come his way nice enough !"

''Well, I'm off for Canada the end of the summer," he went on as he produced a letter from a pal who reported with great detail the values he was getting for his money over there in the way of laimdry, meals, etc. The letter concluded with " — and in four or five years of this I'm coming back home to buy the finest 'pub' you got in your whole blamed country and take life easy."

The evident effect of the reading was so strong that it coincided with my earUer observations that it is by means of such first-hand testimony that most of the decisions of the workers — if not of most of the rest of us — are made from day to day. "My brother, he over here, send for me," the foreign-born workers in America were always saying in explanation of their comings over or their movings from one place in the country to another. Such communications serve as the great means of instruction about things they cannot see, just as the eyes of their daily experience teach them from moment to moment what to think about the things going on around them. Much of the whole attitude of the workers toward government there at home, I found thus based not so much on what they read in the papers as on what they saw going on around them on their job. Said one of this group:

'^Well, I tried hard enough to buy one of the cases they make for carryin* the parts of a cannon — cost three pounds to make, they did, and they're sellin' ^em at auction for two shillin' ! 'But, of course,' they says to me, 'we can't sell 'em in less 'n lots of fifty ! ' And then Lloyd George and the rest of 'em comes down and pats us on the back — and wouldn't know us from Adam any other time — no, nor care."

''Well, let me tell you, we'll all be lucky to have our jobs this winter. It's goin' to be a 'ard time, in my opinion," broke in a very sedate and quiet person of the head-machinist type.

" I don't know what brings you over here," the red-haired and fiery-dispositioned man from Ireland confided afterward when he hailed me on the street and we were alone. "But for Heaven's sake, don't think o' working here! Everybody loses all his ambition here — they hold onto the same job exactly now that they had twenty year ago. W'y, you know, even the tramway men call out, 'Convalescent's Home!' or 'Saint's Rest!' when they stop here or at the arsenal! I give you my word, they just don't remember how to work after they's been here a few years. It's awful! Of course, you'll get your three-pounds-fourteen, hut you^ll he disrespected — by yourself and everybody else! Here am I — nothin' but common labor — at the bottom of the whole pile and shootin' match! And I've had forty-seven public appearances ridin' the best horses in the country! That's what the war has done for me! Now, my friend in Canada — he's better circinnstanced than I — that is, he's not married. But my wife — well, she's young but she's wise, you understand. I was sajdn' to her last night, ^Now here we are, we're fairly comfortable.' We live with her old man and that helps, so we can save about fifteen shiUin' a week besides takin' care of our three-year-old. * We can go to a show when we want to,' I says, ^and have a drink when we want it. And we're as good as a lot of the rest of the people here in this town,' I says. ^But where will we be in ten years from now — when I'm forty years old? Where'U we be then?' I says. An' she says she's game, so I'm goin' to be lookin' up a White Star liner one of these days and see if I can't get started as a steward or something. Somehow or other I got to make somethin' of myself. I'll fair die if I got to stick around and be general labor all my life. And I'm gettin' old just worryin' about what I should do — till I think I could fair shoot Llide George if he was standin' there now." And then he proceeded to hand me a jolt: ^'Course that — even that — wouldn't be so bad for me. My brother and me — well, we mm*dered a policeman in Ireland only last winter. You see, he was arrestin' a man and we tried to take the man away from him and my brother he tapped him too hard with an iron pipe he had. And after he was down I kicked him in the face — and he seemed to be done for worse than we thought for. So the rest of 'em said we didn't ought to leave him in his misery that way. So we all went at it and finished him off. That's the way they do it in Ireland — they don't believe in lettin' people lie in their misery — and everybody helps. The jury disagreed three times, so we was let off. My mother she thinks I'm pretty bloody bad and writes for me not to come home now that so many gangs is gettin' together and doin' mostly nothin' but murderin'. No, I'd not advise you to look for work over there.