Steel Workers' Homes Ruined
In the report made public May 25, 1923, such profiteers in steel as Dinkey and Block and Gary and Grace said: "Whether or not, in the large majority of cases, twelve-hour men devote less time to their families than the employees working less hours is perhaps questionable."
It may be put down as a copy-book axiom that in the Barony of Steel starvation wages and unspeakable working hours are inseparable. Ruined homes, overworked mothers, wretched, unsanitary living conditions, a miserable, monotonous machine existence and mass murder of their children—these are the blessings visited on workers by Garyism and its Twelve-Hour Hell Shift System.
Said Lieutenant Charles Rumford Walker in describing his life as a furnace worker:
"The community of workers takes on a special character, where men live whose day is twelve-hours long. 'We havn'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, '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 different 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 sleeptime and have his shoes tapped or take a drink with a friend."
"The Twelve-Hour Day, I believe, tends to discourage a man from marrying and settling into a regular home life. Men complained that they didn't see their wives, or get to know their children, since the schedule of hours shrunk matters at home to food, sleep, and the necessaries. 'My wife is always after me to leave this game,' Jock used to say, the first helper on Seven. Mathematically, it figures something like this: twelve hours work, an hour going to and from the mill, an hour for eating, eight hours of sleep—which leaves two hours for all the rest, shaving, mowing the lawn, and the 'civilizing influence of children.'
"I have no brief to offer for the Eight-Hour Day as a general panacea for evils in industry. I merely bear witness to the fact that the Twelve-Hour Day, as I observed it, tended either to destroy, or to make unreasonably difficult that normal recreating and participation in the doings of the family group, the church or the community, which we ordinarily suppose is reasonable and part of the American inheritance."
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