CHAPTER IX

THE WORLD OF SEASONAL LABOR AND THE CASUAL WORKERS

“Why is it that those who produce food are hungry, and that those who make clothes are ragged? Why, moreover, is it that those who build palaces are homeless, and that those who do the nation’s work are forced to choose between beggary, crime, or suicide in a nation that has fertile soil enough to feed and clothe the world; material enough to build homes to house all peoples, an enormous productive capacity through labor-saving machinery of forty thousand million man-power; and where there are only sixty-five million souls to feed, clothe, and shelter?”

The foregoing questions were put into the platform and issued by the Industrial Army of 1894 which was known as Coxey’s army. That year was one of great depression all over the United States. The causes for the depression were discussed very widely at the time. It was the year following the great World’s Fair in Chicago and hundreds of thousands of men were out of employment. There was suffering and deprivation in all the cities of the United States. Charitable institutions were taxed to their limit by the new responsibilities put upon them. The idea of having all the unemployed form themselves into a great army of peace, and march to Washington for the purpose of presenting to the President and Congress a petition for the right to labor, developed in the mind of a man named Coxey who lived at Masillon, Ohio. He gathered together the first army numbering several thousand men. These men were organized into companies, and officers were appointed after the fashion of the regular military customs.

Similar armies mobilized in other parts of the country. One at Los Angeles, another at San Francisco, one in Boston, and one in the Northwest, started towards Washington at one time. There were about 10,000 men on the march. They were ridiculed, persecuted, and feared. When the army that started from San Francisco reached Sacramento, it encamped outside the city. On Sunday night this curious army marched down into the center of the town, halted before the first church it came to, then the men filed in and in an orderly fashion filled up every pew. The remainder of the army marched on to the next church and did the same thing. This was repeated until every church in the city was filled to its capacity. This was the first and probably the last time in the history of that city when church pews were at a premium on Sunday night.

The men of this army were harmless for the most part. A great many of them were worthless fellows, but the vast majority were honest workingmen who had been thrown out of employment, and owing to the circumstances of the times were unable to find anything to do, and, consequently, were in despair. Their plan was to go quietly across the country and when they arrived in Washington simply to fold their arms and ask the government what it was going to do for them. Only a few of the men of Coxey’s army reached Washington and the spectacular scheme failed. It, however, emphasized the need of the time and showed up the extreme danger in the situation.

=The Unemployed.= The unemployed man presents a real problem to society. Carlyle said, “A man willing to work, and unable to find work is, perhaps, the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun.” Many well-to-do people living in comfortable circumstances, with position and income assured, assert that if a man wants work he can always find it, and that the only men unemployed are the shiftless and the lazy. Right now the war has absorbed all the surplus labor, and a condition exists different from any that we have previously known in the history of America. Immigration has been cut off and the demands for new enterprises have called for hundreds of thousands of new workers, so that at the present time there is no reason why any man should be out of work. In fact, so serious has the need for men become that the latest interpretation put upon the draft law amounts practically to a conscription of labor for all men of draft age.

=The Banana Boat.= A whistle sounded on the Mississippi river just below New Orleans early one afternoon last summer. It was a dismal, rainy day, and as the long screech died away the sound seemed almost prophetic of some coming disaster. Soon a huge steamship painted drab-gray, with a red diamond upon its smoke-stack, nosed its way from out of the mist and crowded in close to the pier. Scarcely were the ropes fast when there began to appear on the dock men black and white, ragged, unkempt fellows who had hurried from the near-by saloons, poolrooms, and other lounging places. This boat was just in from Central America loaded down with bananas. Two enormous unloaders were set up alongside of the vessel. The machinery of these started and an endless belt, which traveled to the bottom of the hold and out again, came up loaded with bunches of bananas. The fruit was brought down and thrown upon a table. Here two men, standing one on either side of the traveling belt, would take hold of a bunch of bananas and place it upon the shoulders of a third man, who in turn carried it off to the waiting freight-car. Fifty men went to work almost immediately; twenty an hour later in the afternoon; and at nine o’clock that night, under the glare of the electric lights, ninety-two men were busily engaged in carrying the fruit and storing it in the freight-cars.

All night long the men worked at a feverish pace. They were organized so that they formed an endless chain. The first two continuously placed the fruit upon the third man’s shoulder, and he in turn stepped along as fast as those ahead of him would allow. When he was relieved of his bunch of bananas at the car door by two men on the inside who stowed the fruit away, he would take his place in the line of men returning for more fruit. Round after round this group of men passed, until in less than seventeen hours of constant work every banana was taken off the boat. When we realize that this boat carried nearly ten thousand tons, we get some idea of the activity of the workers.

I said to one of the men in the line, “How often do you get a job of this kind?”

“That depends,” he replied. “A banana boat comes in about every three weeks and then I have about two days’ work.”

“What do you do between times?” I asked.

“Well, not much of anything. Sometimes one thing, sometimes another. Just kind of live along between the trips of these boats.”

=Millinery and Dresses.= A little girl in Chicago wanted to learn the millinery business. She easily found a position. It only paid four dollars a week, but she was learning, so she was willing to begin at that price. Just before Easter the shop where she worked was crowded with orders, and she was forced to work from early in the morning until late at night. When Easter was over she said, “All I know about making hats is how to sew wire together and line frames.” The girls in this shop who had been so busy were now thrown out of employment. They either had to find other employment or else live on what little money had been saved during the rush time. “I can never get ahead,” said one of the workers in the shop. “Last year I was able to make just enough to carry me through the dull season.” What is true of the millinery trade is also true of some lines of garment trades, especially the makers of evening gowns. At one period they are rushed to the limit of their endurance: at another there is nothing to do. Business demands cannot be regulated perfectly. The clerks in the stores at Christmas time must expect to do extra work.

=The Vagabond Workers.= One night in Seattle I saw a large group of men gathered on a street corner and singing at the top of their voices. The strange chorus was led by a young fellow who was standing on a soap box. The song he was teaching was mere doggerel; the refrain of it being “Oh, Mr. Block, you take the cake. You make me ache.” The leader would pronounce a line, then say, “Now, fellow workingmen, all sing and sing with all your might. Let us show them what we can do.” And the motley crowd shouted out the words of the song which told the story of a poor “blanket stiff”--a fellow who has to carry his blankets when he goes looking for a job--who got through work in one place, went into an employment agency to ask for a new job and was told that if he would put up the money he could get the job. He paid two dollars and was sent out into the woods. When he got off the train there was no job in sight. He came back and made his complaint, but nothing could be done because that was the method by which the employment agency made its money. He then applied to Samuel Gompers of the Federation of Labor, but all he got from Gompers was “sympathy.” This man’s name was “Block,” and to accentuate the significance of the name the leader would hold up his hand, stop the crowd from singing, and then tapping on his head would say, “What was his name?” and they would reply “Block.” “What was it made of?” and they shouted “wood.”

It was amusing to listen to this crowd but in the midst of the grotesquery of the leader and the raucous howling of the song there was a moral quality and a spiritual earnestness that even a casual listener could feel. These men had just come in from the woods. They were laborers who had been lumbering all through the winter, and now at the end of the season were thrown on the city with nothing to do. The Industrial Workers of the World, that revolutionary organization that was formed in Colorado early in this century, had found a fertile soil in the minds of these men and had not been slow to sow the seed. I stood with one of the group and listened. My friend was an elderly man who had just reached the city from the mines in Alaska. In his youth he had been a miner in Wales. Said he, “This carries me back to the days of my boyhood. The Welsh sang as these men do, and the discontent of the miners in our district gathered headway under the leadership of the local Methodist preacher. The men sang and from their singing began an enthusiasm that rolled throughout the whole region in a wave of protest against the bitter conditions under which we were forced to work. We got results. If these men keep on singing, some day they are going to make their message heard.” The main reason for the I. W. W. and similar organizations is that nothing has been done for the laborer who is at the bottom of the industrial ladder. He is considered a tramp, pushed into the out-of-the-way places, forced to do the hardest, most perilous work, and society forgets him. He is a bum, a tramp, or hobo. No one has a good word for him. Every effort to improve his condition is looked upon with disfavor. This little poem expresses the feeling of many of these men:

“The world is housed, and homed, and wived, It takes no note as I pass by. Nobody shared in the life I lived, Nobody’ll share in the death I die.

“East, west, north, and south I’ve hiked, Seen more things than I’d care to tell; Part of the world that I’ve seen I liked-- None of it liked me overwell.

“I cheated once--or twice--in my time, But the joy of crime I never could see, So I never went the way of crime-- No pull-and-haul with the cops for me.

“I never was low like the hobo crew, Though I’ve begged my bread on many a day, But I always worked when they asked me to, To pay for a meal or a bed in the hay.”

There has never been any great success in the attempts to organize the vagabond workers. The membership in the I. W. W. and similar organizations rises or declines so rapidly that it is almost impossible to quote any figures that are dependable. Professor Parker reported the results of a careful study made in California in 1915 and which showed that there were at that time 4,500 affiliated members in that state. The membership fluctuates, however, because when trouble arises in any industry in the West the membership in the I. W. W. always doubles or trebles. In one strike in Washington the organization claimed membership of 3,000, but there were about 7,000 on strike. The organization of these workers and the explosive quality of their teachings form a real menace to society. The philosophy of the I. W. W. is expressed in the words of one of the leaders who explained that according to their code there is no such thing as right or wrong. He said, “We know what people mean when they discuss these questions but they have no significance in our lives. The only principle that we acknowledge is the principle of expediency. It is better not to break windows because it will get us into trouble with the authorities, but the abstract principle of breaking windows and destroying property being wrong makes no appeal to us whatever.” The man who gave utterance to this statement was formerly a Presbyterian minister. He was in charge of a church in a steel city and his contact with the workers gained for him a clear understanding of the poverty and despair that grow out of their conditions. This vision and the sight of the people on the other side of the social gulf, who were living most recklessly in the midst of their luxuries, led him to become one of the leading radicals in the labor world. The philosophy of the I. W. W., and the power of this organization are increasing just in proportion as we fail to correct the abuses that now destroy the lives of men.

=Causes.= In this country we have made little effort to prevent the consequences which are certain to follow the operation of the law of supply and demand. We have acted upon the theory that all we need to do is to allow natural law to have a chance for its operation. Individualism is praised as being the means of saving the worker. The result is that there is a shockingly large amount of labor turn-over each year--that is, each job has two or three men working on it. We have presented to us also the spectacle of thousands of men who form an army of migratory laborers. In one part of the United States there will be a labor shortage and in another there will be a shortage of work to be done.

If we would know what makes the tramp and the vagabond we must become acquainted with some man who tramps the highway with his pack on his back. His wife and his children were left years ago in some Eastern city when he went out West to find a job. The job which he secured did not keep him long enough for him to become a resident or even to feel settled in the community. The place in which he slept and lived was a bunk-house, dirty, filthy, and filled with vermin; and the food he had to eat was of such poor quality and so wretchedly cooked that he would not have eaten it at all except that he was almost famished and it was all that he could get.

The communities in which this wanderer of the road finds himself have always been against him. The children in the homes are told that if they are not good the tramps will get them. He looks upon the law as being framed especially to cause him inconvenience, and the officers of the law are his special enemies. The only places that are open to him are the saloons, the low dives, and the cheap rooming house. The work he does pays him fairly good wages for a short period; but when he is paid off, with the money in his pocket, there is nothing for him to do but to get drunk, and this he proceeds to do; nor does he sober up until every cent is gone. Then he turns to another job if he can find one. Of course, if he would save his money and try to live a decent life he might be able to get on. But as the pastor of a church in southern Washington said: “Down in my parish, which is in the woods, I have in the winter-time about 1,500 men to look after. They are a rough, hard set who have been gathered together through the employment agencies in Seattle and Tacoma. They believe in nothing and in no one. They are made victims of every possible tyranny. All that they have is their job, and their roll of blankets. The bunk-houses in which they live are so bad that a self-respecting dog would not stay in them. The food they eat is absolutely rotten. They are treated like cattle, with the exception that a valuable steer will receive greater protection, for it is not as easy to get another good working steer as it is to get another hobo to take the place of the worker that is lost. When these drifters are paid off the forces that ruin men get hold of them immediately, and for the next few days they spend their time carousing and getting drunk. The lumber companies in our community are making money fast, but they are destroying men, and scattering dynamite all over the Northwest that threatens to explode in a social upheaval that will shake the whole western part of the United States.” These are the words of a sober-minded Presbyterian pastor and one who has no sympathy for dangerous social doctrines. He is simply speaking out of his heart and from his experience.

In another district one of the officials of a mining company said in his annual report: “This last year was one of unprecedented success. We were able to work continuously and with little difficulty because we had at all times an average of three men available for each job. This gave us workers always ready to our hand.” As was said before, the war changed this situation very largely, and for the time being the old causes which operated to increase the number of the unemployed have been removed. There is more work than possibly can be done, and every worker has his job cut out for him. In a letter I have just received the writer says, “The war offers the right-minded people of America the greatest opportunity in history. We can correct ancient wrongs and right old abuses if we will only put our minds to this task.” But there are certain considerations that must be taken into account if we would remove the causes which make for unemployment and discontent that accompany it. The community’s responsibility for the man out of work does not end with securing a job for him, nor with the regularizing of industry, nor in supporting labor exchanges. We are all creatures of circumstances and influenced strongly by our environment. Therefore, every community ought to provide adequate means for recreation, and decent places where men and women can gather under wholesome conditions.

=A Man and His Job.= One of the slogans of the French Revolution was “The right to work.” Man has a proprietary right in his job and it is the only property that most men possess; when he loses it he is losing everything. Some years ago the Idaho legislature passed a law which guarantees to every citizen resident in the state for six months, ninety days public work a year at ninety per cent. of the usual wage if married or having a dependent, and seventy-five per cent. of the usual wage if he is single. Industry has never been organized so as to include the best interests of the worker. There are hundreds of thousands more workers needed in the good years than in the bad years. In every business special calls arise for more workers to be used for a few weeks or a few days at a time. The reserves of labor necessary to meet these seasonal or casual demands can be reduced to a minimum, providing that industry is regularized. As it is, the individual worker suffers in the machine, or system, that he has helped to create. The modern plan of organization provides for managers, superintendents, foremen, clerks, and skilled men--all dependent for their position upon the group of unskilled men or semi-skilled workers at the bottom.

It is obvious that we cannot legislate so that lumber can be taken out of the forests all the year round, nor can the casual workers--farm laborers, fruit-, and hop-pickers and others--have continual employment. What we can do, however, is to mobilize the labor forces of the country with the same care and ability that we have mobilized our national army. Through a chain of labor exchanges extending throughout the whole nation we can bring the man and the job together. When the lumber employees in the woods of Washington finish with their season they could be brought down into California to work on the farms and in the fields; and then farther down as the fruit ripens, following on straight through the state. In the autumn they could be brought back again to take their places in the woods.

Another thing that will be required is a changed attitude toward the men at work. Just as long as we assume that the workers employed at these tasks are worthless, just so long will they try to live down to their reputation. A Methodist minister in Seattle believed that the average “blanket stiff” had enough good in him to respond to right treatment. He formed a cooperative company and bought up a number of mills in the state. He hired a lot of the commonest workers and sent them out to the woods to work in these mills. Instead of attempting to make a big profit on the labor of the men, he allowed the men to share in the management and profits of the concern. The result was that when all the other mills were having labor troubles he was able to work right straight along, and where others failed he made a big success. The reason was that he faced the issues squarely and fairly, and treated the men as he would himself like to be treated.

=Sin and Inefficiency.= If every individual was normal you could lay the full responsibility upon him and feel that when he failed it was perfectly just that he should suffer, and we would not need to worry about the conditions under which people labor. But sin enters in and with depravity comes inefficiency. Business cannot be conducted as a benevolent enterprise. A man or woman’s wage must be earned by the worker or else it cannot be continued. When a man by drink or other excesses destroys his efficiency it is impossible for him to maintain himself in a position that pays a large wage and which offers steady employment; so he drifts into the ranks of the casual workers. He is unfit for regular work by temperament and habit; but he is willing to work for a short time, even though he works extremely hard. In dealing with the problem of the casual worker then, we have two things to take into account: First, we must regularize industry as far as possible, doing away with the extraordinary demands for certain periods that are always followed by long periods of idleness. In the second place, we must in some way lay hold of the individual man, and by surrounding him with the best influences, make it possible for him to live a life of righteousness and sobriety. In other words, we must reduce the amount of seasonal work to the minimum and increase the efficiency of the worker to the maximum.

We should never lose sight of the fact that personal qualities enter in to complicate this question and make its solution more difficult. The drunkenness and vice of the individual man keep him in a position where it is almost impossible for him to be helped or for him to help himself. The man out of work degenerates. His moral fiber is weakened; he becomes susceptible to every evil. The process by which many a criminal has been made was begun in the hour that the man found himself thrown out of employment. Perhaps it was not his own fault in the first place, but having once been faced with the grim alternative of seeing his family suffer or of yielding to some criminal act, he accepted the latter as the easiest solution of the problem and a way out of his difficulties.

As long as a person is able to provide the necessities of life and to keep himself and his family in a fair degree of efficiency through the use of an adequate amount of food, shelter, and clothing, the chances are that he will develop a new and stronger interest in the things that have to do with the moral and social side of his life. On the other hand, when the means of livelihood are taken away, and a man finds himself denied the opportunity of work--which means that the things that are necessary to satisfy the most fundamental needs of himself and his family cannot be secured--the moral effect on this man, his family, and society can hardly be exaggerated. The whole structure of our life is dependent upon and presupposes regularity of employment. Not only does the fact of being out of a job cut off a man’s means of livelihood, but the psychological effect of being forced to live without working, taken together with the breaking of habits acquired by years of industry, puts a severe strain on the standards of morality which have been built up by long and painful processes. The unemployed man may react in one of two ways: he will become an anarchist and spend himself in fighting the system under whose injustice he suffers, or he will give up the struggle and become a drifter upon the tides of life, a social outcast.

=The Jungle.= The best thing in Upton Sinclair’s story of the conditions in the stock-yards in Chicago is the little picture he gives of the man who finally in despair gave up the struggle for a living, got on a train, and went out as far west as the train would carry him. When he left the railroad track he wandered into a field and lay down beside a stream. Feeling hungry after a while he arose and went to a near-by house and asked for something to eat. This was the first time he had ever begged but the woman at the door was considerate of him and he got his food. Then he returned and lay down again in the rich grass and went to sleep. When he awoke he took off his clothes and had a bath in the creek, then getting out of the water he dressed himself and again lay down; put his hands behind his head and looked up into the blue sky. All of a sudden it occurred to him that he was now getting more out of life than he ever had before. He had worked and worried and all he ever got was just barely enough to eat. Now he had all he wanted to eat, a good place to lie and dream, the pure air of heaven fanning his face, the blue sky over his head, and no work to do. “Why should a man work, anyway? What’s the use?” he said. This philosophy made him a tramp.

Unemployment must be recognized as an evil in and of itself. For the man out of work meals and lodging should be secured. The church has done much in this regard. The soup-kitchens have been so much an adjunct of so many churches that some of our evangelists have come to refer to the soup-kitchen type of Christianity as being a recognized type. The church knows the methods for charity and relief. We must go further than this. The church’s program for the casual laborer should include the education of the community regarding the necessity of regularized industry, bringing it about so that, for instance, hats will be made not only when hats are needed but ahead of time. And, too, there should be public exchanges for employment covering the country and a systematized distribution of public work.

The forming of a comprehensive plan for unemployment insurance is another step forward. Other countries have found this kind of insurance a wise provision. Insurance against every form of disaster is common. We insure a perfect day for a parade. We insure the ships and their cargoes. We insure our lives. Why not insure men against the greatest of all disasters that can befall them, the loss of their jobs? We need not worry about the probability that unemployment insurance is likely to take away the initiative of the men. The danger of moral deterioration in such a case is much less than that which actually grows out of the periods of unemployment.

The church is involved in the whole situation. The men dependent on their wages for a living find their means of livelihood cut off and they naturally turn to the church. A year before the war broke out the unemployed in several cities marched into the churches and demanded help. Some of the churches felt that they were being encroached upon. A committee in one church forced the janitor to sweep the entire building with a solution of formaldehyde, for, as the chairman of the committee said, “You never know what diseases these dreadful people have.” It is undoubtedly true that the churches are always expected to do more than it is possible for them to do. At the same time the unemployed man has the right to feel that if the church is a fundamental institution for the salvation of individuals, for the remaking of society, and the reconstruction of industrial life, it cannot evade the issue nor fail to shoulder its responsibility. To open the church as a sleeping place and to feed the hungry is not enough.

=The War and the Future.= The world war has brought us face to face with a new task. The United States and Canada are at present the producing nations of the world. The Anti-Loafer laws now being carried through are cleaning out the cabarets, the poolrooms, the theaters, and other places where idle men congregate. It will be years before we are faced with the same serious situation that has faced us in the past. However, when our huge armies are demobilized and “Johnny comes marching home,” there will be a new problem which will have to be considered. How can these men be fitted back into industrial life without increasing the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers to such a degree that we will again be faced with a huge army of unemployed?

In periods of unemployment it is the common laborer who suffers most. We have failed to realize this. And yet he makes a big contribution to all progress. You cannot build a bridge without him and, in fact, he is used in every enterprise. Because of his lack of skill, and also because of his too common habits of living, we call these men tramps and hobos, and refer to them in the mass as common laborers. As a matter of fact no man who does any work is a common man. They are ignorant for the most part; vicious in many cases; some are lazy, drunken, shiftless--all of these things; but at the same time they are the men who are cutting down the trees, sawing up the logs, forming them into rafts, floating them down the river, and putting them through the mills. They are the men who are loading the ships at our docks, the men who pick hops and work in the harvest fields; pick the fruit and do the thousand other things that have to be done when the season is right. Besides these, there are the thousands of women who are driven at top speed at certain periods of the year through the unusual demands of industry, and then are thrown out of employment for long periods. Ignorant, unknown, friendless, and made the victims of industrial conditions over which they have no control, they seem of so little importance in the vast system--as merely the lesser cogs in the lesser wheels--that very few know of their existence except when something goes wrong with the cogs, and the whole machine is shut down because of the break. But without them the machine could not run at all.

The casual workers are the true servants of humanity, and yet they are the ones that are passed by unnoticed; the ones that rarely if ever are influenced by the church. They constitute a great army of neglected men and women, a challenge to the church, a menace to society, and a danger to our commonwealth; and all because they are neglected and unknown.