CHAPTER I.
EXPOSE OF AMERICAN COOLIE SYSTEM OF LABOR SHOWS HOW 12-HOUR DAY DEGRADES WORKERS
In the production of steel American capitalism has shown its ugliest brutality. This industry epitomizes the depths of degradation to which workers can be forced under the rule of the employing clans.
"The United States has the largest, richest and most conveniently located deposits of iron ore, copper, lead and zinc in the world, and coal for their reduction." Besides, "A comparison of English and American governmental statistics shows that the average American wage earner produces from two to three times more output in money value than the English wage-earner, and uses from two to three times more horse power."
According to a study of the three shift system in the production of steel made by the International Labor Office of the League of Nations the United States is the only great steel producing country in the world where the 12-Hour Working Day prevails. Not only Europe, but even Canada, South Africa, Japan and India run most of their steel mills on a three-shift basis. The great Tata mills in India have adopted the Eight-Hour Day. Only in China where there is little steel produced do we find the two-shift system.
And the sub-committee of the Federated American Engineering Societies, whom Harding called "our foremost organization of American industrial skill," after an intensive study has found that: "The principle of the 12-hour shift is a survival of the time when it was the custom to work men long hours, and when the mechanical side of the iron and steel industry was less perfectly developed, so that the periods of an enforced idleness of the mill and the men occurred much more frequently than at present."
In the diary of a furnace worker, Charles Rumferd Walker, who was a First Lieutenant in the American Army, we find this condition vividly described.
Said a Scotch Melter to Walker:
"Now in the old country, a man can have a bit of fun. Picnics, a little singin and drinkin', and the like. What can a man do here? We work eight hours in Scotland. They work eight hours in France, in Italy and Germany—all the steel mills work eight hours except in this bloody free country … I'll tell you there will come a time when Gary and all the other big fellers will have to work it themselves—no one else will."
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