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RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
THE PITTSBURGH SURVEY
FINDINGS IN SIX VOLUMES
Editep ev PAUL UNDERWOOD KELLOGG
NEW YORK SURVEY ASSOCIATES, MCMX IV
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Copyright, 1914, by The RussEit Sage Foundation
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INTRODUCTORY NOTE
THE Pittsburgh District — companion volume to Wage-earn- ing Pittsburgh — opens with an interpretation of the genesis of the community by a native Pittsburgher, who has become one of the civic leaders of New England. Contributions by other writers bring out the slow yielding of old institutions con- ceived in the day of small towns, and devised before the epoch of applied science, to the demands of congregate growth ; — the bitter human waste and rankling injustices of the period of transition; the slow unlimbering of the powers of democracy to put progress at the service of the whole people as well as of the few.
Here the emphasis is transferred from civic to industrial forces, and we trace the reaction of these forces upon incoming peoples. We have estimates of the new immigration by a repre- sentative of the old — a Welshman from the anthracite region, and by a representative of the new — a Bohemian who has helped Slavs in their settlement from New York to Texas and the Northwest. We have the impressions made upon a Russian engineer by one <^ the oldest Christian sects of East Europe set down in the bituminous field of Western Pennsylvania. And we have a com- mentary on the influx of Negroes — north bound from plantation to industry along the route of the "underground railway" of sixty years ago, — written by a son of that post-bellum Negro leader whose faith in the freed slaves won for him the nickname "We'se a Risin'."
In stark contrast to this flooding of the steel district by fresh immigration, we see its human seepage to the underworld, see it through the eyes of an explorer of those reverse currents which set toward degeneration and wrong-doing in congested Manhattan. Finally, we have the entrance of further recruits to industry in the growing generation of a glass town, — a faithful picture of the
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INTRODUCTORY NOTE
chalice which sheerly materialistic forces substitute for the brim- ming cup of childhood, as that has been painted by artist and poet since the world began.
The beginnings of social control over economic forces beyond the grasp of individual men and women, are brought out in three inductive studies of organization by the workers, labor administra- tion by the managers, and factory inspection by the public. Con- ditions in the city trades, in the machine shops and transportation — contrasting with or influenced by the anti-union regime in the steel industry— are analyzed by an economist identified with two country-wide labor investigations — the Federal Industrial Com- mission of 1900 and the Industrial Relations Commission of 1913- i;. The human side of works management is shown in cross- section for 38 plants, by an industrial engineer, formerly a manager in the Pittsburgh District. A full decade of maladministration in the labor department of Pennsylvania (1903-12) is epitomized by a former factory inspector of Illinois, who was the pioneer in setting modem standards of public enforcement.
These movements for social control have if anything been slower of evolution in the commonalty of livelihood than in that of citizenship. They have been fragmentary, inconclusive, often in conflict. They have been quicker to break down the sanctions and habits of the early days when those have stood in their way, but they themselves have been prone to revert to precursive forms of despotism. They not only have had to adjust themselves to stupendous changes in the world's way of making things, but they must compass forces at once more desperate and more promising than any in the civic life or in mechanics — forces ingrained in a wage-earning people, resident or itinerant, possessed of the Ameri- can spirit of "getting on,"
In these last volumes to go to press, the effort has been to preserve the validity of the reports as a transcript of conditions at the time of investigation; but to bring out in text, footnote, and appendix, noteworthy changes for good, or the persistence of note- worthy evils.
Paul U. Kellogg
Director Pittsburgh Survey
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
[The Eipbiutary iiuBcnplu. aftci euh aKtloa □[ tbe coatenti. over In turn tlw Kandins und cqwiunfot of Che contiibuton to tliil volume « the time of the Plctibur(h Sor- ver; their praent icaniiuis, and analogoua work ilnee; their writlnxs; uid tbc data and chumeli tbrouih which cbcK contributiong, if prcTioual)' pubUthed. were bcoiwht out. The tetm "macBxioe publication" tefers to theoiiKina] publication of the finding! in Ckaritit$ and Tki Cowwrnj, then publiihed under Chaiitlei Ihiblication Committee. * nalioiul committee of the Charily Orianiialion Society ol the City of New Vork; ilnce become Tkt Surrty. pub- bahed by Survey Ajoociatea. a membenhipcorpoiation.!
1. COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
COMMUNrTY AND WORKSHOP 3
By Paul U. Kellogg
Managing editor Cbariliis and Tbi Commoni; secretary Charities Publica- tion Committee.
Editor The Suntj; member board of directors American Associa- tion for Labor Legislation, New York Committee on Congestion of Population; chairman Commillec Occupational Standards, National Conference Charities and Corrections, St. Louis, 191 1 ; secretary Committee to Secure Federal Commission on industrial Relations, 191 1-13; assistant director Committee on Social and In- duitrial Justice, Progressive Service, 1913.
Magazine Publication. CkU Risfonstbilitiis 0/ Dtmocracy in an InduS' tri^Dittnct, Jantiary, igog; biing in lubslanei tbi first ilattnunlof tbi imeral find- infi 0} tbe Pittiburfi Survey, as set /orib before the joint cotaeniion of toe American Cteic Association, and National Municipal League, Pittsburgh, Nocembtr 16, igoS. Dittribuled as a ptmpblrt. Pittsburgb Otic Exbibil, igo8.
II. RACE STUDIES
IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS 35
Bv Peter Roberts
Secretary for Immigration of the Industrial Department of the International Committee of the Young Men's Christian Association, 1907-; theretofore pastor and investigator of industrial conditions in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. Special agent of committee of Pennsylvania state Young Men's Christian Associa- tion, reporting on needs of immigranti. Dr. Roberts' Pittsburg inquiry was the first field work carried out by the international committee in its aid to Immlgnints which DOW extends from the point of embarkation to each of the industrial districts in this countiy where they are employed. His Method for Teaching Foreignen English, which has been adapted to all races and many occupations, is employed in safety campaigns, citizenship classes, and so forth.
Author: AnthraciteCoal Industry; AnthraciteCoal Communities; Immigrant Races in North America: The New Immigration; English for Coming Americans.
Magazine Publicatiom. Tbe New Pittiburfbers, January a, 1909.
A SLAVS A MAN FOR A' THAT 61
Bv Aix)is B. KouKOL Secretary Savonic Immigrant Society, 1907-: investigator industrial acci- dents, Pittsburgh Survey. Pastor First Slavonic Presbyterian Church. Peckville,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
pastor. New York Ciiy, 1904-1907. Magminb Publication. A Slm'i a Man for a' Thai, Jantutry », igog.
MEDIEVAL RUSSIA IN THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT . 78 Bv Alexis Sokoloff
Engineer: graduate University of Moscow; Academy of Mines, Vienna. Investigator (industrial accidents) and draughtsman, Pittsburgh Survey, 1907-08.
Engineer, Tangier, Morocco.
Magazine Publication. This article bitherlo unpublisbtd.
ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS .... 97 Br R. R. Wright, Jh. Research fellow sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 190^-07; former
_( T,,-_;... u;..: — i-u ;_. — •'■atat of the NegToes in business in
Washington, 1907-08; field secretary
vestigator of the Negroes in business ir n of Washington, 1907-08; field secretary Armstrong Association of Philadelphia, [908-09; director of Men's Work, Eighth Ward Social Selllemenl, Philadelphia, igo^-oS.
Editor Cbriitian Recorder, official organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1909-. Dr. Wright is connected as a member of the board of mana^rs or practical worker with numerous organizations for the benefit of Negroes.
Author: The Negro in Pennsylvania; also the pamphlet. The Negro Prob- lem, a Sociological Treatment. Also government and slate reports mcluding The Negroes of Xenia, Ohio — a social study, far the U. S. Bureau of Labor; Prop- erty Holding Among Negroes of Pennsylvania, for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics; Industrial Condition of Negroes in Pennsylvania, for same.
Magaiine Publication. Tbii article bilberfo unpubliibed.
WAGE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH 113
By John R. Commons
Professor political economy, University of Wisconsin, 1004-: secretary of the American Association for Labor Legislation, 1907-08; member Commission on Public Utilities, National Civic Federation, 1903; expert agent United Stales Industrial Commission, 1901; director American Bureau of Industrial Research, 1904; investigator labor conditions in stock yards, bituminous mines in Middle west, building trades, and so forth. In addition to his own field work. Professor Commons bore a general supervisory relation to the industrial inquiries of the Pittsburgh Survey, Director of Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Eflkieocy, 1910-11; member Industrial Commission of Wisconsin, igii-ij.
Member United Stales Industrial Relations Commission. 1913-.
Author: Races and Immigrants in America; Trade Unionism and Labor Problems; Labor and Administration, and so forth.
Editor, with Richard T. Ely, Documentary History of American Industrial
AND BY William M. Leis Assistant DepI, of Political Economy, University of Wisconsin, 1908-09.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Deputy, Industrial Commission of Wisconsin, tgii-; investigator New York Commission on Employers' Liability, 1909-1 1 ; secretary American Associa- tion of Public Employment offkes, 191)-; expert on unemployment, United States C(»nmisMon on Industrial Relations, 191)-.
Macaiinb Publication (in brief)- Watt-earturt of Pittsburgb, March 6 ; rtprii^ed 0% a cbapUr in Comrnoni' Labor and i^dminiilralioti.
FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH .... 189
(With special reference to working conditions of women and children)
Bv Florence Kelley
General secretary National Consumeis' League, 1899-; chief state in- spector of factories and worluhops for Illinois. 1893-^7; resident Hull House, Chicaso, 1891-99; Henry Street (nurses') Settlement, New York, 1899-: trustee New York State Child llabor Committee and National Child Labor Committee; in addition to her own field work, Mrs. Kelley bore an advisory relationship to the indtistrial inquiries of the Pittsburgh Survey, especially women's labor.
Author; Some Ethical Gains through Legislation; Modem Industry in Relation to the Family, Health, Education, Morality (1914).
Macuine Publication. Factory ImpecUon in PiUiburgb, March 6, igog.
INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE OF THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT 217 By H. F.'J. Porter
Consulting industrial engineer. Mr. Porter's practical experience in- cluded four ^ean in the shops of the Delamater Iron Works, New York City; assistant engineer in the rolling mills of the New Jersey Steel and Iron Company, Trenton; assistant mechanical engineer Worid's Columbian Exposition during the construction period; assistant chief machinery department, in charoe of machin- ery hall at the Exposition: Belhlehem Steel Company, western sales manager, Chicago, eastern sales manager. New York City. 1894-1903; vice-president and _ manager of the Westin^iouse-Nemst Lamp Company, Pittsburgh, 1901-06.
Expert on fire prevention. New York State Factory Investigating Com- mission, igii-i3; founder and first secretary Efficiency Society, Inc., I9II-I3; member Committee on Fire Prevention and Building Code, and Welfare Com- mittee, Citizens' Union, 191 1-, Committee on Factory Laws and Regulations, Merchants' Association, 191 1-, Committee on Private Departments and Exit Drills, National Fire Protection Association, 191 1-, Committee on Fire Prevention, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 191 1; lecturer on shop organization and management, New York University School of Commerce, Accounts, and Finance, and School of Business Administration of Harvard University. During his eight yean' work as consulting industrial engineer, Mr. Porter has introduced efRciency methods including cost systems of organization and management, com- mittee and suggestion systems, lunch rooms, libraries, lecture rooms, schools, and so forth, and safety features, especially in the direction of fire prevention, in industrial plants in various parts of the country.
Magazine Publication. This article hilbirto unPtiUifhcd.
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McicaBt^ Slons
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THE REVtS5£ :
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VI, PrcK-.rurva VII. ScoAl Kixe
336
m8 J6S
Br Jkhes Fo«»es
SecRiiiy McftdKUKT Conr-iEHc. CMrirr 0|3P.iiatioa Socictv. dly of N«v ^'orfc. i9oo-a«. >k ilk a tqtud of (viicc ci6t.-cn ua^aol to him. Mr. FoAes ptacikilly fncd New Yorii of |iiiJm»iiiil bcagjin J^nag ibc Low administntion. In ri^onNnly repnssiDf ctuhubie nposnnv ud 11 iIk sibc tine n<ubiliuling iadividiul livo, be nude pncikal dcoMostratioo of ha xleat u 10 tociil police.
Secreliry and director Niiioful AssKUtio* for Prtvtnnon of Mendi- cancy, igo^.
AalhOT of variout writings oa city and ilincrant meodicants and the social atpccii of police administration.
Tbit article bilbtrio mmpmUisM.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
APPEND] CES
I. Report on Labor Conditions, Stockholders' Committee
United States Steel Corporation J9$
II. Community Contrasts of 1914 in Housing of Mill Workers:
1. A Soho Hillside. The Persistence of Sanitary Neg- lect in Central Pittsburgh. By Abraham Oseroff 406
2. Midland. A Forerunner of Modem Housing De- velopment for Industrial Sections. By W. C. Rice . 410
HI. y. M. C A. Work for Immigrants in the Pittsburgh Dis- trict. By H. A. McConnaughey 414
IV. The Jewish Immigrants of Two Pittsburgh Blocks. By
Anna Reed 419
V. The Negroes of Pittsburgh. By Helen A. Tucker. . 424
VI. The Cost of Living in Pittsburgh and in Other American
Cities Compared, 1909 437
VII. Advance in the Cost of Living in Workingmen's Families 440 — VIII. Statistics from Industrial Development Commission 442
IX. Industrial Accidents in Pennsylvania 443
X. Public ReplyfromtheStateFactory Inspector . 444 XI. An ActCreatinga DepartmentofLaborandlndustry, 191) 446 Xtl. Occupational Diseases Act 4$i
XIII. Women Workers and Social Agencies 4$3
XIV. Labor Union Hygiene for Brewery Workers . 454 XV. Surgical Organization of the Carnegie Steel Company. By
Wm. O'Neill Sherman, M.D 455
XVI. Application Blanks and Forms, Westinghouse Electric and
Manufacturing Company 461
XVII. Relief Department. Westinghouse Airbrake Company . . 468 XVIII. PensionSystem.WestinghouseAirbrakeCompany . 48$
XIX. One Hundred and Twenty-five Working Oiris. ByCharles
C. Cooper 492
XX. Bureau of Safety. Sanitation, and Welfare, U, S. Steel Cor- poration. Statements by C. L. Qose 494
XXI. The Pittsburgh Morals Efliciencv Commission. By
Rudolph I. Coffee SOI
XXII. Statistical Excerpts from Report of the Pittsburgh Morals
Efficiency Commission, 191) $07
XXIII. Records of Repeaters 510
XXIV. Excerpts from Report on Bureau of Police. Prepared by
New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 191) Ji6
Index
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
River at night Fronlispiece
More than a worker (In color). Drawn by Joseph Stella. . . i
Congestion. Map lo
Growth. Map lO
Pittsburgh's hospitals. Map 1 1
Health maps 13-14
Views of Vandergrift 15
Jefferson Avenue
Adams Avenue Pittsburgh Tools. I. For pig iron. II. For home life . 16-17
Blast furnace
Equipment for home life Housing: a district problem 30-21
Willow Alley, Braddock
Jerusalem Court or Bowery, McKeesport
Jerusalem Court from Strawberry Alley
Wash day in an inner court, Braddock
Miller Street, Duquesne
The rudiments of a home
Offspring of the old-time wells
Rear alley, Duquesne
Hazel Alley, McKeesport
Residence street, Pitcaim
A street in Woodlawn
Switchman's shanty 38
Young steel worker 39
A5menseeAmerica(Incolor). Drawn by Joseph Stella ... 31
Slovak 36
Lithuanian 37
Italian 40
Croatian 41
New Pittsburghers and old 44
Basin Alley 4$
Four beds in a room; two in a bed 48
Night scene in a Slavic lodging house 48
Slavic lodging house on South Side 49
Young Russian . . ;3
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Daughters of the new immigration $3
Servian mother and child ;4
Lithuanian women-folk $;
Greek Orthodox priest from Croatia 56
Slavic churches 57
An old Slav (In color). Drawn by Joseph Stella .... 61
Young Russian (In color). Drawn by Joseph Stella ... 68
Slav in bread line of 1908 (In color). Drawn by Joseph Stella 76
Russian miners 84
Women and children 8$
The younger generation — and the old 92
A priest of the Dissenters: of peasant origin 93
Russian progressive labor circle 96
Negro steel workers 97
At the base of a blast furnace (In color). Drawn by Joseph Stella. 1 1 1
Land way and water way 114
One hundred years of river traffic 11;
A floating coal vein 11;
Coke ovens in Connellsville region 1 16
Coke workers 1 16
The West inghouse properties 117
Prince or Pauper 1 18-1 19
Skyline on the commercial center
Bread line at Woods Run, April, 1908
Engineer and fireman 138
A Pittsburgh train man 139
Grinding castings on an emery wheel 140
Filling molds 141
Underground machine men 173
Mine workers of the Pittsburgh District 173
Joseph H. Holmes 176
Tliree first-aid men, Federal Bureau of Mines 176
After a mine disaster 177
Underground fighters 177
Steel worker. Homestead plate mill t8o
Two types. Photos by Hine 181
A glass-house boy 188
Boy holding molds for blower in a South Side glass-house ... 189
The "white" blacksmith shop 324
Engineering for light and air 33;
Cooling hot work 336
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Cooling drinking water for an entire plant 227
Fountain in machine shop 237
Girls' dining room 328
Features of the Heinz factories 339
Recreation room for employes
Sewing class for employes
Roof garden and greenhouse
Stools are poor seats ajo
Chairs with backs are better 331
Washing up in the mill 333
Inexpensive type of sanitary wash bowl 333
Swimming pool 333
Bath house and plunge 336
Locker and lunch room 336
Closet in Comfort building at Lucy Furnace 337
Porcelain urinal 337
Conquering dust. View in carpenter shop 348
Exhaust tubings sucking dust from a circular saw .... 349
The outlet where the sawdust ts bagged 349
River boat for Saturday afternoon outings 3^4
Minstrel show given by employes of H. J. Heinz Company 3$$
Auditorium for employes 2$;
Welfare building, Westinghouse Airbrake Company .... 356
Gymnasium 357
Ball field, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company 358
College room, Westinghouse Club 258
Bridge workers' gardens 2;9
Mining towns of Pittsburgh-Buffalo Company .... 260-261
Johnetta
Marianna
Panoramic views of Annabelle
Miner's dwelling
School at Marianna Woodlawn 264-365
Double houses
Houses from $i,7$o to )i4,$oo
High school
Municipal building
Department store
Meat and fish market Pensioners: American Steel and Wire Company 266
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Stock-holding employes, United States Steel Corporation . . 367
Housekeeping center 27a
Visiting nurses' headquarters 37 j
Cooking class
Sewing class
Reading and instruction room
Sleeping room
H. J. Heini 276
Arthur A. Hammerschlag 276
Charles L, Taylor 277
W. B. Dickson 277
Map of Sharpsburg 278
"The great black mill dominates eye and ear" 279
Back to back houses 383
The way to work sSj
Holding molds 396
Boys in a Sharpsburg glass-house 297
Living conditions, Sharpsburg 302
A glass-house boy's home 303
Relative values 303
As the mill sees the town 303
" Making a pitch " 336
"Throwing his hat" 336
Two types of blind mendicants 337
A Second Avenue lodging house and mission 344
Cheap lodging house, interior 34;
The Bridge of Sighs 358
APPENDIX
Wing of the largest tenement in the district 406
General view of the Soho Hill District 407
Clogged drain on Maurice Street 408
Hydrant adjacent to vault 408
Rock Street, Showing the open drain 408
A hillside battery of disease 409
Midland 410-413
Town plan
Stucco and frame buildings
Low cost frame houses
Poured concrete houses
Tenanted by owners
Toy I and
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Teaching English with a hatchet 414
Boys of a mill section 414
The community tent 41J
Croatian chorus Javor 416
Swedish male chorus 416
Russian singing circle of Braddock 416
At the old city hall 417
Manufacturing a playground. Y. M. C. A., Wilmerding . . 418
Y. M. C. A. community work at Wilmerding 4 [9
Emergency hospital equipment. Carnegie Steel Company . 4^6
Emergency hospital. Clairton works
Office and store room
Redressing room
Operating room
Removing a foreign body from the eye. Edgar Thomson works . 457
Automobile ambulance. Carnegie Steel Company .... 457
Hospital ward. Carnegie Steel Company 4S7
First aid class. Carnegie Steel Company 458
Stretcher drill 459
Firat aid crew letting a stretcher down from a crane runway in the yards of a steel works
First aid crew applying dressings to fractured limb before carry- ing to the emergency hospital
Visiting nurse. Homestead 460
West Penn gymnasium 460
Oxygen helmet 461
Vanadium steel bone plate and screws 461
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LIST OF TABLES
IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS Roberti
I. Foreign white stock of Piitsburgh in 1910, by moiherlongue . . . ja 3. Population of Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian nativity, Pitts- burgh, 1900 and 1910 3j
3. Amountsdepositedby laSlavsina Pittsburgh bank. 1906-1907 54
4. Postal savings deposits and depositon by race and country of birth of
depositors, Pittsburgh, June 30, 1913 54
ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
Wright
I . Ages of 100 Ntgro steel workers 98
3. Years of employment in the Clark Mills of 1 10 Negro steel workers ein-
ployed March, 1907 ... 98
k^. Average daily earnings of 100 Negro steel workers 103
4. Negro population of Pittsburgh, by age and sex. 1910 .... 10}
FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH Kdley I. Industrial workers in Allegheny County in 1907 by industry, sex and age period. Facsimile report by Ekpartment of Factory Inspection of
state of Pennsylvania 194
3. Children at work in Pennsylvania 196
INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE OF THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT
Porter
I. Benefils and pensions paid by Carnegie Relief Fund. 1903-19:0 inclusive 36s
SHARP5BURG: A TYPICAL WASTE OF CHILDHOOD Butler
t. Ages of 806 children in Sharpsburg schools. 1908 386
3. Ages of 41 Sharpsburg children under fourteen found at work in 1908 388
3. Ages at time of beginning work of j 77 Sharpsburg children under seventeen
found at work in 1908 .188
4. Status of fathers of 177 Sharpsburg children found at work in 1908 . 389
5. Work place of 177 Sharpsburg children found at work in 1908 . . 390
XV
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I
COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
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PITTSBURGH
COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
Paul U. Kellogg
IT WAS my good fortune, the summer following the field work of the Pittsburgh Survey, to visit Essen and the other in- dustrial towns of Rhenish-Westphalia. If they shattered the presumption that when it comes to armor plate, I-beams, tubes, or rails, the Pittsburgh steel plants beat the wortd, I was not conscious of the fact. But a week's stay among the Krupp colonies at Essen brought with it the conviction that we in America have much to do before we match the Germans in the science of improved community conditions.
Before me, in terms of the two great steel centers, lay evi- dences (A that new world-competition which has crowded ever thicker upon us during the last five years. For, in the world's economy, Essen has stood for guns but also for a social program ; • its forges have not only rung with the "shining armor" of mili- tarism but they have been lit by the fires of an unparalleled internal policy for the up-building of a people. With Germany thus arm- ing with chemist tube and insurance fund, no less than with the weapons of the Knipps; with China in the throes of revolutions, economic and political, which may send the East after centuries of inaction down the "rin^ng grooves of change"; with the tn- surg«its unsaddling the old order in Mexico; with British states- manship shaking loose from tradition and enacting new social- economic schemes at each sitting of Parliament, we have been on the threshold of a contest among the developing nations more significant than that of western Europe in 1914, one which war will not settle, nor the United States escape. It sets the test of social excellence — social efficiency is too hard and cramped a term — ot whether we can build ourselves up as a great body of Ameri- ' 3
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
•/julns who in trim of muscle and fresh vigor of mind, in leisure, '*- health, and stability, in creative imagination and the joy of the game, can match the labor forces of the other great producing nations of the world, — match them not in any narrow sense, such as the loading of ships for the trebles, or the piling up of bank balances, but in laying hold for ourselves of those things which mean the fullness of living.
For it is a competition not so much of industrial output as of social capital. By dint of black dirt, split fence rails, log cabins, and elbow room, the American pioneers developed a valor of every- day life and citizenship more precious than would have been crops surpassing those of the diked gardens of Holland or the terraced vineyards of the Moselle. The challenge to Pittsburgh, to Fall River and Geveland and Newark and the rest of our work cities is this:
Can we of this century repeat on the frontiers of industry what the settlers of the last century wrought for their generatunP Can we show the world that it means something to have here in America a new continent to fashion life upon?
Now, the physical conquest of the continent spread out our people, and made great draughts on individual initiative. I need not recapitulate the serviceable qualities which that process en- gendered; but we are beginning to find, in our scattered forces, in our inadequate social machinery and in our ineptness at team play, that we paid a price for those qualities.
So untrained to act in unison, we are told, are the peasants of some Russian districts, that the recruiting officers tie a bunch of grass to the left foot of each man when he falls into line to get him to keep step. Perhaps our own English marching count — " hay foot — straw foot" — had a similar origin. The practice at least of instructing the unintelligent voter how to cast his ballot with the crowd by seeing that he has a piece of green paper or a coin in his trousers pocket, is a ripe American custom. In all seriousness, however, a graft-ridden municipality may be nothing morethana piece of governmental machinery built for a small town, — a new flywheel rigged up here, and a misfit set of gears clamped on there. — charged with the impracticable task of serving one of these new, sudden, over-toppling aggregations of people which 4
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modern factories gather about them. With our native stock strong in individual initiative and jealous of personal rights, and with immigrant peoples pouring in to add differences of race, tradition, and religion to the social composition, our lack of habits and media for collective action is a serious handicap. America has yet to learn how to apply scientific discoveries and the economy of organization to the common uses of the people. Before the larger international competition which is upon us, every move- m«it which wrings new utility out of our existing agencies of goveniment, or brings men into co-operative action, is a gain.
The Essen Wav
We are inclined to regard the cities of the old world as long established and to find justification for any lapses of our own in the newness of America. But the visitor to Essen soon learns that it is new as an industrial center. The chronolc^ of the develop- ment (A the steel industry there is not altogether different from that of the same industry in Pittsburgh; and one of the great problems of Fried. Krupp was to mobilize and hold within reach (^ his furnaces and rolls a large and efficient working population.
Entering the industrial field generations later than England, German manufacturers did not have a trained working force ready to hand. Krupp had to draw his men from the country districts, — healthy, unskilled peasants, unused to the quick handling of their muscles, unused to working indoors, unused to machinery, unused to living in large communities. The wages offered, as against the wages of agricultural districts, drew them to Essen; he must keep them there out of reach of his competitors and he must see that they worked at the top notch of their efficiency. It was a loss to Herr Krupp when a man with five years' training in his works left Essen, or was sick, or was maimed.
As a town, Essen was unprepared to absorb this great new industrial population. There were not enough houses; the new- OMners were sheltered abominably and were charged exorbitant rents by the local landlords. There was not sufficient food supply within reach of the growing city, and the workers had to buy poor bread and bad meat, and to pay heavily for them. The town did not have sanitary facilities adequate to dispose of the waste which a 5
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congregation of individuals sloughs off and which, if not properly disposed of, breeds disease. High rents and high prices for pro- visions pared away most of the incentive in wages which must be looked to, to attract this working force to Essen; poor houses and poor food made directly for stupid, half-roused workers and for poor work.
Primarily as a business proposition, then, Herr Krupp started that notable group of social institutions which, from one motive or another, were to be expanded until they supplied an infinite variety of wants to the Essen workers. The firm bought up suc- cessive plots of land, laid them out, sewered them, parked them; and at the end of fifty years 30,000 persons were living in houses belonging to the Essen works. During that time, there had been a growth in quality as well as in the number of houses, the buildings of the first workmen's colony. West End, being rough, crude boxes, while the later cok>nies ctf Alfredshof and Friedrichshof were de- signed with red roofs and graceful lines, with lawns and modern housekeeping conveniences. Rents were fixed low. t found not less than 77 Krupp supply stores, operated on a profit-sharing basis, selling meat, bread, manufactured goods, and household furniture. One of the greatest bakeries in Germany was set up by the Krupps to be run on a cost basis, along with slaughter houses, flour mills, ice making plants, tailor shops, and other establish- ments supplying the needs of the community. Hospitals, con- valescent homes, pensions, invalidity and accident funds were early instituted, and later fortified and expanded under the im- perial scheme of industrial insurance promoted throughout all Germany.
From the standpoint of the employer, this welfare work of the Krupps succeeded in keeping neither trade unionism nor socialism out of the ranks of the working force; from the standpoint of the workers, it tended to put them in a position of semi-feudal dependence for comforts and to sap their initiative in ways not in accord with American ideas; but it served to gather at Essen, to keep there, and to keep there at a high standard of working eificiency, one of the most remarkable labor forces in Germany.
It was this last aspect of Essen which served us as a parallel in first laying the findings of the Pittsburgh Survey before Pitts- 6
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burgh. The question we held up was, how comparable results can be achieved in an American industrial district where one corpora- ti<m does not wholly dominate; where we are dealing with a much greater aggregation of people spread over a much greater territory, and where we must work out our solution through the channels of popular government. American spread-eagleism has moulted considerably since the 90's, but there is still sufficient youth and ginger in it — even in the introspective patriotism of an investi- gator— to make me set down the civic responsibility of democ- racy in an industrial district as nothing less than
"to come abreast of and improve upon the community standards reached under any other system of government, and to do this in a demo- cratic way as distinct from a despotic or paternalistic way."
Our inquiries in Pittsburgh dealt with the wage-earning popu- lation (a) in relation to the community life, and (b) in relation to industry. In summarizing the results before the national civic meetings in Pittsburgh in 1908,* I endeavored to group them so as to bring out the responsibility of democracy imbedded in both relationships. My summary may serve at this date as a binder in presenting the monographs brought together in the two con- cluding volumes of the Pittsburgh Survey, dealing as they do, in turn, with certain civic and industrial problems of the District.
I need scarcely repeat that the tendencies observed in Pitts- burgh are to be found in other of our industrial centers. Here, as Mr. Devine points out,t because of the extraordinary industrial development, these tendencies give "tangible proofs of their real character and their inevitable goal." Our severest criticism of any one community comes not from comparing it with its fellows, but from comparing the haphazard development of its social insti- tutions with the organic development of its business enterprises. And still more in the methods and scope of progressive industrial organizations should a responsible citizenship find some of its most suggestive clues as to ways for municipal progress. While,
* The joint convention of the American Civic Association and the Nationa] Municipal League, Pittsburgh, November 16, 1908. This summary deals chiefly with factors in community and workshop environment subject to social control; and does not enter into wages and other questions of the distribution of wealth.
t Devine, Edward T. : Pittsburgh the Year of the Survey. The Pittsburgh District, p. I.
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for example, distant ore strippings, coal pits, and coke ovens have been linked masterfully with the furnaces of the Pittsburgh E>is- trict, and a chain of steel plants has been flung out across the country, the public service of the steel communities themselves has been cramped in the sheathings of earlier days.
Administrative Areas
The most effective city administration can not act to ad- vantage unless the units through which it operates are workable and bear some relation to the functions they are designed to per- form. The radius of the old-time city, as one English writer has pointed out, was the distance a man could walk from his work in its center to a home convenient in the outskirts. Today, for most purposes, a city is a rapid-transit proposition. For most purposes, a municipal area can be governed most effectively if it includes all such districts as can be reached by city workers, by subway, steam, or surface lines. The movement for a "Greater Pittsburgh," which during the year of our inquiry was advanced by absorbing Allegheny City, and the movement for a "Greater Birmingham" which has been in progress in the analogous English industrial center, are recc^nitions of this fact.* Mr. Forbest found the restricted bounds of the old city playing into the hands of yeggs and gamblers and hampering the police. Such bounds were and are a handicap to every other municipal depart- ment.
But for certain functional activities of a great center, much wider areas must be reckoned with. In 1907 the sanitary force of Pittsburgh inspected food supplies only after they reached the city, and sources in the immediate neighborhood. Yet the 300,000 quarts of milk said to be consumed every twenty-four hours came from 8,000 dairies, some of them 200 miles to the west in Ohio. Today the Pittsburgh dairy inspectors cover the whole District. Again, the sewer and water problem of Pittsburgh is a watershed problem. Over one hundred towns and boroughs are dumping their sewage into the rivers which run past Pittsburgh and from
'Woods, Robert A.: Pittsburgh. An Interpretation of its Growth. The Pittsburgh District, p. sa
t Forbes, James: The Reverse Side. P. 307 of this volume.
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which Pittsburgh must draw its water. No one of these govern- mental units can work out its sanitary problem alone. Close co- ordination is needed throughout the whole river district. Such considerations have given scope to the inquiries by public and private agencies in Pittsburg during the last five years, which have supplied the community with large-scale plans for sewage disposal, traction, street development, and flood prevention.*
There is necessity, then, for expanding our administrative areas and for relating each to its function; a process which brings into being a further civic problem, — how to create this enlarged municipal machinery without sacrificing that local loyalty and interest which in neighborhoods and small towns make for good government. In Pittsburgh we have a market and office center, with groups of outlying mill towns and half-agricultural districts lying between. The opponents of city congestion wish to break up all our big urban centers into such an openwork structure. If the citizens of Pittsburgh can create effective methods (rf govern- ment and high standards of community well-being for this ganglion of working communities, they will have made an original contribu- tion to municipal science.
But let us look more closely at this question of area as applied to particular social institutions. We have the theory in America that common school education should be supplied by the public, and that every child should be given equal opportunity to secure an elementary education. Until the end of 1 91 1 the actual operation of the schoc^s was conducted in Pittsburgh under an oki vestry system of ward control — a system given up years before by Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities of the same class, for the simple reason that the ward has proved to be an ineffective and unjust administrative unit in education.
Each ward laid and collected a tax on property within its limits for the erection and maintenance of school buildings.f Thus, ward two (old numbering) in the business district, with a total of only 363 pupils, could draw on property that had an assessed valuation of {37,491,708; while
* Bumi, Allen T.: The Coalition of Pittsburgh's Qvic Forces. The Pittsburgh District, p. 49.
t Harrison, Shelby M.: The Disproportion of Taxation in Pittsburgh, p. i$6; also Nonh, Lila Ver Planck: Pittsburgh Schools, p. 317. The Pittsburgh Kitrict.
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ward fourteen, with 3433 children, drew on property worth ^4,364.077 (taxable property very neariy the same but the number of children seven times as great). Ward thirty-«ne had 1,173 children and only 13,074,085 in assessed property — or three times as many children as ward two and not one-tenth the taxable property. No wonder, then, that the valuation of school buildings and equipment ranged tiom approximately (41 per school child in the thirty-first ward to |i,033 per schocd child in the second; the income for maintenance of buildings, from ^.00 per school child in the thirty-fifth ward to $84 per school child in the fir^t. No wonder that our investigators found buildings in which children were obliged to sit on benches, or on chairs in the aisles; wards in which basement rooms were thrown into commission for school purposes without adequate heat, light, desks, or ventilation; schools unconnected with the sewer; schools with- out fireproofing, without fire-escapes, without fire drills.
By its outvirom system of ward control and taxation, the teaching force i^ Pittsburgh was supplied, in districts where the work was hardest, with school houses and other tools which were least effective. When the new central board came into control in the fall of 191 1* it took over some ward schools which in plant and spirit ranked with any in the country; some whose equip- ment had practically to be scrapped offhand.
In one year's time the new board remodeled 36 buildings; built 39 portable structures to relieve congestion; installed industrial training in 13 grade schools, seven high schools, and two industrial schools; re- graded classes, limiting them to $0 each; opened 46 ungraded classes; checked much retardation; created a department of special schools and extension work, and one of vocational guidance; standardized the com- pulsory attendance system; threw open the school buildings for public meetings and social centers; and otherwise turned a less than half-used, disjointed, decentralized scheme of school-keeping into what promises to become, cumulatively, an effective instrument for education.
Turn to another sodal institution — the hospitals. We may conceive that the first service of a hospital is to be a refuge for the sick and injured, and that an adequate hospital system should deploy its buildings so that they will be quickly accessible to the people who are likely to have use for them. We may compare such a system to a telephone company which thn>ugh sub-ex- changes, centrals, and private connections, effectively reaches
* Kennard, Beulah: The New Pittsburgh School System. The Pittsburgh District, p. 306.
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every district; or, to cite a contemporary social institution in Pittsburgh, with the library system* which through eight branches and 44 sub-stations places books in easy reach of the entire city.
How stood the case with the hospitals of Pittsburgh? The city was in 1908 served by a group of private institutions, many of them adequately equipped, progressively managed. There was, however, no system of co5rdination between them, either in the operation of their free wards or in the maintenance of an effective ambulance service. Sick and injured people were carried long, unnecessary distances at great risk. New hospitals were erected under the eaves of old hospitals. Seven new ones were going up in Pittsburgh the year of our inquiry, yet when they were all completed, they ]dt a great belt of river wards, thickly populated, without a convenient hospital — wards in which disease was rife.
This failure to think through the hospital needs of the city is more than a matter of geography. Motor vehicles have expanded the sphere which can be reached by a given hospital; a district ambulance service could bind the existing institutions together so as to cover fairly promptly the whole urban area. The need is organic and reaches deeper. The Wesleni Pennsylvania Health Conference of 1910. which brought to- ' gether representatives of no less than 7; agencies, laid it bare as never before, — the 14 dispensaries each working independently of the others, the 17 associations maintaining nurses with little or no reference to each other's efforts or capabilities, and the 33 important hospitals in and about Pittsburgh, "every one of them going headlong about its business of life- saving as if it were the one and only agency in the field."
In the last few years there have been marked gains in providing for the treatment of particular groups of casesf and in hospital social service work at the hands of progressive superintendents. Yet it remains true in 1914 that there has been no general municipal hospital created and no
• Olcott, Frances J.: The Public Library. The Pittsburgh District, p. 335-
t Perhaps 100 victims of luberculosii could be cared for in proper inititu- ti<Mi» in Pittsburgh In 1907-08; whereas there were in the city fully j.ooo sufferers in a sufliciently advanced stage to be a peril to all with whom they came in con- tact, and at a moderate estimate three-fifths of thij number were unable to pro- vide proper home care. When a municipal sanatorium is opened in January, 1915, re-enforcing present provisions at the private hospital of the Pittsburgh Tu- berculosis League, the almshouse pavilions, and the state sanatoria at Cresson and Mt. Alto, will have at least 600 beds at its disposal — over five times the number in 1907-08. but still a bed for but one in five of its white plague victims.
A maternity hospital and a modem convalescent home are recent additions to the other specialized institutions, which include a municipal hospital tor con- tagious diseases, besides private hospitals for eye and ear. for nervous diseases and for children, and homes for incurables and for crippled children. II
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adequate division and coordination of effort on the part of the private hospitals, no systematizati<»i of visiting nursing or of ambulance service [the police patrol wagons without medical attendants picking up many accident cases]; that with, if anything, a surfeit of general wards and beds, neighborhocxl workers complain now, as five years ago, of the difficulty experienced with certain subsidized hospitals in getting patients accepted who are not on\y sick but poor and without influence; that for some classes of cases — as children sick with a complication of measles and pneumonia — no provision at all exists, no matter how deplorable the home conditions of the little sufferers. Meanwhile, state, county, and city all continue to care each after its own fashion for the insane. In- vestigations made by the Public Charities Association in 1914 disclosed that at (he city almshouse at Marshalsea two young physicians receiving less than fi.ooo each were in charge of 702 insane patients; that there was no laboratory or department of hydrotherapy; that absolute authority in medical matters was in the hands of a former Pittsburgh policeman who had been appointed superintendent as reward for political services;* and that numbers of patients were kept constantly in restraint by the use of band-muffs, strait -jackets, chains, and other physical devices.
Gjntrast this general lack of unity and standardization with the centralized scheme of surgical organization instituted by the Carnegie Steel Company in 1909, which reaches from first aid box, throu^ well placed emergency hospitals in each of the mill towns, to centralized hospital wards in Pittsburgh, where every recourse of science is available for the more serious cases — a system which has cut down infection to a fraction of one per cent, and has measurably reduced the period of convalescence.!
Similarly, with 6,000 children of wage-earners going through the thirty or more children's institutions of Allegheny County, there is so little co-operation that brothers have been found in one institution and sisters in another, without an agreement on the part of the agencies caring for them as to a future plan.J
A Town's Tools
A second point of contrast between Pittsburgh, the industrial center, and Pittsburgh, the community, lies in the progressiveness and invention which have gone into the details of the one and not
' Since superseded by a qualified alienist as the first step in a general reform.
t Sherman, Wm. O'Neill: Surgical Organization of the Carnegie Steel Co. Appendix XV, p. ^i$ of this volume. t Lattimore, Florence L.: Pittsburgh
as a Foster Mother. The Pittsburgh Disirici. p. )]7.
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of the Other. This is illustrated by those children's institutions which fail to respond to modem movements in education, hygiene, and child-pladng. it is illustrated by the aldermen's courts* which clutter up and befog the courseof minor justice. Unsuper- vised and unshorn of their powers of petty persecution in city and mill town, they compare with the comprdiensive municipal court system of Chicago about as the open forges of King John's time compare with a Bessemer converter.
Again, — Pittsburgh is the second city in Pennsylvania in point of population; in some respects it is the center of the most marvelous industrial district in the world. Thousands of men and women are engaged in hundreds of processes. The state factory inspection department had up to the end of 1913 not so much as an office in this city.f There were inspectors, but for the working- men laboring under insanitary conditions or handling unprotected machinery they were not easily get-at-able. The conc^tion we advanced of an adequate labor department office in Pittsburgh is more than that of an industrial detective bureau. It is rather that of a headquarters, with an adequate force of technical experts and physicians who can study consecutively the work processes oi the District with the idea of eliminating, wherever possible, those conditions which make for disease; with laboratory facilities for ocperiment and demonstration of protective devices, calculated to reduce accidents; — drawing, to this end, upon the industrial experience of the whole world.
The factory inspector's office in Birmingham (En^and) is in close co-operation with courts, with employers, and with workmen. During the three years ending in 1908, its suggestions reduced the number of deaths due to one variety of crane from 31 in the first year to three in the last. In the twelve months studied by the Pittsburgh Survey, there were 42 deaths from crane accidents in Allegheny County steel mills and the public authorities did not even know their number.
All of the great industries of the region stand in need of just such engineering headquarters as, since 1908, has served
• Blaxier, H. V., and Kerr. Allen H.: The Aldennen and their Courts, p. 139: also Burns, op. cii., p. 56. The Pittsburgh DJiirict, and Forbes, James: The ReverK Side. p. 377 of this volume.
t Kelley. Florence: Factory inspection in Pittsburgh, P. i89of this volume. The State Department of Labor and Industry created in 1913 has the nucleus of a scientific staff; but under the first year's appropriation the office of the supervis- ing inspector's staff in Pittsburgh has been some of ihe time uithout even a clerk.
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one of them — the testing laboratories established at Pittsburgh by the Federal Bureau of Mines. These have not only demon- strated the relationof coal dust to the spectacular mine explosions, but have taken up the everyday safety problems of the pits.
The old-time city built a wall about it to keep out invaders. The invaders of a modem city are infectious diseases. In the de- velopment of sanitary service the modem city is erecting its most effective wall. In Pittsburgh, the health authority was up to 1909 a subordinate bureau without that final authority which should go with its supreme responsibility toward the health of $00,000 people. Until the Guthrie administration there had seldom or never been a physician or sanitarian as head. For five years there had not been so much as an annual report. Two- thirds of the appropriations to the Pittsburg health bureau were engrossed in a garbage removal contract; only one-third was free for general health purposes.
With such an inadequate barricade, we may imagine that disease sacked Pittsburgh throughout the seasons and compari- son with the death rates of four dties of corresponding size — Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis — for five years I1902-06I showed that this had been the case. In her average death rate per 100,000 from typhoid fever, and from diarrhoea and enter- itis, Pittsburgh was highest. Pittsburgh was next to lowest in the list in pulmonary tuberculosis; but the explanation probably lay in the tendency of local physicians to ascribe such deaths to pneu- monia, bronchitis, or other diseases of the respiratory system, where Pittsburgh was again highest. So also was Pittsburgh highest in deaths from violence (other than suicide) ; which being interpreted meant accidents.* Summing up the health situation for the Pittsburgh Survey at the ^d of 1908, Mr. Adams said:t
"Between public indifference, private selfishness, and politi- cal inertia, the germ has pretty well had its own way with Pittsburgh, and the city's annual waste of life from absolutely preventable disease
'For the succeeding five-year period, 1907-11 inclusive, not only was Pittsburgh's typhoid rate cut, but also its rate in three of the remaining four divi- sions dealt with in (he text. Nevertheless for typhoid, for diarrhoea and enteritis, for pneumonia, bronchitis, and other diseases of (he respiratory (rac(, and for accidents, it still had the highest rates among the five cities comparedl
t Adams, Samuel Hopkins: f^ttsburgh's Foregone Asset, the Public Health, Cbaritkt tmd Tb* Commant, February 6, 1909, p. 940.
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has been a thing to make humanity shudder, had it been expressed in the lurid tenns of battle, holocaust, or flood, instead of in the dumbly accepted figures of tuberculosis, typhoid, and infant mortality. .
"Starting at the lowest level, let us formulate our initial axiom in terms of dollars. A sound man can do more work than a sick man. Therefore he can make more money. A sound city can do more work than a sick city. Therefore, in the long run, it can accumulate more wealth. Public health is a public asset. This is a truth which in her sin^e-minded purpose of commercial and industrial expansion, Pitts- burgh long ago forgot, — if, indeed, she ever stopped to realize it. Conse- quently, at a time when all the other great American cities have organized thdr forces thoroughly and are waging battle, with greater or less scien- tific skill, against that most potent of all destroyers, the germ, this mighty aggregation of half a million human beings has only just declared war, and has bardy established its outposts.
Mr. Adams added, with a touch of prophecy:
"The test is yet to come. . . . For when hygienic and sani- tary reform impinges, in its advance, as it needs must, upon the private purse of some, the political purposes of others, and the industrial and commercial license of the whole, then will come the tug of war Then, accCH-ding as shortsighted selfishness shall prevail over, or succumb to, civic pride and patriotism, the victory will be to the germ or to the city."
At the time this was written, Pittsburgh's inadequate health bureau, with inadequate legal authority, was for the first time in the hands of a skilled sanitarian. For the succeeding five years, the new department with augmented powers and resources was placed in the hands of a physician who was without training in public health work, 1^0 had been president of the notorious Councils of 1908.* Only during the current year (1914) has Pitts- burg attacked disease not only with an adequate departmental oi^anization but mth a trained sanitarian as chief of service.
Such segments, drawn by way of illustration from different branches (rf the public service in Pittsburgh, make it clear that if
* In June-July, 191}, the New York Bureau erf' Municipal Research made a report to the Pituburgh City Council of tbe work of varioui public department!. Its icpoit oo the department of public health revealed large and apparently busy (orcet at inspecton, often overiapping each other — milk, meat, and food inspectors visitiDg tbe same stores, sanitary and tenement Inipectors the same neighborhoods; bat DO fuflident check-up of inspecton, no system of filing complaints, and lax enfarcement For example, milk inspecton sedulously took tbe temperatures of every can coming from the same shipping point, although the milk had not been
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democracy is to lift the common life to new levels it must over- haul the social machinery through which it operates and bring it to standards comparable to those set by banks, insurance com- panies, and industrial corporations.
Social Tests
There are at least two tests to which such social machinery can be put by the community. The first is that of operating efficiency. In hospitals, in schools, in municipal departments, units of labor and product can be worked out as definitely as are the tons of the steel workers, the voltage of the electricians, the dollars and cents of the banks. By vigorous systems of audit and long-headed systems of budget-making, intelligible to the ordinary citizen, the community can secure an output from these social institutions com- parable with the investment it makes. The Bureau of Municipal Research in New York has been the pioneer exponent of this pro- gram ; and we have examples of its constructive influence in budge- tary and administrative reforms set going by the Pittsburgh Civic Commission under the new Pittsburgh charter and small council.*
There is another equally intensive test to which social ma- chinery and conditions can be put. It is conceivable that the tax payer may get his money's worth from the municipal government while wage-earners and householders generally may be suffering from another and irreparable form of taxation, which only in- creased municipal expenditure along certain lines can relieve. So it was that we projected our inductive research in Pittsburgh into such methods of social bookkeeping as would show something (^ the larger waste of human life and private means.
Let me illustrate by the toll of misery and loss which preceded
iced in transit and the massing of these readings was put to no practical use. Smoke inspectors made igi hour-long observations of stacks and chimneys in 191a, th« only value of which was to obtain legal evidence: but there were no prosecutions that year. The tenement division was the exception in the sanitaty bureau in having a system of records well devised to keep staff and supervisor in touch with field conditions. The department followed an extreme go-as-you-please policy toward garbage and rubbish contractors.
A distinctly forward step under this administration, however, was the institution of school medical inspection, the stall consisting of inspectors, diagnos- ticians, and nurses. Under the new Edwards administration this work has been expanded into a bureau of child welfare.
* Following surveys made for the city by the New York Bureau of Muni- cipal Research and the Emerson Company, in 1913, the county commissionen at the instigation of the Voters' League engaged the Bureau to make a survey of that much less developed but large spending unit of government, the county.
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Apparatus for produi:Lng pig iron in tonnage thai beats the world
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COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
the erection in 1905-08 of the six-million-dollar filtration plant* — the city's most signal investment in health. For thirty-five years typhoid had been endemic. Computing death rates per 100,000 population for the larger cities the two dties which are today com- bined in greater Pittsburgh were the principals in a scourging rivalry. In 1901, Pittsburgh was first and highest. New Haven second, Allegheny third; in 1902, Pittsburgh was first, Allegheny second, Washington third; in 1903, Pittsburgh was first, Geve- land second, Allegheny third; in 1904, Columbus was first, Pitts- burgh second, Allegheny third; in 1905, Allegheny was first, Pittsburgh second, and Columbus third; in 1906, Pittsburgh was first and Allegheny second. But this showing, startling as it is, fails to afford a grasp of what this scourge meant to the wage- earners (rf Pittsburgh, comparable to Mr. Wing's household studyt erf 448 typhoid cases, with their 2,323 weeks of lost wages, their hospital charges, doctors' bills, nurses* fees, cost of ice, foods, and medicines, mounting up to a total loss of $56,253 for less than half the cases of but six city wards in but one year — ^wards in which lost earnings and sickness expense were at a minimum. There were other drains which did not admit of tabulation. It was impossible to compute in terms of dollars and cents what it meant to a family to have the father's health so broken that he could not work at his old job, but had to accept easier work at less pay. It was impossible to put in tabulated form the total value to a family of a mother's health, and strike a proper balance when typhoid had left her a physical or nervous wreck. It was impossible to estimate what was sacrificed by a boy or girl obliged to leave school in order to help support the family because typhoid had incapacitated the natural breadwinners.
But such human facts bring htune to a workin^an his stake in government, his share in the civic responsibility of democracy.
Household Needs The municipality is not alone in facing the demands of a new (^ntury. The household faces a shifting and socialization of
* In October, 1907, there were $93 cases of typhoid in Greater Pittsburgh; for the same month the year following— the filtratbn plant having been set in operation — the number was 96.
t Wing, Frank E.: Thirty-five Years of Typhmd. The Pittsburgh Dijtrict, p. 63.
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functions, and some of these have gone by default in the process of transition. Much of the sanitary quandary of the times has grown out of belated attempts on the part of families to supply them- selves with water, keep a cow, or dispose of their own garbage and excreta in the midst of urban conditions.
With these and even larger household problems, the American no less than the German industrial community is concerned if humanly it would prosper. 1 1 was beyond the compass of the Pitts- burgh Survey to study in a comprehensive way what could be done to improve the quality and lessen the cost of food supplies.
We ran upon suggestive clues. The new filtration plant was m it^lf a great common broaching of the sources of clear water, and the health authorities were for the first time seriously addressing themselves to cleaning up the equally contaminated channels through which the city is supplied with 40,000 gallons of milk per day. Before the Guthrie administration, this vitally important merchandising received, in Mr. Adams' phrase, rather less attention than the comer-stand "vending of collar buttons. " Yet to the supply of impure milk more than to any other one cause, was attributable one-fourth of all deaths in 1907; namely, those of children under one year of age.
The ups and downs of dairy inspection in the years since can not be reviewed here — the elimination of fonnaldehyde, the enactment of a milk code setting a basis of bacterial count for the sale of milk, the estab- lishment of municipal milk dispensaries, with physicians and nurses in attendance along lines pione«-ed by the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Milk and Ice Association. The zero point, from which the local advances in milk control can be measured, may well be the conditions of certain local dairies visited for us in the summer of 1907 by Dr. George W. Goler, health officer of Rochester, an international authority on milk. He wrote:
"Co out to one of those dairies near the Country Club which sup- plies milk to some of the families living in the best localities and see the conditions under which milk is produced for the future citizens of the state and nation. A dirty one-room house that once did duty as an out-house, supplied with water by a hose, a few old tubs in which cans, bottles, and utensils are washed in cold water, and where atl the waste flows into a vault beneath the foundation of the house. A damp, dark old stable festooned with cobwebs, without drainage, where all the liquid refuse finds its way through cracks in the floor to the space beneath the structure, and where, on filthy floors, in some cases raised but one poor ptank above the common floor of the stable, the swill-fed cows stand and give milk for some of the babies of Pittsburgh aristocracy, whose parents are willing to pay the munificcntsumofeight cents a quart for the product.
"Visit cow stable after cow stable within easy motor ride from 18
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Pittsburgh, and the conditions of filthiness prevailing in the stables arc exceeded only by the depth of manure and mud in the barnyards.
"The conditions of the cows, cans, utensils, and barnyards, at the distant points from which the city draws its milk, may be judged by the fact that they pasteurize the milk before bringing it to the city, and pas- teurize it again before it is sent out from the dairy."
On the basis of conditions found in 1913, the Bureau of Municipal Research recommended a "thorough reorganization of the food inspection service" of the Pittsburgh Department of Health. No records were found of the number of places inspected, nor was a record kept of individual stores. In all divisions, except milk inspection, numerous violations were recorded with few prosecutions. Important advances were noted in the service, yet a slaughter house with privy opening off the killing room, contemned carloads of vegetables dumped in the railroad yards to be picked over by children, loose milk sold in general supply stores, often with half closed cans and exposed dippers, were examples of weak links found in the chain of protection which tended to vitiate the whole service. It was reported that 90 per cent of the milk was brought in an average of 100 miles, that the railroads provided no refrigerator cars, that 60 per cent of the creamery milk was still heated to keep it from souring during the long un-iced haul and 2$ per cent of this milk reheated after reaching town.
One of the reforms early instituted by the new health administra- tion in 1914 was the concentration of milk inspection at the dairies. No more loose milk is sold in stores, and but one pasteurization is permitted.
Sanitary regulation is of course but one phase of the problem; the need is to promote the production of clean milk as a bountiful commodity. Miss Byington's study* of the cost of living for Home- stead householders, especially her favorable reports on the garden plots cultivated by a few of them, went to show that by utilizing unbuijt-up areas in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh, analyzing the soil and im- proving methods for facilitating the handling of garden produce, the marketable supply of vegetables could be measurably increased and the cost of living of the Pittsburgh District lowered from what un- biased reports have shown it to be, — wellnigh the highest in the country-t The situation was later made the subject of a special inquiry by an economic survey instituted by Mayor Magee and carried forward by Prof. J. T. Hddsworth, dean of the School of Economics of the Uni- versity of Pittsburgh. Recently, the Industrial Development Commission prompted the State Department of Agriculture to start a truck farm experiment station on the outskirts of the city.
• Byington, Margaret F.: Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, (The PitUburgh Survey!) New York, Charities Publication Committee, 1910. tS«e tabulations. British Board of Trade. AppendixVI, p. 4)7orthij volume. '9
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wage-earning pittsburgh
The Housing Supply
There is one necessity of life in Pittsburgh of which there was and is a paramount shortage and to which the Survey gave specific attention, — shelter. We could but compare the efficiency of the modern blast furnaces to perform their function and the efficiency of many of the houses to perform theirs. The output of the one is pig iron; the output of the other, home life and childhood. The tene- ment census carried on by the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health in 1908 showed that there were over 3,000 tenements in the Greater Gty. Nearly 50 per cent of these were old dwellings built and constructed to accommodate one family, and as a rule without conveniences for the multiple households crowding into them.* With these and with the one- and two-family dwellings, which continue as such to shelter the vast bulk of the wage-earning population in Pitts- burgh, the primary governmental relationship is that of sanitary control. The forward movements of the last five years have resulted in adequate laws; sanitary improvements have been in- stalled in many properties; but enforcement has been so sporadic as to amount to dallying with life and death. Four years of need- less delay in building Pittsburgh's filtration plant and clearing the disease-laden water supply, sacrificed an easily calculable number of lives.t Less calculable, but charged with all manner of human miseries, has been the cost of more than as many years of needless delay in cleaning up Soho.J
Under intermittent pressure from the health authorities thousands of privy vaults have been filled and abandoned, yet in 1914 eight to ten thousand still remain in use in Pittsburgh. Such vaults are an open menace to health because of the insects which carry disease from them to the tables and living rooms of the people. Consider the contrast, — these old, ramshackle, unwholesome, disease breeding appliances of the back country here in Pittsburgh, the city of great engineers, of mechanical invention, and dF progress.
There are three phases of this problem of shelter which have a special bearing upon my main thesis. The first is, that the
* Dinwiddie, EmJIy W., and Crowell, F. Elisabeth: The Housing of Pitts- burgh's Workers. The Pittsburgh District, p. 87.
t Wing, Frank E.: op. cit. The PitUburgh District, p. Sy t See Appendix I), p. 406.
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The hydrani at (he righi in close proximiiy to Ihe octaRonal privy structure, was the only water supply for the enlire courl. On the date the photograph was taken the hydrant had been out of use for two days and the tenants had had to carry water from
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Wash Day in an Inner Court, Braddock
Thirteen ramilies used this court. In the octagonal building eight closets emptied
into a sewer which was flushed only occasionally
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MiLLtK Sfkhet. Duquesne Open drain at side of sirtel
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COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
health authority, however efficient in supervision, can not meet the quantitative demand for wholesome accommodations. Even though Tammany Hall, Yellow Row, Painter's Row, and other unnamed shells have been torn down; even though the owners of many buildings have been made to install sanitary appliances; the situation remains unmet unless new houses — new houses in quantity — ^are erected to care for the population which has flooded into Pittsburgh and which, there is every indication, will swell as greatly in the years ahead.
It should be said that real estate dealers, builders and building and loan associations have not been inactive. Certain industrial corporations have shown initiative in developing outlying proper- ties.* The situation is serious enou^, however, to demand the formulation of a constructive public policy for the entire r^on. In the words of our original report:!
"It demands for the Pittsburgh District such town planning and traction development as will open up wider suburban areas and relieve congestion. It demands such radical modification of the tax system as will put a premium, as in metropolitan Boston, <mi home building, rather than a premium, as in Pittsburgh, on the speculative holding of unim- proved land. Pittsburgh might well be the first city to try out in America the a>-operative building scheme which has gained so much momentum in En^nd, and by which the shifting industrial worker owns not a house, but stock m a housing company, which builds wholesale. Such a plan would admirably supplement the operations of the realty companies and building and loan associations in housing the growing industrial force of the steel district, and would offer an opportunity for investment at $ per cent and the public good such as opens in no other direction to the man of large means and large imagination who would leave his impress <» the Pittsburgh Dbtrict."
Legislation secured by Pittsburgh civic bodies in 1911 and 191 3 has put in motion radical changes in the tax system; the town planning and traction reports of 1910-1 1 have set bench marks for community expansion. But movements for promoting building construction have failed as yet to lay hold upon the public imagi-
' Note pholographs of the salelUle com muni lies, Vandergrift, Woodiawn, Marianni ind Midland illuslratios this volume. See also Porter, H. F. J.: Industrial Hygiene in the Pitlsburu District, p. 317 of ibis volume; and Rice, W. C: Midland. Appendix II. p. 410.
t The Pittsburgh District and the Housing Situation. Cbarititi and Tbi Commomt, February 6, 1909.
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nation in any large way; and in contrast to Cleveland's low-^are service, Pittsburgh's street railway system obstructs the spread- ing out of homes by its lack of through routes and its niggardli- ness with transfers.
This haphazard method of letting the housing supply take care of itself, and the consequent high cost of rents, cramps the general prosperity of the city only less than it cramps the standard of living of tenant wage-eamers. Moreover, it puts a premium on single men, drifters, lodgers, as against the man with a family. Immigrant boarders who rent from a boarding boss, and sleep eight or ten in a room or sleep at night in the beds left vacant by the ni^t workers who have occupied them throughout the day, — such transients can lay by money in the Pittsburgh District. But the immigrant who wants to make his stake here, bring his family over, and create a household, must pay |io or |i; a month for rent; and must pay high prices for all the other necessities of life. If the merchants of Pittsburgh should set out to discover some one means for increasing the volume of purchases of the buying public, they could find no other which would affect it so impressively as the multiplication of households, through the multiplication oi convenient, low cost, low rental, sanitary houses with which to meet the needs of stable family groups as against the needs of the lodgers.
The need for more and better shelter is not merely a city problem. It is repeated in each of the mill towns where as a whole the movements for sanitary regulation have not made head- way as they have in the greater city. Miss Butler* found breed- ing places of disease in Sharpsburg; back-to-back houses such as were condemned in England seventy-five years ago. Attractive homes are to be found there, in Braddock, Pitcaim, Duquesne, McKeesport, Homestead, and the other industrial suburbs, but the accompanying photographs tell the story also of old buildings, filthy, ill-equipped, and overcrowded; and of new buildings vio- lating every canon of scientific housing. Homestead, for ex- ample, had in 1907-08 no ordinance against overcrowding, no ordi- nance requiring adequate water supply, nor one forbidding privy vaults in congested neighborhoods. Foreigners were crowded
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thick in the second ward between the river and the railroads. In 31 courts studied by Miss Byington* in this neighborhood, only three houses had running water inside the house. One hundred and ten people were found using one yard hydrant. Out of 239 families, ;i families, including sometimes four or five people, lived in one room each. Even among the families which did not take lodgers, half averaged over two persons to the room. A crude re- flection of the effect of these conditions was indicated by the death rate in this second ward. To every three children bom there one died before it reached two years of age, as against one to every 7 or 8 in parts of Homestead where detached and livable dwellings prevail.
This comparison of health and borne conditions in a small town was true in a large, cruel way of Pittsburgh itself. In co- operation with the Typhoid Fever Commission we analyzed by wards the death certificates of people dying in Pittsburgh dur- ing a five-year period. We grouped these wards into districts the living conditions of which were more or less of a kind.f Let me compare the mortality figures of wards nine, ten, and twelve (old numbering) — a group of river wards in the old city, near the mills, peopled for the most part with a wage-earning population of small income — with ward twenty-two, a new residential district in the East End. What were the chances for life for the men, women, and children living in one district and in the other P The chance of a man's dying of bronchitis in the river wards was two and a. half as against one in the East End; the chance was four of his dying from pneumonia as against one in the East End, five of his dying of typhoid as against one in the East End. These are rough proportions, but they are of terrific significance. Our American boast that everybody has an equal chance falls flat before them. The dice were loaded in Pittsburgh when it came to a man's health. His health is the workingman's best asset; and the health and vigor of the working people are in the long run the vital and, once lost, the irrecoverable resources of an industrial center.
We are come to a point where, without going into further
phases of the municipal life, we can define the plain civic responsi-
* Byington, op. cit, pp. tjiff. t See inserted health mapi, facing pp. 13-14.
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bility of democracy in an industrial district. That responsibility is so to rontrive and operate the social machinery of the community, so to lift the neighborhood and household conditions that they will attract and hold a strong and vigorous labor force for the industries on which the prosperity of the district must depend. Here lies the responsibility of the community to the industries it fosters and the responsibility of the community to its own future: — lest the rfficiency of its workers be mortgaged before they go to work in the morning. And this responsibility carries a counter one. Neither in the interests of the community as a whole, nor in the interests of all the industries as against those of any single industry, nor in their own interests, can the people afford to have their working strength impaired or wasted by insanitary or health- taxing conditions during the working hours.
The Social Challenge to Industry To begin with, Pittsburgh can not afford to have half a thou- sand workingmen killed in any year or a vastly larger, unknown number of men seriously injured. The Pittsburgh Survey made an intensive inquiry into the facts surrounding the deaths in in- dustry during twelve months, and the injuries treated in the hos- pitals during three. The investigatkin was rarely opportune, for during the six years that have succeeded commissions in more than twenty states have taken up the problem of industrial injury and compensation. Miss Eastman's investigation* remains perhaps the most serviceable inductive study we possess of the workings of the old common law system of liability under which the United States entered the twentieth century.
We found that of the 536 men killed in Allegheny County in the year studied, the accidents fell on Americans as well as foreigners; 238 were native bom. There were 195 steel workers killed, la; railroad men, 71 mine workers, and i}$ in other occupations. We found that it was the young men of the District who went down in the course of industry. Eighty-two were under twenty-one years of age, 23 1 between twenty and thirty. Over half the men killed were earning less than |i$ a week, a fact which challenged the fairness of the law in assuming, as it still does in Pennsylvania, that wages cover risk. In 63 per cent, whether in the case of married or unmarried, death by industrial accident meant the sudden cutting off of the sole or chief support of a family.
* EastnuD, Crystal: Work-Accident* and the Law. (Kitsburgh Survey.) 24
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COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
These facts as to the native born, the competent, the young, the bFead-winning who went down in the everyday operations of industry, were summed up in a great death calendar at the Pitts- burgh civic exhibit in the fall of 1908 — ^its $26 red crosses standing each for a man killed at work or who died as direct result of an in- jury received in the course of his work. The case was put thus:
Htttburgh hu itamped out smallpox; its phyiidaiu are fighting tuborulous; the municipality it checking typhoid. Cannot engineera, foremen, employert and vrorkmcn come together in a campaign to reduce accident!?
Despite notable gains made by certain employer; in the years since this exhibit of 1908, the red crosses in the death calendar for work>acct> dents in Allegheny County have run up every year into the hundreds, serious injuries into the thousands, many of them needless. No greater public service could be done by labor department, coroner's office, health department, union, or civic body than to make current public analyses of these accidents, such as would show what plants and employments still maim limbs and snuff out lives where others save them.
The records kept by the state factory inspector's office up to the present year are worthless.* Neither the Allegheny County coroner's office nor the Pittsburgh Department of Health segregate deaths from work-accidents in a way that shows how far the gross number has been cut down. The coroner's office, however, gives the following figures for two trade groups, mines and mills, 1908-13 inclusive, which indicate that the twdve months studied by the Pittsburgh Survey — July t, 1906, to June 30, 1907 — were prophetic of the annual death toll exacted from 1908 on. Miw MiUi
1908 73 96
'909 T 'M
"gio 96 '55
1911 Ill 101
19" 79 'J'
i9'3 <£5 '73
Avenge six yean .... 89 i)o
Piltsburgh Survey [|3 montlu] . 71 19;
How a representative steel corporation plant has cut down its
accident rate is charted in Appendix XV, p. 4^y Yet for the mills of the
county as a whole, electric shock killed ten in 1913 as against seven in
1906-07, operation of trains 24 as against 42, railroads 27 as against 31.
* See Appendix X, p. 445.
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From [907 to 1913, inclusive, the department of health credits traumatism by machines with, respectively, 33, i;, 1 1, 30, 1 1, 31, and 30 deaths, by no means a descending scale.
We put the work-accident cases studied to that same test of human measurement which 1 have shown was of such significance in gauging the losses due to typhoid fever. This steady march of injury and death means an enormous economic loss. Is the burden of this loss justly distributed? we asked. What takes the place of the wages of these breadwinners? What resources of their own have these families to fall back on? What share of the loss is shouldered by the employer? In the care of the sick and depen- dent, what share falls in the long run upon the community itself?
The Pittsburgh District has still to make satisfactory answer to these questions; for while we tallied up the number of dead and showed the misery and injustice wrought in a way whidi helped spur other states to action, Pennsylvania itself remains in I9i4the only one of the great industrial commonwealths which has failed to enact a modem compensation law.
The year of our investigation saw the beginnings of that system of accident prevention which has since lifted the United States Steel Corporation to the position of leadership in this field. In 1910 it adopted a relief plan anticipating compensation laws by making a greater share of the accident loss a fixed charge on the industry. The problem today is that of compelling the whole Dis- trict to match standards in safety engineering and compensation set by its most far-sighted managers. Our analysis brought home to us that the pemianent way to keep down the accident rate would be to make killing and injury come higher to the employer.
For example, take six men who were totally disabled for life during the three months studied— one of whom lost an arm and a leg, one of whom isparalyzed.andfourof whom will walk on crutches the rest of their lives. Our figures showed that, of these men, one received I36;, one liaj, one $30, and three no compensation. Bearing in mind the broad policy of the Camegie Relief Fund, and of the standards of relief set by excep- tional employers, the bald fact remained that in the case of both injuries and deaths, including both married and single men, no dollar of comptn- saiioti was received from the employer to take the place of lost income in considerably over half the cases.*
* Thi» excludes luMpital and funeral expense, often met by the employer.
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But this question of industrial injury is only part of another and larger question of the relation of industty to health. The workers of Pittsburgh are dealing not with simple ploughs and wash tubs and anvils, but with intricate machines, often in great workrooms where hundreds work side by side; dealing with poi- sons, with voltage, with heat, with a hundred new and but half mastered agents of production.* In the rapid development of factories in America, we have only begun to construct them with reference to the well-being as well as with reference to output.
Let me illustrate from the women-employing trades as brought out by Miss Butler's investigations.! In two of the aScommercialJaundries in Pittsburgh the washroom was on the upper floor. In 26, rising steam and excessive heat not only caused discomfort in the departments above but tended to induce diseases of the respiratory organs. Tobacco dried in many of the stogy sweatshops made the air heavy with nicotine, filled the room with fine dust, and increased the danger, always present in the to- bacco trades, from tuberculosis. In foundries and machine shops the custom of placing annealing ovens in the rooms where cores are made caused excessive heat in the workroom and filled the air with a black dust. Apart from dangers of accident, of speeding, and of injurious processes, the health of a working force bears a direct relation to the length of the working day. Mr. Fitch's analysis} erf the time schedule of the various departments of the steel industry showed that in a majority of them the day of twenty-four hours is split between two shifts of workers who averaged twelve hours each. Up to 1910, a fifth of the men worked not six days but seven a week; and a very considerable share of them, once a fort- night in changing shifts, a long turn of twenty-four hours. The seven-day week has since been cut down but the iron rule of the twelve-hour day still govems.J Employers may differ as to whether they can get the most work and the most effective work out of a man who labors twelve hours a day, or ten, or eight. But we hold that the community has something at stake here. How much citizenship does Pittsburgh get out of a man who works twelve hours a dayP Paternalistic Essen might not fare badly by such a schedule; but it scotdies our American mill • See Porter, op. cit. P. J17 of this volume.
t Butler, Eliubetfa B.: Women and the Trades. (The Pitubur^ Survey.) t Fitch, John A.: The Steel Workers. (The Pittsburgh Survey.) I For report of .Stockholders Committee see Appendix I. p. 39$. 27
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towns. How much (^ a father can a man be who works twelve hours a dayP Barracks life may not fare badly by such a schedule, but Miss Bytngton's study* showed how it bears down upon house- hold life in Homestead. The community has a claim on the vigor and intelligence of its people, on their activity in civic affairs, ^ich it is letting go by default. So long as Pittsburgh continues to tolerate the twelve^our day in railroading and steel making, it will get only the tired-out leavings of some of its best men.
My generalization, then, is that if the civic responsibility of democracy in an industrial district is to be met, the community should do what a first-rate industrial concern would do — figure out the ground it can cover effectively and gear its social machinery so to cover it. By social machinery 1 mean hospitals, schools, ser- vice to householders; all that wkle range of activities that have a direct bearing on the living conditions of a people. It should hold these agencies accountable for results, as business enterprises are held accountable; and its touchstone should be the welfare of the average citizen. Unless a wage-earning population is so insured against disease, its vigor and effectiveness so conserved, the com- munity is not meeting its responsibility toward the industries which d^)end upon these workers for output nor its responsibility toward the workers who depend upon these industries for livelihood.
In turn, the democracy should see to it that the industries neither cripple nor exploit, but develop, the working force which constitutes the great human asset of the community — a communal resource worth conserving to the utmost c^ its potential good.
Finally, if such a program is to be carried out in an Ameri- can and democratic way, the workers themselves must have greater leeway in which to bear their share cf the burdens and responsibility.
In America
For who, after all, is to carry out such a program for wcH-kshop
and community? To go back to our original parallel, the Krupp
name has stood not only for concern for hunuin welfare, but for a
scheme of autocratic control. More than one American visitor
has drawn huge breaths of relief on getting away to Dussddorf,
or other of the Cernun towns whose democratic achievement has
fairly matched that c^ the industrial over^cHds d Essen. As
* ByingtoD, Margairt F.: c^. dt, pp. 145 IT.
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COMMUNITY AND WORKSHOP
this volume goes to press, all western Europe is wrestling to shake dynastic militarism from the shoulders of the common life. With us, the age long struggle for newer and more liberal equilibriums asserts itself in industry.
In the days of its height, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers paid small heed to the needs of the day la- borers in the mills. Today many a highly organized craft has little concern except for its own terms of work. The brewery work- ers and mine workers are exceptions and not only indude all laborers in brew-house and mine in their scheme of organization, but stand for safety and sanitation along with hours and wages. But in general, in wage-eaming Pittsburgh, these human considera- tions are being pmnoted from above. Not only has the Steel Cor- poration— the largest employer in the District and the largest in the United States — set about the rehabilitation of the housekeeping and healthfulness of its great plants, cut down accidents, elimi- nated infection, and created a compensation scheme in advance of state legislation, but the influence of these things is reacting favorably upon the mill towns. Sanitary committees of the mills ask the borough health officers how they are protecting the milk that goes to the families of the mill workers. Seven thousand men co-operated on these committees of the Steel Corporation last year. This has meant not only an advance in physical upkeep, but in human understanding between different grades of workmen, foremen and superintendents. Yet if the workers who are now asked to co-operate in locating washrooms and guarding flywheels set out to concern themselves with the hours they work, or the pay they get, the scheme of co-operation breaks down. Meetings are spied upon and halls closed. "Trouble breeders" lose their jobs. They are in a belated new-world Essen, more scientific in its welfare work, but as autocratic in its benevolent dictation. Profit sharing and pensi<Mi schemes, however excellent in other ways, are in themselves so devised as to constrict self-assertion. Aroused stock- holders have helped eliminate the seven-day week but have failed to dislodge the twelve-hour day. Yet if the workers themselves should organize to take up the agitation where these stockholdo^ left off, they would meet not only with inertia but with reprisal.
Meanwhile forces more powerful even than these policies of repressu)n have banked workmen down upon one another. The 29
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WAGE-EARNING PiTTSBURCH
changes in machinery which have eliminated much craftsmanship and created a great mass of semi-skilled work, have as it were, shaken down intelligence like a quickening leaven into the body of insecure labor — and we find creedal and racial animosities, differ- ences of language and grade of skill sunk in common protest like that which marked the mass strike of Westinghouse employes in Turtle Creek valley in this summer of 1914.
Approaching the situation from three widely separate quarters. Prof. Commons, Mr. Woods and Dr. Roberts, all three, forecast five years ago this emergence of the under-men, the upward thrust of whose aspiration has yet to stagger the steel industry.
In the community life, a situation not without its analogies presents itself. I n the swelling Socialist vote and the spread of the single tax, in the movement for popular control over municipal affairs and in the collective action of small churches which have broken with the leadership of some of the largest and most estab- lished congregations, we have so many manifestations of fresh alignments, based on broader reaches of the social order, less patient with the forces which have dominated Pittsbui^'s growth, far from united as to things to be done, but tractable through neither the old type of ward politics, nor the ordinary tuggings of financial leading strings.
Both in industry and civic life, then, Pittsburgh in 1 9 1 4— even more sharply than when the first investigators of the Pittsburgh Survey went into the field in 1907 — presents the clash between the Old World and the New. It puts the question whether the domi- nating group thrown into power by the process of the last half century is to set the meets and bounds of life and labor, and, battened down by its policies, we shall have in Pittsburgh the great flaring up of a repressed and divided people; or whether in shop and borough, in trade group and city, through new contacts of understanding, new opportunities for growth and prosperity broad enough to embrace all men, democracy will yet merge the elements which make up congregate industry ; and like the old time puddler's ball of raw metal, a new generation will "come to nature."
The five years since the first publication of the findings of
the Pittsburgh Survey have brought marked gains in the fashioning
of life in the Pittsburgh District and in the nation. Nonetheless,
now as then, the challenge of social circumstance holds for both.
30
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■n by Joseph SIrlla
As Men See America II
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II RACE STUDIES
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|
UoUurTamvu |
5ss?ia |
Wh'SJ'phooio or FOUtCNOK |
Wsm Stock |
||||
|
NnmbB |
Ptrent |
Sumbtr |
Pit ant |
N,-Atr |
PtrctM (ion |
||
|
EocUib and Cdtk . . |
3J.4S« |
.5.3 |
73.3M |
38.4 |
108*40 |
J1.8 |
..-l |
|
"■SSii .... |
"t |
JI.6 |
"■'1 |
'". |
■"■;i; |
'" |
'". |
|
Total .... |
30^7. |
11.7 |
71.000 |
37 -S |
ioaJ71 |
30.8 |
■ 9.1 |
|
SwcdUb .... gST" : |
1,370 |
-0 |
"'II |
\ |
1,501 |
.8 |
.■.;. |
|
Toul .... |
IA.3 |
1.1 |
1.431 |
■1 1 J.034 |
I.D |
.6 |
|
|
LatlD and Gnk French '.'.'.'. Gran .... |
14.198 ■48 |
.0.1 |
B,l8« 1.1 |
4-3 |
946 |
6.7 |
": |
|
Total .... |
.6.410 |
11.7 |
I0,»03 |
S-7 |
27.113 |
8.3 |
S.1 |
|
Slovak .... Sovenian. I^^l^^.pedecd' |
10.&06 \'^ 1.04a •:i 1. 6 IB |
r. |
14.246 i,M6 log |
■9 |
J4.8M 048 |
lO.J -4 1-4 |
6,s ■ i I-S |
|
Total .... |
3»,.46 |
3T.{, |
11.894 |
ii.]> |
fii.040 |
18.7 |
11.6 |
|
UuclBHlSed Armenian. ^TianandAc^de . . AUothet: |
IT.iOS 2.716 4^ |
1-9 |
8.M8 1.083 173 |
" |
10AJ6 3,790 70 & S |
6.3 |
|
|
Total .... |
16.007 |
II.4 |
9,303 |
4.9 |
IS.400 |
7.6 |
4.7 |
|
Unknown .... |
IJ47 |
.9 |
1,764 |
.9 |
3.011 |
-0 |
.6 |
|
Gnnd total. . . |
140.436 |
100.0 |
101.4S3 |
100.0 |
331.019 |
lOO-O |
62.2 |
This table is compiled froin statistics presented in Volume I of tlie reporta of the ThirtEcnth Census. By "foreign white stock", is meant all persons, wliether native or foreign born, one or both of whose parents were born abroad. The right liand column of the table shows penons of each specified mother tongue as a proportion of the total population of Pittsburgh.
That persons of Slavic and Lettic stock are present in lai^e numbers is one of the significant facts revealed by the table. In the foreign bom white population persons of Slavic or Lettic mother tongue outnumber personsin any other major group; in the native born population of foreign or mixed parenlage, persons of Slavic or Lettic mother tongue are more numerous than persons in any major group lave Ihe groups composed, respec- lively, of persons of English or Celtic mother tongue and of persons of Germanic mother tongue.
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
Peter Roberts
THE day laborer of a generation ago is gone, — a change which has been swifter and more complete in Pittsburgh than in many other of our industrial centers. "Where are your Irish? your Welsh? your Germans? your Americans?" 1 asked an old mill hand. "Go to the city hall and the police station," he said. "Some of them are still in the better paid jobs in the mills; but mostly you'll have to look for them among the doctors and lawyers, office holders, clerks, accountants, salesmen. You'll find them there."
The day laborer in the mills today is a Slav. The foreign bom of the steel district include, it is true, representatives of every European nation, but 1 shall deal here only with the races from southeastern Europe, which for twenty-five years have been stead- ily displacing the Teutonic and Keltic peoples in the rough work of the industries. The tendency of the Italians is to go into con- struction, railroad work, and the mines, rather than into the plants and yards; and my group narrows itself down to the dominant Magyar, Slav, and Lithuanian. What 1 have to say of them in Pittsburgh and Allegheny City is in the main true of them in the manufacturing towns of the whole District.
Roughly speaking, one-quarter of the population of Pitts- burgh is foreign bom." The foreigner is nowhere more at home than here, and nowhere has he been more actively welcomed by employers. The conflict of customs and habits, varying standards of living, prejudices, antipathies, all due to the confluence of representatives of different races of men, may be witnessed here. The whole territory is thrown into a stem stmggle for subsistence
* In 1910 foreign-boni whites comprised a6 per cent of the population aod Negroes about j per cent.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
and wage standarxls by the displacements due to these resistless accretions to the ranks of the workers. The moral and religious life of the city is equally affected by this inflow of peoples. The most backward of them are superstitious and ignorant, victims of cunning knaves and unscrupulous parasites. Their religious train- ing differs widely from that of peoples of Protestant antecedents, and institutions that were dear to the founders of the city are fast being undermined by the customs of immigrants from southeastern Europe. Yet as a whole, they bring with them physical and cul- tural resources which as yet, in any large sense, the English-speak- ing community fails to elicit or thoughtlessly wastes.
An exhaustive study of the immigrant population of the steel district is outside the limits of this chapter. I shall set down only what a month brought me as I visited lodging houses, courts, and the mills of Greater Pittsburgh ; as I talked with priest and leader, policeman and doctor, banker and labor boss; but I shall present the facts in the light of many years' residence in the anthracite coal communities, where, in another section of Pennsyl- vania, at Mahanoy City and Wilkesbarre and Scranton, I have known the Slav and the Lett and their efforts to gain a foothold in America. I shall deal with the situation not as it appeared on visits during the hard times of 1907-08, when the immigrants re- turned home by the thousands, nor in the recurrent depression of 1914; but as I came to know it in the heyday of prosperity, the early fall of 1907. This is the situation with which the interven- ing years have had much in common and with which we must reckon in a permanent way.
In 1880 Slavs, Lithuanians, Hungarians, and Italians formed less than 1 per cent of the population in Pittsburgh [including Allegheny]. By 1890 these peoples, with the other immigrant ele- ments from Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Russia, had reached 3 percent; by 1900, 6percent; by 1910. 13 per cent. By 1900 over one-fourth of the foreign-bom population of the two cities combined came from the four countries named. The movement of the Teu- tonic and Keltic races had practically ceased. The 1910 census*
*The foreigD-bom whites in rgio numbered 140,4)6, an increase in ten yean of aj.soi. or aa.a per cent. In the same decade the total population of Greater Piitsburgh increased only 18 per cent (froni4ji,;ia to^jj.^oj). It should be noted that ibe increase in the total population <m the entire county was over JO per cent.
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
shows an actual decrease of i,;i4 (from 33,839 to 33,32$) in the number of foreign-bom whites from Great Britain and Ireland, irtiile the number of whites bom in Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Russia had increased from 29,87$ in 1900 to 68,487 in 1910. They constituted practically one-half of the foreign bom — ^49 per cent — a proportion all but tmce as great as in 1900.
Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants lead the list from these countries. Lithuanians, Croatians, Servians, Slovaks, and Ruthen- ians are numbered by the thousands, and Magyars, Greeks, Bohemians, and Roumanians are here in lesser groups.
Detailed figures for immigrants from Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Russia follow in tabular form.
TABLE 2. — POPULATION OF AUSTRIAN, HUNGARIAN, ITAUAN, AND RUSSIAN NATIVITY. PITTSBURGH, 1900 AND igiO*
|
ComtOry of Birth |
E>Eit50NS OF Each Specified Nativity in |
PerCbht Increasb |
|
|
1900 |
1010 |
||
|
Austriab Hongaiy [laly Riusiac |
117.4 UJ-o 117-4 1J3-9 |
||
|
Toul |
a!Ml75 |
«I.h87 |
129.3 |
|
Vmma born as apecified as a per- MDtage of the entire foreign-born white popuUtion of Pittsburgh . |
a6 |
49 |
■United States Census, 1900 and 1910.
t> Including Austrian Poland and Bohemia.
^Including Russian Poland,
It must not, however, be forgotten that Jews and Germans form a large proportion of the foreign bom from Austria, Hungry, and Russia.
The "nwther tongue statistics" gathered in the last census are interesting in tlus connection. In Pittsburg out of the total of fordgn-bom whites 37.9 per cent spoke "Slavic and Lettic" tODgues, and of these more than half were Pola. Immigraflts speaking "Endi^ and Celtic" tongues formed a^.3 per cent; German-speaUng immigrants, ai.o per cent; Italian-spealung imnugrants, lai percent;aodiiiimigranuwliospokeYiddisfaorHebrcw,9.i percent. SeeT;"
Yiddish or Hebrew, 9.1 per centrSee Table 1, 35
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The representatives of these nations touch elbows in the streets, so that the languages heard on Saturday night when the people are marketing in the foreign quarters are as numerous as those in a seaport town. Twenty dialects are spoken. Yet the polygbt mass that confuses the visitor and induces pessimistic impressions as to the future of the city is each morning marshalled to work without tumult. The discipline of the industrial estab- lishments converts this babel of tongues into one of the chief forces of production. Therein lies an appraisal not only of the American entrepreneur, but also of the adaptability of these men coming from nations of low efficiency, who are able so quickly to fall into line and keep step in an industrial army of remarkable discipline and output.
In normal times every day brings its quota of immigrants; occasionally they come by carioads. The records of the ports of entry show that in 1907, 187,618 persons gave Pittsburgh as their destination, but many of these scattered to the neighboring Pennsylvania tovms and many undoubtedly went to the mills and mines of eastern Ohio. The city ts a distributing point and owing to this shifting of the newcomers the outflow may often equal the inflow. Conditions in local industries determine which of these two currents runs the swifter.
Before taking up the living conditions in Pittsburgh as they especially affect these immigrant laborers, let us consider for a moment certain of their characteristics and their relation to the general economic situation. First, it is the wages that bring them here.* The workers on the hills of Galicia, in the vineyards of Italy, and the factories of Kiev, earn from 25 to 50 cents in a day. When the American immigrant writes home that he earns from {1.50 to f3.oo, the ablebodied wage-earner in the fatherland who hears this will not be satisfied until he also stands where the higher
* The Federal Immigration Commission, on the basis of its natbn-wide inquiiy in 1907, reiched the same generaliution as Dr. Roberts and Mr. Koukol (p. Bo) u to Ibe ecoDOcnic motive in present day immigration:
"While social conditions alFect the situation in some countries, the present immigration from Europe to the United Slates is in the largest measure due to economic causes. It should be slated, however, that emigration from Europe is not now an absolute economic necessity, and as a rule those who emigrate to the United States are impelled by a desire for betterment rather than by the neceuity for escainng intolerable conditions." Abstracts of Eteports of the Immigration CcHnmissioa, p. 15. Washington, 191 1.
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
wages govern, [t is these homegoing letters more than all else which Tecniit the labor force. They are eifident promoters of immigration. Said Big Sam to me, in his broken English, " There are no ablebodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town in Servia; they have all come to America."
When prosperity is at flood, the men in charge of furnaces, foundries, forges, and mills in the Pittsburgh District, can not get the help they need. The cry everywhere is: "Give us men." A foreman, therefore, will assure Pietro and Melukas that if brothers or cousins or friends are sent for, they will get work as soon as they arrive. More than that, the Slav and Italian are no longer de- pendent upon the English boss in the matter of finding work for their countrymen. The inflow from southeastern Europe has assumed such proportions in the industries of the cities that super- intendents have, in some instances, appointed Italian and Polish and Lithuanian foremen; and with these, as with German and Irish, blood is thicker than water. They employ their fellow-coun- trymen. They know the condition of the labor market and can by suggestion stimulate or retard immigration.
The tonnage industries of Pittsburgh have expanded tre- mendously in the last two decades. Such industries need strong manual laborers as do no others. The Slavs have brawn for sale. Herein, at bottom, is the drawing force which accounts for such a moving in of peoples and the readiness with which they find their places in the specialized industries of the District. Pittsburgh has clamorous need for these men. Take the average Lithuanian, Croatian, Ruthenian, or Slovak, and his physique compares favor- ably with that of any people. Most of the immigrants are from agricultural communities. Their food in the fatheriand is coarse, their habits are simple, their cares few. They have an abundance of vegetable diet, pure water, pure air, and sunshine, and they develop strong physical organisms. Taking them as a whole, we get the best of the agricultural population. The day has not yet come when the weak emigrate and the strong stay at home. No ship agents, however active, can reverse the natural order of the tide of immigration, and natural selection supple- mented by federal scrutiny gives us a body of men physically most fit for the heaviest demands made by our industries. Nowhere has this been better illustrated than in Pittsburgh. 37
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
These men come to be "the hewers of wood and drawers of water." There are representatives of each race far removed from the lowest industrial stratum; but taking these people as a whole, the bulk of the unskilled labor in the city — ^the digging and carrying in the street, the heavy labor in the mill, the loading and unloading of raw material on railroad and river, the rough work at forge and foundry, the coarse work around the factory, and the lifting necessary in the machine shop — is performed by them.
This is the level at which they enter the economic order. What trade equipment do they bring into the work with themP Their industrial efficiency is low and I should estimate that 9$ per cent have no knowledge of modem machinery or methods of modem production; they are children infactory training. Further, those who have trades find themselves in an industrial environ- ment where their previous training is of little value. They are ignorant of the English language, and the few mechanics and trades- men among them because of this ignorance can do no better than join the ranks of the common laborers. We must bear in mind, however, that those who know how to use tools, once they are put to work that requires some skill adapt themselves quickly to it. Hence we meet not a few Slavs and Lithuanians who do work of a semi-skilled nature; nor does the exceptional man stop there. Sons, also, of men of these nationalities who settled in the city a generation ago have risen to positions of standing in the industries. It is not unusual to hear of this man or that who has become a fore- man in the mills or taken a place in business or in the professions.
But on several counts the average Slav, Lithuanian, and Italian is not as acceptable a day laborer as was the immigrant from northwestern Europe. The common opinion of American employers is that the newer immigrants are stupid and that the supervisory force must be much larger than that required for English-speaking help. Many employers would no doubt prefer the latter; but for the wages they offer they must take the Slav or mn short-handed. The United States immigration agent in Pittsburgh is constantly besieged by employers of labor who need help. Many stories are told of one firm stealing a group of laborers marshalled at the port of entry for another.
The influence which letters and money sent home have
38
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IMMIGEIANT WAGE-EARNERS
in recruiting immigrant workmen has been spoken of. These people make little or no use of labor agencies, unless the saloon and the small bank may be so denominated. In each nationality there are acknowledged leaders who play the part of intermedi- aries between superintendents and their people. But such investi- gations as I have made at Ellis Island do not lead me to believe that the employers of labor in Pittsburgh violate the contract labor law.* Labor agencies in New York City make a specialty <rf distributing Slavs, Lithuanians, and Italians to firms in need of hands. The leader who supplies men to a mill or mining concern gets so much for each man supplied. Whatever contract there may be is executed this side of the water. For instance, I found a leading Croatian who had a specific understanding with one of the mills of Pittsburgh that all men he brought would find employment. No coatnct was executed and in the opinion of the local immigra- tion agent there was in the proceeding no violation of the contract labor law.
The drawbacks to the new day laborer as such have been stated. On the other hand, it is a common opinion in the Dis- trict that some employers of labor give the Slavs and Italians preference over English-speaking applicants because of their docility, their habit of silent submission, their amenability to discipline, and their willingness to work long hours and overtime without a murmur. These foreigners as a rule earn the lowest wages and work the full stint of hours; in the machine shops they work sixty hours a week; at the blast furnaces twelve hours a day for seven days in the week with a twenty-four-hour turn every fortnight. The common laborer in and around the mills works nominally a ten-hour day, but overtime is the rule rather than the exception when trade is good. The unit of wages is an hour rate for day labor, and a Slav is willing to take the longer hours (twelve hours a day for men who may have worked fourteen and sixteen on the farms in the fatherland). In 1907 possibly 60 to 70 per cent of the laborers in the mills came out Sundays for the purpose
• In the wMIem district of Pennjylvania, there have been instituted by the Hailed States attorney within ten years 33 suits for violation of the contract labor law, of which one was pending in June, igi). Of the remaining 31, 31 were di»- <mitinued under direction of the attorney general and one was carried through with the result that a verdict of {i.ooo and costs was secured.
39
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
of clearing the yards and repairing.* In one mill I found Russians (Greek Orthodox) in favor for the reason that they ^dly worked on Sundays.
My belief is that certain employers of labor have reaped advantage from racial antipathies. For instance, the Pole and the Lithuanian have nothing in common and each of them despises the Slovak. Superintendents know this and use their knowledge when foreigners are likely to reach a common understanding upon wages or conditions of labor. These considerations have helped make it less difficult for factory operators to keep open shop and non- union shop in Pittsburgh. The constant influx of raw material fr(Hn backward nations into the industries of the city has had somewliat the same elTect as the flow of water in an estuary when the tide is rising. All is ccMnmotion. This conditicm will exist as b>ng as the inflow <^ Slavs and Italians continues as it has in the last decade. But when they have become permanratly placed and their workaday intelligence and grasp of American condi- tions rise, racial prejudices will give way to common interests. When this time comes, accustomed as they are to association for protection and to following directions, Pittsburg will witness the rise of stnmger labor organizations than were ever effected by TeuttHi and Kelt.
We have seen, then, the Slavic day laborers coming into the steel district in vast numbers. Of their strength and their lack of skill at the outset there is no doubt. We have noted some of the snap judgments that are current about them; such as, that they are stupid and submissive. And we have noted also some of their potentialities which must be reckoned with «i masse in the future. All this puts us in position to get the bearings of my flrst statement that it is the wages that bring them to Pittsburgh, and to see what advances they are able to make once they have gained a foothtdd. The Slav enters the field at a rate of pay for day labor which is higher than that which brought the Germans and the Kelts. The lowest wage I found Slavs working for was i^}4 cents an hour.
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
The wage of common labor in a majority of the steel mills in 1907 was 15 or i6>^ cents for a ten- or a twelve-hour day.*
But the newcomers know nothing of a standard wage, and when work is scarce they will offer to work for less than is paid for common labor. Such was the case with a band of Croatians who offered their services to a firm in Pittsburgh for $1 .20 a day. When the superintendent heard it he said, " My Cod, what is the country coming to? How can a man live in Pittsburgh on $1.20 a day?" The foreman replied, "Give them rye bread, a herring, and beer, and they are all right." (I have known a coal operator in the anthracite fields to pay Italians and Slovaks 90 cents a day. and ask neither what was the country coming to nor how they could subsist.)
More, the Slavs will consciously cut wages in order to get work. A man who knows something about blacksmithing or carpentering will work at a trade for little more than half the standard wage of the District. They count their money in the denominati(»is of the fatherland and estimate its value according to old country standards. Some foremen take advantage of this. Again, skilled men will at the command of the boss render menial services without a murmur. "These fellows have no pride," said an American craftsman to me; " they are not ruled by custom. When the foreman demands it they will throw down the saw or hammer and take the wheelbarrow."
So the Slav gains his foothold in the Pittsburgh industries, and while gaining it he undermines the income of the next higher industrial group and incurs the enmity of the Americans. Shrewd superintendents are known not only to take advantage of the influx of unskilled labor to keep down day wages, but to reduce the pay of skilled men by a gradually enforced system of promoting the Slavs. In the place of six men at |io a day, one will be employed at $1 $, with five others at half, or less than half, the old rate, who will work under the high-priced man. Inventions, changes in processes, new machines, a hundred elements tend to complicate the situation and render it difficult to disentangle the influence c4 any one element. But this much is clear: the new immigra-
* For pment rates, see Commoni, John R.: Wage-earnen of Pittsburgh. P. ii9ofth)SvoluiDe.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
tton is a factor which is influencing the economic status of the whole wage-eaming population in Pittsburgh; it is bound to be a permanent factor; and its influence will be more and not less.
It is a mistake to imagine that the Slav or Lithuanian can not adapt himself to modem industrial conditions. Possibly 20 per cent of these laborers from southeastern Europe now work at machines, the skill needed to operate which requires a week or two weeks to acquire. To be sure, they are machines "so simple that a child could operate them, and so strong that a fool can not break them." Many Slovaks work for the Pressed Steel Car Company in Allegheny, as riveters, punchers, and pressmen, while others are' fitters, carpenters, and blacksmiths. Some Croatians and Servians are rising and are found in the steel mills as roughers and catchers. I saw Ruthenians feeding machines with bars of white-^ot steel. It was simple, mechanical work, but of a higher grade than that of scrap-carrier. The Poles who during recent years have emigrated from Russia and Austria-Hungary are as industrially efficient as any group of immigrants and work in both mills and foundries.
A forei^er who has a chance to become a machine operator generally goes into piece work and in 1907 his earnings were likely to average from I2.00 to {2.50 a day. But all men at the machines are not on piece work. A foreman explained this to me as follows : " If the machine depends upon the man for speed, we put him on piece work; if the machine drives the man, we pay him by the day." The man operating a machine by the day got from $1.75 to f2.oo. Many boys and young women of Slavic parentage work in the spike, nut and bolt, and steel wire factories. They sat before ma- chines and pickling urns for ten hours and received from 75 cents to $1.00 a day.
The Slovak riveters, punchers, shearsmen, and pressmen in the Pressed Steel Car Company's plant were paid by the piece and for the most part made from f 3; to $50 in two weeks.* Fitters, carpenters, blacksmiths, and painters were getting from $2.00 to $2.50 by the day. A Slavic banker told me of Croatians and Ser-
* A pooling system, accompanied by rale cuts, which was put in effect in 1909, led to a proloDged stnkc in which Sii\s and Americans joined forces. See Tbt SuT^, XXll: 656-663 (August 7, 1909).
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vians who made as high as ¥70 in two weeks, and others who made between $3.00 and ^.00 a day — many of them in positions which once paid En^ish-speaking workmen twice those sums. High and low are relative terms and they signify very different standards to a Slav and to an American.
There is much that inspires to prophecy in the sight of the thousands of Slavs already doing efficient worit in the mills. The sooner the English-speaking workers recognize this and make friends of these workers, the better. No class of work is now mo- nopolized by Teuton and Kelt, and the service rendered by the Slav and Lithuanian will b^ore many years equal that of the for- mer in market value.
With this rapid statement of the economic position of the Slavs, we can more intelligently approach the problem of their living OHiditions. But first let us bear sharply in mind that their work is often cast among dangers; is often inimical to health. Many work in intense heat, the din of machinery, and the noise of escaping steam. The congested condition of most of the plants in Pittsburgh adds to the physical discomforts for an out- of-doors people, while their ignorance of the language and of modem machinery increases the risk. How many of the Slavs, Lithuanians, and Italians were injured in Pittsburgh in one year noone could tell me in 1907. No reliable statistics were compiled. In their absence people guessed and the mischief wrought by contradictory and biased statements was met with on alt hands. When I mentioned to a priest a plant that had a bad reputation he said, "Oh, that is the slaughter house; they kill than there every day." I quote htm not for his accuracy, but to show how rumors circulate and are real to the people themselves. Exag- {^rated though such hearsay was, the waste in life and limb has for years been great — and so continues — and if it had all fallen upon the native bom a cry would have gone up long since which would have stayed the slaughter.*
* Of tbe }OOindiuImlfaUliIie» inoneycarin Allegheny County (J "'y ■■ 'QOiS. to June )o, iQo?), gathered by the E*ittsbuTgh Survey from the coronePs office, the einplover. aixftne family, 291 were foreign bom. See. in this volume, Kellogg. Paul U.: Community and workshop, p. 34; Porter, op. cil.. page 345;
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In the matter of oimpensation for injuries, the American workman has been and remains at sore disadvantage under Penn- sylvania laws, but the foreign speaking has been subjected to ad- ditional injustice.*
Up to 191 1, if the widow of a man killed in a mine or mUl of Pennsylvania lived in Europe she could not recover any dam- ages,t even though the accident were entirely due to the ne^ect of the company. Because of this ruling, certain strong companies in the Pittsburgh District seldom paid a cent to the relatives of the de- ceased if they dwelt beyond the seas. 1 asked a leader among the Italians, "Why do you settle the serious cases for a few hundred dtdlars?" He replied: "We find it best after much bitter ^tperi- ence. The courts are against us; a jury will not mulct a corpora- tion to send money to Europe; the relatives are not here to bewail their loss in court; the average American cares nothing for the foreigner. Every step of the way we meet with prejudices and find positive contempt, from those in highest authority in the courts down to the tipstaff. When I settle for $300, 1 can do noth- ing better."
The influence of the industries reaches still further into the lives of the immigrants. Each people has a tendency to colonize in one section of the city and to work in some one mill. The Bohemians are strong in Allegheny City, but few of them are found in Pittsburgh. The Slovaks predominate in McKees Rocks and Allegheny Gty, and many of ihem are found in the Soho dis- trict of Pittsburgh. The Poles are numerous in many parts of the Greater City. The Lithuanians live in large numbers on the South Side and near the National Tube Works and the American Steel and Wire Company. Many Ruthenians work in the Oliver
PitubuTgb Survey.) An appendix therein presenti the accident prevention work carried on by the cotutituent companies of the Steel Corporation — the largest employer of the Diitricl — under » central safety committee appointed April, igO&. Certain progressive employeis, as the Pittsburgh Steel Company, had car^ lier addrtsHd themselves to some phases of the ptoblem; more have done so since. But there is no local or state compilation of accident statistics that amounts to anything, and the public remains in ignorance as to the current human kMS in iikdustty.
*See p, 34, thb volume.
t This law of 1911 provides that when an alien dies from injuries the bus- band, widow, parents, or children of such alien, although residing abroad at the time of tbe injury, can recover damages.
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New PiTTseuRGHERs AND Old
Uniformed national socielies in Ihe scsqui-centennial parade in t^9. Two hjghlanden,
represenrative of ihe older immigration, at ihc lower right
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Basin Allev In the Italian quarter on Ihe Hill, Pittsburgh
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Steel Works, while the Croatians and Servians have worked for the most part in the Jones and Laughlin plants. My information is that other things being equal, foremen try to get one nationality in assigning work to a group of laborers, for they know that a homogeneous group will give them the best results. National pride also enters into selection. In talking to a Lithuanian of the serious loss of life which had occurred when a furnace blew up, I asked, "Were any of your people killed in that accident?" He answered quickly, " No; catch our people doing such work as that ! There you find the Slovak." Of the grades of unskilled labor, the Slovak, Croatian, Servian, and Russian (Greek Orthodox) may be said to perform tasks the roughest and most risky, and the most injurious to health. There is, then, a more or less natural selection of peoples in the neighborhood of the different great mills.
The geographical contour of the region has also had its influence in keeping the foreign population within certain limited districts. The two rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, have cut their beds into the Allegheny range, leaving a narrow strip of land on either side of their banks which offers limited sites for dwellings, mills, and factories. The lowlands were pre- empted long ago, and the contest for parts of them between the mills and the homes has been intense. There is an advantage to the employer, however, in having his crude labor force within easy call, and night work and the cost of carfare help keep the mass of men employed in common labor near the mills and on the con- gested lowlands. 1 visited homes of Slavs and Lithuanians which were clean, well furnished, and equal in comfort to those of Ameri- cans of the same economic level. These foreigners had been in the country many years and their children had become thoroughly assimilated.
But our first concern is with the recent comers, who too often live in lodgings that are filthy: whose peasant habits seem to us uncouth; and whose practices are fatal to decency and morality in a thickly settled district.
Yet the foreigner pays a higher rent than does the "white man." In Bass Street, Allegheny City, English-speaking tenants were paying $15 a month for four rooms, but Slavs were charged 45
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
fso; othen paid |io and $I3 a month for houses for which Slavs were charged f 17 and J18. On Penn Avenue a Slav paid $17 for three rear rooms, while an English-speaking family renting ei^t rooms in the front of the building paid but ¥33. One family paid 99.50 for one large room in an old residence on the South Side; another paid $10 for two rooms, another }i6 for three; and on Brandt Street a man was found who paid {22 a month for four.
The rent is not always fixed by the landlord. Where lodgers are taken it is sometimes regulated by the number the " boarding boss" can crowd in, the landlord getting $1 .00 a nwnth extra for each boarder. Many houses of from eight to 12 rooms had in them anywhere from three to six families. They were built for one family, and until such time as the owners might be forced by the bureau of health to install sanitary appliances, there was every prospect that they would have equipment for but one. Too many landlords when they deal with foreigners have ap- parently one dominating passion — rent. They make no repairs, and with the crowded condition above described the houses soon bear marks of ill usage. Whenever foreigneis invade a neighbor- hood occupied by English-speaking tenants, property depreciates. The former occupants get out, the invaders multiply, and often the properties pass into the hands of speculators. Houses once occupied by Slavs can seldom be rented again to Angk>^axons.
It is in the immigrant lodging houses that conditions are the worst, though not always so with the choice of the men. The Croatians, Servians, Roumanians, and Greeks have only from 5 to 10 per cent of women among them; hence the men of these nationalities have but few boarding houses conducted by their own people to go to, and crowding is inevitable. English-speaking and German families will not open their doors to them. Single men in groups of from six to 30 go into one house in charge of a boarding boss and his wife. Each man pays from 75 cents to $1 .00 a week for a place to sleep and the little cooking and washing that are to be done. Accounts of food for the company are kept in one book, and every two weeks the sum total is divided equally among the boarders, each man paying his pro raia share. The bill for two weeks will hardly amount to $3.00 a man, so that the average boarder will spend perhaps $10 a month on room rent
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and maintenance. When men pay $3.^0 for room rent, soup is included in the contract.* The mania for saving results in many cases in skimping on the necessaries of life. A priest told me of a Lithuanian who spent 10 cents a day for food and by helping the landlady in her housework saved his room rent. A number of Rus- sians on Tustine Street were paying $3.00 a month for room rent; they bought bread made by Russian Jews, got a herring and a pot of beer, and lived — not always — in peace.
Ekimestic tragedies sometimes invade these communal households, such as a case of assault and battery which came up in an alderman's ofhce. The complainant was a single man who appeared with a ghastly scalp wound. When his boarding boss had presented his bill at the end of two weeks, the charges were ^5.00 more than the boarder thought they should be. He pro- tested and the boarding boss took a hatchet to silence him.
In these boarding establishments the kitchen is commonly used as a bedroom. When the boarding boss rents two rooms, he and his wife sleep in the kitchen, and the boarders take the other room. It is not altogether unusual for a boarding boss to rent but one room. He and his wife put their bed in one comer, the stove in another, and the boarders take the remaining comers. Sometimes the rooms are so crowded that the boss and his wife sleep on the floor; and cases were repeatedly to be found where beds were being worked double shift — night and day. The city bureau of health in 1907 endeavored to reduce the number of beds in a room, but it did not follow that the people occupjang that room got out, — they slept on the floor minus the bed. The prob- lem is one of the hardest that sanitary inspectors have to cope with.
Sometimes four or six men rent a house and run it them- selves, doing their own cooking and washing and occasionally bringing in a woman to clean a little. They may stand this for about six months and then leave when the rooms are past cleaning. Such crowding is very prevalent in the low-lying parts of the South Side, in the neighborhood of Penn Avenue in the city
* For a man extended presenlation of the boardinsboss syitem, tee B)iiigton, Marguet F.: Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town, pp. 138-140. (The nttslnir^ Survey.)
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
proper, and in sections of Allegheny. On Tustine Street I found 33 Russians, composing three families, living in one house of six rooms and an attic. The Croatians also crowd badly. A milk dealer told me of 38 who lived in a small house in Carey Alley. When 1 asked, " How do they live?" his reply was, " I don't know and don't care if I get my money for my milk." His reply summed up the attitude of many of the English-speaking people who have dealings with them. In Pork House Row and near Eckert Street in Allegheny, things were no better, and conditions in some blocks of houses under the California Avenue bridge were a:s bad as any seen. The Italians are close livers; but possibly the worst con- ditions I saw were among the Armenians in the neighborhood of Basin Alley.
Before we condemn immigrants, however, for the filth of their lodgings, we must remember that they are largely rural people unused to such city barracks, and that they are frequent sufferers from our own municipal neglect. This fact is illustrated especially by their ignorance of the danger of typhoid fever. Dr. Leon Sadowski estimated that as high as $0 per cent of all young foreigners who had come to Pittsburgh up to 1907, con- tracted typhoid within two yearsof their coming.* Dr. Maracovick told me that in four years no less than 100 Croatians in the neigh- borhood of Smallman Street had come down with the fever, and that most of them had died. " You can not make the foreigner believe that Pittsburgh water is unwholesome," said another physician. " He comes from rural communities where contamina- tion of water is unknown." Other physicians told of men who had been warned, deliberately going to the river to quench their thirst.
Where so many single men are huddled together the laws of decency and morality are hard to observe. The boarding boss seldom has a family and, in going the round of these houses, the absence of children is conspicuous. A physician who works among them said, " The average boarding boss's wife can not have any, — the moral conditions make it a physical impossibility."
* The municipal filtration plant which has overcome tbis lituition was first operated in 19116. Sec Wing, Frank £.: Thiny-five Yean of Typhoid. The Pittsburgh District, p. 6j.
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I * Room; Two in a Bed
IS writing home. Before him were piclures of
NiCHT Scene in a Slavic Lodging House Three men in the far bed, two in each of Ihe others, twelve in the room. In some of these lodgings day workers sleep at night in the beds occupied by night workers in the daytime
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ii
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She stands in striking contrast to the average Slavic woman who in her natural environment is the mother of children. These mid-European peoples are not so passionate as the Italians, but many of the single men, as is the case in all barracks life, will fall into vice. A physician toid me that gonorrhea is very prevalent among the Croatians and Servians ; another said of the Slavs in gen- eral, "They frequent cheap bawdy houses and come out diseased and robbed." Many brothels hereabouts are known as "Johnny Houses," for the reason that they are frequented by foreigners whose proper names are unpronounceable and who go by the name of "John." These were houses of the cheapest kind given over to prostitutes in the last stages.* The number entering them on a "wide-awake" (pay) Saturday night was large. A man who knew this section fairly well, said, "Sometimes these men have to wait their turn."
The presence of young immigrant women in the lodging houses adds to the seriousness of the situation. Here again it is a question of wages that brings them to this country. They do the drudgery in the hotels and restaurants which English-speaking ^rls will not do; and they are to be found in factories working under conditions which their English-speaking sisters would resent.f If any persons need protection, these young women do. There was no adequate inspection of the labor employment agen- cies in Pittsburgh, which solicit patronage among them, often to wrong them. Not only did some of these agencies make a practice of taking their money but they sent girls to houses unfit for them. An innocent girl may leam the character of the house only when it is too late. And even if sent to the average immigrant lodging house her lot is a hard one, especially when the men of the place are on a carouse.
Slavs and Lithuanians are fond of drink and spend their money freely on it. Some spend more money on beer than they do on food. The evidences of drink in the homes were apparent on all sides. Empty beer kegs and bottles were to be seen every- where. In Lalimore Alley on a September morning, 1 counted
* Sm Forbes, James: Tbe Reverse Side. P. 307 of this volume. tSee Butler, Elizabeth B.* Women and the Trades, pp. 34-35. (The Pittsburfh Survey.)
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
20 empty kegs in one yard; and in another comer there was a pile of empty bottles. It is nothing unusual for a beer wagon on Saturday to deliver into one of these boarding houses from eight to r2 cases of beer. When a keg is opened the boarders feel that they must drain it. " It won't keep," they say. Sunday is the day for drinking. One man often drinks from 15 to 20 bottles, while he who drinks from the keg consumes from two to three gallons. The appalling size of these draughts is of course influ- enced by customs in the old country where beers are many times lighter than our intoxicating American brews.
No social gathering is complete without drink. Marriages, baptisms, social occasions, holidays are all celebrated with beer and liquor. There is no good time and no friendship without it. The Slavs usually rent a hall to celebrate their weddings. The scenes of debauchery with which such festivities sometimes end are discountenanced by the respectable element.
Not only do national customs and national tastes and usages make for drunkenness, but also the undeniable fact that the liquor saloons are the only American institutions which effectively reach the great mass of the non-English-speaking immigrants. For the young men pool rooms afford loafing places of the worst sort. The cheap vaudeville shows, nickelodeons, and skating rinks are run for profit and not for the sake of clean recreation such as the community should provide.
Where the environment of the home is insanitary and repul- sive, and where opportunities for recreation are limited and sordid, crime is bound to flourish. Approximately one-fifth of the persons incarcerated in Allegheny County in recent years have been immigrants from southeastern Europe. A visit to the police stations of the South Side on Sunday morning when the police magistrate dispenses justice after a "wide-awake" Saturday night, is a thing never to be forgotten.* In such a section the foreigners form a majority of the offenders. On one of my visits to a South Side court a young Slav was brought in who had vio- lated a city ordinance. He could not speak English. The magistrate asked him how long he had been in the country. " Four years," he replied. "And you can not talk English?" said • See Forbes, James: The Reverse Side. P. 378 of this volume.
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
the judge. " Don't you know that you ought to learn English that you may know we have laws and ordinances which must be obeyed?" In the judge's remark there was a deeper commentary on civic duties unfulfilled than he perhaps realized. Who was to blame? Was it the Slav boy? Or was it the community which had failed to meet him halfway?
Here it is well to point out that the public school authorities had not made any strenuous effort to open evening schools for foreign adults in the city. The notable exception to this rule was the work conducted by Principal J. W. Anthony among the^Jewish people of the Hill District, which grew out of classes at Columbian Settlement. Another evening school, in the establishment of which a priest was the prime mover, met with fair success for a time, but the foreigners dropped out quickly. When asked why the school was given up, one of the school officials said that the pupils did not want it to continue. Their hours of work, however, their fatigue, and changing shifts probably were more important factors. Kingsley House, Woods Run, and Columbian Settlement were carrying on successful classes for foreigners, and the Young Men's Christian Associations of the districts were only entering the field of civic and language instruction.* The development of the evening courses of the Carnegie Technical Schools had been sig- nificant, but as yet they had not reached unskilled immigrants, who need a nearby elementary help.
The camp school opened at Aspinwall in 190; by Miss Sarah Moore for the Society for the Protection of Italian Immi- grants, was the first of its sort in the country. This school and the later one carried on at Ambridge illustrated what could be dora, and what response could be looked for from the immigrants themsdves. More important still, these schools were in 1907 the means of securing the passage in Pennsylvania of legislation en-
* Dr. Robmi' npoit in 1907 as a member of a committee of the Penmyl- vania Young Men's Christian Association led to a recognition of Ibe importance of work for imoiiBrants by both state and national bodies. I^e was made secretary fotiftimigratiMioftbciKWlmlusiriai Department of the International Committee and this Pittsburgh investigation was his tint lield work as a baiis for mapping oat plans. In the years succeeding, there has been a remartuble expansion in the woric among foreigncn carried on by the Young Men's Christian Association io the Pittsburgh District. See Appendix HE, p.4i4of this volunte.—EDiTCM.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
abling local school authorities to open classes for adults. But in Greater Pittsburgh it remained true that the educational author- ities were not yet awake to the importance of opening schools for foreign-speaking people and inducing them to attend. Yet there could have been no greater service rendered these young foreigners (or the city that harbors them) than that of aiding them to form clubs, and of engaging competent men to teach them English and give them some idea of the history and laws of the country.*
In police station No. 3 on Penn Avenue, the cases averaged 44; a month during the ten months covered by my study. Drunk- enness and disorderly conduct predominated, and 27 per cent of the charges were brought against foreigners from southeastern Europe. Three-quarters of the accused were single men. The large number of single men among the foreigners who lack decent homes doubtless partly accounts for the frequency of their arrest. Similar proportions were found at station No. 7, Carson Street.
The docket of an alderman's court on the South Side, in an area where Slavs and Lithuanians form a large part of the population, showed that 40 per cent of the accused were of these nationalities; but these cases varied greatly from those in the police stations. His list tended to confirm the general report that the aldermen were giving preference to cases where fees were sure. Immigrants, ofttimes innocent, were the special prey of such as were unscrupulous. Even so, profits were not what they once had been. "The foreigner knows too much now; old times are past," a constable said. In the old times he had made from $1 ; to $20 a day. But even if the most flagrant abuses are now infrequent and if some of the aldermen are of good character, the system of irresponsible petty judges, dependent along with their court attendants upon the fees that come in, is wrong, and the foreigner is the most grievous sufferer from it.f
* See North. Lila Ver Planck : Ptttiburgh School*. The Pittsburgh District, p. 187. Also Kennard, Beulih: The New Kttsburgh School System. Ibid., p. 469. Action uken by the new central board of education in 1913, made night claue* an integral part of the lystem of public education. For a deicription of the work of Khool and home libraries among foreignera lee Olcott, Frances J.: The Public Library. The Pittsburgh District, p. 334.
t In 1911 by act of legislaturea county court with five judges wascstablisbed. In I^ttsbur^, it makes a resort to aldermanic courts in civil cases practically unnecesury. In spite of the feeling against aldermanic courts, it was found im-
52
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Young Russian
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
We must not, however, over-estimate the lawlessness among these people. We have seen the manner of life of the single men of the industrial army, and the dangers that beset them. What encouragement is there to the immigrant who seriously wants to get ahead in life? A priest estimated that one-tenth of the young men of his race who come to this District go to the bad; the other nine-tenths may drink more or less, but they manage to save money and in time acquire property. Of the Lithuanian families in Pittsburgh more than lo per cent own their homes. Many Poles and Slovaks also have purchased homes. When an Italian resolves to stay in this country, he buys a house. But in 1907 few Croatians, Ruthenians, and Servians owned real estate.
It must be remembered that there are influential Slavs and Lithuanians living in the better residential sections. Some Poles and Italians are in the professions, and some Lithuanians are prosperous business men. All these people, however, do business among their own countrymen, and as yet their influ- ence is largely restricted to this circle. The leading banks of Pitts- burgh have learned that immigrants save their money, and many of them have a foreign exchange department in charge of a foreign- speaking man who is a leader among his countrymen.
A banker doing business among the Servians stated that each pay day he sent back between ¥20,000 and ¥25,000 to the old coun- try. In September of 1907, one of the banks on the South Side where the foreigners do business had f6oo,ocio on deposit. Such a showing had come only after a vigorous campaign on the part of the banks of Pittsburgh to overcome the distrust which foreigners felt toward private institutions. 1 ndividual small banks conducted by men of their own lutionality were the rule for many years. The institutions were ephemeral and the impression prevailed among the laborers that they were schemes of sinister men to wheedle their money from them. Some men still secrete their savings, trusting no one.
poraible lo abotUli them immediately, both because of the strong political influence of the aldennen in their several winls and because » constitutional amendment is held to be necessary. So that in civil matters, wherever a litipnt is so disposed, and in criminal matters, the aldermen ply their activities as oif yore. The county court, which has proved eminently satisfactory to attom^s and the public, is regarded as an entenng wedge which will ultimately result in the abolishment of aidermanic courts in Pittsburgh. They continue to be the petty custodians of law and rights in the minor industiial communiliei of the State. See Blaxter, H. V.: The Aldermen and (heir Courts. The Rttsbur^ District, p. i}9. Alw Kellogg, op. dt., p. ij, and Forbes, op. cit., p. y^ of this volume.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
Through the courtesy of one ctf the Pittsburgh bankers, this table of 13 representative Slavic depositors is given:
|
TABLE }. — AMOUNTS |
DEPOSITED BY BANK. 1906-1 |
3 SLAVS 907 |
IN A PITTSBURGH |
||
|
Amounts Deposited During |
|||||
|
DtpniioTS |
Neormber |
March. anlMay |
Jily.cnd |
TtAat DtpotiUd |
|
|
A B C D E F C 1 c ; ; ; ; ! L |
$9i 103 45 ii 60 340 70 100 lOJ |
as •& too 60 IJO 190 jo |
>30 93 as 'd 100 60 SO 14s 300 90 |
lOS 7J SO »s 'IS 140 40 |
Ui7 J35 300 300 ajs SaS 300 |
The extent to which the new postal savings system has been utilized in Pittsburgh is shown in the following tabk:
TABLE 4.— POSTAL SAVINGS DEPOSITS AND DEPOSITORS BY RACE AND COUNTRY OF BIRTH OF DEPOSITORS, PITTSBURGH, JUNE 3O, 1913
|
Deposits |
Depositors |
|||
|
RauamdOmidty oj Birtb |
Avtragg AmoHiaptr DepotUor |
AmtmM |
NuwAtr |
PtrOm |
|
Native-bom white* |
I67.98 |
UtAii |
315 |
43-7 |
|
Forcigii-bon) whites bom in Russia . . . Italy Gerauny .... Fr/: : Other foreign countries > . |
;oi.ii 9J-8s |
r7.79i 6jJ4 6.624 4.140 3.191 |
143 S9 47 41 4" a? 34 |
■ri 6-S S-7 S-7 37 47 |
|
Toui .... Negroes |
»l«3-34 3J.64 |
J44.39I 3S9 |
39" ■4 |
S4-4 1-9 |
|
Grand total . . . |
fel77 |
»66.i6s |
731 |
100.0 |
■ Includes couDtcies npnMottd by less than 30 depositon.
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Servian Mother and Chclo Family of an orihodox prieit
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IMMIGRANT WAGE-EARNERS
In this connection it is interesting to examine once more what might be called the personal ledger of the Slavic day laborer in Pittsburgh. We had seen that more than half the Italians, Croatians, Servians, and Ruthenians are single men, and that a large proportion of the other races are similarly placed. Many are married but their wives are across the seas. Their policy is to make all they can and spend as little as possible. We saw that in 1907 the wages of common labor were from $i .35 to $1.65 a day and that those who had acquired a little skill earned from $1.75 to I3.25. The monthly expenditure for board and lodging of single men bent on saving did not exceed |io a month. Some Russians complained when their monthly bill amounted to $8.00. The drink- ing bill did not exceed {5.00 a month; and the sum spent on cloth- ing hardly equaled that. A common laborer easily saved from $10 tofi; a month; the semi-skilled workers from $20 to I25, boarding bosses were accumulating what was to them a competence.
But while the wages o( the day laborers in the District were high for the single man who lived in lodgings, the foreigner who brought his family here and paid American prices for the neces- sities of life, faced a different situation.* The father of a family could not hope to get accommodations for less than $13 or $15 a- month, and then he would have only two or three rooms. The Slav, as we have seen, had to pay more than the English-speaking man for the same house. The man who earned less than I40 a month and paid even }i2 in rent had not a large fund on which to raise a family. He belonged to one or two lodges, which meant an outlay of |i. 00 to )i.$o each month. He usually paid 50 cents a month to his church, and as often sent his children to the parochial school at, say, another jo cents for each, or f 1 .00 for three. He had to buy the school books needed by the child, which might amount yearly to from I3.00 to ^4.00. Is it surprising then, that the children were sent to work at an eariy age and that many were reared in cramped and dirty quarters?
When mills are running regularly and the father is able to work each day, such a family manages to get along. But when
* For a statistical study of the budgets of unskilled laborers see Byington, Margaret F.: Homestead; Tbe Households of a Mill Town, p. i)8. As food prices have advanced more rapidly than wages of common labor, the predicament of the immigrant family is at least as serious today as in 1907. See Commons,
g. dt., p. 1 19: also Appendix V) I, Advance in Cost of Living in Workingmen's miliei Since 1907, p. 440.
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sickness comes or work ceases, then the pinch of hunger is felt. Miss Lippincott, for many years secretary of the Pittsburgh As- sociation for Improvement of the Poor, stated that in good times but few Slavs or Lithuanians applied for aid; that only when the father was killed or injured was aid occasionally needed.
The fraternal organizations among the Slavs, Lithuanians, and Italians both provoke thrift and provide various forms of in- surance against mischance. They are the dominant form of social organization and afford opportunities for leadership to the stronger men. The National Slovak Society, for instance, had in 1908 a membership of 50,000, and the Polish National Alliance 75,000. Pittsburgh had some 30 locals of the latter society alone, each with a list of from 40 to 300 members. The lodge oi^nizations cS these people can not be discussed here in detail;* it is sufficient to note that in case of sickness and death they look after their members, that they provide social centers for the more thrifty of the people, and tend generally to raise the standard of life. Besides these lodges, the Slavs, Lithuanians, and Italians have organizations for enjoyment and amusement; the Poles have societies also for self-culture, such as dramatic clubs and singing societies.
There is reason to believe that the home governments of these people foster the formation of organizations along racial lines; the church also fosters racial societies. In so far as such organizations perpetuate national customs and habits in America, they tend to make assimilation difficult. A strong people swayed by racial consciousness on foreign soil will either impose its own concepts and ideals upon the social life around it and modify it, or will build around itself a wall which the customs and habits of the country will find difficulty in penetrating. This is seen in Pittsburgh. The Poles and Italians form a city within a city, the customs and habits of which are distinctly Polish and Italian.
When we come to political life, we must accord leadership to other than the Slavic groups — to the Italians. A political leader among them claimed that four-fifths of all Italians in Pittsburgh who had been in the country five years were naturalized. He held that the Italians of Pittsburgh polled about 5,000 votes which were scattered over 1 1 wards. Next to the Italians came the Poles. The Polish vote was set at 4,000. Many of these men * See Byington, op. cit., pp. 158-168.
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Greek Orthodox Priest from Cboatu n trouble the priests are the people's counselors; they sympalhiie with Ihem in
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had been voters for years, but of the influx that had come to' Pitts- bui^ within the ten years preceding 1907, not 30 per cent had ijeen naturalized. The Poles had two or three political clubs, and such clubs were also found among the Lithuanians and Croatians. Too frequently the racial leaders — often saloon keepers — are the satellites of some English-speaking politician who through them controls the foreign vote. Some of the more intelligent for- eigners are dissatisfied with this manipulation of their people. Among them young men are arising with political aspirations. It will not be long before the city will feel their presence. If in some 15 wards the Polish and Italian votes were to unite, their leaders would hold the balance of power.*
Slavs, Lithuanians, and Italians have a strong religious ele- ment in their make-up which plays a never-ending part in such racial communities as are to be found in the Pittsburgh District. Unless this element is reckoned with these people are not to be understood. The great majority belong to the Roman Cath- olic church. Some Protestants are found among the Slovaks, Lithuanians, Magyars, and Italians, but they form only a small percentage.! Certain of the southern Slavs are subject to the Patriarch (^Constantinople, and the Russians maintain a Greek Or- thodox church. Religious ceremonies and observances have strong- est bold upon Poles and Lithuanians, Croatians, and Servians.^ We have seen that the number of men far exceeds that of women among these immigrants from southeastern Europe. This the church attendance corroborates. I have seen in Pittsburgh a congregation of 1,000 men, all in the prime of life, so intent upon the religious exercises that the least movement of the priest at the altar found immediate response in every member of the audience. The ritual
* In 1910 Uie city wai distributed into larger ward units than formerly. Tbe I J did wards spcdlied in the text have now been included within the bounda- riei M six new wards. An indication of the trvth of the power of a united foreign vote is fonnd in the fact that Attorney Frank A. Piekarski, a Pole, was appointed aisiiiant city solicitOT in 1909.
t Tbe Protesunt denominations in the city conduct missioo work among the Slavs and Italians. Several missioiiarie*, cdpotleur*. and Bible readers are em- ployed.
JThe Roman Catholic church has not the influence over the Bohemians and Italians that it has over the above mentioned people. Many of the Bohemians are free thinkers. The luliansirereligiousbut forthe most part lukewarm in their attitude toward the church, and their edifices do not compare with those of the PolM.
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ctf the church has a deep hold upon Slav and Lithuanian: often the men go to confession at six in the morning in order that they may go to communion the day following. When men are so em- ployed that they can not attend mass on Sundays, they will attend one on Saturdays. The home must be consecrated once a year; and hundreds take their baskets laden with provisions to church on Easter morning that the priest may bless the feast they hope to enjoy that day.
If we measure the efficiency of the Roman Catholic church among the Slavs and Lithuanians in Pittsburgh by the money spent on buildings and maintenance, it can not be equaled by either American Catholicism or Protestantism. The people give freely of their hard earnings to erect costly church edifices and support the priesthood. The Slavs and Lithuanians have been on the South Side of Pittsburgh only for twenty years, but in 1907 they possessed church property valued at three-quarters of a million dollars, and most of it is paid for. They also erect parochial schools and maintain them.*
The priests have great power over the lives of their people. Some are charged with accumulating riches, but taken as a whole, I view them as a body of men loyal to their vows and honoring the profession which they serve. These priests are busy men. A parish of two or three thousand means endless activities. With the influx of Slavs and Lithuanians into the country, and the necessity of organizing new parishes, the difficulty has been to secure properly qualified priests to take charge of them. Hence many of these clergy are overworked. Considering the great numbers of their countrymen constantly arriving from Europe, it is surprising how carefully the priests keep in touch with the new- comers. Some whose parishes are constantly changing take a census each year. They know the affairs of their people; their hous- ing conditions, their hardships in mine and mil), the wrongs they suffer. In trouble, the priests are the counselors of their parishion- ers; sympathize with them in their struggles; institute and man- age insurance societies against sickness and accident. Some found and control building and loan associations. Their influence lies
*See North, Lila Ver Planck: nttsburgh Schools. Part 11, Roman Catholic Parish Schools in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Dislrict, p. 338.
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primarily with the adults who come from the fatherland. The children are not so amenable to the discipline of the church; nei- ther do they give their earnings as freely to its support. The for- ward problem of the church thus becomes one of meeting the re- ligious needs oi men and women of Slavic blood reared in a new country.
In this sketch of the foreign-speaking pet^les of Pittsburgh, brief though it be, we have seen how dependent the industries of the city have been upon the supply of ablebodied men from the agricultural communities of Europe that have freely given their strength to the expansion of these industries. Never was there an army of workers more docile or willing. That they undermine the income of the next higher industrial groups is clear, but once their foothold is secure, we may expect the rise of stronger labor organizations among them than those they have been used to displace.* For even more than English-speaking people they believe in mutual protection, organizing and conducting various societies for this purpose. The churches owned by them repre- sent offerings made by men who literally earn their bread by the sweat of their brows; and while they find their pleasures in crude ways, many save money, and the number who own homes is in- creasing.
It is also clear that there are imperative needs of these people which should be met if the cause of civilization is to be served. The fatal and non-fatal injuries of the mill fall heavily upon them. The value placed upon human life here will not bear comparison with that of older countries whose civilization we claim is lower than ours. Each week a tale of wrong and suffering, agony and death, is sent across the water, which seriously reflects upon the industrial life of America.
We have seen that the housing conditions considered are a disgrace to civilization, and that the insufficiency of houses, the greed of landlords, the exigencies of some of the people and the penury of others, bring about this condition. There should be
* Abundant proof hu been given of tbe ability of foreign workmen to unite. A case in point was the strike in the Pressed Steel Car Works in 1909. Foreisnert had displaced striking English-speaking workmen six yean before; later, tiKy uietn- sclvcf went oo a prolonged and bloody stHke.
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Stricter regulation of immigrant boarding houses alike in city and mill towns. Americans who coin money in shacks and those foreign bom who are too greedy to pay for decent quarters, should feel the firm hand of the law.
But negative work is not enough; positive and aggressive work must be done if these foreigners are to rise to the measure of their opportunity. Every nationality has its esthetic side. Other cities have fostered the national dance, have encouraged works of art, and have induced the foreigner to show the artistic side of his nature.
This in far greater measure should be done in Pittsburgh.* If these people had incentive to develop their needlework, to show their artistic skill, to sing their national songs, and to dance their native dances, to contribute their culture to the common store, the life of the city would be richer and stronger.
Then why should the descendants of those who gave Lafay- ette a welcome, and who championed the cause of Kossuth, not go forth in sympathy to these people of Slav and Iberic origin? The rich inheritance of our institutions we cherish; we believe them to be more excellent than any which the older countries of Europe can boast. Thousands of these people yearn for an insight into that form of democratic government that has made America great among the nations of the earth. But they are left in ignorance of our language, our laws, our government, and our history. We should be willing to meet them halfway. Public schools should enter into this work with greater zeal; and social agencies stretch the cords of their tents to take in these men who are anxious to learn.
* The fint public and official effort to recogniie groupi of forej^en wis made in connection with the seiqui-centennial celebration of die founding of the city in September, 1908. L.arge delegationf ot more than a dozen nationalities paraded in their homeland costume. The Pittsburgh Playground Association has in recent years done much to bring out the artistic side of the foreign bom throu^ folk dances and participation in annual May festivals. See Kennard, Beulah: The Playgrounds of PittsbUT|^. The Pittsburgh District, p. 31$. Leaders ii '
several foreign colonies have been eager To lend assistance. EHttsburoh Italians for several yean have celebiated Columbus Day with a parade and ball. Tbe Y. M . C. A. has carried on " all nations " singjng contests in recent yean. See Ap- pendix Hi, p. 417.
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A SLAV'S A MAN FOR A' THAT Alois B. Koukol
ABOVE one of the busiest comers in Pittsburgh, an immense side wall advertisement in Croatian solicits patronage for L an American bank. In the railroad stations and on the principal thoroughfares you can see groups of people who bear un- mistakably the Slavic physiognomy. But unlike the sign — itself an evidence of the new immigration from southeastern Europe — the Slav is slow and unspectacular in making an impress upon the imagination of the community. He is reserved, and even when he comes from southern districts lacks the animation so characteristic of the Italian.
Though the Slavs are one of the three largest racial elements that immigration is adding to our population, though in the Pitts- burgh District they constitute over one-half of the workers in the sted mills, yet in spite of their numbers and their importance as an industrial and business factor, there is, 1 believe, little actual un- derstanding and appreciation of them on the part of Americans. The bosses know them chiefly as sturdy and submissive workmen; their American fdlow-workmen look down upon them largely because of this patience and their willingness at the outset to work at any wages and under any conditions; the public at large knows the Slavs by their most obtrusive and objectionable traits, — especially through the newspaper stories of their rows and fights when they get drunk (hi pay day <»- when celebrating a wedding or a christening. Few people stop to think that in spite of his proclaimed stolidity the "Hunkie" brings with him aspirations the same in character, though as yet not so ambitious nor so definitely formulated as those of his Ameiican neighbor.
It is my design to set down something of the spirit of the immigrant Slav, his character, his attitude toward America, and 6i
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the effect upon him of the conditions under which, as in Pitts- burgh and the neighboring mill towns, he lives and works. In preparation for this task 1 visited some 200 families; moreover, \ am a Slav by birth, and all my life 1 have lived and worked among the Slavic people.
The natural question which rises in one's mind is, Why did these great hordes come to America and to Pittsburgh? Let me answer in terms of men. The main cause is economic* On the one side there is the Old World surplus of labor accompanied by low wages, the barrenness of the land which every year becomes more tnsufTicient to support increasing populations, and the economic disasters affecting sometimes individuals and sometimes whole communities; on the other side, tales of the wealth gained by some bold pioneer and of the great opportunities in this country, con- firmed and exaggerated by the crafty agents of transportation companies. An illustration of this economic impetus is the simple story of Grigory Leshkoff. Grigory comes from a Russian peasant family in which there were seven sons and 30 poor acres of land. " What were we to do at home?" Grigory demanded of me with a shrug. "Just look at one another, — hey?" One by one these sons left the crowded farm and sought work in the few mines and factories located near them. Grigor/s younger brother was the first man from the village to seek America, coming here in 1902. Others soon followed him, however. "And now," said Grigory, " there are in Homestead at least jo young men from our village."
Grigory, by the way, is a veteran of the Japanese war, having come to America immediately after its close. But he had tittle to say about this, one of the great conflicts of modem times; in fact, he looked upon his experience on the battlefields as quite common- place compared with his experience in the steel mills. From the first he emerged without a scratch; in the second he lost a leg. When 1 saw him he was deeply concerned as to what a strong man of twenty-seven with only one leg was going to do with his future, — ^and the simple peasant saw little hope ahead.
Grigory came from Chernigov. From this province and from Minsk and Grodno, where the soil is exhausted and where the
* See Roberts, op dt. P. 3) of this volume.
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shares of the villagers tn the communes grow less with each redis- tribution (tf the land, the Russians are setting out in increasing numbers. Not altogether dissimilar causes for emigration operate in certain districts of Austria-Hungary. The province of Pribich used to be one of the richest wine-growing regions in Croatia, but some twenty years ago the vines were devastated by a blight which necessitated replanting with American stock. Through this dam- age to the vines hundreds of once prosperous farmers were reduced to poverty. Many of them came to the United States in the hope of earning enough money to pay for the necessary replanting of their vineyards. Lazo Milutich, who gave me this information, was himself one of those affected by the calamity. He came first to Allegheny City, tried different jobs, and after two years' wandering landed at Wtlmerding, where he had worked for ten years in the same foundry.
Other causes than economic pressure have, of course, played their part in this great migration. Political oppression is one. I have known a number of political refugees among the older Slavs, many of whom are now persons of importance. And another is the blandishment and trickery of the steamship agent. John Godus, a Slovak living tn Braddock, was one of a group of 1 2 young men brought here in 1901. To their village came a man dressed as a common worktngman. We can imagine him in high boots, wearing an embroidered shirt, and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He was a steamship agent, thus disguised to escape the attention of the gendarmerie. He quietly found out what young men were at the age when one has to present himself for conscription in the army, — ^for such youths, he had discovered, were the easiest to induce to become customers; secretly argued with them that it would be foolishness to give three of their best years to the army, where they would be slapped, kicked, and cursed; and in the end sold them all tickets.
It is periiaps but natural that Pittsburghers should believe that the fame of their industries draws these Slavs straight from their villages to the Union Station and the " Point." Yet this is true only in exceptional cases, such as that of Joseph Sabata, a Bohemian. He was an iron worker at home and was employed in a large rolling mill in Moravia. Its machinery was imported 6j
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nostly fram the United States xad he, oolidng the name of an AJlcgbeny firm on xatt at the pieces, thooght that in that dty he coold learn more aboot his busiuess; aad so he decided to come over. After being landed at Ellis Island, he discovered while in line muting to be qoestianed. that e«vT>-bady was asked to show an address. Such an address be did not have, bat being quick-witted behastily scribbled on a piece of paper "Afiej^ieny," and the name of a cousin stiQ in the old country who coold scarcely have beard of Pittsbm^'s North Side. He was icadity admitted, went straight to AUe^ieny. and when I saw him was earning $3.7$ a day in a machine shop.
In another case, the coming to Pittsburgh was wholly acci- dental. Viclav Milek. a Bohemian, who when I met him had been in this country d^teen years, came here with his parents niien a lad of sixteen, intending to settle with the rest of the family on a farm in Wisconsin. But on the way across the ocean they became acquainted with anothw Bohemian family, bound for Pittsburgh, who had been robbed of tlicir moeey, and to these people AUIdc's father knned |8o. In otder not to kiee this money be decided to keep near his debtms. Viclav even to this day is sorry that hb parents didn't go onto a farm, — and for a double reason: first, he has a natural preference for farm labcH- which is never to be gratified; second, in the course of his work tor an Allegheny company, an accident crippled him for life.
In the vast majority of cases the Slavs in Pittsburgh had not the slightest intention of settling here who) they first came to America. Usually their settling was preceded by a period of a year or two or even Itmger during which they wandered hither and thither, from one employment to another, from town to town, looking for the right place in which to establish themselves.
Large numbers of the Slovaks come to Pittsburgh by way of the anthracite fiekls. At the time of the strike of 1902, and for several years before, when conditions were bad in hard-coal mining, — half-time, and the like of that, — Slovak mine workers drifted west, across the state to the steel mill district.
The experience of a Ruthenian named Kova] is typical of a great number of men. He came to America in 1900, and was sent by an immigrant home in New York to work in the forests of West
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Virginia as a woodcutter. The wages there were only ;o cents a day, and in other ways conditions were so bad that he with three comrades ran away. They set out through the woods, finally coming to a little settlement with a saw mill. Here they were offered work and they stayed for about two months, earning f i.$o a day. Then a surveyor who spoke Polish came to the village, and he told them that in Allegheny they could earn a good deal more money than in the woods, so to Allegheny the men decided to go. There they obtained work as laborers in the locomotive works at $i .;o for a day of ten hours.
Such a wanderer also was Smulkstis, a Lithuanian who had started life as a messenger boy in the telegraph service in St. Petersburg. He came over to a friend in Wilmerding but, unable to get the kind of work he wanted, he sought out another friend in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he got a job in a woolen mill. The following spring found him back in Pittsburgh as a machine operator in an electrical plant. Four years after his arrival — he was still only twenty-two — he was a crane man in the Home- stead steel mills.
A Croatian who when I met him was spending the winter in Duquesne, was a type of the migratory railroad laborer who drifts from one contractor's gang to another. He had been all over In- diana, Ohio, and the Middle West, having taken his wife and chil- dren with him. They had made shift in cars and shanties and construction camps of all sorts.
One fact that impressed me in Pittsburgh was the number of Slavs earning low wages who yet seemed to be fitting themselves permanently into their new environment, John Gerza, an engine cleaner in the Fort Wayne yards, and his family, had apparently, in their five years in this country, adapted themselves to the atmos- phere and to the life of Pittsburgh. There were no regrets nor lookings backward, nothing to draw them away from their present life. The explanation for this adaptation is the explanation in so many other cases that it is worth setting down. Gerza lived in a Moravian village where till sixteen years before there had been no impulse to move away from the soil. The villagers were rooted to their ancient homes; they thought only of the land, and they tilled it in the same old primitive manner of their forefathers. Then a
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railroad was built through the country, and factories sprang up. •These drew agricultural laborers from the villages, and thereby unsettled the population; unsettled the old conditions of life, practically destroying that love for, that almost physical kinship with, the soil and the old home which I found so strong among the Slavs in general. Gerza's wife used to work in a sugar factory at home; he himself used to be a brakeman on a freight train. With them it was not the severe and wrenching change from farm to factory, which involved the breaking away from loved surround- ings; it was the comparatively simple change from one industrial pursuit to a comparatively similar industrial pursuit.
Palinski, a Russian Pole (rf forty-five who had been in Amer- ica eighteen years, was an excellent example of that really consider- able class of low-paid workmen who have made a small success — if owning a home and having a happy family and feeling content be success. The highest pay that Palinskt had ever received was %i .6; a day, and yet, though he had five children, he had managed to buy in conjunction with his brother the house in which they both lived. They paid Ji,6oo for the property, and when I called upon him Palinski told me that Jones and Laughlin wanted to buy it and he expected to sell for at least ^3,000. The oldest child, a girl of fifteen, was in the public school, and his three other children of school age were being sent to the parochial school where tuition must be paid for. The house was strikingly clean and well ar- ranged. Palinski seemed to be well satisfied with himself, his family, and his work.
It was a marvel to me how a man with Palinski's wages could own such a pleasant home, raise so large a family of children, educate them, and keep them well dressed and healthy. The explanation lay in a great measure outside Palinski. He was a good man, but, as in many cases where Slavs have wrought pleasant homes out of little wages, the credit was largely due to the wife. Mrs. Palinski must have been a wonderful manager; even to the casual eye, she was neat, bright, and energetic. In estimat- ing the worth to America of this pair, one must not consider alone the hardworking husband and the able wife; one must consider their contribution of healthy, educated children.
Men like Palinski are fixtures; in a gmeration or two their 66
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children and children's children are Hkely to form an indistinguish- able part of that conglomerate product, the American citizen. In contrast to these men are the great numbers who are not content, who are not luctures, whose great dream it is some day to get back to their native village, live out thdr years there and, what is no small consideration with many, be laid at rest in friendly soil. Why these men, even when successful here, have this yearning and return home for this reason, presents a rather tough question to most persons. That question, I think, I can best answer by reciting the case cS Mike Hudak.
Hudak was a Slovak who came to this country when a youth erf nineteen. He was a fine type of man in every way; physically he could almost be classed as a giant, for he stood six feet two, was deep of chest and broad of shoulders. He worked in the Pennsyl- vania railway repair shops at Oliver, earning |8o a month, which is good pay for a Slav when one considers that the work is regular and not dangerous. He seemed to be a figure in his neighborhood, for when I walked home with him one day he was addressed from all sides in tones that showed liking and respect. He dressed neatly and had a fluent command of English gained by seventeen years' residence in this country. If there is any type of immigrant that we need above all others it struck me then that Mike Hudak was that type.
1 first discovered his yearning by asking him why he was not a citizen. " Why should 1 forswear myself?" said he.
1 did not understand.
"As I am going back to my own country, it would not be right to give up my allegiance there and make myself a citizen here."
I pressed him for his reasons for going back, and he gave them to me — reasons that fit thousands and thousands of cases. With him that preliminary process of being separated from the soil had not taken place, as with John Gerza. He was a fanner by age-old instinct: his love for the land was a part of his being, a yearning which would leave him only with death. Now, since over here he had been plunged straight into industry, the only land he had ever known in a way to become attached to it was that of the country in which he was bom, and when the time came when he was able «7
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to gratify his longing for land his thoughts went only to his old home. So. though socially as well off here as he would be there, and economically much better off, he was going back. Undoubt- edly he, too, would have become a fixture in America could he have gone onto a farm immediately upon his arrival here, for then his instinctive land-love would have been weaned from the old country.
The Slavs, as has been said, are strong, willing workers, and are generally considered by the steel mill officials the best laborers they get, — but now and then there is a man who is too slow for America. One of these was John Kroupa, a Bohemian, who had been here twenty-two years. Faithful, strong, willing, it wasn't in him to keep up the pace. In his earlier years here he was em- ployed in a steel mill, but he had been dropped. As he frankly said to me, " You have to be pretty quick in those mills, and it isn't a job for a man like me." Later he got a job as watchman on a Pennsylvania Railroad crossing in Woods Run, and there he worked for sixteen years, his wages I40 a month (in the last two years, $44) for a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week. All this while he hoped for promotion, but it did not come and this non- recognition rankled within him. "Other men, who were all sore from sitting down so much, were promoted," exclaimed he, "but 1, who was always hustling, was never thought of, and 1 can tell you it wasn't an easy job to watch that no accident happened, as' more than 300 trains passed that way every day and very often at full speed, with small heed to the city ordinances, — 30 or 40 miles an hour." Finally, the crossing was abolished, the tracks having been elevated, and the job was done away with. The superintendent came to him at his watchman's shanty. "Well, John, I am sorry for you; going to lose your happy home. But you'll get another just as good." This was too much for John; his long smouldering disappointment burst out. "Go to hell!" said he. " Happy home? I could just as well have been in the penitentiary over there; 1 would have been much better off, with- out the worry I have had here. During sixteen years 1 haven't had a single day off. Sundays and weekdays both I've been here for twelve hours. Do you call that a happy home?"
He refused a new watchman's job and opened a little store
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in Woods Run, which he established out of his savings and with the help of his children — a store which might have served Dickens for one of his grotesque backgrounds, for here were on sale hard- ware, candy, crackers, bacon, eggs, molasses. Kroupa can not be classed as a failure, for he managed to buy a home and raise and educate a good-sized family, but his qualities of constancy, honesty, and sobriety do not come so high as some others in the American market.
Among the Slavs, the Slovaks strike me as the most ambi- tious and pushing.* This is all the more surprising when one re- members that the conditions out of which they come are as bad as the conditions surrounding any of the Slavs, and worse than most. The Slovaks when they arrive are poor, illiterate, have no training, are inured to oppression; yet they have pluck, perseverance, en- terprise, and courage. From their ranks are recruited many of the foremen in the mills and an ever increasing number of merchants. In the Woods Run district, with which I happen to be best ac- quainted, a low-lying mill neighborhood along the Ohio in Alle- gheny Oty, probably one-half of the stores and saloons are in the hands of Slovaks, or their close neighbors, the Hungarian Rusnaks. They began as common laborers. Most of the stores are well kept and, in general, prosperous looking, and among their customers are not only Slavs, but Americans as well.
A type of this class of men, the men who succeed in the ac- cepted American meaning of success, was John Mlinek. When I first saw him I had not the least thought that he was a Slav, so well dressed and thoroughly conventionalized did he seem, and such good English did he speak. He came to America when only fifteen years old and for thirteen years worked successfully as a breaker-boy and driver in the mines at Mahanoy City, in the iron works at Elizabeth. New Jersey, and as a riveter in the Pressed Steel Car Company at Allegheny. In this last place he was soon making from $3.00 to $4.00 a day. As he neither drank nor in- dulged in any other form of dissipation he saved considerable money. In 190$. he married a Slovak giri bom and brought up
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in this country, who for several years before her marriage had been a clerk in a store where foreign customers traded. She was a little more refined than the average English-speaking girt of the working class, and held a high position in her own circle. She was ambi- tious and induced her husband to start a store in Woods Run for the sale of cigars and candy. From what I could gather he was doing very well, and they already must have saved several thou- sand dollars. These young people seemed to be much liked in the community; they were prominent both in their social circle and in their church, and Mlinek was an influential man among the Slovak societies, though he did not push himself to the front. He was, i should say, at the beginning of a considerable success; his prospects and his personality favored his achieving it; only some untoward set of circumstances could keep him down.
A few paragraphs back, in speaking of Hudak, I drew atten- tion to the powerful call their native bit of earth makes upon so many of the immigrants. But frequently when men go back, intending to stay, in response to this call, the old country is not strong enough to hold them. Such had been the case with this same John Mlinek. His ambition had been to be a welt-to<lo farmer in Hungary, and recently he and his wife had made a pre- liminary visit to his old home and bought a farm. They remained a few weeks, — but those few weeks were quite enough. He came back entirely cured. "Every little clerk in the village looked down on me, because I didn't speak the official language, Magyar," Mlinek said to me. "They were officials while I was just a peas- ant. They didn't earn a quarter of what I do, yet I had to bow to them. That made me sore. In America I'm a free man. Besides, I've got a better chance to do well here than in the old country. Yes, America is good enough for me."
Mike Mamaj was another successful man; he too returned to Hungary, expecting to live there, and he too turned his back on his native country and set out again for America, this lime to stay. He had learned to speak, read, and write English, and was full of energy, though rather rude and domineering in manner. During the early part of his career in America (he had been here twenty years) he had had a hard time, but for the last seven years he had been a foreman in the car shops at Woods Run. He had 70 men 70
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working under him, and part of the time he had earned $ioo a month. He owned the house in which he lived, worth about f2,soo, had property in the old country to the value of $i,$oo, and had money in the bank.
Mamaj was proud of his success, of his home, of his children. So proud that, on the occasion of our first meeting, though the bedtime hour of nine had come, he dragged me off to show me the evidence of what he had done in America.
First, I had to inspect his home, which was neat and well furnished. Then he ordered his children (three daughters, aged eight, ten, and thirteen) who were going to bed, to dress and recite their lessons for the stranger. While the girls rather sleepily dis- played some of their English learning, Mamaj stood by, hands in pockets, and nodded proudly.
One deplorable condition that 1 frequently met with among the Slavs was contempt for American hiw.* This is largely due to the teaching of experience, — and experience of one particular sort. The story of Vilchinsky, a Ruthenian boarding boss, is a common one. On October 14, 1907, one of his boarders was celebrating a patron saint's day. This meant a lot of drinking by all, and during the festivities they got more or less under the in- fluence of liquor, but they were in their own house, there was no public disturbance, and toward midnight they all went to bed. About two o'clock in the morning, however, when they were all asleep, officers came to the house, wakened everybody, and load- ing them into patrol wagons and buggies took them to a police station. The boarding boss, four girls, and three men were all taken before the alderman charged with disorderly conduct. Without any regular hearing, — none of them could speak English and there was no interpreter, — the squire demanded $20 apiece for the boarders and $$0 for the boarding boss. All but two girls paid the fine immediately, and these two were then sentenced to the county jail. During the following day their friends succeeded in collecting enough money to pay their fines and the $i.;o extra for board in the jail. Abuses such as this were due to the fact that aklermen and constables obtained fees from the fines collected (in this case amounting to I340), which made it to their interest to get as many cases into court as possible. Many men with whom
'See Roberts, pp. $0-53; Forbei, p. $78. 71
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I talked stated that the constables often provoked disorder when none existed for the sake of the profit in the arrests. The Slavs knew that they were victimized, and at the same time they realized their helplessness; the natural result of this was a bitter con- tempt for law.
"Huh!" sneered Vilchinsky, "the police are busy enough all right stopping disorder when the men have got money. But when there's hard times, like there is now, a man can make all the noise he pleases and the police won't arrest him. They know he hasn't money to pay a heavy fine and costs. It ain't law they think about. It's money."
There are plenty of quarrelsome Slavs just as there are quar- relsome men among other races; and when you have a combination of Slavic ill-temper and the above-mentioned judicial practice, then there is basis for trouble indeed. Zavatsky and Yeremin, Russians, and neighbors in a steel town, drank more than was good for them one Saturday afternoon in a saloon, and at last Zavatsky spoke his mind about Yeremin's wife, whom he did not consider as good-looking as she should be, and indulged in drunken threats against her if she did not stop throwing ashes on his side of the yard. Yeremin repeated to his wife these threats and remarks, and Mrs. Yeremin, being a choleric woman, went to the squire in spite of the fact that it was very late in the evening. But as it was pay day, he was in his office ready for business.
A constable was sent to Zavatsky's house to arrest him. The constable went into the kitchen and, finding nobody there or in the next room, went on upstairs. Here there were a number of boarders talking, but they were not dnmk. The constable, seeing these men, thought it would be wisest to have assistance, so he brought two policemen and then started for Zavatsky. They broke open the door of the room where Zavatsky was sleeping, dragged him out of bed, and told him to get up. He was in a drunken stupor and afterward claimed that he did not resist the constable; in fact, scarcely knew what was going on, but the con- stable felled him with so heavy a blow that it made a scalp wound and the blood rushed out and blinded him. While on the floor, Zavatsky remembered a revolver under his pillow, and raised his hand and gat it. The constable wrested it from him and accord- 72
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ing to Mrs. Zavatsky's version, exclaimed, " I'll give you a revolver, you son of a gun," and shot Zavatsky in the chest. Mrs. Zavatsky, catching up a hammer, rushed at the constable, but he knocked her unconscious by a blow on the head and she fell to the floor. Before that, however, she had screamed to the men, "Come down, boys, come down, they're killing the gazda!" One of the first to come to Zavatsky's assistance was his kum (a kum is one who is godfather to one's children, or to whose children one is godfather; a very close relationship — generally a man's dearest friend). As Zavatsky's kum tried to rush into the room, the two oflficers gave him several violent blows on the head. The other men rushed down, but all were seized by the officers, with the ex- ception of one man whose flight was suddenly stopped by a shot in the leg.
As a result of the m61£e, the whole household of lo men and one woman was taken in patrol wagons to the squire's court and committed to jail, charged with disorderly conduct, felonious as- sault, and interference with an officer in performance of his duty. Zavatsky and the boarder who was shot in the leg were sent to the hospital for treatment. At first it looked as if Zavatsky were not going to live. After a hearing four days later the prisoners were all committed to the grand jury, and according to my information were all sentenced to jail for varying periods. None of the police- men nor the constable had even a scratch to show, although they charged these lo men with felonious assault. The house, when I saw it just following the affair, looked as it might have looked the day after a battle.
Not even so brief a sketch as this would be complete without an instance or two of the men who have been handicapped by in- dustrial acddent.* Such men are met everywhere in Pittsburgh, — they are so common as to excite no comment. In proportion to their numbers the Slavs are the greatest sufferers from accidents in the Pittsburgh region, for to their lot falls the heaviest and most dangerous work. The report of the National Croatian Society for i9o$-o6, to give a general example of what industrial accidents mean to the Slav, shows that out of a membership averaging about
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17,000 for that period, g; men were killed by accident (almost a third of the deaths from all causes). Eighty-live other men were permanently disabled. In addition, 97 died from consumption, the inception of which is often traceable to the character of thei^ work.
Andrew Antonik's job was to run a "skull-cracker" in the Homestead Mill. This is a contrivance to break up scrap so that it can be more easily melted, and its main feature is a heavy pear- shaped iron ball which is hoisted into the air and then allowed to drc^ upon the scrap which has been heaped beneath it. The crash of this ball throws pieces of the scrap in all directions. The work is very dangerous, especially at night when it is hard to see and dodge the (lying scrap. One Monday night (he had worked the day before on a twenty-four-hour shift) Antonik failed to see and dodge. A chunk of scrap weighing four or five hundred pounds struck his leg and crushed it so that it had to be amputated.
Almost a year after the accident 1 went to visit Antonik, and found a mild-faced, kindly looking, not very intelligent man of forty, sitting in his landlady's kitchen rocking her baby. That was Antonik's job now, to take care of his landlady's children in part payment for his board; that was all he was good for yet, for he had only a leg and a stump. He had been paid Jijo by the company; of this he had sent f ;o to his wife in Hungary and had used the balance to pay his board during the seven months since he had left the hospital. Now nothing remained. The company had promised him an artificial leg and light work as soon as he was able to get around, but his stump was not yet entirely healed, and as he had not a cent and his wife was writing him letters beg- gjng for money for the children — there were five of them, the eldest a deaf and dumb giri of thirteen — Antonik was worried.
He looked at the future blankly, helplessly. He had at first planned to bring his family here, but now he could not get the money for that. Nor could he go back to them. He wouU be more useless, more helpless, on a farm than here. The only solu- tion Antonik could see to the lifelong problem suddenly thrust upon him by that flying piece of scrap, was for him and his family to remain indefinitely apart, he working at whatever poor job and at whatever low wage he could get, and sending a little to Hungary 74
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to help out, his wife to continue working on a fann at 1 2 or i $ cents a day.
CXten the handicapped man's problem is thrust directly upon the wife for solution, as it was upon the wife of John Hyrka. Hyrka was a Ruthenian of thirty; his wife was twenty-eight. He was making fair wages in the Duquesne Mills; they were both healthy and strong, and they had high hopes for the future. But May 2(6, 1907, John, who was working on a platform directly over a limestone mill, stepped upon a rotten plank and he shot down into the mill. Before he could be extricated the flesh had been torn from the soles of both feet.
He was sent to the McKeesport hospital, where attempts were made to graft flesh upon his soles. Some months later his feet were still not healed, and it was practically certain that the grafting would be a failure and that he would be a cripple for life.
When this tragedy descended upon Mrs. Hyrka she was within a month of confinement. Into this grim situation entered the baby, adding its cares. For months after the accident she was in no condition to work, and when she did regain her strength the demands of the infant would not permit her to take up regular empk>yment. For six months she lived upon $30 a month paid her by the company; then the company cut off this allowance, and after she had felt the pinch of want for a time, she demanded a final settlement. They offered her |6oo, she to pay all further hospital bills, which up to then had been met by the company. She talked the matter over with John, and between them they decided that to have the flesh scraped from one's feet and to be a lifelong cripple ought to be worth as much as f 1,000. But this seemed an exorbitant estimate to the company, and as Mrs. Hyrka held firm to her own figures, the matter was still unsettled when 1 left Pittsburgh. She was then living on what she could borrow; the high hopesof twenty-eight were all blasted; she knew that she had a cripple on her hands for all his life, thirty or forty years perhaps, and she was wondering, desperately wondering, how she was going to be able to support him.
The burden of the home making may fall upon a child. In looking into an accident case I called at a home in Saw Mill Alley — a cheerless, dingy neighborhood that is flooded every year by the 7S
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iueh water. ! was Rczned n lae iucdiea by a s^Uht P;:^:^ oH rd SficeB. and lona d:s£:.-:«ered ntai sae was rhe real bead at ibe brjTie. 5oe had ;ist lirraigc :3e wash, and ai sadt a aae nvn lSc best </ hr^Bcs is Arte :c be in disorder. Here, iuwcver. evrr/zhm^ was neat and oean. Annie tcid 3ie iier stzry vZind.y cnouzh. Her faiiier. vto bad been a taboicr in ooe <tf tbe mius. bad been killed b> an engne wt^e wortic^ in tae yard at ni^t. Her mother had remarried and soon afur had beoi boned to death b>- tbe expiosian c€ a kerosene Lucp. Annie «xs now keep- ing house for her brjCher and her stepfalho'. As the seventeen- year-old brother was lather sh> . and as the stcpfatho- was a oi^t watchman, by nature a man of no authority' and aijowcd by his work little opportunity to exercise it even had be poMrswrd it, tbe main control oi the household had passed ioio Annie's hands. That anthority she was using weO, as was shown not only by tbe tidiness of tbe house, but by the fact that it was cfaiefl>' through ber tnflueoce that ber brother was atttnding night sdwol. She had energy, determination, and character. She read and wrote both English and PoUsh. She said sbe hlted to read books, his- tory e^iedally, bat that sbe hadn't the time.
A quality that I have noted again and again among the Slavs is their readiness to bdp their countrvinen in distress. — already instanced by tbe case of Milek's father kniring mooey to a robbed feUaw^mmigrant. Sometimes this generosity shows itself amid the most adverse circumstances, as it did with Koval. Koval (the Rutbenian that 1 mentioned as having wandered about before settling in Pittsburgh) had himself had enou^ misfortune during three years in America to drive all unselfish feeling for others out of a man's heart. Oite year after coming to this coun- try he sent for his family and his younger brother. Immediately upon their arrival his three children and his brother fell sick with typhoid fever. They were no sooner well than Koval himself contracted the fever. This illness drained their resources and forced them (o fill their home with boarders — a hardship upon the slight wife, all (he more keenly felt because keeping boarders had been no part of their original plan. Then all three of the children were taken ill with croup. The usual price for a doctor's call is $t.oo, but the doctor charged $3.00 each visit inasmuch as he had
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three patients; Koval protested but had to pay. Two of the chil- dren died, and Koval, by this time financially exhausted, had to go in debt to the undertaker for the funerals. And then amid these last disasters came the financial crash of 1907 with its misery of unemployment ; certainly enough to sour the milk of human kindness in any man. But the penniless Koval did not drive out his penniless boarders, now only a burden. Instead, he gave them 3 sleeping place, divided with them the food he could get on credit from the grocery, for since he was a steady man and a house- holder Koval still had some credit; and for the food they still needed he and his boarders would go and stand in the bread line, which had been established in Woods Run. Not only did Koval not throw out the helpless boarders, who already encumbered him, but he took in seven additional people who were in distress. Two of these latter were young men from his native village who had landed in Pittsburgh in the midst of the depression; two were Russians who had been found wandering through the streets, neariy frozen, by a policeman, who brought them to Koval; the others were a countryman, his wife, and child of six, to accommodate whom Koval had to give up his own bed. During the period of my acquaintance with him Koval was supporting 1 2 boarders, only one of whom was paying him a cent.
What he was doing seemed quite the natural thing to Koval; he hardly seemed conscious of his self-sacrificing generosity. "Why do you keep all these people?" 1 asked him. "Why, what else could 1 doF" he returned. "They have no work and no other place to go. 1 can not throw a man into the street. They will go themselves when they can."
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MEDIEVAL RUSSIA IN THE PITTSBURGH DISTRICT
Alexis Sokoloff
THEY appeared in immense numbers with their hideous looks and ugly cries."* So to the proud Romans looked the Cymbrians and Teutons, the forefathers of the advanced nations of the present middle Europe, in their first beaten-off in- vasion of Roman soil. So now to the prosperous and respectable people of America look the "foreigners," especially my kith and kin — the Slavs. So, in truth, after living over three years among Americans, away from the foreign quarters, did these immigrants appear to me, too, when work had ^ven me a panoramic view of their life.
Day after day, walking from house to house in an endeavor to gather information about men whose names had been distorted by their American transcription and whose nationality was but vaguely indicated, seeking addresses given only approximately, I caught glimpses of hundreds of living pictures — pictures not unlike vivid photographic snapshots.
Here is one : You enter the kitchen of a dark tenement under the Tenth Street bridge. The dim light of an oil lamp on a long, dirty table shows a crowd of about 15 men sitting rather silently around the table and along the walls; in the foreground a dirty woman with a huge knife is busy over a large pan containing almost a whole fried calf; next is a young fellow, perhaps her son, chewing with smacking lips at a large piece of meat held in both hands, decidedly dirty hands. You can not help but notice the hungry, wolfish looks of the other fellows as they watch the lucky one. You ask your question and hurry on under the impression that you have seen a repast of the troglodytes; only afterward bring-
* Quotation from a [toman historian in Cutiot't HUtoiy of FraDce. Vol. I, Chapter T.
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ing a little correction to your impression — ^that it was not a dinner but the filling-up of the dinner pails for tomorrow that you saw.
In photography, by some process, similar pictures can be combined into one which makes a composite of them all; so, too, my snapshots combined into one picture the life of these foreigners — ^a weird and ugly picture, whose gloom the few cheering impres- sions I received did not dispel. There were, however, some pleas- ant sights now and then; for instance, that of a newly wed Slovak couple, both hardly more than children, good-looking and con- tented; he a laborer in this country about three years, she here less than one. He had been slt^tly injured on his left arm and upper body by an explosion of a blast furnace, and received about jtjo from the company at one time. Peasant girl though his wife was, yet their sin^e room, serving as kitchen, living, and bedroom, showed that such a room could be remarkably attractive. New, shining kitchen utensils did not offend me beside a bright, clean bed.
But everyone knows the effect of a snapshot; most of them show the creature they portray in a grotesque attitude. A paint- ing or a drawing, product of patient work in which the artist can give the right perspective and select the essential from the super- fluous, surpasses them in truthfulness. I should be willing to reproach the Americans for having merely what may be called snapshot knoMedge about foreigners, if 1 could pretend in any way that what I am going to say about Russians is the result of a thorough investigation. But at least the lack of exhaustive inquiry is with me somewhat compensated for by foreknowledge of the subject: I am a Russian myself .
I did not expect the Russian worktngman's house to add any cheering o^or to the desolate impressions I had received of the foreigners' standard of living, although my first contact with it had been a pleasant one. This was in Essen, a small mining town not far from Came^e, though very far from civilization. I was directed to the houses of the Russians by an Italian woman, who showed, to my amazement, that she had no small vocabulary of Russian words, evidently the fruit of good neighboring with these Slavs. In an orderiy enough kitchen I came upon a group of genuine Russian "muzhiks," some of them with long beards, look- ing grave and mighty venerable, their tn>users tucked into high 79
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boots and their blouses girdled with narrow bands. All, however, were dean and quiet. The mine in which they worked had been closed for a long while and few people had remained in the town, so that there was now no overcrowding. 1 was greeted with spontaneous kindness and goodwill, and treated to a ^ass of genu- ine " kvas," that healthy national beverage made of dry bread, with no alcohol in it. My ear was greeted with the Russian now spoken near Moscow and in the province of Tamboff, so musical to me, in- deed, that 1 was jealous of it, after the characterless speech of the educated classes. I felt myself transplanted to a Russia more real even than the one I had known in the middle provinces of the empire. And to think that these fellows had never seen Russia proper, nor had their fathers or grandfathers! They were Old Believers from the province of Suvaiki in Russian Poland, the northern part of that territory which, like an inland promontory, juts into Prussia and Austria. They belong to the second migra- tion of Old Believers. About two hundred years ago their an- cestors had fled from the persecution of the Moscow government to the republic of Poland, then still a force in Europe. After Poland's division, some became subjects of the Czar again, some of Austria, and a few of Prussia. Few Americans have ever heard of these Russian dissenters, although they number millions.* The sect is a product of the church reform of Patriarch Nicon (Patriarch, 1652-1666). However strange it now seems, in early times the Russian government marched ahead of the people; in fact, it began to lag behind only one hundred years ago. The monk Nicon, a simple peasant (who might have looked like one of the miners sitting before me in the house in Essen), had gained such a powerful influence over the Czar, Alexis Mikhailovich, that he could handle him as a puppet. He conceived the idea of purifying the Russian Bible and liturgy books from the mistakes of transla- tors and transcriptors, and of eliminating some customs not agree- ing with Greek Orthodox traditions. Hence the schism. The important questions whether in church processions one should walk "with the sun" or "against it," whether one should administer
* A. Prugavin, a wellknown invnti^tor of relis<otu secti in Russia, in the first chapter of a pamphlet on the Old Believers, tries to prove that the govcm- inent's estimite of j.ooo.ooo is incorrect and that 1 5,000.000 Is but a conservative figure for the number of Old Believers.
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the Lord's Supper from five or from seven "phosphors" (1 do not know which number is holy to these dissenters and which to us orthodox), led to some fighting and much head cutting. But the causes of dissension were actually much deeper than ques- tions of ritual; the revolt was one of the last unsuccessful protests against the steadily encroaching, centralizing dominance of Mos- cow. Thenfon, we see exactly the most freedom-loving elements embracing that schism. If these people now form only a sprink- ling of the population of Russian Poland they are very numerous in the northern Russian provinces of Arkhanguelsk and Vologda, in Ural and in Siberia. All the Cossacks* of Orenburg (the pet bodyguard of the present Czar), and many of Don and Terek are (^Believers. You smile. Cossacks and freedom! There was a time, however, when the name of Cossack was synonymous with freedom, association with which now remains only in a meaningless saying, "free as a Cossack." Moscow had known how to win the Cossacks to her cause by making them a little more free than the rest of the people. It is natural now that the Old Believers, almost untouched by the centuries of progress, should make a common cause with the present government — a government which would be glad to see Russia put back into the seventeenth century.f They now revere the Czar, who in times of persecution they actu- ally called "anti<^rist." 1 was advised not to say anything offensive against that person in order to avoid a possible big un- pleasantness.
For good looks, the Russians are rather a disgrace to the Slavic race. One can see that they are not only disinherited sons of the Creek and Roman civilization to which the other members
* A putoni, wiriike people of skilful honemen, inhabiting different partt of Rinsia ajxl drawn upon largely to fumUh cavalrymen for the Ruisian army — hence the erroneous idea often entertained that the term Conack means primarily a mounted soldier.
t The year in which this was written, the Russian Douma look up tlie ques- tion of legalizing the Otd Etelievers. This was the first of a series of measures de- signed to put inio effecl the principles of religious liberty enunciated in the empe- tot's manifesto of May i), 190;. A bill was introduced lo grant this sect the free practice of their religion, together with certain special riles, but denying them the privilege of proselyting among the membeis of the Orthodox church, oi^ preaching in poblie, or of using the title of priest. The bill was subjected to a two-sided attack. A representative of the holy synod denied the right of pariiainent to legislate in matters affecting the Orthodox church, while the Liberals proposed ~ts removing the above restriction.
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of the Arian family belong, but that they committed a mesalliance, absorbing many Ugro-Finnish tribes. Out of a dozen Servians one can, in my opinion, find as many good-looking chaps, usually of a dark, energetic type, as among other men. Among Polish peasants, one often meets faces of a noble, almost womanish beauty. But the Russians too often show their high cheek bones and narrow eyes. Yet among these Old Believers I met fine faces under beards vdiich with a little trimming and grooming would have made many a fellow look like a Tennyson or a Longfellow.
The head of the house in the town (^ Essen was of this type. There was an almost " noblesse d'allures" in the broad, quiet sweep of hand over his long beard, during the course of the argument which we had started about those same beards. "We do as our fathers did," he said.
He recalled the picture of the Russian peasant which had lingered in my memory since the days of my boyhood in Vologda in the north of Russia: [A sturdy villager coming into the room, taking off his cap, slowly and reverently crossing his brow before the holy images, — z whole gallery of them in the "red" comer, — and then bowing himself before our peasant host and each of my fellow-visitors.] The procedure impressed me as more dig- nified than the pompousness of any of the officials whom I saw, and I wondered that the custom was not followed now by their class.
Yes, they might have come yesterday from the heart of Russia, so little could the influence of the New World be discovered upon them.
Yet it appeared that some of my hosts had already been in America more than eight years. Kalamazoo stoves, how- ever, seemed to be the only articles borrowed from progress. None knew more than a few words of English, with perhaps a few of Ital- ian or Hungarian. One man had evidently seen the nickelodeon picture of Salome's dance, as the long beard and hair in the figure of St. John, current in the films of local instruments, fortified his argument for beards. While the argument was still unfinished, I found out that I was in Essen No. i, and that the Polish felk)W I was in search of must be in Essen No. 2, over an hour's walk. During that hour's walk, elated by the sympathetic snapshot view
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I had received of my countrymen, 1 scoffed at the term "nation of low efficiency," which 1 had heard applied to Russians. Backward, yes, but not of low efficiency ! It must have been men exactly like these I had seen a moment ago who, 800 in number, conquered Siberia, perishing, all of them, but not before they had "greeted" Ivan the Terrible with a "czardom." Men like these had beaten and repulsed Tartars and Turks and challenged the dominion of Moscow. A mighty breed these men of the backwoods. They were our "frontiersmen."* As I walked along 1 picked out, as a boy picks out the raisins from a cake, all the proud mottoes, all the glorious deeds of Russian history. That war-cry of the republic of Novgorod, "Who is against God and Great Novgo- rod!" Or that answer of the besieged Russians to the victorious Mongolians who promised the defeated ones grace on condi- tion of their giving the tenth of all the people in slavery: "Go on with the fight! who will be left shall be yours" — and no one was left. 1 recalled this unconquerable spirit of Russia in rising from disaster ever since that eventful day when the Mongolians in 1224, afterdefeating the Russian army at Kalka, had eaten their supper sitting on the wounded Russian princes covered with boards and saddles — those princes who while their companions had been too busy with petty reckoning among themselves, had come out to meet the enemy. The spark of Promethean fire was not brought to Russia as to some happier nation by conquerors; her people have had to strike it out for themselves. By the time I found my Polander, I was almost full of the conceit of a "Slavophil" about Russia.
I was soon punished for my fatuity, however, by another snapshot view. I had come with special purpose to make ac- quaintance with the Old Believers in Cokeburgh, a mining town to all purposes exactly like many others of the Pittsburgh District, but containing an especially large number of Russians. Out of
'The Old BeKevm are strikir^y described in a novel by "Pechenky," pMudcnym of P. I. MelnikoR (iSai-if^), called tn ForeiO and On Mouniami, a quasi epopee classic in Russia not because of its literaiy merit, but on account of its remaricable dclinealion of character. InterestinK is it to note that Pechersky himself was at the head of a department ruling over the destinies of these dissenters, wiuch from tAdta times had been one of the most crafting of all the grafting depart* ments of the government, and he was also reputed to be himself a grafter.
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between 400 or ;oo miners (almost all foreigners) 300 were my countrymen, about half of them Old Believers.
1 reached Cokeburgh on a beautiful early Sunday morning. 1 was disagreeably struck, on leaving the train, with the sound of what seemed to be drunken brawls sounding from many houses. Such indeed they were. Yestenday had been pay day and bearded men were drinking and drunk. Many houses were deserted, the revelers being grouped in a few. An ugly sight! Dirty, dis- heveled men in filthy kitchens filled with empty bottles, kegs, and barrels; everything helter-skelter. Worst of all was the foul lan- guage they were using, without any provocation, regardless of the presence of children. I knew they did not use those bad words in the north of Russia. This is the influence of soldiery, so numer- ous in Poland and on the borderline and so hateful everywhere. But when 1 rebuked them, in quite unrestrained expressions, for their foul language, nobody knocked me down ; they were ashamed, for a while at least. They felt insulted only when I refused to drink a glass of beer with them, invariably offered without pre- liminaries. Many were sitting in the room with their hats on — a thing 1 would not have believed about a Russian peasant.
Revolting as is this drunkenness, something like an unhappy historical tradition prevails among Russians, as in early times was the case in Merrie Old England and as is the case in Germany at thepresentday — not to count overindulgence in drink a sin. Ato- tally indecent, drunken man in both Russia and Germany is more an object of solicitude and sympathy than of scorn. Saint Vladimir, the apostle of Russia, is credited with having said, when the choice of religion was proposed to him: "No Mohammedanism for us; Russia's joy is drinking." 1 am myself, however, enough of a German student to appreciate companionship around a nicely served table with beer and song. Possibly the complete lack of the esthetic in their drinking was what made it so revolting. Out in the open air beneath green branches these Slavs might not perhaps have looked so offensive. They may have had some such idea themselves, for during a walk 1 took in a little forest nearby 1 saw under almost every tree traces of successive festivities. Nobody was really senselessly drunk, however, not even late in the after- noon. The saying holds true of many a Russian, " Drunk for a
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dime; making fuss for a dollar." If they Rg^t, the essential weapon is the fist, never a knife or a pistol. In spite of the lack of police surveillance, or perhaps because of it, drinkers in these mining towns get into trouble less often than they do in the city. Yet it is decidedly for the worse that they drink in their homes, seMom going to the saloons. The children and women thus become used to the sight of debauchery, though I saw no women in the houses where drinking was going on. The women were by themselves else- where, untidy, some barefooted, and almost all in weekday clothes. "Why is this so here," I asked myself, "when 1 remember the streets of Russian villages on Sunday, bright with all the colors of the rainbow in the women's bands, frocks, and kerchiefsP" Pos- sibly the answer was to be found in the fact that the nearest church of Old Believers was about forty miles from Cokeburf^,* and Rus- sian Sunday adornment is inseparable from church-going. Only girls of marriageable age, or close to it, were displaying quite American apparel and hairdressing, and this without any con- nection with the length of time they had lived in America. A nice American lady to whom I showed the picture on the page opposite, when she saw the girl standing first from the left said that she must have been in this country most of her life. Yet she had been here only six months. I talked with her and found her fresh, with rustic, awkward bashfulness.
The village "belle" was also a daughter of the Old Believers, but she had bwn brought up in this country. Refined in feature and of slender figure, she spoke perfect English, yet showed much of that defiant, overbearing lack of kindness one meets so often in the city shop giri, whose manners she was evidently imitating. I wished her to pose for a picture with her uncle, but she balked at the suggestion of being photographed with such an un-American object. She could not see as 1 did, what a majestic head of a boyar her uncle had, — so much like Boyar Morosoflf, he who re- fused to sit "below" a man beneath him in rank at the Czar's ubie, and being ordered to don a buffoon's dress so taunted the Czar with bitter truth and insults that he was beheaded for dessert.
The large woman in the middle of the group was possessor
* Now nearer at hand, in Marianna.
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of the sole abstinent husband among the Old Believers, a small taciturn man. "They do not like him; they don't like anybody who does not drink with them," explained the woman, "so he stays at home." He proved to have been in America about seven- teen years (the longest term in America of any Russian that 1 met) and six years in Cokeburgh. Nothing in his manner or in the ap- pearance of his house, though it was decent enough (his wife and he had no children, no boarders), showed particularly the influence of America. There was neither the quaintness of the Russian " izba" about their barren room, nor the comfort and neatness of the American home.
1 saw nothing encouraging about my countrymen that day. The charming strains of a violin being played with a clarinet, which I heard coming from a Hungarian house on my way to the station, filled me with deep sorrow because of the lack of anything beautiful in the lives of my people. If that music could but. have been theirs!
Later, in another mining town in the north of Allegheny County — Russeltown, called by Russians "Wet Mines" — I vainly tried to find shelter for the night in some Old Believer's house. My companion was a Russian, just beginning in the business of book- selling. Three men at that time were making their livings by selling books, holy images, and crosses, but mainly books, among Russians in and around Pittsburgh. Ready enough were the Old Believers to let us into their houses, but these were crowded be- yond belief. The rumor that Wet Mines was about to start up had brought a multitude from other places.
" Say, Beard, do you have a room in your house for tonight?" This to a burly fellow hardly distinguishable for the darkness, yet unmistakably an Old Believer. "But, my 'bratets' (my dear little brother)," he kindly responded (I was ashamed at having apostrophized him so roughly), " I have just moved to the town and have no furniture whatever in my house; it's on the way; if you don't care — welcome." And this welcome comes out of the darkness to a stranger, of whom the " Beard" can see only that he is from the city (a bad recommendation indeed), and that he can talk Russian. No asking to which of the 66 nationalities in Russia and almost as many religions he belonged — but straight out, " Wel- 86
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come. " True, there was not very much to which the visitors were welcomed — a quite empty house, a bundle of shawls spread upon a pile of Straw in one room all the furnishings they possessed, and nothing at all in the other. An attractive-looking woman was sitting on the floor, gazing dreamily into the blazing coals of the fireplace. In answer to my "God help," she made place for me before the fire. In a moment I was sitting beside her, talking to her as though we were old acquaintances. Meanwhile, the man was grabbing a big armful of straw from his own pile, and preparing a bed for the bookseller and myself in the other room. I can not help remembering that bunch of straw. It makes the penny dole of a poor fellow equal to the gift of a Rockefeller. Christians those peasants are, by the strongest claim — natural disposition. That oft-repeated cry, "We must Christianize the foreigners," is like breaking into an open door.
To the woman I complained of the disorder and filth I saw everywhere among my people. "Why are all so dirty? Is it the same over in Russia?" She became animated. "Why! andboard- ers? How can you keep the house clean with 20 men to take care of, and children?" She had had four, one of whom had died, and shewasnot yet twenty-three. "Who keeps boarders overintheold country? Not to think of siich a thing!" It was too obvious to ask her why Russians do it here. It is the only chance they have to accomplish the main purpose of their coming, which is to save mcmey; an amount insignificant in America, perhaps, but lai^ in a Russian village. Boarders and keepers; and for both sides it is bitter. The "hazda" receives $3.00 per month from each man. For this sum the latter is entitled to a lodging together with some 1 5 other men. A neighbor had 28 at one time, said the woman, in four rooms — the half of a company house — for which she paid J8.00. Each room was about 30 feet square.
The hazda attends to the washing of underwear and bed- clothes, suppUes cabbage for the soup, and does the cooking. She reaps s(»ne profit from butcher, bako-, and grocer on the things she purchases for her boarders. Minor features in the unwritten con- stitution of keeping boarders are peculiar; the hazda herself, but not her man, has the right, free of charge, of taking part in the mess; so have her ungrown children. When the men wash after 87
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coming from work, she is supposed to wash their backs. Arduous task, undoubtedly, that of boarder-keeping. At the highest esti- mate, it can bring about $60 per month, if based on 20 boarders. With the husband making a little over this sum, 1 heard of a couple who had managed to amass J6,ooo in five years.* They had had exceptionally good fortune, no doubt, up to that point — no seasons of non-employment, sickness, or other losses. The husband then died, and although almost half of the money was spent on a tre- mendous drunken "pomin" (that heathenish survival of accom- panying a burial with a carouse), and a gaudy monument in the cemetery, the wife returned to Russia a rich, envied widow, sure to find a husband.
"Say, do you have 'banyas' (bath-houses) there in Suvaiki as they do in Great Russia?" "Oh, certainly, my father had a nice banya." So it is; even the poor peasant in north and middle Russia has, besides his "izba," a bath-house, as an American has a bathroom. It is not a very elaborate affair; a room with a high bench built stepwise and a big water tub; hot stones from the fire- place in the anteroom are thrown into the tub to heat the water; others are besprinkled, producing an enormous amount of steam, which one can take in degrees of heat on the different steps of the bench. Invariably the bath is accompanied by a "birch broom" beating all over the body, thus intensifying the heat. The bather especially likes that taking-the-breath-away sensation. The amount of heat a peasant can stand by being beaten with birch twigs would take the breath away forever from many a more highly organized being! Steam and birch twigs remove dirt very effectively, without the use of soap. It is not to be contended that the peasant loves his banya solely for the sake of cleanliness; it is a pleasure to him. The saying that it is only in the third genera- tion that the foreigner in America takes to the bath, is reversed in the case of Great Russians at least. It is the first generation that changes its habits; it stops taking the bath niien it comes to America. A Moscow merchant would not see the insulting point if I should read to him what I saw in a Sunday newspaper not long ago, that he goes to bath once a year; why, he might as well be accused of not liking his vodka as of not liking hb bath! * In this case possibly a clandestine selling of liquor helped.
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"Why don't you make the bath-houses here?" I asked my hostess, and she explained how much of an undertaking it would be. " Does your husband drink as much as the others?" I continued my inquiry. "Once in awhile; he does not spend much on drink." As a matter of fact, none spend much on drink. A keg of beer costs only $i.oo and is sufficient for a good spree for five men. Most know when to stop. The expense comes later at the adjust- ment of the result of drinking; payment for battery and arrests. " Does your husband beat you?" " Doesn't beat, doesn't love," she answers in Russian saying.
1 neariy failed to notice the woman's children — three of them, sitting quietly not far from us, seemingly possessed of that "con- templative spirit of the East." The oldest, about ten years old, attended school, and spoke English as well as Russian. His father had already taught him to read in Russian.
1 still had to provide a quilt and a bedckith for the night <H] my straw bed. Again going from house to bouse, chance brought me first to an English-speaking family, where I was given to understand that 1 was crazy to ask such a thing — stranger as I was. I could not but agree with them, civilized as I had become, and would doubtless have acted as they did. But in an Old Believer's house, 1 got a quilt and a sheet just for the asking. The quilt was M and dirty, but the home-made linen cloth, fresh and dean, was exquisite.
Searching for my companion, 1 came across a group of Old Believers outside a house. Through the light which streamed from an open door I discerned standing with them a tall man, not very well shaved, with drooping mustachios; certainly an Ameri- can. He proved to be a former Texan cowboy, now a farmer living on 13 acres of land in the vicinity of Wet Mines. 1 wondered that he kept company with my Old Bdievers and told him so. "Oh, they are as good as gold to me," said he. As 1 engaged in conver- sation with him, not as a Russian but just as a "decent-like fur- riner," his opinion could not have lacked sincerity. I found him, later on, sitting in an Old Believer's house, among a bearded crowd, drinking and jollying with them. For him they embodied the essential traits of a "white man": no littleness, no stinginess; readiness to fi^t on provocation, redoubtable, too, in fight; the 89
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good-natured, cheerful disposition; and last, but not least, the ability to drink like a fish without dying from it. Oh! if there were but common soil of intercourse with Americans for these Russians other than drinking!
I finally found my companion in an empty house surrounded by a crowd of young fellows who were poring over his case of books. Among them were four American boys. Bottles strewn on the floor made it clear that drinking was going on in this house, although with the exception of a red-headed fellow they called " Dutchman," who was rather piggish and obscene, I did not notice anybody behaving badly. All were busied with books. A nice-looking Russian youth was translating the inscriptions under the pictures in a book about the Russian-Japanese War to a refined, sympathetic Ameri- can chap who might have been driven from a good position by bad times out of the city. The Russian youth talked to me with rap- ture about the joys of reading a book with the long title "Story About How a Lioness Has Reared a King's Son."
My wish to secure some photographs of Old Believers suf- fered defeat in Wet Mines. The investi^ting proclivities I had displayed gave ground to rumors that 1 was a detective. Rus- sians hate nothing so much as a spy. Only two women, typical "babas" (peasant women) in the house from which 1 got my quilt and beddoth, could be coaxed to pose; but 1 spoiled everything by my tactlessness. They wanted to put on their Sunday bravery, being indeed extremely dirty from the labors of the morning turn- out of men to work. " You're good enough for me as you are," I insisted, " I want you in everyday clothes." To my amazement the older woman turned on me in a fury. "Look here, sport (frant), I'll break this stick on your back. You want our pictures to laugh at!" Poor woman, certainly 1 did not. The memory of those howling, whistling, yelling crowds — Americans and near- Americans — jeering at her peasant dress when she first came to the mining town, had left too sore a spot to be touched. I had already seen bearded Old Believer men going on a long way round to the grocery store to avoid the "ba, ba" (imitation of a goat) of the boys and grown-up men.
But for this incident, 1 found the Old Believers invariably the most kindhearted, goodnatured lot of people I had ever met, 90
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almost childlike, despite their sometimes sullen looks, and I learned only to love them. Not much of an asset, is it? — this kind- ness and goodnature — as qualities for a man to depend upon in the struggle for life. Yet, if the golden age should come, more of these qualities will be needed. The Romans could not imagine that any force but brute force counted. Nowadays the world believes that "brains" alone count. 1 do not wish to say that every casual American observer wll find these men of such kindly dispo- sition as 1 describe. Ignorance is suspicious, stubbornness is difficult to handle. And he is difficult, the Old Believer. Maybe, too, those good qualities of heart belong alone to men who have had to struggle only with nature, not with men, for their existence. I am told that here, under the ground, it comes often to ugly fights for cars. Through faulty organization in some of the mines, cars are not furnished promptly nor in sufficient number for the coal loaders. And Old Believers, it is said, prove more savage than anybody else in the contest to secure them.
In common with all Russians in America, these men are steady workers, despite their k>ve of drink. " Drunkard and wise — two virtues in him," they are apt to say cynically about them- selves. Their industry came rather as a surprise to me. We Russians of advanced thought often agree with the reactionanes in one thing; that the "muzhik" is lazy. " If he vwAd not be so lazy, there would not be famine; a big stick is good enough for him," says the reactionary. "If he were not so lazy, he could throw all that pile of corruption into Hades," say we. Over- worked, the Russian peasant of course is not. Can one imagine in America a scene like this: a huge fellow lying on the ground in the market-place waiting for an employer. He may be asleep; all his concern is to produce the sole of his bare foot, on which is chalked the price he expects for his labor. Woe to the man who shall arouse him for bargaining.
Is there then real ability among them? you ask. Have any achieved success? To be sure, there is no railroad president among their number, but I know a heater-boss on the South Side, who is boss over five furnaces; he can make $130 to $150 per month. Now, to the ordinary reader this may seem of small account. But 1 know enough of steel making to assert that it is about as easy for 91
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an ordinary American college graduate to become a railroad presi- dent as for a Russian peasant to become a boss heater. The work is skilled and the position is next to that of a roller-boss in respon- sibility. This man has been in America over fifteen years; he has left the " old belief" and embraced orthodoxy. He once came to our newly bom Russian club and threatened us with all the terrors of the police for being supposedly enemies of the church. His con- viction of finding protection against ideas in the police force showed that he did not know that he was in America, and not in Russia.
I n Siberia, many Old Believers are rich gold miners and traders with China. In Russia, also, they are beginning to be successful in all walksof life. The leader of the now ruling conservative party, a certain Guchkoff (his brother is mayor of Moscow), is of this stock. Morosoff, the king of the cotton mills, belongs to it, too. In a recent conversation with a man from Riga, that thoroughly German city of the Baltic provinces, this man spoke of the Old Believers as " those millionaires." Indeed, very many of their num- her there have achieved large fortunes. A sufficiently striking example is such a wellknown name as that of KusnetsolT, which appears on each china plate made in Russia. The main thing, however, to record of them is that they are of that stock of Russian peasants who sit on a soil, barren and sterile, but which I never heard to be in famine. Famine in Russia is the product of a rich soil, which having been for centuries scratched only enough to yield a bare sustenance, refuses it now.
Certainly, here in America, it is hard for these peasants to compete for success. Among other Russians one may find mechan- icians even educated men. It is easy for a German to open a deli- catessen store, for a Jew to open any kind of store (each may have been in business in the old country), thanks to the help and advice of their countrymen. Advice is so often much better than money. The best advice on business matters was given me always in the Russian tongue, and 1 do not forget that it was from Russian Jews.
It is characteristic that I met so many Slavs in the heating processes of the steel mills. There they find the chance to start and to leam by themselves. The starting stages of a laborer around the furnace or of an assistant heater are very arduous. Naturally enough the Slavs get the job. Whatever their manner 92
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of life is, the Old Believers are the most self-dependent group of Slavs in America. Not having the help of the church. Old Believers are accustomed to stand much more alone than other Russians. 1, who have not a good word for the Russian ofRcial church at home, recognize the helpfulness of it here, where it gives some kind of organization to the amorphous mass of Russian peas- ants. The Old Believers show a remarkable weakness in their church oi^nization, caused mainly by the ambiguous position of their priests. In the Greek church, ordination is a sacrament and can be performed only by a bishop. Now bishops can be appointed only by an assembly of bishops, and many Old Believers argue that the so-called "Austrian" bishops are not lawful and they recognize only the priests of the Orthodox church who come over to "old belief." Others either wrangle about their priests, or do not recognize any. Out of the estimated 10,000 Russians in the state of Pennsylvania, in my opinion close to 3,000 are Old Be- lievers. Of these over 1,000 live in Allegheny County and the vicinity. Yet scattered as they are these people have only one prayer house (in Essen), and one priest — a peasant, quite like any member of his flock, without education, although undeniably a good, sober man. He was bom a Prussian citizen and served in the Prussian Guards, with whom he was at Sedan in 1870, as a non-commissioned ofBcer. Afterward he became a Russian, and worked as a small boss on government railroads. Now here he is a printHS inUr pares with the Old Believers. His six foot three, or thereabout, looks extremely sound, and no one would think him to be sixty-seven years old. This pnest, however, does not seem to be goierally accepted, and many marriages await a blessing in the (dd country. Lack of organization is generally a weak point with Old Bdievers; indeed, the worst thing I know about them is that they are not strong union men and they are accused of having brokm up the longshoremen's union in Erie. 1 do not know whether or not this chaise be true, but 1 do know that the derisive " ba, ba's" hurled at them must have been no Small factor in any estrangement of the Old Believers from the rest of the workingmen. If to me should be put the question that so persists in the discussion of any group of immigrants: Are they desirable, those long-bearded Russians? 1 am almost ready to say no. Not 9i
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because of their drunkenness; this can be cured, and must be cured. Sweden, thirty years ago, was a land of drunkards; not so today. Not because of their crowded, inhuman living. This can be reme- died by regulations similar to those that in time of war are posted on every freight box-car in Russia — " Eight horses or 40 men only." But rather because of the fact that so few wish to become American citizens. 1 can not see how a group of men can be desirable in any country which they regard as a purgatory, be they ignorant Rus- sian peasants in America, or highly skilled Belgian engineers in Russia.
Together with the rest of the Russians — for the matter of that, with the rest of the Slavs — these Old Believers live as though yet on passage, in steerage, "temporarily," without thought of adapting themselves to the conditions that surround them, still less of improving them. They expect to go back home. Patriotism has nothing to do with their return. It is a matter of personal expediency. A simitar phenomenon exists in Russia. Our small industrial force there is more than half composed of such hybrid contingents — peasants coming to the industrial centers "to make money for taxes"; living in conditions as bad, though hardly worse than those in Pittsburgh. But here the parallel ceases, for though a Russian city is by no means a great center of culture, its civilizing influence on the hordes of peasants who flock to it is much more rapid and effective than is the case in America. Here in this great country of freedom and enlightenment the wall that encircles ignorance seems to be higher and more impregnable than that of China. Still, if I noticed among my people any inclination to stay here, it was among these same Old Believers. Many have made the journey here two, even three times, and have lost at- tachment to their native soil. Perhaps these would not now be- come farmers. If when Old Believers first arrive they could be helped to settle in their primordial capacity of husbandmen, the United States would have in them a good agricultural element. Not that I believe my long-bearded countrymen to be human material inferior for whatever purpose to any other people coming to the United States. But undoubtedly it would be a hard task and a long one to turn men who for two hundred years have preserved their Russian traits in Poland, into Americans. Possibly decent, 94
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neighboriy Americans — not merely reformers and social workers — could conquer Russian ignorance and superstition if they could overcome their own disgust at the " hideous looks and ugly cries" of the foreigners. So Marius conquered the Cymbrians and Teutons by making hts soldiers first face the barbarians without fear. Yet, it can hardly be.
It is up to the Russians themselves to convert their unen- lightened compatriots to "Americanism," not using the term in the European sense of shrewdness and agility, but as meaning what is good in civic life. There are already Russians in America fitted for such work. The revolution has sent over here many men who in their own country were ready to risk their lives to teach people how to live like human beings. Where are you? Some, as did Garibaldi, may be making candles for a miserable pittance, lost in dreamsof returning home to fight. Others, indignant at themselves and at their countrymen for giving themselves up to selfish pur- suits when they have known the service to principles, are de- nouncing America for all kinds of things. Here is a task for you, Gdevy? ot-sovis!
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS R. R. Wright, Jr.
HOW far have Negro workmen gained a foothold in the great tonnage industry at the basis of Pittsburgh's economic life? Accustomed as the public is to associating Negroes with personal service, small business enterprises, and unskilled labor, their participation in steel making is worth some scrutiny, as an indication of the part they may play, and the meaning of this part to them and to the community, in the American industrial development of the future. While Negroes make up perhaps less than 2 per cent of the working force of the steel plants, individual workmen hold positions of all grades, from that of yard laborer to skilled workman or foreman. My commission was to make a per- sonal study of [00 Negro steel workers, belonging to what is perhaps the most remarkable group in the industry — those employed in the Clark Mills of the Carnegie Steel Company.* Negroes first went to work at this plant during a strike in the 8o's t and at the time of my inquiry in 1907 they made up one-sixth of the force.
The men in the group studied were employed for the most part on the rolling mills (steel) ; some few on the mills which roll the iron from the puddling furnaces.
'The total numbcrof Negroes in these milli, all of whom were interviewed, was I to, and statistics taken from the company's reports, aod so forth, cover the entire group. Otherwise, the facts given concern only the i oa men of whose lives and work an intimate personal study was made. Names and addresses were supplied by an official of the Camegie Steel Company, himself a Negro, but the data were secured chiefly from the men themselves. They were met at the mills during meal times and on pay day; at the churches and at their social clubs; and the homes of about 7J per cent of them were personally visited from once to four or ttve times. Thus, although complete information could not be secured from all the men, the writer had opportunity to study the Negro steel worker under various conditions.
t For occasional references to Negro mil] workers and tabulations as to their budgets see Byington, Margaret F.: Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town. (The Pittsburgh Survey.) Excerpts from Miss Tucker's general survey of the Negroes of Pittsburgh afford the community background of this special group. See Appendii V, p. 414 of this vdume.
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They were nearly all men in the prime of their working years, when 1 met them, only six being over fifty years (^ age. Over half were between twenty-five and forty.
TABLE 1. — AGES OF 100 NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
|
'It* |
Mtn |
|
14 ynn Mid 1«« than 16 year* 16 yean aod leu than 30 yean 30 yean aitd leu than 3) yun aj yeaii and lew than jo yeare )0 yean and leu than ); yean }i yean and leu than 40 yean 40 yeaira and lest than 50 years |
i i 17 '9 |
|
100 |
|
FROM FARM HAND TO MILL WORKER The length of service of these men was difficult to ascertain, because some of them had not been continuously employed at the mills. A few, owing to the financial depression, were not actually engaged in the steel work at the time <^ my inquiry, but they ex- pected at any time to return to it. The time of beginning work in the Clark Mills, of all the Negroes employed in March, 1907, was secured.
TABLE 2. — YEARS OF EMPLOYMENT IN THE CLARK MILLS OF I lO NEGRO STEEL WORKERS EMPLOYED MARCH, I907
|
Year, in MiTl Work |
M«t |
|
1 year and lesi than 3 years 3 yean and leu than 3 yean 3 years and leu than 4 years 4 years and less than j yean j years and less than 8 yean 8 yean and less than 10 years 10 years and less than i; yean 1$ yean and leu than 31 yean |
i '1 7 |
|
Total |
|
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
That is, about one-fourth of the men were new to the work, having been employed less than a year; neariy half had been em- ployed for less than two years, less than one«ighth from two to five years, about one-fourth from five to ten years, about one- sixth for more than ten years. A few men had been employed as many as thirty years in mill work. A roller, probably the high- est paid Negro workman in the Pittsburgh District, claimed to have started in the mills in Virginia at eleven years of age and to have continued in the work for forty years. Others began between the ages of twelve and fourteen. As a rule, however, skilled men who had worked up had entered the mills after they were sixteen years of age, and many after they were twenty. Very few of the men in responsible places had started under fourteen or between fourteen and sixteen years of age. On the other hand, few cases were found of Negroes working in the mills who had not done some kind of hard labor before they were sixteen years of age.
Most of the men were Southerners. Of the 94 who gave their birthplaces, 61 were bom in Virginia, nine in Tennessee, seven in Alabama, two in Kentucky, four in North Carolina, one in Mary- land, five in other southern states, three in Pennsylvania, and two in other northern states. Most of them had made their start in life before the days of compulsory education and child labor laws. Generally the work done was on a farm or in a house or hotel; rarely in a factory where a special posture or a special routine for the entire day was required. After reaching more mature years, they had usually been engaged in some kind ctf out-door labor, such as railroad work, hod-carrying, or farming; a few had been in in- door domestic or personal work before drifting into the mills in the South or North. The currency and speed of the transition is shown by the fact that neariy half had been in the mills less than two years, and neariy half also had begun working in the mills the first year they came to Pittsburgh.
As to education, there was but a limited amount among them. No one of the 100 men questioned would admit that he could not read and write, and evidence to the contrary could not be obtained. A large num- ber of them admitted having had less than two years' schooling. In the 99
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
rural districts of the South, where most of these men were bom, the school term had been from two lo five months and school facilities were woe- fully inadequate. As a consequence, very few had had the equivalent of a Pittsburgh grammar school education. Several, however, who had come to the city in their youth, had attended the Pittsburgh public schools from one to seven years.
Of the Negro boys in the Gark Mills, most of those I talked with were, like the men, natives of the South, but had come to the city before they were twelve years of age. Only one had completed the grammar school course. Most of Ihem had not reached the fifth grade. How many started to work earlier than the Pennsylvania law allowed, I had no means of learning with accuracy. One little fellow who looked to be about fourteen, and to weigh loo pounds, claimed to be sixteen and to have worked two years; he was in knee pants.
As a rule Negro boys do not remain in the mills long, nor work up in them. Of the boys under twenty years of age reported to me, only two had been in the mills more than two years. Many drop out the first year. Once having earned money, however, they do not, except in rare cases, return to schoiri. One man who had been a mill worker for many years, hadasonof sixteen years who had been in the mill four years. In another family there were two boys aged fifteen and seventeen; both had been in Pittsburgh for nine years but they had gone only as far as the fourth grade in school. The younger had worked in the mills about a year and a half; the older one about nine months. These boys earned from 75 cents to f i.i; per day and they and their guardians expressed great pride in this fact. No doubt they contributed quite largely to the family income. In but few instances, however, were the boys living with their parents.
UP FROM UNSKILLED LABOR Most of the men who had been five years or more in the Clark Mills had worked up from unskilled labor and were en- gaged at some point in the process of steel manufacture. Three had reached the highest position — that of roller — two on one mill and one on another. The two Negroes who were on the same mill had complete charge of it with from 10 to 18 men under them, white men as well as Negroes.
In order to gauge the responsibility borne by these men the process of rolling as carried out in this plant, one of the older and smaller plants of the Steel Corporation, should be described: The bars of steel, or what are technically called billets, come in specified sizes to a mill. These
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS ■'.;.•
billets — my description is. of course, that of a non-technical man-^iaie heated in a furnace and then rolled into shape to suit the order. Ai.the-. furnace from two to four men are employed — the heater, who superip'-*'.. lends the furnace and is responsible for the temperature of the steel, thaC . . it be taken out at the proper time; the charger, who puts the steel into the furnace; and the assistant heater, who helps the heater and is subject to his orders and sometimes paid by him. When the metal is properly heated, a boy called the"puller-up,"ordoor boy, opens t he door; the heater draws the steel with a pair of swinging tongs and carries it to the first rolling machine (the mill), where it is rolled several times, till it becomes a certain length and thickness. This first rolling machine is called a roughing machine, and the men are called "roughers," — sometimes "rougherv up" and " rough ers-down " or "catchers," according to the work done. On the far side of the machine a boy stands who raises the steel to a higher roll, so that the rougher-up or catcher can push it through; he is called the "hooker-up." Then come the finishing rolls, at which stand two men, who rdl the steel into its proper width and breadth. Two men at these tcA\s are called "finishers." "Shearsmen" or "sawyers" cut the steel sheet, and "fillers," "bundlers," and other laborers prepare it for the consumer. The "rdler" has entire charge of all machines and is responsible for all the processes from the furnace to the finishing. He receives the order from the superintendent as to the product desired; he must order his raw ma- terial, set his rolls, and prepare all machinery for work, and is responsible for the product. All told J9 of the men studied had reached the posi- tions described— rollers, roughers, finishers on rolls, puddlers, mill- wrights, heaters, and so forth.
Most of the men are paid by output, so that their wages depend upon their own efforts and those of the mill crew they work with. Like the whites, the majority put in a twelve-hour day; and like the whites, the unskilled workers earned less than {2.00 a day. But a full fourth of the Negro workers were earning $3.00 or over- Two rollers reported earning fis each per turn, that is, a day or night of twelve hours; but out of this each paid a helper. Another roller said that he averaged $7.50 per turn after paying his helper. Heaters reported I6.50 per turn to be divided with a helper. One hundred steel workers reported their average earnings to be as follows:
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
|
Auraf DaOy Eamingt |
Mm |
|
i.ooandlcu thMji.jo |
6 |
|
].;o and leu than tj.oo j.oo and leu than ^j.jo j.jo and leu than $4.00 4.00 and leu than Js-oo |
I 4 4 9 |
|
100 |
|
• The*e were largely youtlw.
As to expenditures, no definite information was secured, except in regard to the item of rent, which ranged from |S.oo to fz; for dwellings containing from two to seven rooms. Most d the houses in which the men lived were frame buildings, situated in back streets and alleys. Only two were on streets paved with asphalt; about a score on streets paved with stones; and the rest on unpaved streets, where the mud stands heavy and thick during rainy seasons. Within the houses, however, the conditions, even in the poorest homes, were better than without. Many had neat sitting rooms or parlors containing pianos or organs. In nearly all, large crayon portraits and landscape chromos found conspicu- ous place. Food seemed to be substantial and abundant. I visited a number of homes just at dinner time and without pre- vious notice, always to find an ample supply of good food. Like- wise on a certain pay day, I spent three hours at one of the mills, meeting men as they came to get their pay. None came in their working clothes; most had polished their shoes, which were dif- ferent from the ones worn at work; all were well, even stylishly, dressed, and bore nothing about them to indicate their calling.
As very few of the Negroes now in the steel mills were there as boys, so very few of those now there had children to take their places. The supply of Negro labor comes from without, and must continue so to come if the group studied are representative. For while we found a large numberof marriages among them, the num-
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
ber of children to these marriages was small, averaging but one to the family.
Out of 89 reporting their conjugal condition, 67 were married, seven were either widowed, divorced, or separated, and tj, chiefly youths, had never been married.
The percentage of married men among these Negro sted workers was very much higher than among the Negroes of Pinsburgh as a whde. Of the families of the 74 men who were or had been married, the largest contained six children; three families contained live children each; five families, three each; 14 families, two each; and nine families had (Mily one child each; while 43 men who were or had been married, reported no chil- dren. (In all cases I mean living children. Several m«i had lost their only child, and a number had lost more than one.) Nearly three-fifths (;6.8 pN cent), therefore, of the married Negro steel workers had no chil- dren, and among the total of 74 who bad been married, there were only 73 children. Their tendency seemed to be to marry, but not to have chil- dren. Why this is I am unable to say; but these data accord with those secured elsewhere, showing a general decrease in the size of the Negro family in urban cwnmunities.
Bearing in mind the eomomic status of a majority of these people, a gjance at the age distribution of Pittsburgh Negroes as given in the 1910 census will illustrate the family situation which lies back of the fact that the Pittsburgh mills are not gathering their Negro steel workers out of the native Negro population:
TABLE 4. — NEGRO POPULATION OF PITTSBURGH, BY ACE AND SEX. 1910
|
Mala |
Total |
|||
|
Numhtr |
Percent |
|||
|
Lisstha |
849 1,307 3.489 a.789 1.779 |
330 973 III 16 ■IS 55 |
■f 1,85 3.o7« 409 i"3 |
|
|
1 year and leu thin j yean J yean and leu dian 10 yean 10 yean and leu than ij yean 1 } yean and leM than 30 yan M yean and leu than aj ytun aj yean and leu than jj yean ii y^m and leu than 45 yean 4$ yean and leu than 6; yean |
7.0 7.6 7-» 71 36! I 19.1 |
|||
|
■4 |
||||
|
Total |
'J.3J1 |
13,371 |
3s,633 |
.«>.o |
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
The excess of males (who form ^2 per cent of the Negro pop- ulation) over females, is worthy of note for the reason that in the United States as a whole males constitute slightly less than half (49.7 per cent) of the Negro population. Far more striking is the small proportion of children under fifteen years in this group, — 34 per cent as compared with 37 per cent for the entire Negro popu- lation of the United States; and the large proportion of persons between the ages of twenty and forty-five, — 55 per cent in this group as compared with 37 per cent in the entire country. Aged persons, that is, persons sixty-five years of age or older, form in Pittsburgh 1.6 per cent of the total Negro population, tn the United States 3 per cent.
It is evident that if the Negro population of Pittsburgh is to develop normally the percentages at both extremes must be- come greater; but this will mean a greater number of dependents, and poverty among them must greatly increase unless they have the foresight to husband their resources and create a surplus.
Most of the men spent as rapidly as they earned. Among the 100 studied, there was little saving except through insurance. All carried some kind of insurance, both in regular companies and in other organizations; some had policies in two or three insurance companies. Most (^ the married men and some of the single ones carried straight life policies, as well as sickness and accident insur- ance. One man reported having $1 ,000 in bank, another, (2;, and several others reported unspecified sums. About a dozen claimed to possess property, but only half of these owned real estate in Pitts- burgh. One man owned two lots. Some said they had little places in the South, inherited from parents; a half dozen held preferred stock in the United States Steel Corporation, some of them as many as five shares at a par value of $ 100 per share, paying 7 per cent per annum. These were men in the higher places in the mill.
COMMUNITY LIFE The chief social organization among them was the secret society; the church next.
The Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, and the Masons were represented in the order named; while the True Refonners and the Gal- 104
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
lilean Fishennen contained many members. Less than half of the men were members of a church; many who were not members said their wives were; but most of them attended church occasionally. Church members were usually Baptists. In the midst of the mill district was the Good Hope Baptist church, pastored in 1907 by a pure black from Alabama, Rev. C H. Messer by name. Several mill workere were on his board of deacons and trustees, and the church had a large following among them. A noticeable feature to one well acquainted with Negro churches elsewhere was the orderliness of the service. On the occasions of my visits there was an entire absence of the emotional expressions for which the members of this race are so generally noted, and very practical sermons applicable to the life of city Negroes were given. The president of the oldest Negro building and loan association in the city, a worker in the mill, is an officer in this church, and the effort to establish a day nursery for Negroes is now chiefly supported by the members. In the opinion of one of the Negro pastors, contact with the foreign element in the mills had done a great deal to lessen the faith of his people.
While there was no labor union among the Negroes of the mill, a social club was maintained. 1 visited this club on Sunday afternoon and listened to the proceedings, which ranged from a discussion on the Bible to one on the construction of machinery used in the mills.
Except on Saturday night, there was not a great deal of drinking; and it very seldom happened, I was informed, that a man came to work under the influence (^ liquor.
I n all cases Negroes and whites seemed to work together with- out friction, though in the early days there had been in every plant more or less trouble, even bloodshed, riot, and killing. White men have often refused to work with Negroes, but where the manage- ment has stood by the right of the competent Negro to work, this open protest has died out. In the Clark plant, for instance, a num- ber of years ago. no Negroes were employed. Now Negroes work in most of the mills. On one mill, already mentioned, where the two chief rollers were Negroes, both had several white men under them; on another mill, a Negro roller was always on the night turn and had a different group of workmen under him each week. In each group there were white men. In one furnace the chief heater was a Negro and his assistant was white ; in another the chief was white and the assistant a Negro; another furnace had a Negro heater and Negro assistant, and a white boy to open doors; another, a Negro rougher 105
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
and catcher and a white hooker-up. In some cases even, Negroes did all or most of the skilled work and whites the unskilled work; but 1 did not find any mills in which Negroes did all the unskilled and whites all the skilled work. In the Black Diamond Mills, Negroes did most of the puddling. Though in some mills Negroes filled chiefly the positions where the workers are subjected to the most heat or hard physical efi'ort, as in the case of heaters, rough- ers, and puddlers, they were by no means limited to them.
As to the quality of their work, I was informed by the super- intendent of one of the plants where Negroes were largely em- ployed, and where some of the heaviest and most diflicult labor, requiring much skill, was directly executed and supervised by them, that the work was well up to the standard, and that the output equaled the amount usually turned out by white workers. The same superintendent said that no sentiment governed the em- ployment of Negroes; it was purely a matter of business, and they held their own because they could do the work.
THE NEGROES AND THE UNIONS The Negro steel workers of Pittsburgh are not union mem- bers and they have not been for many years.
The history of the Negroes in ccHinection with the iron and steel unions is long and interesting.* In the early days, before the Amalga- mated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was formed in 1876, there exbted the Sons of Vulcan, in which the puddlers were the dcxninant de- ment. There were at this time Negro puddlers in the South, but they were kept out of the Sons of Vulcan by a constitutional clause limiting mem- bership to whites only. Consequently, when in 1875 a strike in one of the Pittsburgh mills occurred, colored men came from Etichmond, Virginia, and took positions as puddlers. This was the beginning of Negro puddlers in the Pittsburgh mills. The next year the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was formed and its preamble declared : " In union there is strength, and in the formation of a national Amalgamated Association embracing every iron and steel worker in the country, a union founded upon a basis broad as the land in which we live, lies our only hope." No Negroes were organized at that time, but a few years later they were or- ganized in both Pittsburgh and the South. Their connection with the union which was at one time one of the strongest in the country, has not, however, been very satisfactory.
•See Tucker, Helen R.: The Negroes of Piltsburgh. Appendix V, p. 434. 106
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
The general opinion of the Negro men I talked with was that the unions were a hindrance rather than a help to them. Several had been members, and one had been president of a southern union and delegate to a national convention of steel workers; some had gone out on strikes for the union. Their testimony may be summarized as follows:
(i) The organization out of which the Amalgamated Asso- ciation of Iron and Steel Workers was formed did not admit Ne- groes.
(2) After the Amalgamated Association was formed, white union men refused to work with Negro union men, or to help pro- tect Negro union men in a controversy with employers.
(3) All the new opportunities secured by Negroes have been secured in spite <^ the union and not with the union's co-operation.
(4) Membership has been offered only after the Negroes have successfully won their places as against the unions.
In support of the first point, they say no Negro is known ever to have been a member of the Sons of Vulcan, the Associated Brotherhood of Iroa and Steel Heaters, or the Iron and Steel Roll Hands Union; and that amalgamating these bodies did not lessen the original prejudice, despite the clause in the constitutkHi already referred to. The most intelligent labor leaders may have meant to include Negro workers in the union pro- gram, but it was not so understood by the mass.
In support of the second statement, several instances are given wh«e uni<»i white men refused to work with their colored brethren. One of (he principal instances was at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Some N^ro workmen who at their union's request had struck in Pittsburgh, heard of the need of puddlers in Beaver Falls. They did not go alone, but were accmnpanied by the secretary of the union — a white man — who tried to gel wt^k for them there. But the Beaver Falls men would not work with them, despite the pleadings of the secretary. The Negroes had to return to Pittsburgh. Other instances have been recited to me, some of which show that the declarations of the constitutions and the broad stand taken by some union officials were repudiated by the workmen.
In support of the third statement, it is asserted that Negroes now work only in non-union mills; that they got their opportunity in the Black Diamond Mills by takingihe place of strikers, after they had been ignored by the union at Beaver Falls; that they secured their place in the Clark Mills as wdl as in Homestead and most of the other places by going in 107
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after white union men had quit; and that only after they had gotten into the mills were they offered membership in the union. Then the Negroes in Pittsburgh were organized and a little later the Negroes of Richmond, so that, as they put it, the whites might be insured against the latter acting as strikebreakers. The last attempt to organize the Negroes was in 1901, when many of them at the Clark Mills struck in order to help white men maintain the union. The strike failed, and since then the union has been entirely eliminated from the Carnegie plants.
The whole history of unionism in the Pittsburgh steel in- dustry as far as Negroes are concerned has been the attempt on the part of white workmen to use the former to their advantage, without giving any corresponding advantage to them. Thus, in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere, intelligent Negro workmen are in a quan- dary, believing most fervently in the ideals of labor unions, but obliged to oppose them because of their practice. It is only another instance of the unfortunate blundeiing of labor men in letting prejudice and undemocratic ideas drive away from them the sympathy and co-operation of the thinking element of any rapidly rising group such as Negroes are becoming. Action of this kind gives the opponents (A the labor movement 3 weapon, destined to become more and more powerful, with which to com- pass the defeat of those plans for the betterment of the conditions of life and work which are cherished by every laboring man, re- gardless of race or color.
As a rule the men were Republicans, though they were less fervently partisan than is usual among Negroes of the working class. The action (A President Roosevelt in the case of the Negro troops at Brownsville, Texas, had dampened their ardor at the time of my visit. Yet no man with whom I talked ventured to call himself a Democrat; and 1 found no Socialists among them. I discussed the question of socialism with several. One man said it was a pretty good theory; and he noticed that most of the people for it were poor, while the wealthy were as a rule against it. So far as he was concerned, he sympathized with the poor. "Things are bad I know," he said. "The poor people don't get what they ought to. But," he added, " 1 am afraid of the poor white men; they don't see that we Negroes have to live as well as they, and they are not willing to give us a chance. So far as I am concerned, 108
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ONE HUNDRED NEGRO STEEL WORKERS
1 let socialism and all that sort of thing alone; and I stand by the man that stands by me, and that is the rich man every time." And he concluded with the emphatic statement: "No Negro ought to have anything to do with socialism."
And this, I found, was the general attitude of the Negro workingman who had thought at all on the subject.*
THE NEGRO AS AN INDUSTRIAL FACTOR The most difficult task, in making such a group study, is to draw accurate conclusions from the information secured, but the following seem to be beyond controversy. It is of significance,
(i) That Negroes are able to direct and successfully run the machinery connected with this most important and dangerous in- dustry— the making of steel.
(2) That Negroes will work under men of their own race, without the supervision of a white man; and that under certain circumstances, white men will work under the supervision of and cooperate with Negro superiors.
(3) That the output of a steel mill is not necessarily limited because the work is directed chiefly by Negroes.
(4) That Negroes of this particular district are largely out of touch and harmony with the great popular movements of trades unionism and socialism, not so much because they are out of har- mony with or opposed to the fundamental principles involved, but because past experiences have made them lose faith in the efRciency of such movements to lessen their own (the Negroes') ills.
($) That the Negroes in Pittsburgh, because of their recent coining to the city, and the small proportion of young children and very old people who would naturally be dependents, are enjoying a prosperity which a more normal development of a native Negro population, unless accompanied by increased foresight and thrift among them, will very probably lessen.
(6) That the majority of Negro steel workers are not re- producing themselves; while they work hard, eat good food, and
* In 191 3, the Secretary pro tern, of the Allegheny County Campaign Com- mittee of the Socialist Party wrote: "So far ai 1 have been able todiicover, we do not have a single colored steel worker in the party in Allegheny County." 109
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in INDUSTRY
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GAINFUL OCCUPATIONS IN PITTSBURGH
|
P<r Cnl <^ In- enati from 1900 mi CMiQUly |
|||||
|
Sa |
,»> |
im |
|||
|
»„., |
P<rC«l |
Nambtr |
P«fC«l |
||
|
SS,: : |
34^56} |
?J:| |
1l» |
IV |
I9.S |
|
Total |
.M.W6 |
.00.0 |
J33-6JT |
'~-' |
IS -3 |
|
PbrCbni |
|||||
|
Nalif WkiU |
|||||
|
PatlZ- |
S" |
Stn |
|||
|
Ml SJ.6 III 30! 1 39.3 IS. 3 |
37.6 li 14.6 s 3».» jo!o 19-3 |
13-» 34^3 SI." 76.a TJ.O SI rt.s |
^ |
||
|
iS |
J:t |
||||
|
Blectrldaiui^decuicalengli^etn- . . |
i| I9.6S6 1.33J |
1.6 |
|||
|
si:^S""^^S'3SSi: ■ ■ ■ |
S-J4| |
1-4 |
|||
k Not olbenriw «ped
The tint lable ahoii In the decade, 1900- lO. thcr employed a» compaied with
ko incT^aAe of 50 ^r ce
_ . iployed In i;
iitetpoading proportioD for men was about 83 per c The Dumber and the general nativity ar-" —
10 per cent in ipoo. The
icalindua
>nby tb
ftirtUbe
noted that the largen group ,
who number almoat lo.ooo. The second largeat group cnuiata of leBcral laborer* and tbe third largest of machinists and miltwrishts. Tlie proportion of native-born whites of native pamts is largest among electricians and electrical englnecn and •malleM among taHon; tbe proportioii of native-born whites of foreign parents li largest among apprentices, and among [lumbers snd gMsndsteim fitter*, and *malleM among tailors; Ihepropmtlon -" — '— ■— ^ —>--—-- •-•-'- est among tailon and among labr— — '" '"*" *«..«j«— k»--* i.
UharETs in ear and railroad *bop* .
ler among (eneral laborer* and among furnace men, anetter men. beaten and pour-
iamuchlli
tailora; the propOTtloo of forei«n-bom whites is __ iron foundries, blaat furnace* and rolling mill*, and ipprcnilces. The propoitkn of Negroes
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WAGE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH
John R. Commons William M. Leiserson
PITTSBURGH THE POWERFUL— THE [RON CITY— THE WORKSHOP OF THE WORLD. Situated on the Allegheny plateau at the headwaters of the Ohio, rich in mineral resources, easily accessible to markets, such are proud claims of a district beyond all others the strategic center for the production of wealth.
PITTSBURGH RIOTS OF 1877— HOMESTEAD STRIKE OF 1892— PITTSBURGH MILLIONAIRE. These tell of Pitts- burgh's strategic position in another campaign — the worldwide struggle for the distribution of wealth.
Gigantic in its creation of wealth, titanic in its contests for the division of wealth, Pittsburgh looms up the mighty storm mountain of Capital and Labor. Here our modem world has achieved great triumphs and faced grave menace.
Outwardly, much of western Pennsylvania is not inviting. The surface is hilly, with narrow and precipitous valleys and few flood plains. Not much of the land is suited to cultivation, and the meager agriculture of its populous areas is shouldered to the uplands. But for heavy manufacturing Nature has peculiarly exerted herself. Three great rivers and three smaller ones afford transportation. The Allegheny comes down from New York state, draining an area of ii.joo square miles. From West Virginia comes the Monongahela. At "The Point" of Pittsburgh these two rivers mingle their waters to form the Ohio, and this river carries the products of the city to the west and south. Within the Pittsburgh District these three large rivers receive the waters of smaller ones. The Youghiogheny empties into the Monongahela, the Kiskeminetas joins the Allegheny, and Beaver River flows into the Ohio.
Through the hills which line these rivers run enormous 8- 113
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WACE-EAKNiNG PITTSBURGH
vdns of bituminous coal. Located near the suiface, the coal is easily mined, and, elevated above the rivers, much of it may be brought to cars and boats by gravity. There are billions of tMis of it, good for steam, gas, or coke. Then there are vast stores (tf oil, natural gas, sand, shale, clay, and stone, with which to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead In iron and steel, glass, electrical machinery, steel railroad cars, tin plate, air brakes, and fire brick.
To the gifts of nature has been added the bounty of gov- ernment. Besides Pittsburgh's share in the long time benefits of tariff legislation, G>ngress has appropriated over |20,ooo,ooo for river improvements in this region. The Monongahela in its ori- ginal condition was navigable for steamboats only at high stages.' Today steamboats go its entire length in Pennsylvania; and for $2 miles beyond the West Virginia line, as far as Fairmont.
As a result of these improvements, frei^t rates on fuel have been reduced and manufactures stimulated. Coal formeriy shipped by rail now goes by river at a cost in some cases reduced as much as So per cent. The woric of the government on the other rivers and in Pittsburgh harbor proper luis brought similar results. The Allegheny River and the Ohio about nttsburgb formeriy abounded in boulders, snags, bars, and shoals. Most of these obstructions have been removed, and the government is continuing its work of making navigation easy.
The transportation system provided by nature and govern- ment is supplemented by a network of railroads; five trunk^ine systems with their branches and a score of leased lines radiate from the city. Besides these, there are several connecting lines owned by the steel companies, binding together the various plants.
Business enterprise, taking advantage of these resources, is able to turn out from the district surrounding Pittsburgh what is without any doubt the greatest annual tonnage of any similar area in the world. The greater part of this tonnage, of course,
• A private company built seven lockj and dams on the river in Pennsyl- vania, producing slack water from Pittsburgh to within two miles of the West Vir^nii state line. The United States government paid this company $).70o,ooo for Its property and rights, and appropriated S3,JDO.O(X> more for building new locks and dams and improving the old ones.
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arises from the heavy products of coal mines and steel mills. Coal mining has been marvelously perfected. Electricity applied to undercutting and hauling enables a single mine to turn out 6,000 and 7,000 tons of coal a day. En EMstrict No. 5 of the United Mine Workers of America, including with Allegheny County eight other counties of Western Pennsylvania, fifty million tons are pro- duced yearly.
With its output of pig iron the Pittsburgh District supplies over one^ourth the total product of the United States, and not far from one-sixth of the iron and steel tonnage erf the world is produced in Allegheny County alone. The value of the products of the iron and steel industries for a territory with a ten-mile radius was in igio* over $300,000,000. In that territory the value of the products of the allied foundry and machine shops amounted the same year to over |$o,ooo,ooo; that (rf electrical machinery, ap- paratus, and supplies to $20,000,000; that of the products of rail- road car shops, including manufacture and repair, to approximately 917,000,000; that of glass, to $9,000,000; that erf all manufactures to above half a tullion.
In the production of this enormous wealth thousands of workers consperate. According to the census, Pittsburgh has a population of half a million.f According to local enthusiasts the population is five times that number. Both figures are misleading. The first limits the city to its political boundaries; the second extends it over a radius of 75 miles from the court house, and includes a territory under the government of three states and a score or more counties. It is difficult to define the limits, but the whole ot Allegheny County is homogeneous in an economic and social sense, and corresponds roughly to what is commonly termed the Pittsburgh District.^ Here, roughly, a million people live,§
'The coal and iron trada, civic, ceiuus, and linanctat bodies employ different geographical units in discussing this industrial region, so thai il is difficult to bring together broad statements as to the Pittsburgh District. Tor compilations for a 10 mile radius, based on the census of 1910, as issued by the Pittsburgh Industrial Devdopment Commission, tee Appendix VIII, p. 443.
t United States Census, 1900— 431,} la: 1910 — J33.90}. Both figures include All^hcny City, annexed in 1907.
t When not otherwise qualified, the term F*ittsburgh District as used in this section may be undentood to refer to Allegheny County.
I United Stales Census, 1900— Tyf.ojS; igio — 1,018,463. 115
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move, and have their being. Of these, approximately 2jo,ooo are wage-earners employed in 3,000 establishments.
How do these wage-earners fare in the division of products derived from these magnificent resources? What is their share and how do they get it? These are questions which are fundamental to our inquiry. First, there is everywhere the great ocean of com- mon labor — unprivileged, competitive, equalized — making up from two-fifths to one-half the total. Above this expanse, here and there for a time, appear like waves and wavelets those whom skill, physique, talent, trade unionism, or municipal favoritism lift above the fluid mass. Restless, unstable, up, down, and on, like the ocean, so is the labor of Pittsburgh. From the employ- ment bureau c^ a huge machine works we learned that in a single year of continued prosperity, 1906, they hired 12,000 men and women to keep up a force of 10,000.* And this restless "go and come " is only slightly less with the skilled than with the unskilled, for the foreman of the tool room in the same establishment esti- mated that to keep up his required force of 100 men possessing the highest grades of mechanical skill, he hired 100 men during the year. The superintendent of a mining property, lacking, however, the exact records of our machine-shop bureau, insisted on the amazing figure of 5,000 hired during the year to maintain a force of 1 ,000. The largest operator of the District thought this was too high, but said that hiring 2,000 in a year to fill 1,000 per- manent positions was not an exaggerated index of labor's mobility in the Pittsburgh District.
What are we to infer? Seemingly the economist's hypothe- sis of the immobility of labor compared with the mobility of capital is almost reversed within the Pittsburgh District. The human stream from Europe and America whiris and eddies through the deep-cut valleys of the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the Ohio, like the converging rivers themselves. But the ponderous furnaces and mills remain fixed like the hills. What is the explana- tion of this pass and repass of labor? Is it the climate, the fog, the smoke? Is it the difficulty of finding homes and the cost of housing and living? Yes, answers our employment bureau,
• See Porter, H. F. J., op. cjt. P. 117 of this volume. 116
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which has made a careful study of the situation with which it deals. Is it the defeat and exclusion of trade unionism, which in other places makes for stability and the rights of priority for the man who has longest held the job? No, for neither the inflow nor the outflow of organized mine workers is appreciably less than that of unorgan- ized machine workers or steel workers. Is it low wages and long hours? No, answer the mine workers again. Is it specialization, speeding up, over-exertion? Yes, very largely. These are both cause and effect of excessive restlessness.
By minute specialization of jobs, by army-like organization, by keeping together a staff of highly paid regulars at the top, the industries of Pittsburgh are independent of the rank and file. Two- thirds of the steel workers are unskilled immigrants, and thousands of them in their ignorance of English are as uncomprehending as horses, if we may judge by the kind of Gee! Whoa! and gesture commands that suffice for directing them. Specialization, elimi- nation of skill, payment by the piece or premium, speeding up,* — these are inherently the aims of Pittsburgh business men, and the methods that turn out tons of shapes for the skilful work- ers of other cities to put into finished products. Without its marvelous framework of organization, eliminating dependence on personality in the masses and thereby rendering personality more indispensable in the captains, it would be impossible for Pittsburgh to convert its stream of labor into the most productive labor power known in modem industry. Large rewards for brains, — to overseers, managers, foremen, bosses, "pushers," and gang leaders in descending scale; heavy pressure toward equality of wages among the restless, changing, competitive rank and file, — these are the principles which Pittsburgh applies to the distribu- tion of the wealth in the production of which she holds supremacy.
These contrasts in the economic scale are scarcely more violent than the ups aitd downs in the common fortunes of the District. Andrew Carnegie has said of the iron and steel industry that it is a case of either Prince or Pauper. Certainly no staple manufactured article responds so violently to the prosperity and depression of the country as pig iron. So it is with all the indus-
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tries of Pittsburg that follow in the train of King Iron. When the Pittsburgh Survey began its work In September, 1907, the Prince was oo his throne, — full years of prosperity and glorious optimism had been his. Long before September, 1908, Carnegie's Pauper walked the streets. From every type and class of labor came the report of a year with only half, or three-fourths, or even one-third of the time employed. Hardly another city in the country was hit as hard or stunned as long by the panic as was Pittsburgh. The overwork in 1907 was the out-of-^work in 1908.
Here, again, was evidence of the marvelous mobility of labor. Suddenly the dikes of prosperity that had held tn the great level ocean of immigrant coirmion day labor, which we estimated at two-flfths to one-half of the 250,000 wage-earners of the Pitts- burgh District, gave way. Thousands of foreigners left pre- cipitately for Europe.* For such unskilled laborers as stayed and could find work, the rate of pay held. Organized labor, which in numbers may have been one-third of the total, fell to possibly one-fifth, and trade union earnings from the various heights to which they had been lifted, began to sink to the un- organized level. Those divisions of organized labor, which, like the building trades, were able to protect their high rates of hourly pay, suffered most of all from unemployment, and their level of yearly earnings fell furthest toward the level of the unorganized.
Between the great level of common labor and the higher levels of organized labor were the other third or two-fifths of all the wage-earners, whom physique, talent, skill, or municipal favoritism had also lifted above the mass of their fellows. These, too, in the common experience of unemployment began to fall toward the lower level of earnings.
Slowly, in the succeeding years came the rehabilitation of earnings and employment, until in some trade groups still higher levels were reached and until with 1913-14 another, if lesser period of ebbing activities set in. Significant developments since 1907-
* This CToa-tt»i shuttling of unikiiled labor is responsive, alio, lo Europein events. During the Balkan War immigrants were scarce, unskilled latxir ra
o $3.75 and tyoo a day for emergent work and stories were current of employers 'stealing" carloads of recruits from each other. A year later (1914 — before the general European war}, an employment agent slated he could supply as many men
IS needed at half that figure. The general European war has, itself, potentialities which may change the labor situation in the American sleel district more funda- mentally than the most prolonged hard times.
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PRINCE OR PAUPER Andrew Carnegie has said of Ihe iron and steel induslry that it is either ne or the olher
Skvlime of the Commercial Center Some monuments to Pittsburgh's might in time o( prosperity
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08, as well as in the years preceding, are noted in the following pages, but they deal primarily with the status of the Pittsburgh worker at the close of the seven prosperous years with which the century opened, as this status was thrown into relief by the suddm shifting from prosperity to depression.
First Prince, then Pauper; overwork, then underwork; high wages, no wages; millionaire, immigrant; militant unions, master- ful employers; marvelous business organization, amazing social disorganization. Such are the contrasts of " Pittsburgh the Power- ful." the "Workshop of the World!"
DAY LABOR
When he is free to make his own bargain with the employer, and competition is unrestricted, the Pittsburgh laborer who is without skill or command of English gets in prosperous times $2.ooa day or under. In 1907-08 he sometimes got as low as |i.3s for a stint of ten hours. In the mills and yards outside the ctty t6}4 cents an hour was the prevailing rate for the kind of work done by the Slav immigrant, but in Pittsburgh proper 1 ; cents was more generally paid for such labor. Jones and Laughlin in the city could hire Slavs at 1; cents, while the United States Steel Corporation in the mill towns was paying i6}4 cents.*
To railroads and contractors belonged the distinction of being the industrial employers who paid the lowest wages for day labor. Section hands, mostly Italians, in the Pittsburgh District,
* Certain »teel mills have paid as 1owas(i.3i per day in subsequent years; one establishnieni in 1910 paying but }[.o6. This level is not one. however, set by the industry at a whole. The policy of the Steel Girporation has been to siandardiu pay for unskilled labor and hold to it in good limes and bad. laying off men, and working the mills part time, bul not cutting the day labor rate. In igro. the United States Steel Corporation raised its rates to 17}^ cents an hour, Jones and Laughlin to [6. In igij the Steel Corporation raised to 30 cents an hour, Jones and Laughlin to I7>i cents. This represents an increase in hourly wages for common labor (from 1907 to [91)) of 31 per cent (or the Steel Corporation, and of 17 per cent for Jones and Laughlin, Meanwhile, the cost of food in workingmen's families for the North Atlantic stales, as reflected by the best estimates available, that is, the index numbers of the United States Bureau of Labor statistics, has advanced 36 per cent. The advance for the country as » whole has been ^ per cent, while that for the North Central states with which Pittsburgh has more in common economically than the geographic area with which the census classifies it, has been )3 percent. See Appendix VII, p. 441.
Such a comparison of wages and prices from 1907 to 1914 does nothing to alter the sober finding of the Pittsburgh Survey in 1907-08 that common labor in the Pittsburgh District is paid leu than the standard of famity subsistence. For the meaning of this in the lives of the people, see Byington, Margaret F,: Hom«< stead: The Households of a friill Town. (The Pittsburgh Survey.) 119
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earned i'i}4 cents an hour, $1.35 a day, but the employment agents on special contracts seemed to be able to get i6}4 cents. We struck up a bargain with one of these enterprising wholesale dealers in humanity as he was leading his gang to the depot. He claimed to have sold them at this rate of pay for work in Alle- gheny County, and offered to furnish us a hundred like them for a month, to lay natural gas pipe in Wisconsin at $2.00 a day, pro- vided we paid their round trip traveling expenses back as far as Chicago and gave him exclusive contract, together with the sole privilege of running the commissary. Giving his name and number in the telephone book, he referred us to the Standard Oil Com- pany, for whom he claimed to be sending men to Oklahoma for the same kind of work on the same terms, the company paying the round trip expenses back to Pittsburgh. Probably, however, the Italian section hands in the Pittsburgh District at Si. 3^ a day were getting as much, or more, out of the railway companies as they could have netted out of their fellow-countryman, this Americanized padrone. Eight to twelve dollars for a week of sixty hours has since 1907-08 been the gamut of wages* for the unskilled where compe- tition is free and English unessential. Higher levels are reached even in unskilled work when trade unionism, municipal politics, or the Enf^ish language become factors in the situation. The building laborers, for example, were getting $2.00 for a day of eight hours in 1907-08. This was 50 to 60 per cent more by the hour than was paid for a similar zero degree of mechanical skill in other jobs. In 1908 the hod-carriers and mortar mixers among them secured $3.00 a day, or a scale of 37K cents. This rate was due to the institution of the Building Laborers' and Hod Carriers' Union, established by the American-bom English-speaking common la- borers, white and colored, to protect themselves against the " green " Slavsand Italians. But this organization was weak. Only theaid of the organized skilled trades in building construction made it possible for them to launch their effort for short hours and high pay.t but these trades were as yet making no effort to protect the
*ln :gi) prevailing day rate} ran front (1.6; toSa.i^and labor was hard to get at that. In 1914 before the outbreak of the European war, jobs were hard to get at |i.7{. This was in the general labor market, including contract work, which reflected the ups and downs of demand.
t On account of a comparatively dull season in 1910 in building operations, the day laborers were not steadily employed during that year The large contract- ors took advaDtage of this fact and declared for the open shop, and a strike ensued 120
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mass of excavators, chiefly immigrants.
The state limits work on public jobs to eight hours, and municipal and state politics showed its hand also in the $2.00 paid by the municipality to the 200 day laborers it employed directly.*
When labor is in heavy demand, the English language is worth 2 cents an hour. The non-English-speaking worker be- ginning at i6}4 cents can often get i8>^ cents by the time he becomes sufficiently Americanized to fill a job where a knowledge of English is needed. Additional fitness, adaptability, a political connection, or trade unionism, with no additional mechanical skill, brings him an additional 2 cents, 8 cents, or even 10 cents an hour.
TRANSPORTATION WORK
Teamsters. In the factories and on the railroads the Slav and the Italian fill the ranks of common labor; it is among the teamsters that the Negro finds his congenial job. The factory is too confined, the work too monotonous; but following his horses, he can see the sights and get paid for riding. Of 9,000 teamsters in the District in 1907-08, more than one-half were Ne- groes.
A teamster reaches his stable between 6 and 6.30 a. m. and is supposed to quit at ; p. m. He must clean and take care of his horses. Usually he gets an hour for dinner. On the average he works ten hours a day, but this is not fixed; he must get through with his route. If he has very much overtime he usually receives his regular rate per hour for it. Sunday and holiday work are paid for at the same rate. In the city the teamsters do not have much overtime, but in the mills overtime adds a considerable amount to the drivers' earnings. One man interviewed earned nineteen and one-half days' pay in two weeks. He averaged right along about eighteen days at every fortnightly pay day. which resulted in a partial victory for the employers. Since then, as part of the general trend In the building trades, the union has built up a membership of ijoo. All big jobs, on skyscrapers and other buildings, where organized labor is in con- trol, employ union building laborers. Union hod-carrien, scaffold builders, mor- tar mixers, and so forth, receive ^jyi cents an hour. The common laborers who do the excavating work receive if cents. Men who bepn work half an hour ahead of the mechanics and leave half an hour late, get lime and a half; double time on
* Under the civil service rules, which apply to all city employes, day laborers have to pass a physical examination. A law of 189; requiring contractors doing public work to work their men no more than eight hours, was declared unconsti- tutional by the supreme court in 1911. Prior to 1907 the city had paid fi.jo and f 1.7J for ordinary day labor.
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The usual wage in Pittsburgh in 1907-08 was }io a week for the driver of a singlehorse, and }i 3 for two horses. In the suburban towns, tH was usually paid for driving a two-horse team. Thus the predomi- nant rate was 18 to 30 cents an hour. The steel companies paid their teamsters |3.oo for a ten-hour day, with overtime and Sunday work at the same rate. The express cranpanies were paying);; and |6o a month. There were no fixed hours and the men were obliged to keep at their work until all deliveries were made. They had every other Sunday off. Simi- lariy, the cab drivers had to clean their own carriages and worked Suadays, holidays, and any hour of the day or night without extra pay. In 1904 the wages of these were ^9.00 and iio a week. A strike in 1905 raised wages to $14 a week cm carriages and $1^ on hearses. The bosses thm signed an agreement with the cab drivers' union, renewed in 1906.
The three locals of team drivers, cab drivers, and ice men at the height of their power numbered about 3,000 men. Only the cab drivers' organization survived the hard times. In 1913, the International Broth- erhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen, and Stablemen's Hdpers organized a local which is still in a formative state. The garbage collec- tors employed by city contractors went on strike in the summer of 1913, organized, and secured a raise fnmi |3.oo to |3.3j a day.
RivERHEN. A class of American workmen, akin to the teamsters in skill but not in color, are the river transport workers.
The working day is twelve hours on the double crew boats and somewhat longer — as high as fifteen or eighteen hours — on boats with single crews. Double crews are six hours on and six hours off. The men eat and live on the boats and work seven days in the week. The effect is demoralizing. They work for a "stake" and then " knock off " until their money is gone. Drunk- enness is the prevailing evil among them.
Their wages per month in 1907-08, with board included, were: firemen and deckhands, $;o; mates, $jo; engineers, |ioo; captains, f laj. About 500 rivermen, organized as a local branch of the International Longshoremen, Marine and Transport Workers' Association, called a strike in January, 1907, and demanded $60 a mtmth for firemen and deckhands, and fSo for mates. The strike was lost, and after two months the men went back to work at the old rates.
The marine engineers organized in the fall of 1913, and attempted to secure better terms in the spring of 1914. The companies refused the demands, the men went on strike, and outside engineers were brought in to take their places.
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Stkeet Railway Employes. So far we have been discuss- ing the transportation men whose work is closely akin to primi- tive methods of haulage. These lead up to the employments which have come in with mechanical horse power. Motormen or conductors can be broken in almost as fast as teamsters. Yet the wages of the street railway men are 30 to 30 per cent higher by the hour and they work an hour or two less per day. They are today fitter and steadier men than the teamsters. They have more responsibility, and their organization, a branch of the Amal- gamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employes, is a strong one and makes annual agreements with the Pittsburgh Railway Company. The union in 1907-08 had about 2,700 mem- bers and included, with the exception of about 100 men, all the motormen and conductors working in Pittsburgh. This was the third largest local union of street railway employes in the United States, and the wages it secured by joint agreement were the high- est east of the Mississippi. Prior to the absorption of all the street railway lines by the Pittsburgh Railways Company and the adop- tion of the secret ballot in political elections, employment could be secured through political leaders. Since then the men have been hired as they come, according to fitness.
Runs on the street cars are ctmtinuous and there is no time off for meals.* Unduly long runs may mean overwork and insuffi- cient help; while short runs may mean low earnings for the crews who have them. Therefore, the schedule of hours and runs ts an important matter to street railway operatives. In 1907 the Pitts- burgh Railways Company revised its schedule so as to shorten the long runs and equalize the work. The longest run was brought down to ten hours and forty minutes as against eleven hours, and nine or ten hours became the day's work for most street railway employes. Extra pay for Sundays, holidays, or overtime was not allowed, but Sunday runs were arranged for somewhat shorter periods than on weekdays. These schedules represented a reduction of 30 to 40 per cent in the hours of labor since 1902.
On June 36, 1909, all the motormoi and conductors employed by the Pittsbu^ Railways Company went out on strike. Their main grievance was that the company had promised to reduce the number of
* Tbe men must leUe a few minutes between trips for their lunches. 123
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"short runs" from 213 to half the number, but had not done so. Other grievances related to methods of discipline which the employes complained were too severe. Through the efforts of Mayor Magee the company agreed on June 39 to reduce the short runs to 106 and to leave the other matters to a board of arbitration. The men returned to work pending the arbitration. The report of the board, which was accepted by both sides, ordered the reinstatement of an employe who had been dismissed for drunkenness, and provided punishment less severe than discharge.
Under an agreement made in 1910. either party was obliged to notify the other in writing thirty days before the expiration of the agree- ment, if they desired to make any changes in the contract. By this time, in contrast to the teamsters, all but $0 of the 3,000 street railway men in Pittsburgh wore the union button. The proportion still holds.
The agreement in force in 1908 fixed the wages of first-year men, both motormen and conductors, at 24^^ cents an hour, and the rate advanced by stages, so that three-year men got 26j< cents. This scale represented a reduction in view of a loss in earnings by the company following the panic of 1907, of one-half cent per hour from that made in the preceding year by a board of arbitration. The agreement of 1910 restored the 1907 rate for the men then in the service and increased the wages of those who should remain with the company three years or more. The rates fixed were 25 cents an hour for the first six months of service, 25^^ for the second six months, 26K for the second year, 27X for the third year, and 28}4 cents for those employed more than three years. After 191 1 those who had been in the service of the company more than four years were to receive 29^ cents an hour, but all new men who should be employed after April, 1910, were to be started at 23 cents. The 1912 scale was as follows: first six months, 23^^ cents; second six months, 3; cents; second year, 26^^ cents; third year, 28 cents; fourth year, 29 cents; and after four years, 30 cents. In 1914, the men asked for a 35-cent flat rate for all, and the demands are [July-Septem- ber] in process of arbitration.
Railway Employes. To handle the enormous trafRc of the Pittsburgh District, the various railways employ about 50,000 people. Of these the Pennsylvania lines have about 35,000. The men actually employed on the cars and engines are classed as switchmen (or yardmen) and roadmen. Yardmen do not go outside of the switching yards. They receive the trains, distribute them to the various tracks for unloading, and make up trains to be given to the roadmen.
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About 3,600 men are employed in the switching service in and about Pittsburgh. A switching crew is composed of one conductor or foreman, three brakemen or helpers, an engineer, and a fireman.
Considering the requirements of the railway service, its severity and danger, as well as the wages and hours, the condition of the yardmen is similar to that of the roughers and catchers in the rolling mills. They are much the same kind of men, largely American bom, of strong physique and endurance, working long hours at the hardest work.
Up to 1907 most of the yards guaranteed their switchmen a mini- mum half day of six hours. If they worked less than this they received a half day's pay. If they worked over six hours they received pay for the actual time employed. One yard guaranteed the men a full day's pay if they worked over six hours. In 1907 a minimum day of ten hours was established and the pay was arranged on the hourly basis. This change was the result of a threatened strike in the fall of 1906 for an eight-hour day and an increase of 6 cents an hour in the rate of wages.
The rival unions in the yards, the Switchmen's Union of North America and the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, both presented these demands. To head off the proposed strike the Pennsylvania Railroad issued an order increasing by 10 per cent the wages of all employes receiv- ing less than ^200 a month. The move succeeded. The Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen immediately modified their demands, the Switchmen's Union held out for the original demands, the railway companies en- tered into conferences with the trainmen and a compromise was arranged, — the men to work in two" tricks "of twelve hours each, one coming on, the other off, at 6:30 a.m.; but to be paid for eleven hours — the dinner hour being deducted — and to be guaranteed a minimum day of ten hours. That is, if a man is out only two or three hours he still gets his guaranteed rate for the day. The rates were fixed at the scale given above for 1906.
In 1910, and again in 1912-13, scales in the eastern territory affect- ing $3 lines have been fixed by a series of arbitration awards, the last beingthoseof the engineers dating from May, 1912, the firemen from April, 191), and the trainmen from November, 1913. For the most part, the rates paid on the Pennsylvania lines have been above these awards, the general level for all roads in the territory creeping up toward them, and, in some few instances, passing them. The rates per hour for yardmen on the Pennsylvania are from so per cent to nearly 95 per cent higher than those of twenty years ago.
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In some of the mill yards the night crew and the day crew change shifts every two weeks. Before the enforcement of the seven-day rule in 1910, these mill switchmen were once a month confined to their engines or cars for twenty-four hours.
In the railroad yards in 1907-08 day crews usually got off every other Sunday. Night crews worked one Sunday and had two off. The present general practice of the Pennsylvania is to observe a Sunday shut down. In case of wrecks crews are out as long as twenty-five, thirty, and even forty-eight hours. Outside of emergencies, however, the hours of yardmen are regular; little overtime beyond twelve hours is required.
The reverse was true of roadmen up to 1907. While the time tables were so arranged that the hours approximated twelve or thirteen per day, congestion of freight compelled men to work much longer. A man starting with a freight could not tell when he would get back. He might have to lie for hours at a siding.
Prior to the enactment, in 1907, of the federal law restrict- ing hours in inter-state commerce to sixteen, some men reported being out thirty, forty, and even sixty hours at a stretch. Dur- ing the winter months ei^teen to twenty hours was the regular thing for freight crews. The time record of an engineer for two months in 1907 was: August, twenty-six days, 391 hours; Sep- tember, twenty-five days, 386 hours; average fifteen hours a day. Twice during September he worked forty hours at one turn. He began Saturday noon and quit Monday morning.
The effect of the Federal law in correcting these excessive hours is shown in the percentage relation which overtime paid freight crews
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and passenger crews bears to the total wages paid such crews during the years 1913 and 1913 for the Pennsylvania lines east of Pittsburgh: 1911 . /^ivi;M 5.1 percent Paitngtr \,t pn cent
igi) ... " 6.1 percent " 3.1 percent
Moreover, it would be extremely uneconomical for a company to operate with the old irregularity — since under the awards train employes are guaranteed a ten-hodr day for time held away from home terminal after a given number of hours, ranging from eighteen to twenty-eight hours. To quote a Pennsylvania R. R. official as to present praaice:
"While the Federal Law places a time limit of t6 hours in which an employe may remain on duty, the percentage of men relieved in order to avoid this violation is comparatively small. This is due to the fact that the railroads have, during the past decade, expended large sums of money in yards and terminals as well as additional running tracks, which has resulted in permitting the men to make their runs in reasonable time. In fact the majority of freight runs on the Lines East of Pittsburgh are paid for on the basis of 1 1 hours, while the running time consumes 8, 9, and to hours, thereby giving the employes a bonus of the hours saved under the i I hours paid for. Of course, under extraordinary circumstances, these crews are detained beyond the time limit placed on the run, in which case, however, they receive overtime on a minute basis."
The pay for the men on the road is fixed by a combination of hourly rate and mileage ran. A minimum day of ten hours is guaranteed, on an assumed run of 100 miles in that period. If the employe is out longer than ten hours, or makes over 100 miles in that ten hours, he gets extra compensation on a pro rata basis- miles or hours, whichever is greater.
The 1907, igio, and 1912-13 scales per 100 miles or less or ten hours or less are shown on the following page. They indicate the general rise in pay throughout the period, and the last two columns show the relation of the Pennsylvania Railroad rates to the general award.
Some of the railway brotherhoods have strong organizations in the Pittsburgh District, but their insurance features and the difficulty of calling a strike on a railroad system serve to make the men conservative and to delay improvements in their condition. It required federal legislation to set a limit of sixteen to their con- secutive hours of labor. The switchmen's union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, — as the railway brotherhoods are not, — has shown a more aggressive spirit and has incurred the hostility of the railway managers, who are inclined to favor the 127
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rival union, the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen.* This conflict of jurisdiction, especially in the switchyards, also tends to stand in the way of action for improvement.
MINIMUM SCALE. lOO MILES OR LESS, 10 HOURS OR LESS
|
1907 Award |
mo Award |
ms-is Award |
19lt-lS P.R.R. |
|
|
Local Frtigbl Trains: Engineer <lowejt type engine) Fireman (lowest typeen^ne) Conductor .... Brakeman .... Flagman .... Throttgh Fuighi Trains: Engineer (highest type en- gine) Fireman {highest type enpne) |
$}.6o a-io a.40 j-so 2.80 |
U7i i.oo J.97S 4-75 3.00 |
Isoo J-J5 4- SO J.OO 4.75 J.30 |
>5-"> 3} 5 4- SO 3.00 J.00 4.8s ).JO |
Note: The passenger scales and schedules are if anything more complicated than those of the freights. In general, the positions are preferred as they are more regular and ^ve a man more time at home, even when they do not net more pay.
It is evident that organization has made a decided difference in the condition of men engaged in the transportation trades. Teamsters and rivermen, whose unions are weak and unstable, have been checked in reducing their hours of labor or increasing wages. In contrast with these the street railway employes, whose organization by 1910 included all but 50 of the platform men in Pittsburgh, have greatly reduced their hours of labor since 1902, and in addition have secured many improvements in their condi- tions of employment together with substantia] increases in wages. The organizations of the steam railroad employes have been strong in numbers but they have lacked aggressiveness. Their hours of labor are therefore comparatively long, and whatever reduction of hours they have secured has come through governmental action. Substantial increases in wages have come to them, however, partly from the desire of the companies to head off any militant organizations among their men.
'The secretary of the switchmen's union gives this range of rates on the three lines in which they have a fooling in the Pittsburgh District in t9i4: yard crews, — conductors, day jS-jg,; cents per hour; night, 39-41-1; brakemen, day, 35-36.5; night, 36-38.5.
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WAGE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH SUPPLY TRADES
In juxtaposition to the transportation industries in Pitts- bur;gh which employ teamsters, rivermen, and railway men, whose working hours are. for the most part, spent out of doors, may be placed a group of " indoor occupations, " which present locally even greater contrasts in the process of labor organization. The workers in these occupations include the mercantile employes in stores and printing plants, and the bakers and brewers — chief among the food producers of the city. Ail these industries are closely identified with city life, and in them we find the general sentiment of the community toward labor, often the result of union propaganda or union purchasing power, playing a part in determining the status of the workers.
The difficulty of standardizing the multitude of retail stores made it impossible even for the strong union of "sales people" which once existed, to have any effect on wages. Yet this union was, during the big day of the Knights of Labor, when the general spirit of organization was strong in the land, able to shorten the hours of work and fix definite hours for opening and closing of shops. In this, to be sure, employers were willing to ac- quiesce in so far as competitors could be made to open and close at the same time, and the reduced hours continued long after the union dropped out. Among the bakers, shortage in the supply of workmen helped to fairly double their wages within a period of fifteen years and to cut down hours by one-third to one-half. But to the scarcity of workers must be added the ease with which the use of the union label can be enforced where consumers are mainly working people. This fact accounts for the strength of the Jewish bakers' union. The effective use of the union label, and also of the boycott, in another industry where the consumers are very largely workingmen is illustrated by the brewery workmen. They have organized the entire industry, and by uking into their organ- ization every workman, whatever his trade, who works for the brewery, they present a solid front to employers. The result is that brewery workmen enjoy an eight-hour day and their earnings approximate that of men with a much higher grade of skill. Sim- ilarly in the printing trades, those empbyed on newspapers have been in a strategic position from the fact that public pressure coukl 9* 129
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
be brought to bear on the publishers. It has given them an ad- vantage, so that their earnings are greater and they work fewer hours per day than do men in the book and job offices.
Retail Clerks. For a long time Pittsburgh had one of the strongest organizations of retail clerks in the country. Although the union is now practically destroyed, the hours and conditions of labor which it first established by agreements with employers have tended to continue.
Salespeople's Assembly No. 4907, Knights of Labor, of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, was organized about 1885. From the very beginning it proved successful and grew rapidly. In 1902 and 1903, at the height of its power, it had agreements with 3; stores and counted 1,200 members. All but two of the largest stores were unionized. These two, Boggs and Buhl in Allegheny, and Joseph Home and Company in Pittsburgh, by offering conditions just a little better than those provided in the agreements, were able to keep the union out.
The union found it impossible, as has been said, to regulate wages, and consequently the agreements were concerned only with hours and conditions of work. Previously, clerks had worked an indefinite number of hours. They would arrive at the stores at 6 or 7 in the morning and remain until 9 or 10 at night. Satur- day nights they worked much later. Having no fixed day there had been no pay for overtime, and often Sunday work was unpaid.
The first agreements of the union fixed the hours definitely at 7.30 a. m. for the opening, and 6 p. m. for closing, except on Saturday, when the closing hour was 10 p. m. All work outside of these hours was overtime, for which time and one-half was to be paid. Work on Sundays or holidays was paid double the regular rates. These agreements were usually for periods of three or five years. The last of the series of city-wide agreements provided:
I. Store open not earlier than 8 a. m. the year round.
3. Store closed not later than ^.^o p. m. during first five working days of the week, except from the first Monday after the Fourth of July until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in September,wf)en the dos- ing hour shall be ; p. m.
3. Store closed not later than 9 p. m. Saturdays, except as here- after provided for.
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WAGE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH
4. Store closed all day Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, as governed by state law.
;. The party of the second part shall have the privilege of keeping store open on the six (6) evenings preceding Christinas not later than to o'clock.
6. All services required before the time and after closing shall be paid for at the rate of time and half-time, pro rata to wages, provided that when stock needs attention at closing time, )0 minutes shall be allowed to place it in order, and further provided, that customers in the act of buying at closing time shall be served until purchase is concluded. All salespeople who are disengaged at closing time shall be promptly permitted to depart.
7. One hour shall be allowed for dinner and supper, and should this privilege be forfeited in the interest of business, so cents shall be paid for it.
8. Tardiness in the momtng or at meal times shall be subject to the regulations of the firm (as per store rules) except that when penal- ties are imposed, they shall in no case exceed time and half-time, pro rata to wages.
9. No employe shall be continued in service who does not work in harmony with the Salespeople's Assembly, and in engaging help due preference shall at all times be given to its members.
10. No goods shall be sold by others than members of this assembly except they are only special or extra help, and all such shall, upon demand, beccone members
[Other rules provided that all employes must be members of the union except proprietors' relatives, managers or buyers.)
When in [90; this agreement expired at the store of Eisner and Philips, that firm refused to renew it. The employes struck and were defeated. One by one the stores gave up the agreements. While the hours which had been agreed to were not immediately changed, the union was disrupted and it now maintains its exist- ence on paper only. Several attempts of the Retail Clerks' International Protective Association, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, to reorganize the sales people, have proved unsuccessful.*
The effect of the absence of a union soon became apparent. In
1908 Labor Day was not observed as a holiday by the retail stores; and
some of the stores which had fomieriy closed at ; p. m. during July and
* An employe' association instituted since 1906 is not in any sense a union.
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August during this year remained open till ^rjo. The same year Miss Butler* found i4stores working regularly from 8 a. m. to 9:30 p. m. — the schedule or the old union agreement. Eight stores, however, were work- ing from 8 a. m. to 6 p. m. Two stores were open not only Saturday evenings but evenings during the week as well until 9 and 10 o'clock. One store had no Christmas overtime and its trade was apparently not lessened thereby; but the others had overtime amounting to from ten days to two weeks. Six of them had a double shift arrangement whereby employes were on holiday duty alternate evenings, coming later on the days fdlowing nights at work. Seventeen stores had no double shift during the holidays, requiring a working week of from 73 to 84 hours.
Wages of retail clerks vary so greatly that it is impossible to give any general rates. In 1907-08 clothing salesmen began at f 10 or $12 per week, and when experienced their wages rose tofiS, $20, and $2;. "Gents furnishing" salesmen, including hat salesmen, were usually started at yS-oo per week. Experiencedmengotfromfia tofiS. In I907-o8some department stores salesmen received as little as f6.oo per week and women less than this amount.f Sale people had thus been unable to better their own conditions since the union failed. They have gained since by move- ments among the purchasing public. In some of the large department Stores conditions were above the average in 1907-08, and special con- sideration was shown the women employes. But up to 1910 only one store in Pittsburgh — McCrecry's — met the "white-list" requirements of the Consumers' League. Three other department stores — ^Joseph Home Company, Boggs and Buhl, and Meyer Jonasson & Company, were on the white list in 1913; ij are listed in I9i4.t
Printers. The pnnting trade is subdivided into severa! branches. The pressmen's and feeders' unions engaged in a country-wide strike beginning in 1907 and, as far as practical pur- poses were concerned, lost in Pittsburgh, and in many other places.
* For detailed description of conditions among women workers in the mer- cantile houses see Chapter X of Buller, Elizabeth Beardiley: Women and the Trades. (The Pittsburgh Survey.) In November, 1913, a new law went into effect providing for a mty-four-hour week and a ten-hour day for girl employes under twenty-one and excluding them from all night work after 9 p. m., makmf; no exception for mercantile houses at Christmas time. For the 191) law affecting women's work, see Kelley, op. cit. P. ai) of this volume.
t Wages of salesgirls among a group studied by Kingsley House in 1913 ranged from (3.00 to tl-oo for girls from fourteen to seventeen; $4.^ to fio for girls over that age. See Appendix XIX, p. 49a, A nwvement for a minimum wage law failed in 1913, and will be agitated again in 191$.
X For white Ibl, see Appendix XIII, p. 4J4.
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In the commercial plants in Pittsburgh their strike gradually dissi- pated but was never fonnalty called off. The way the matter was left was that where a shop worked longer than the eight-hour day, it paid time and a half for the ninth hour. The web-press men of the newspaper ofTices have fared better than the flat-bed men of the commercial shops, getting from I3.00 to 13.7$ in 1914 as against $3.00 to $^-49 in 1907, and working an eight-hour day.
Although the open shop movement in the printing trades lost the typographical union many places in Pittsburgh, this branch was more strongly entrenched than the others. In 1907-08 the union had 400 members, or less than one-half the compositors in Pittsburgh. All but one newspaper and about half the job offices were working under closed shop agreements. The depression threw half the men out of work and many of the job offices closed down. In the years since, the largest job offices have remained open shops but all the dailies belong to the Pittsburgh Newspaper Publishers' Association and are parties to joint agreements with local No. 7 which have raised standards.
Under the agreement governing morning and evening newspapers in 1907-08 piece work was forbidden, all work was on a time basis and the test of competency of employes on machines was 4,000 ems per hour. This was raised to $,000 per hour by agreement in January, 1909.
The minimum wage of all employes in the composing rooms of the morning newspapers, except proofreaders, machine tenders, and machine tenders' assistants, was 60 cents per hour.* After eight hours the rate was 70 cents. On evening newspapers the minimum rate was $5 cents, and for all work over eight hours it was 65 cents. For all work over ten hours, the rate was price and one-half. Proofreaders on both morning and evening papers were paid $33 per week, and j$ cents an hour for overtime. The minimum wage for machinists was $5.00 pet day and their assistants got {3.30.
In January, 1914, a live-year agreement was entered upon, setting, for the morning newspapers, 6; cents per hour during the first three years, 66 cents during the last two years, seven and one-half or eight continuous hours at the employers' option to constitute a day's work, exclusive of half an hour for luncheon; proofreaders to receive not less than $33.50 per week for an eight-hour day with overtime at 65 cents; machinists to receive not less than |$.oo per day, and machine tenders not less than (3.3$. On evening newspapers the rate is 60 cents per hour for cc»n- *The Pittsburgh DitpaUb paid 6r cents an hour. "33
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
positors during the first three years, 6i cents the last two, hours identical, proofreaders to receive not ]ess than f33.$o with overtime at 60 cents, machinists and machine tenders the same as above. For all work over eight hours in any one day, the rate is price and a half. The work is on a time basis exclusively, and bonuses are prohibited.
In book and job offices printers and proofreaders received in 1907-08 a minimum of $16 a week for day work, and $19 for night work. This had been the rate in Pittsburgh for ten or fifteen years, and in the opinion of the officials of the union it was ridiculously small. Where plants were run in three shifts, one received the day scale and two the night scale. Piece work (hand setting) was at the rate of 38 cents per thousand ems for day, and 40 cents for night work. Overtime by day or piece was at the rate of price and one-half. Operators on monotype or linotype machines received a minimum rate of $2 1 per week for day work, and $2$ for night work. The minimum rate for casters was $18 by day and fas by night. Where two casting machines were employed the rate was (31. $0 for day and fsi-so for night work.
During the current five years the union has stood for a scale of prices ranging from $17 for proofreaders and journeymen in 1909 to (30 in 191$, night work at (3.00 per week above the day scale, and overtime at the old rates. Machine and casting scales have remained about sta- tionary except that monotype operators who take charge of casting ma- chines and linotype operators call for a scale of $34. Piece work has been abolished in union shops.
Where these agreements are in effect apprentices are limited to one to five journeymen in the jobbing offices, one to eight on the newspapers; while practical printers who want to learn to operate the machine must be paid the regular scale after a twelve weeks' probationary period.
The agreement between the union and newspaper publishers' association provides that neither party shall enter into a sympathetic strike or lockout, and that matters of dispute be submitted to a committee of arbitration selected two by the publishers, two by the union and these four to select a fifth; decisicMi to be final and binding on both parties. A similar arbitration scheme is provided in the jobbing agreement.
Bakers. Among bakery workmen, unionism is yet weak. Hardly 30 per cent were organized in 1907-08. In the preceding period of prosperity the supply of bakers had not been up to the demand, due to the fact that the long hours and Sunday work had teniied to keep boys out of the trade. Because of this shortage of bakers conditions had improved considerably, but when the financial panic with its consequent unemployment came, the '34
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men were not able to stave off a general reduction in wages of I3.00 per week.
The 200 union bakers were organized in three local unions of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers' international Union <^ America. There are few American bakers in Pittsburgh. Ger- mans, Austrians, and Slavs predominate. There are also some Italians, who in 1907-08 were entirely unorganized, and worked under the worst conditions. One of the locals was composed entirely of Yiddish-speaking bakers, and these had the only union bakeshops in the District. This Jewish local union made agreements with two boss bakers by whidi the latter accepted the union scale of wages and hours, and in return were empowered to place the union label on all their products.
Bakery workmen are divided according to their work into three classes. The"first hand"isonewhoattendstheoven. "Second hands" work at the bench and are sometimes called "bench hands." The "third hand" is the helper.
The improvement in the bakers' condition during the fourteen yearspriortothepanicof 1907 can be seen in the course of their wages per week:
1900 1007
10- II* I5t 7- 8* i3t
During the period referred to the hours of labor steadily decreased. In 1894 bakeries operated fourteen and sixteen hours every day, while on Friday twenty hours was the rule. By 1900 the hours had fallen to about eleven per day. In the two union shops in 1908, the men worked r^ulariy a ten-hour day, — one shift from ; p. m. to 3 a. m. and the other from 3 a. m. to ta m. These were the only shops where the hours were fixed, with the exception of the large bakeries, like those of the National Bis- cuit Company, where the men who worked at the ovens worked the same number of hours and got from 18 to 30 cents an hour. Most ba- kers had a working day of ten or eleven hours, except on Friday when the usual time was thirteen hours. The Icmger time on Friday was due to the fact that no work is done Saturday night.
The agreements in the two label shops in 1907-08 provided for the minimum scale shown in the first column on page 1 36, although the actual wages were found to be higher.
'With board, lod^n^ and liundTy. fSio-fn with board, lodging, and lanndiy. l^.oo-IS.oo with board, lodging, and laundry.
135
|
a.,. |
im |
ISM |
|
isl h>nd . . |
. »9- »ll |
»I1-»1J |
|
2d hand . . |
4- 6- |
6- 8' |
|
3d hand . . |
3. SO- 5' |
4- S' |
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WACE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
SCALE OF WAGES PER WEEK IN JEWISH LABEL SHOPS
1907-S 1914
First hand, at oven fao ^37
Second hand, foreman of bench work . . 16 aj
Second hand, bench worker .... 1 ; 30
Third hand, helper 13 18
Following the financial depression the bakers' unions more than re- gained their ground. The general rates in the trade have advanced to the standard set by the label shops in 1907-08, while the Jewish unions have brought the scale in the small shops up to the figures given at tberif^t. In 1910 when they presented their scale, there was a strike that lasted only four hours. The men won, receiving an increase in wages and a reduction in the number of working hours.
En [913 the Polish bakers organized, securing a six-day week, a nine-hour day and $20 a week for first hands, (17 for second; in 1914, the bakery salesmen of the Hill District organized, getting a six-day week and an all-round increase of $1.00 a week; and in 1914, also, the Jewish cake bakers got six days, nine hours, and a f 1 .00 a week raise.
The unions have failed to get any permanent footing in the largest establishments, where in 1907-08 laborers got from 1; to so cents an hour, and oven and bench hands, 30 to 30 cents.
Brewery Workers. The brewery workers are the only workmen in the Pittsburgh District whose entire industry is thoroughly organized, and this favored position they owe to the union label and the boycott. Every brewery in the Pittsburgh District works under a signed agreement with the brewery workers' union, and every agreement provides for the closed shop. These establishments employed about 3,000 people in 1907. As has been stated, every employe in and about a brewery is admitted to the union, regardless (A his occupation. The type tA organiza- tion is thus different from any thus far described. Incidentally, this has brought the organization into c(»)ftict with the engineers' and coopers' unions. In these jurisdictional disputes the principal point at issue has been whether members of these two crafts who work in breweries shall belong to their respective unions or whether they shall remain in the brewery workers' union. It is the old question of trade autonomy versus the industrial group.
The effectiveness of the latter form of organization in such an industry as brewing is seen in the wages, hours, and condi- .36
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WACE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH
tions of labor laid down in the contracts. In that signed in April, 1907, it was agreed between the employers and the union that in case of dull business the workingmen without exception should be laid off in rotation, and no one was to be laid off for more than one week at a time. In case of sickness the employe had to be restored to his position on recovery. Disputes were to be settled by means of a conference committee composed of three members of the union and three men appointed by the employers. If no decision were reachol an outside party was to be chosen as arbi- trator. Other points in this three-year agreement — which except for the increases in wages has been renewed in practically identical form in 191 1 and 1914 — are as follows:
Beer might be given free to all employes during working houn at option of employer. The tenn of apprenticeship in the wash-house, cdlar, and brew-house was set at "not less nor more than two years, and each firm was required to have its apprentices instructed in all the dif- ferent branches of the trade during that time." Apprentices were not to be under eighteen or over twenty-one years of age at the time of be- ginning their apprenticeship. They had to become members of the union within two months after their engagement. One apprentice was per- mitted to every wash-house, cellar, or brew-house employing less than 10 men; to 10 men, two apprentices; to 30 men three; and for every addi- tional 10 men one more apprentice might be employed. In the bottling- house one apprentice was allowed for every live men or fraction employed.
Eight hours constituted a day's work for all men within the brew- cries. Nine hours were required of brewery drivers and stablemen in contrast to the ten-hour day of the unorganized stablemen and drivers employed by wholesale liquor dealers. Seven days constituted a week's work for engineers, engineers' helpers, wipers, oilers, firemen, and fire- men's helpers. All other employes, except drivers, who on Sunday were to give not more than one hour to cleaning their teams, worked six days a week.. Drivers and bott ling-house employes were paid time and one* half fw Sundays and holidays,* but regular rates for ordinary overtime. AH other employes were to get time and one-half for overtime as well as for work on Sundays and holidays. Previous to 1907 bottling-house employes had worked eight and one-half hours per day, and the men in the breweries nine hours. Engineers and firemen reduced their hours from twelve to ei^t the same year.
* Since raised for drivers to double time for extra work on these days.
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The following table shows the scales of wages signed ii and 1911:
Miniwaim H^agi 1907 1911
Wash-bouse employes and coopers in the wash-house or pitch-yard . fifi.oo (week) fiy.jo
Men in the cellars and brew-house . 1 7.00 " 1 8.00
First man in the wash-house, brew- house, and feimenting cellar 18.00 " 19.00
First cellar boss 30.00 ". 31.00
Chief engineers 1 10.00 (month) 1 10.00
All other engineers .... 20.00 (week) 31.00
Firemen, pipe-litters, and repair workers 17.00
> 19.00 19. SO
30.50 33. $0 35.00 33. JO
18.00
ers, wipers, oilers, malt-dryen, and
ice-pullers i;.oo " 16.00
Route drivers 19.31 " 30.00
Shippingorprivatetradedrivers 16.50 " ly.jo
Bottled beer drivers .... 18.00 " 19.00
Stablemen 1 5.00 " 16.00
Whcdesale dealers' drivers . 16-30 " 16-21
Helpers 14.00 " 14.00
Bottling-house employes . 3.50 (day) 3.50 (wi
17.50 31.50 19.00
30.50 17.50
l6-3i
16-
ek) 17.50
It will be seen that the earnings of the men who worked in the brewery proper ranged in 1907 from f 16 to|30 per week, while all bottling-house employes got $2.50 per day. Work was steady, and though it required but half the time to learn the brewer's trade, the journeyman bad an annual income equal to, if not greater than, that of the ordinary building trade mechanic. Again, the wages of stablemen were )i $ per week, while drivers received from %\6 to %2\. Considering the reduction of hours, the union had therefore increased the wages of its teamsters over those (A unor- ganized teamsters Jo to 60 per cent by the hour. In 1909 and 191 1 the men in the breweries entered into agreements* with the owners, which still further increased wages, and again in 1914.!
" In 1913 the United States Brewers' Aswciation and the brewery workers negotiated through their repmentativei a co-operalive plan of accident and sick- ness ifuurance, otd age pension, and so forth, remarkable for its comprehensiveness. It was voted down by union referendum.
tThe 1914 agreements contain, along with the wage scales, a Kbeme of sanitary standards. See Appendix XIV, p. 454.
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WAGE-EARNERS OF PITTSBURGH
METAL TRADES
Next to the steel mills the manufacture of machinery, machine parts, and appliances occupies the greatest number of workers in the Pittsburgh District. These "metal trades," as they are commonly called, are as closely related to steel, the major industry (A Pittsburgh, as that is dependent upon the vast stores of coai in the surrounding country. They are the sub- sidiary industries which use the iron and the steel from rolls and furnaces and make it up into finished products. In these indus- tries thousands (A mechanics, machinists, moiders, blacksmiths, and boiler makers, mainly Americans, are doing the skilled work, while immigrants find occupation as foundry laborers. Both American boys and immigrant men work as machine hands and helpers in an endless variety of jobs.
Plants which fabricate the structural parts for bridges, buildings, viaducts, and so forth, are characteristic of the region. Their operations lie midway between the heavy work of the tonnage industries and the highly skilled work of such establish- ments as the New England tool factories and the automobile works of the Middle West. The development of machinery with its ever increasing specialization has played havoc with the organizations of workers in these midway groups. Moreover, em- ployers have combined to prevent the men's organizations from dictating terms of employment. The result has been that nine hours has constituted the prevailing day's work for many years. All attempts to reduce the hours to eight have failed, except in the case of a comparatively small number of blacksmiths and boiler makers. Instead of having a minimum rate set by what the men determine to be a fair day's pay, wages are determined by what the employer considers a man to be worth to him. Increases of wages have accrued mainly to the men of higher skill among the pattern makers, iron moiders, and blacksmiths.
Their unions have not had enough coherence one with another to secure advantages for the whole industrial group, such as the brewery men have won for their calling. Not until we reach the building trades do we again find solidarity and co- operation among a group of alliol crafts.
Machinists. Probably i ;,ooo men were employed in the machine shops of Allegheny County in 1907-08. The highest skill was found among "39
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the ;,ooo in contract or jobbing shops. These are all-round mechanics; they may have a different kind of work to do each day and are able to work from blue prints. About one-fourth of these belonged to the union in 1907, and the same proportion is reported to hold in 1914. The re- maining 10,000 were chiefly "machine hands" working in "specialized shops," in which a particular product is constantly duplicated and each workman is confined to operating a single machine. The specialized shops, of which the Westinghouse plants are examples, are run "open shop." This specialization in the machine industry has been one of the causes which has weakened the machinists' union thnnighout the country. In the So's the Pittsburgh branch of the International Association of Machinists controlled nearly all the machinists in the District. It was able to establish the nine-hour day (1890) several years before the general agitation for nine hours began in other parts of the country. Now the union confines its efforts entirely to the contract shops, and in these also it has lost ground.
The largest employers of machinists were in 1907-08 united in the Manufacturers' Association of Pittsburgh, affiliated with the National Metal Trades' Association. The latter association is composed of persons, (inns, or corporations, owning or controlling plants in which areemployed not only machinists, but molders, core makers, pattern makers, black- smiths, brass workers, electrical workers, pipe-fitters, and members of kindred trades handling iron, steel, brass, or other metals. Members pay 1 1 >{ cents per month for each operative earning $3.00 and over per day. Two men earning less than $3.00 each count as one operative. The National Metal Trades' Association insures all its members against strikes. When a strike occurs, the national association supplies strike- breakers free of cost. The employer, however, must pay for their board, lodging, and protection where these are necessary. In times of peace the national association employs "special operatives," hired usually at fioo a month, whose business it is to make a daily report to the employer re- garding everything that goes on in the shop. These men are empbyed by members of the association at about 3$ cents an hour, the difference between this rate and the }ioo being paid by the national office.
For several years prior to 1904 the machinists' union of Pittsburgh made verbal agreements with the Manufacturers' Association. The scale was 30 cents per hour as a minimum, with a fifty-four-hour week. Many machinists were paid more than 40 cents. In 1904 the employers' organization wrote to the union asking for a conference to discuss wages, but the union refused. Times were bad and the machinists feared wages might be reduced. The old scale, therefore, remained in force.
On April I, 1907. the union presented a demand for a minimum of 40 cents per hour, a fifty-hour week, and a 10 per cent increase for those 140
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who were already getting more that) 40 cents an hour. The employers offered a 7K P«r ""t increase for ail men, in order not to establish any fixed minimum. The union refused this crffer and ordered a strike. About 1,800 mm, including 3oo apprentice boys, were involved. The National Metal Trades Association supplied the firms in the Manufac- turers' Association with strikebreaken. At first the employers were seriously crippled. A member of the Manufacturers' Association said that the strikebreakers who were sent in were a "bad lot"; they were in- eflicient and they refused to work long in one place. But the employers managed to keep the shops going, and as the strike dragged on some of the dd men went back and the better strikebreakers developed into good workmen. A number of the smaller firms conceded the demands of the union. Many of them had in fact been paying 40 cents an hour be- fore the strike, and the union waived its demand for a fifty-hour week. The larger shops, however, continued to run with non-union men.
The strike was still in progress when the panic came. Fully half of the machinists were thrown out of work, and remained out for a whole year. In the scramble for what work there was, union demands were for- gotten. The menbegantoleave theirorganizations; of the 30 machinists' kxlges in the District 10 only remained intact. Lack of work turned the balance so far in favor of the employers that the union was defeated.
Thereafter, the fifty-four hour week has continued to prevail in most shops, the working day running from 7 a. m. to ; p. m., with time out for lunch, and from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m. five nights a week where night shifts were employed. Many firms allow a Saturday half holiday, making up the time by operating 9^ hours on five days, and ^yi hours on Saturday. Time and one-half for overtime, and double time for Sundays, is paid in union and in "open" shops. The ten-hour day governs in the machine shops of the steel companies; in these and other non-union establishments only straight time is paid for overtime.
The strike put an end to the old fixed minimum wage for machinists. Few skilled men, however, get less than the 30 cents per hour which had prevailed theretofore. The practice in 1908 was to start a man usually at about 33 cents an hour, but sometimes as low as 35 cents, rates running up as high as 4$ and $0 cents, with perhaps 40 cents as the average. The Westin^ouse Company in 1914 are paying machinists 38 to 3; cents an hour, approximately market rates for the District.
Following the strike of 1907 the employers have determined the ratio of apprentices to journeymen as they see fit.
What union officials termed an "ilt-advised strike of newly or- ganized men" broke out in the machine shops of the Pennsylvania Rail- road between Pittsburgh and Altoona in the summer of 1910. Union officials did their utmost to avoid this strike, but the men had suffered 14'
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SO long under real or fancied grievances relating to the method of pay for piece work and to an allied black list, that they could not be restrained from walking out. The company imported strikebreakers and the strikers were beaten. The men were organized into the Pennsylvania Shop Employes' Association, and receive some recognition. In May, 1911, the machinists and blacksmiths in the Baltimore and Ohio shops struck. Wages, hours, and thesystemof piecework were the points of contention. Here the strike was more successful.
In the summer of 1914 came a spirited but unsuccessful mass strike in the Westinghouse plants in East Pittsburgh under the guidance of leaders of the Detroit Branch of the 1. W. W. Seventeen nationalities were fused and held tt^ether for three weeks before the break in the ranks came. Five thousand out of a payroll of 14,000 had been laid off due to the depression and the working time cut down to stave laying off others. Efficiency system abuses and discrimination against socialist leaders who had organized the Allegheny Congenial Industrial Union were charges brought against the company, which President Herr agreed to take up if the men returned to work. This they refused to do as a body, the strike from the beginning being less for specific demands than an appeal to solid- arity among the workers, coupled with revolutionary propaganda. The company then advertised for men and the Strike petered out. It was marked by restraint on both sides.
MoLDEKS. About 4,000 wage-earners were employed at molding in the Pittsburgh District in 1907-08, less than half of whom were members of the International Molders' Union. The six locals had together some 1,900 members, including 300, or about three-fourths, of the core makers employed in the District. Of the skilled molders only about 300 were outside the unions, while in the malleable iron works, employing about 1,000 men of less skill, there were no union men whatever. To be eligible to the union, a molder must have served an apprenticeship of four yean, or worked four years at the trade. The union has held its own.
The employers are organized in a branch of the National Founders' Association. Earlier, this association controlled 36 of the 68 foundries in the District, and these 36 employed a majority of the molders. In 1907-08, however, only six companies belonged to the association. While the molders' union had been able to get but one employer to sign an agree- ment, the skilled employes in most shops were union men. A majority of the molders employed by the Westinghouse Machine Company, for example, belonged to the union. In prosperous times the molders have been well able to maintain the union scale of wages, but when a depression comes employers usually manage to reduce wages. Tlius in 1908, when about two-thirds of the skilled molders were out of work, employers re- duced the daily rate from $3.^0 to $3.3$. 142
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After a strike in 1899, fj.oo was established as the minimum wage. In 1903 a 10 per cent increase was secured, making the daily rate $3.30. Following a reduction in 1904, which the employers voluntarily restored, the union in 1906 secured an increase of 30 cents per day, and f3-;o re- mained the minimum daily wage until the hard times. By 1910, the molders had so far recovered their strength that in unionizing one of the largest shops in this District, a scale was secured providing for $3.7; for a nine-hour day, and by 1913 this had risen to ¥4.00, the present scale.
The molders' union is opposed to the piece-rate system. This system has prevailed in the malleable iron works, which are entirely un- organized and in which in 1907-08 the men earned about $3.00 per day.
Nine hours has been the molders' working day since 1902. Some shops have been working nine hours per day for thirty years. Time and one-half for overtime; double time for Sundays and holidays is paid both molders and pattern makers.
Pattern Makers. As early as 1878, pattern makers in Pitts- burgh formed a union under the Knights of Labor. Now, however, they are part of the Pattern Makers' League. There has been little trouble between employers and men and from the labor standpoint this trade continues one of the best in the vicinity. In 1907-08, 300 men out of about 4io working at the trade in the District were organized.
Four dollars for a nine-hour day was the prevailing rate. This wage was the union minimum and the nine-hour day had prevailed since 1891. Many union men, however, got $4.2^ per day and a few made as much as |;.oo. The Westinghouse plants employed some union men, but they were a minority. Wages in these latter plants were 40 and 43 cents per Eiour. The men were started at the former figure. The dif- ference in money between the union scale and the Westinghouse rates was therefore small, a difference made up to the men by the steadier work which the big company afforded. In 1914, the rate in the Westinghouse plant at Trafford City is from 40 to 45 cents, while the union minimum was 45 cents an hour in manufacturing shops, 50 cents in jobbing shops.
The course of wages per day for pattern makers for thirty years in the Pittsburf^ District has been as follows: 1880- fa.3$; 1884- fa. 50; 1887- $3.-jy, 1890-93, $3.00; 1893-96 about $2.yy, 1897, l^.oo; 1900 $3-5°; 1905-10. ifoo: 1913-14. >40S-$4SO-
Boiler Makers. The boiler makers might be classed among the metal, building, or even the transportation trades. They work in shops, work outside on buildings, and for the railroads. Less than half of the 1,500 boiler makers in the District were organized in 1907-08. When employed outside they had the wages, hours, and conditions general in the building trades. Their scale then was {3.60 per day of eight hours, or 4$ cents an hour. Inside men had the nine-hour day, like the machinists "43
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and the tnolders, and their pay was about the same — (3.IJ a day or 3; cents an hour. In the railroad shops, boiler makers, like all other em- ployes, had less favorable conditions. The hours were ten and wages $i.y) a day. The 400 to 600 men who worked in the steel mills repairing boilers and doing similar work were all non-union, and theirs was the poorest rate in this trade — f 300 for a day of ten hours.
Employment was very steady for boiler makers during 1906-07. The panic, however, caused many to leave town, and about a third of those remaining were out of work during 1908. No attempt was made on the part of employers to reduce wages on account of hard times, and with the return of prosperity the union made great strides in member- ship. By 1910 about two-thirds of all the men in the District had become organized. They had also secured an increase in wages by that date and had reduced the number of working hours for many inside men to eight.
By 1913 outside workers secured a rate of ;o cents per hour for an eight-hour day, inside workers 40 cents an hour for a nine-hour day. Rail- road boiler makers secured 38 cents per hour for a nine-hour day, and boiler makers in the mills receive $4.00 for a ten-hour day. Moreover, men in this union have gotten the highest overtime rate in the District. On some classes of repair work on Sundays the pay has been three or four times the ordinary rate per hour. Boiler makers, also, are allowed the so-called "dirty dollar" given to them by the employer to cover the cost of laundering and the destruction of their clothes when engaged in some particularly difficult and dirty work.
BLACKSMrTKs. The union blacksmiths of the District comprise about one-third of the total number engaged in this work. In 1907-08 the union numbered about 600 men, divided as follows: 100 wagcm and carriage men, and $00 men in miscellaneous shops. Experienced men got 50 cents per hour for an eight-hour day, and time and one-half for overtime, with double time rate on Sundays and holidays. Non-union men got anywhere from 20 to 40 cents per hour and worked nine and ten hours per day with straight time for overtime work, in 1913 and 1914, the union agreements have called for a minimum for helpers of iSyi cents, maximum 33^ cents; minimum for blacksmiths (new men) 37^^ cents; experienced men, 47><-53 cents.
BUILDING TRADES
Turning to the building trades we And a set of workmen who
have forced their daily rates of wages higher than those of any
other men in the District. At least four things have helped them
do this: First, the skill required in the trades; second, the closely
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allied anions; third, the seasiHial character <^ the work; and fourth, the fact that the work has to be performed by local em- pk>yers at a particular place, at a particular and usually limited time, under constant pressure from the purchaser.
Amcng the building trades rates of wages are highest in those which require the longest period of apprenticeship, and which have the longest periods of seascnial unemployment. In 1907-08 wages ran from 43 >^ cents an hour for painters, up to 65 cents for bricklayers.* Most of the trades received ;o cents an hour. All men who earned 45 cents an hour or more, with the excepticMi of roofers, had spent at least a probationary four years Mon they had been admitted to their trade. Slate and tile roofers had an apprenticeship period of only three years. Steam- fitters and plumbers required five years, while structural iron workers required eighteen months of actual work at the " construc- tion of bridges, viaducts, buildings, or other constructicmal work either of wood or iron." The tile layers' apprenticeship period was only two years, but apprentices were taken only from among the helpers, who ctften worked a good many years at not much over half the journeymen's pay. Hoisting engineers, who got ;o cents an hour, bad no specified apprenticeship rules, but the state required these men to be licensed, and a license was issued only after an examination and two years' work around the engine.
Bricklayers were getting the highest wages per hour in the building trade. They have a longer period ctf unemployment than do any other group, seldom working more than seven months in the year. Their yearly earnings at 65 cents an hour in 1907 averaged not much over $800. Next to bricklayers, plasterers lose the roost time; they work perhaps seven or eight months in the year. Their hourly rate was 53^ to 56K cents; yet the an- nual earnings of the ordinary plasterer were only about $700. In fact, whatever the rate per hour might be, it worked out that the annual earnings in most of the building trades ran from about $700 to fSoo. in those trades which had a high daily wage and steady work the jrear round, such as that of elevator constructors and dectricians, there was a scarcity of workroen.
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Altogether, about i;,ooo workingmen were organized in the building trades unions. They represented perhaps 75 per cent of all the men working at these trades. In the separate trades, the proportion of organized to unorganized workmen varied greatly. Plumbers, bricklayers, and elevator constructors had over 90 per cent; other trades ran from 50 per cent upward.
There was seldom much difference between the wages of union and non-union mechanics. In most cases the union rate was also paid to non-union men. Where there was a difference the union rate was usually paid to some men in the shop; that is, the wages were not depressed in all the occupations, owing to lack of organization. In a union shop there was usually a flat rate for all; for, although the union fixed only the minimum wage. employers were not inclined to go above that.
In all building trades the hours of labor were et^t per day. In most of the trades this period had been established during the years 1900-02. Bricklayers and masons won their eight-hour day in (896 and plumbers in 1898. Many of the trades have since secured a four-hour day on Saturday during the summer months and some the year round.
While most of the building trades were well organized in 1907-08, some organizations seemed to be losing ground. Within a few years preceding, employers in at least three trades had established the open shop, and in each case this was fc^owed by a reduction in wages. The Pittsburgh Local of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers' Union had been almost disrupted in the struggle with employers organized as the National Erectors' Association. The latter refused to pay the union scale of $6>^ cents an hour, would not recognize the union, and paid 50 cents per hour to skilled mechanics and a lower rate to the less skilled. Almost all master plasterers were running open shops and had reduced wages from ^.50 to $4.20 a day. The carpenters' union was unable to maintain its scale of ;o cents an hour, and the master builders paid anywhere from 43K to 50 cents. In several other trades employers and unions had been fighting over the closed shop and the scalest^wages. In the strug^of these trades, as in those of others reviewed, employers were aided by the financial depression of 1907-08, which threw many men out of work. 146
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In the period of their greatest strength the workmen's organi- zations had secured signed agreements from the employers, but in 1907-08 most of the trades were working without agreements, and union officials claimed to be opposed to making them. 1 1 was noticeable, however, that unions without agreements were with difficulty maintaining their wage scales, while plumbers and elevator constructors who had signed agreements were secure in their union wages even through the panic.
In this experience, we may have a clue to the spread of agree- ments and "sympathetic" action throughout the building trades in the years since. Not only have the wage cuts of 1907-08 been made good, but there have been marked general advances in pay;* in some crafts made secure against such a financial de- pression as that of 1914 by three and five-year compacts.
Detailed Description by Trades Bricklayers and Masons. Practically all the bricklayers and masons who work for building contractors in the Pittsburgh District are organized in trade unions. The membership of these unions in 1907-08 included about i,;oo bricklayers and ;oo masons. The non-union men of this trade, who numbered about 600, found employment mainly in the mills, where pay was ^j}4 cents per hour and ten hours constituted the working day. Up to the year previous the pay of non-union men had been only 30 cents per hour. These men were thus averaging about one- half the sum the union bricklayers in the building trades could make, but their work is comparatively steady the year round. In 1914, non-unbn men are getting from 40 to 60 cents.
During the period from 1888 to 189;, 40 cents was the minimum rate per hour and nine hours constituted the day among organized Pitts- burgh bricklayers. From 1896 to 190$ wages were raised from 4; to $0
• lncreas« have ranged from 8 to jo per cent. Whereas In 1907 only two of the I J building trades unioni listed in this study were getting 60 cents an hour or more we find the scales of i [ of them calling for that standard or above in 1914. The prevailing rate may be said to have shifted from ;o to 63^ cents an hour, or, putting it in terms of dollars and days, from S4.00 tof ;.oo. Fifty-six and a quarter cents if the lowest hourly rale set by a building trade's union today in Pittsburgh — that of the painters, whereas they got 43^4^ cents in 1907, and the hoisting en- gineers as low as jj^i. The bricklayers continue at the top of the list in 1914 with 70 cents as their present hourly rate, but the tile layers and plasterers have 68^ cents. The plumbers will have the same in 191; and the electrical workers in 1918; while the long term agreement of the plasterers calls for 73 cents In 1915,7} cents in 1916; and that of the plumbers for 7$ cents, a year later |f6.oo a day). For changes In collective organization in building trades see p. 183.
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cents; to 60 cents in 1906; 6; in 1907; and 70 in 1913. The wages of the masons similarly rose from 3; cents in 1888 to 5$ caits in 1907, with prospect of 60 in 1914. Many workmen, of course, make more than the minimum- The eight'hour day has prevailed in both trades since 1896.
Despite their high hourly rate of pay, the bricklayers were averag- ing in earnings in 1907-08 no more than fs.jo per day. They work perhaps half the working days of the year. The masons were averaging even less — about $2.2y, but by the use of fires, tents, canvas, and other means, interference with their work by inclement weather has become steadily less, so that it may be said to be no longer seasonal.
The union bricklayers and masons of Allegheny County were in i907-o8organiiedtnsixlocalsoftheBricklayers'and Masons' International Union of America. Three locals were composed of bricklayers and three of masons. These locals elected a committee of la members, six from each trade, which was known as the executive committee of the Inter- national Union, Allegheny County. AH executive and judiciary powers covering Allegheny County were vested in this committee. " It shall be the tribunal to which all matters of general importance to the welfare of the several unions, or any of their members shall be referred. . . . cases of unions against unions and individuals, after action has been taken by subordinate unions."
No agreements had been made between the Bricklayers' and Masons' Union and the Master Brick Contractors' Association for five or six years. But the executive committee referred to issued a working code which the union was powerful enough to enforce. The code stated that "any person coming on any job who is not a member of the Brick- layers'and Masons' International Union, and who does not appear to be a practical bricklayer or stone mason must be examined at once, by a com- mittee appointed by the steward, which committee must report on the day of its appointment, if possible, and in no case later than the next succeeding day, as to whether the applicant be a practical bricklayer or stonemason or not, and if the report be unfavorable, he must immediately cease work. "
Further, "no member or members of a stone masons' union shall be allowed to cut or lay stone for any person or contractor, or company who employs non-union bricklayers, and no member or members of a bricklayers' union shall be allowed to lay brick for any person, contractor or company who employs non-union stone masons. "
The code laid down the other conditions under which the men might work. The day's work of eight hours was to be performed between 8 a. m. and ; p. m., except Saturday, when work must end at la o'clock 148
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noon. Time taken for lunch might be thirty or sixty minutes as the men elected. Piece work was prohibited. No work was to be done on Labor Day. Any member working on the other legal holidays or on Sunday must be paid double time. Overtime was permitted in cases of extreme emergency, on condition that time and one-half be paid. The employer had to pay carfare unless the men's place of work could be reached by payment of one five-cent fare. Any time lost in waiting for pay, or in going frmn job to job, or while waiting for or building scaffolds, was paid for at the regular hourly rates. The bricklayers and masons, when struc- tural iron workers or others were on a job, demanded that they be pro- vided with proper covering at the expense of the contractor, to protect them from danger. No member or members or local union could call a strike. All grievances had to be submitted to the executive committee of Allegheny County. Strikes were illegal unless sanctioned by this com- mittee. Foremen were obliged to be members of the union, and no fore- man or apprentice could lay brick or stone before or after regular working hours except as overtime. The first man on any job was designated as steward. He was the guardian of the interests of the others, and had to be respected as such. This working code was strictly enforced. It was required that the authorized business agent be recognized and permitted to inspect the men's cards; and that whenever the rate of wages was in dispute, the pay envelope should be submitted to him on request.
Article 13 read : "No member of any union in this jurisdiction shall work on any job where the men have quit work on a question involving this working code, under such penalty as the union may detemiine. "
The initiation fee of the Bricklayers' and Masons' Union was $2y Dues were 50 cents per month, and it was provided that: "In case of a strike for wages each and every member who may obtain the established rate of wages shall be assessed not less than fifty cents nor more than one dollar per day, as the union may agree, to establish a fund for the relief of those on strike. " In 1913 dues were set at Jii.oo per month.
Unlike somt of the other building trades, the bricklayers and masons have not slumped in hard times, holding almost every man in the District with the exceptk>n of the men who work in the mills.
Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. Men who put up the iron and steel framework for the great skyscrapers and bridges are in a much less favorable position than bricklayers and stone masons. Their trade is newer, less secure, and has run afoul of the great manufacturing interests which supply the erectors with steel shapes. The local of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers' Union was organized during the summer of 1900. By January, 1901, it had 700 members. A year later 149
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this number had doubled, and in 190; the membership was 1,800, There- after for several years the union grew steadily weaker, due first to a struggle with the employers' association [which culminated in the country-wide dynamiting conspiracy of the national officials of the union and their con- victions at Los Angeles and Indianapolis]; and secondly, to the decline in building operations following the financial depression of 1907. The union now seems to be on the upgrade again in Pittsburgh.
To be eligible to the union a man must have worked at least eighteen months at the "construction of bridges, viaducts, buildings, or other con- structural work either of wood or iron. " After this period of apprentice- ship he must pass an examination both as to health and ability to do the work. Noman over fifty years of age is eligible to membership. Foremen may or may not be members of the union, as they see fit.
The employers are organized as a branch of the National Erectors' Association. Membera of this association are firms which do iron and steel construction work throughout the country. The American Bridge Company, a constituoit company of the United States Steel Gnporation. is the most influential member of this association. Other important firms with headquarters in Pittsburgh are the Riter-Conley Manufactur- ing Company, McQintic-Marshall Construction Company, Pittsburgh Construction Company, Pittsburgh Steel Construction Company, Fort Pitt Bridge Company, and HeyUPatterson Company. This association in 1906 broke off all relations with the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers and entered upon the policy of maintaining open shops, making no agreements and dealing with the men individually. In 1907 on every job a card (see opposite page) was tacked up stating the conditions under which all men, union or non-union, must work.
Before the structural iron workers were organized in 1900 skilled men among them earned only 27!^ cents an hour. In January, 1901, the union demanded f J.oo per day. This sum was won after a strike lasting five days. In May of the same year the union entered into an agreement with employers by which wages were raised to {3. 60 per day. A three weeks' strike established the rate of 50 cents per hour as a minimum. It was in 1906, when the union demanded 56X cents per hour, that the employers organized, established the open shop, and thus were able to hcA6 to the old rate of wages. Some union men continued to work for the companies in the association, but they had to abide by the working rules of the employers; among them, that grading as to "skill and fitness" should be by the employer and not by the union card. Only such bridge- men as were accounted "skilled" were paid 50 cents per hour. The wages of the others varied from $2.00 per day upward. But the hours which the union had reduced from ten in 1900 to nine in 1901 and eight 150
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PRINCIPLES AND WORKING RULES
NATIONAL ERECTORS' ASSOCIATION Date nace ...
ist. Work will be conducted on the Open Shop plan.
2nd. The right to work will be accorded to every man irrespective of his membership in any organization.
3rd. Eight hours shall constitute a day's work.
4th. The minimum rate of wages to be paid to skilled bridgemen shall be 50 cents per hour. Skilled bridgemen shall be competent to perform such work as the erection, rigging and handling of travelers and other important mechanical appliances used in the erection of work, the erect- ing in place and connecting of members entering perma- nently mto a structure, and the driving of field rivets.
;th. When one shift only is worked, time-and-one- half will be paid for overtime. When two or more shifts are worked, the men in each shift will be paid the regular rate of wages per hour. Double time will be paid for work performed on Sundays and the following holidays : Decora- tion DAy, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day, or the days observed as these holidays.
6th. Workmen will be paid every two weeks upon pay days to be fixed by the employer, except in localities where it is required by law, or where it is the prevailing custom to pay weekly.
7th. It will be the general custom to withhold not more than one week's time to enable the employer to prepare the payrolls, etc.
8th. When 3 workman is discharged or laid off, he shall be paid in full within 24 hours.
9th. When a workman leaves the service of the employer of his own accord, he will receive the pay due him on the next regular pay day.
loth. No persons other than those authorized by the employer shall have access to the work during working hours.
Card Posted on All Jobs in the Pittsbukch District in 1907-08 in 1903, the employers found it inexpedient to increase. In 1913, as part of a general revision of rates, the association raised its Pittsburgh rate from ;o to 56^^ cents — the figure demanded by the unions in 1906.
It should be borne in mind that in prosperous times the working season lasts but eight or nine months. During the hard limes from Octo- ber, 1907, to June, 1908, three-fourths of the Pittsburgh structural iron 151
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workere could find no employment. During this period the union was practically out of existence and contained but a handful of members. These few men were able to get 56K cents per hour by working on small jobs scattered over the District. Corresponding to the employers' oppo- sition to agreements, we found the union opposed to them as a result of their experience. The charge was that contracts were not kept. Further- more, as stated by the president of the Pittsburgh local, the union wanted to take advantage of improved trade conditions and not be bound by any agreement. By 1910, the union had built up a membership of ;oo, and about 9S per cent of the members were steadily employed, although the strike against the Erectors, begun in 1906, nominally continued.
In 1914, the union reports a membership of 1,300 in Pittsburgh. In 1911 the housesmiths consolidated with the structural iron workers and they have so strengthened their joint position by making commcHi cause with the other crafts in the building trades that since 1913 local office building construction has been closed shop.* Their present scale is 62}4 cents an hour or $j.oo for eight hours, time and one.^alf for over- time, and double for Sundays and holidays.
Housesmiths. Housesmiths and structural iron workers were affiliated in the same international union long before the consolidation of their Pittsburgh locals. The housesmiths do the ornamental iron setting in the interior of buildings. There was hardly a score of non-union men in the District in 1907-08, and the union had much more effective control of the trade than had the structural iron workers of theirs. The stronger position of the housesmiths was due to the fact that they worked chiefly for small competing contractors to whom the work of setting up the orna- mental iron work was let.
On January t, 1906, the Master Housesmiths' Association entered into a three-year contract with the housesmiths' local union, in which they agreed to employ none but union men. Where union men could not be had non>union men might be employed, providing the men were satisfied to become members of the union. The union agreed not to permit its members to work for any contractor who failed to comply with the terms of the agreement, and to use all lawful methods in furthering the ends it was desired to achieve by the agreement. Ac«)rding to this agreement not more than one helper was allowed to each filter or journey- man, and each firm could have one apprentice, Apprentices had to begin
* Thefabricating plants continue non-union; and only a share of the bridge workers are organized. The bulk of the open shop work consists of bridges, via- ducts, and mill buildings: in 1914, also, the steel for the Pennsylvania freif^t sheds in Pittsburgh is being erected by a member of the National Erectois Association, open shop.
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under the age of nineteen, had to register in the union, and if they could command the union wages for helpers they might act as such. A fore- man if he used tools must become a member of the union. Misunder- standings, whenever they arose, were arbitrated by three disinterested parties and work was to continue pending the arbitration. Sympathetic strikes, however, were not to be considered violations of the agreement.
The wages fixed by the agreement provided that for the years 1906 and 1907, ;o cents per hour should be paid for fitters (skilled house- smiths) and 35 cents for helpers. On January i, 1908, the fitters were to receive an increase to 56X cents or ^4.50 per day. This had been the wages in the trade in many cities during 1907. Pittsburgh housesmiths remained behind because of their three-year agreement. During the de- pression, moreover, many employers were able to cut the rate to $0 and even to 47^^ cents per hour; but later the fitters secured an advance to $6>^ cents per hour; and, with the structural iron workers, today get 6a>i cents as against 33>^ cents in 1900. In demanding these increases the housesmiths have argued that their trade is extra hazardous. They claim that a man has been killed or several badly injured on every skyscraper erected in the Pittsburgh CMstrict*; on one large building alone two men were killed and two crippled for life, while six more were injured.
The eight-hour day was secured by the housesmiths in 1900. Working hours have since been from 8 a. m. to 5 p. m., all work performed before or after these hours being paid at the rate of time and one-half; Sundays and holidays at double time.
Hoisting Engineers. The hoisting engineers send the materials up to the bridges and buildings in process of erection. They are employed mainly by the construction companies which belong to the National Erectors' Association, and in 1906 they met the same fate that befell the bridge and structural iron workers at the hands of that association. The power of the uni<m was broken and the open shop generally established. The union of Hoisting and Portable Engineers which was organized in i9or and grew steadily until 1903, had in 1907^-08 a membership of but too out of 1. 000 hoisting engineers in the E>istrict. Later they added to their strength by taking in the Afro-American Engineers' Union and became able to control work done outside of the National Erectors' As- sociation. In 1914, the union split temporarily, one faction joining forces with the bricklayers and one with the building trades council.
No apprenticeship system exists in this trade beyond what the law
requires for securing a license as a steam engineer. To secure such a
license the applicant must have worked on an engine for at least two years,
* In 1909, nine men were so killed.
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and he must pass an examination conducted by two competent engineers. It is unlawful to operate an engine without a license.
Eight hours, which was secured by the union in 1901, is the working day for all hoisting engineers, except those employed in the steel mills. In 1907-08 the latter usually worked twelve hours at 3; cents an hour. The rate of wages generally paid in 1907-08 was 37>^ cents an hour. Some of the smaller building contractors employing union men paid ;o cents. By 1913 the hoisting engineers had shared in the general advance in the building trades, the union rate for broken time being 62yi cents an hour. For work by the week $27 was paid. In January, 1914, the union raised to 6s cents.
Carpenters. The carpenters of the Pittsburgh District in 1907-08 mustered a total of 36 locals of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. These had an aggregate membership of nearly 4.000 which was a majority of the carpenters in the District.
The local unions elect delegates to a carpenters' district council of Pittsburgh and vicinity, which looks after the general interests of all carpenters in the District. For many years the union made agreements regularly with the employer?. But in 1905 the Master Builders' Associa- tion declared for the open shop and locked out all union men. Two years later not only master builders but workmen said they were opposed to agreements. The officers of the union contended that agreements pre* vented them from taking advantage of improved conditions to increase their wages. They complained, however, that under the open shop the unorganized men were benefited by their union, and that for this reason it was hard to get new members. With the estaUishment of the open shop, moreover, the union was unable to enforce the rules of its apprenticeship system by which any person under twenty-five years of age might engage himself to learn the trade of carpenter and joiner, and after three years, if competent, enter the union as a journeyman, and receive not less than the union's minimum rate of wages. [Since changed to: age, twenty-two; apprenticeship, four years.] The contractors, moreover, graded the carpenters in the open shops as to their "ability and competence" and paid them accordingly. Their rate of wages for skilled men in 1907-08 was 4)K cents per hour, while the union rate was 50 cents. Those who were less skilled were paid less, some receiving only 30 cents per hour.
Radical changes have come since. The union is today working under a three-year agreement signed in May, 1914, with the builders com- posing the Builders' Exchange League, on a dosed shop basis, calling for i6yi cents the first half year. 60 the second, and 63}^ the last two years.
Eight hours is the general working day in the trade, although some 154
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nMi-union men work ten. For all work over eight hours, time and one- half was paid in 1907-08; holidays double. The new agreements call for a forty-four hour week, a Saturday half-holiday, and double time for Saturday afternoons, as well as Sundays.
Electrical Workers. The electrical workers, also, were in 1907 straying against the open-shop movement and more recently against a split in their own ranks.* In 190$ the electrical contractors tried to es- tablish the open shop, but after a strike lasting about a month they signed a two-year closed-shop agreement. When this agreement expired the struggle began again, and was still in progress in 1907-08. No agree- ments were being made, but the union tried to enforce its closed shop rule, and in many cases was successful. Here, as with the carpenters, there has since been a change of front.
There are two classes of electrical workers: "inside wiremen" who do the wiring in buildings, and "linemen" who work on the streets and underground. Together they numbered about 800 in the Pittsburgh Dis- trict, and the local unions of the two trades had about 600 of these men enrtdled. Today 90 per cent of the men are reported as union members.
To become an inside wireman a boy has to serve an apprenticeship of four years. The ratio of apprentices to journeymen permitted by the union where it is in control, is not more than one to three. There is con- siderable division of labor in this trade, but the union has tried to prevent any permanent classification of men. It has insisted that every apprentice shall be taught to become an all-round electrician.
Thetowest point in the wages of wiremen was reached in 1899 when the rate was fs.a; perdayof ten hours. The next year this was increased to^. JO. In 1901 the union secured $2.70 per day, and reduced the hours to eight. From 1903 on, the wages of inside wiremen were ^.00 per day, and in 1913 those working for contractora were able to secure 14.60. Time and one-half for overtime, and double time for Sundays and holidays, are paid as in other building trades. Practically all these gains were made by means of strikes. In June, 1914, without a strike, but through negotiatran, nothing less than a five-year agreement was entered upon calling for 3^yi cents an hour for the first year (^4.60), 63^ cents the second, third, and fourth, and 68>< cents, the fifth year.
Steady employment is the rule for most wiremen. Those who work for amusement places and private persons do not have steady work, but their rate of pay per hour is from laK to 25 percent higher than that of other t
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Although linemen do not belong to the building trades, they will be treated here, as they are directly connected with other electrical workers. Their local union includes linemen, trimmers, underground cablemen, cable-splicers, trouble-men working for distributing companies, telephone switchboard men, attendants, repair and station constraction men in central lighting and power stations. In all there were 350 members in 1907-08, while about 100 competent mechanics and about 100 of less skill remained outside the union. The union itself has been torn by fighting.
The apprenticeship regulations of linemen differ considerably from those of the inside wiremcn. The apprentice must be over eighteen years, whereas the inside wiremen require him to be under eighteen. The period of service is three instead of four years, and at the end of the period the apprentice is initiated into the union without an examination.
Of the employers of electrical workers the Bell Telephone Company was least controlled by the union during the year studied. It employed 23; men and had an open shop. The company had been able to reduce the minimum wages by subdividing the work and grading the pay ac- cording to the skill required. This practice was prohibited by the unicm wherever it was in control. It permitted no specialization on such work as installing tdcphones, for example, and required 3 skilled mechanic to do this. Union men were employed almost exclusively by the police and fire departments for their wiring, and by the city lighting plant in Allegheny. The same was true to a slightly lesser extent of the street car and lighting companies. No political pull, union men said, was necessary for an electrician to get a job from the municipality. In- ciden'tally, the workmen favored municipal ownership and operation because the city lighting plant, the police and fire departments, offered better conditbns of employment than they had been able to win from the private companies.
The wages of linemen varied with different employers. The city of Pittsburgh paid the men who took care of its police and tire wires tgp a month, while Allegheny paid {3.3; per day. In 1913 Greater Pittsburgh was paying its linemen fj.jo a day. Cable splicers in 1907-08 got f 3. 50 a day from the telephone companies and $1 10 a month from the Allegheny County Lighting Company. Installers working for the Bell Company were paid from $i.;o to ^3.75 per day. This was the work which the union required to be done by skilled electricians at journeymen's wages. The union rate for skilled mechanics was J3.35 per day, a rate generally established during 1907 after a strike lasting twelve houis. In 1908, however, the employers took advantage of the depression to reduce wages 3; cents per day. The linemen struck and remained out for five months, but to no effect. Three dollars per day, which had been paid for five ■ S6
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years preceding 1907, was the rate which was again established. By 1910, the rate for outside men had risen again, this time to ti-75- The hours of wwk for linemen are nine per day except on public work, where by statute they are fixed at eight.
Elevator Constructors. One of the strongest unions in Pitts- burgh is that of the elevator constructors. In 1907 it had ijo members and controlled the trade absolutely. There were not a dozen non-union men in the District and most of these were "knockabouts." There are said to be less than the dozen today.
The work of an elevator constructor requires considerable skill, and the supply of skilled mechanics who could do the work has not kept up to the constantly increasing demand. Some helpers become journeymen elevator constructors, but the business agent of the union had never heard of a case of an apprentice becoming a journeyman, although, as will be seen, apprentices were provided for in the agreements between employers and the union. This was one source of the union's power. The recruits were all skilled mechanics. To become a member of the union a man was required to be a citizen of the United States or Canada, or he must have declared his intention of becoming such. The initiation fee was f^o. half of which must be paid upon application. Then the applicant was submitted to an examination by a board of examiners consisting of five members. This examination cost him 53.00. If he passed he had to pay the rest of his initiation fee before he could become a member. Workmen of other crafts could become members after they had been employed at elevator work for three months on a "permit "card issued by the elevator constructors' union.
The union classified workmen into mechanics and helpers- A mechanic was one who had successfully passed the examination provided by the union and who received the regular rate of mechanic's wages required by the union and agreed to by employers. Helpers were men registered by the union to hdp mechanics. A helper had to furnish suitable tools and provide a box for them, and was not allowed to do mechanic's work unless under the immediate personal direction of a mechanic No mechanic was permitted to go on jobs unaccompanied by a hdper, nor a helper unaccompanied by a mechanic — except to inspect elevators.
The employers had come to meet annually or semi-annually, as the Elevator Manufacturers' and Builders' Association, to make trade agreements with the union. These agreements laid down the conditions under which work should be earned on. In case of trouble or misunder- standing between an employer and his workmen, provision was made for arbitration of the difference. A conference committee of five members, 157
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two from each side and the four electing another, was permanently estab- lished to consider all difficulties. Work must go on pending the decision of the conference, except in cases where the international union ordered a strike. It was provided, however, that no strike ordered by the Inter- national Union of Elevator Constructors should be considered a breach of the arbitration clauses in the agreement. Employers further agreed to employ only union men, and the union bound itself not to let any of its members enter into competition with employers or permit them to take contracts on their own account to do elevator work.
Under the agreement in force in 1907-08, one apprentice was allowed to each shop where there were less than 10 mechanics. Where there were more than 10, employers might have one apprentice to every 10 mechanics. A preference for apprentices between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one was expressed, and apprentices had to join the union and pay an initiation fee of fia Piece work of any kind was prohibited and the union imposed a fine of (35 on its members for a first offense and f 100 for every offense thereafter, for any violation of this rule. In order to avoid jurisdictional disputes with other unions the agreement enumerated the kinds of work on which the contractors should employ only members of the union. This agreement, however, did not entirely pre- vent trouble with other trades, particularly with the carpenters and housesmiths. The work of the elevator constructor partakes so largely of acombinationof that ofother trades that these jurisdictional disputes have aroused considerable animosity.
The working day specified for elevator constructors was ei^t hours, except on Saturdays during June, July, and August, when it was four hours. "Regular time" was between 8 a. m. and $ p. m. Where work was done in two shifts, the night shift was paid at the rate of time and one-half. For alt other overtime the men got double pay.
Wages were fixed at ;o cents per hour or {4.00 per day for me- chanics, and )sH cents per hour or $3.85 per day for helpers. "Permit" helpers received jiXcentsper hour, or|3.;opcr day. It was agreed, all men working outside of Pittsburgh and within a radius of 35 miles of the city hall, should receive traveling expenses; leaving for their work on the train nearest 8 a. m., the time spent in traveling being at the expense of the employer. Apprentices were paid $i.$o per day during the first year, and 50 cents per day additional each succeeding year.
During the depression in 1907-08 nearly one-half of the men of this trade in the District were out of work; but in good times they are employed practically the year round.
By the end of 1909, the union had organized practically all
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elevator constntcton in the District, and in the spring of 1910 secured employers' signatures to a scale of $6}^ cents per hour for me- chanics and 37>^ cents for helpers. Under this agreement the summer Saturday afternoons off became a part of the regular schedule, and men in the trade worked a forty-four-hour week. In May, 1913, a new three- year agreement was entered into, fixing 62}4 cents for mechanics, 40 cents for helpers, Saturday half holiday, and overtime paid double. In the twelve-year period since 1903, the mechanics have lifted the wages of their helpers to a point higher than their own were at the beginning of the period. They themselves are getting twice what they had at the start. The course of wages since the organization of the union in 1901, up to 1913, has been as follows:
laos 100a 190^-^)8 1606-06 1910-13 161S-18 Helpers . fi.8o |3.so $3.50 la.85 ^JJX* l3.3o
Mechanics . 3.50 3.50 3.7$ 4.00 4.S0 5.00
Painters, Decorators, and Paperhancers. The union of paint- ers, decorators, and paperhangers in Pittsburgh has been in continu- ous existence since 1886. Until a few years ago it regularly entered into agreements with the Master House Painters' and Decorators' Asso- ciation. In 1907-08 there were no agreements, but the union was strong enough to enforce its conditions in most shops. There were from 1,600 to 1,800 union men in the District, all being employed in house painting and decorating. Car painting for the railroads and street car companies was done by non-union men. There were also ;oo or 600 painters in the county not belonging to the union, a good many of these working in the steel mills.
The union men were distributed among 16 local unions, each of which sent two delegates to a council known as District Council No. 1, Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The objects of this council are: "the establish- ment of a central representative body having jurisdiction over all matters rdating to the trade and general interest of the organized painters, dec- orators and paperhangers of Pittsburgh, Allegheny, and vicinity; to bring about harmony and unity between all local unions for the common interest of all; to establish an eight-hour workday; to establish a mini- mum rate of wages for all journeymen; and issue annually a code of working rules relating to change of wages, etc " This district council has centrally located headquarters which are open from 8 a. m. to $ p. m. It exercises "I^pslative and executive power on all matters relating to the common interest and welfare of the local unions and their members." 159
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It establishes "a minimum rate of dues of fifty cents per month, and initiation fee for all locals in this district. " The district council has power "to frame all working or trade rules (subject to referendum of the local unions) and enforce the same, collect all fines for the violation of trade rules, issue a quarterly working card, order all strikes and decide all disputes between locals or members." It also has power to make trade agreements with employers.
The union rules require that the shop chairman shall see that each man employed is a member of the union in good standing. Ap- prentices are allowed in the ratio of one to every lo journeymen. All apprentices must be registered with the district council, and fresco ap- prentices must be indentured to the local union of fresco painters.
The regular workday is eight hours, from 8 a. m. to 13 noon, and from 13:30 to 4:30 p. m. For all work done outside of these regular working hours the rate of time and one-half must be paid, and double pay is required for Sunday and holiday work. The non-union car painters and those who work in the mills are employed regularly ten hours per day.
House painters received in 1907-08 43>^ cents an hour, or I3.40 per day, while the rate for fresco painters and decorators was jo cents an hour, or {4.00 per day. Paperhangers worked by the piece and their usual earnings were from fj.oo to {7.00 per day. If an employer preferred to employ them by the hour he had to pay 62)4 cents an hour. Car painters employed by the railroads earned from $60 to f8; per month; those working for the street railway company were paid |3.so to ^3.00 per day. In the mills the wages of painters were ^.75 and I3. 00 per day; but these non-union men were employed regularly through the entire year, while the union men in the building trades had work only about eight months in the year.
In 1909, the union was able to secure the adoption of a new agreement; and in 1914 is working under a 56^ cent scale.
Plasterers. Plastering is still another trade in which there has been a struggle m Pittsburgh over the open shop, the employers having the upper hand in 1907-08, the unions in 1913-14. In 1907-08 there were peitaps 700 plasterers in the District; only about half that number were in the union and no agreements were in effect between the employers and the union. Some 40 Negro plasterers, working for Negro contractors, were all non-union.
The union had a set of working rules which it tried to enforce
when it got control of a shop. Under them no one was permitted to
take charge of a job as a foreman unless be had been a member of the
union for one year. These rules also made definite provisions for keeping
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up the efficiency of the members. It was the duty of the foreman when starting a job to examine the specifications and see that atl work was done as specified. A penalty was imposed for working without specifications. FuTtber, "any workman doing a piece of work not according to specifica- tions, if found guilty {was] subject to a minimum fine of $1.00 for fiist offense and for second offense the fine [was] not less than |$.oo and as much more as the executive board [might] decide."
Provisions for apprenticeship were very minutely worked out. The employer was required to make application to the union for permis- SKMi to employ an apprentice. In the application the employer was to state the name and age of the boy wishing to serve his trade, and the wages that he would pay in each year of the boy's apprenticeship. He was furthennore required to pledge himself not to discharge the apprentice without good and sufficient reasons. Grievances on the part of either cmE^oyer or apprentice were to be submitted to the executive board of the union for investigation and imposition of penalties. An employer who bad been in business for at least one year was entitled to one apprentice, and two years after the indenture of the first apprentice he could take another. The union attempted also to limit each employer to two apprentices.
Plasterers in Pittsburgh have been working eight hours per day since 1898. From 1896 to 1898 the hours were nine, and prior to that time ten hours was the rule. Plasterers lose much time from seasocul causes, working for only seven or eight months a year.
The union rate of wages in 1907 was ^6yi cents, or S4-$o pcr day. By establishing open shops employers were able to reduce this rate to f4.ao per day, the rate generally paid from 1900 to 1905. The non-union Negro plasterers earned about $3.00 a day.
In March, 1910, the plasterers secured a new agreement with the big contractors. It was a closed-shop agreement; closed at both ends, the men binding themselves not to work for other contractors and em- ployers binding themselves to hire no men but those bdonging to the union. Wagesunderthisagreement werefixedat ff.oofor anei^l-hour day {62}4 cents). In contrast to the carpenters' union at this period the plasterers' union was adding to its membership daily, attributing the increase to its closed-shop agreement.
In the spring of 1914 they entered upon a three-year compact at (5.50 {68fi cents) the first year, 95.7$ the second, and I6.00 the third; an eight-hour day, forty-four-hour week, one and one-half time for overtime, and double time, legal holidays and Sundays.
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Plumbers. Practically all plumbers in Pittsburgh are American bom and practically all are members of the union. They work umier signed agreements with the master plumbers and make one of the strongest labor bodies in the city. The j per cent of Pittsburgh plumbers who are unorganized find work in small shops not parties to the agreement, or in the mills.
Plumbers' apprentices serve five years. They are registered in the union and pay 2; cents per quarter for their working cards. When they are ready to come into the union, their initiation fee is put down to one- half the regular amount. The minimum initiation fee, according to the constitution, is };o. The union sometimes charges more than this.
There were in 1907-08 about 400 master plumbers in the Pitts- burgh District and they employed from 700 to 800 plumbers. Local plumbers were first organiied in 1879 under the Knights of Labor. Wages were then ^3.00 for a ten-hour day. In 1884 they gained a nine- hour day with a minimum rate of ty^o for journeymen and $3.00 for apprentices who had just served their time. During the crisis of 1893 the union disappeared, but by 1894 it had regained the scale of Ij.jo for nine hours.
In 1898 the eight-hour day was won. Four dollars a day was secured as a minimum in 1901. Two years later the union struck for ^.jo, and the men were out over four months, but they lost the strike. In May, 190$, the Master Plumbers' Association signed a closed-shop agreement with the union on the basis of $4.00 for an eight-hour day, the agreement to last for three years. [The rate of wages for plumbers in the nearby open shop town in Pennsylvania was from I3.00 to ^3-75 for a nine-hour day.] A supplement was added to this agreement in 1907, which gave first class journeymen $4.50 per day and second class (ap- prentices just out of their time) I4.00; no member allowed in second class over two years. It also provided for a Saturday half holiday, fnm June 1st to September 30th, to be paid for at double time if worked.
Under a renewal agreement signed in 1910, first class plumbers were to receive Ij.oo after January 1, 1913, and second class plumbers I4.J0 per day. The plumbers are now working under a five-year agree- ment which calls for a raise to |j.$o for first class and f ;.oo for second class plumbers January 1, 1915; and f6.oo and Ij. 50 respectively January I, 1917; the eight-hour day, forty-four hour week, time and one^ialf for overtime, and double time for holidays and Sundays.
SxEAMFiTTEas. Practically every steamfitter who works in the Pittsburgh building trades is a union man. In 1907 they were members of Local No. 318, International Association of Steamlitterf and Steamfitters' Helpers of America, which had 400 members in Pittsburgh. 162
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in 1913, the steamfitters' national was taken into the United As- sociation of Pliunben, Gas and Steamfitters. The Pittsburgh steamfitters are, however, organized in a separate local 1449) and claim that there are not more than 2 per cent non-union men in the District, and that those work on jobs away from Pittsburgh. About 300 non-unkin men work in the mills of the District, most of which employ a dozen or 1 5 steamfitters the year round. There were also in iQoyinthecityfourorfivenon-union shops which bid on mill work. These employed from 1 50 to 300 steam- fitters. For scMne reason the union had never been able to organize the men in these shops. It was not that their employers were opposed to an organization, for the same employers recognized the union of machinists and paid their scale. The men simply refused to join.
The steamfitters in the building trade were organized in the late 90's. Trade agreements were made from the very banning, and they have been welt kept, employers and workingmen being strongly in favor of them. The agreement which went into effect in January, 1907, did not stipulate that there should be a closed shop, but the scale was main- tained by requiring that if a non-union man were employed, he must become a party to the agreement. Further provisions required that there should benolimitatton totheamountof worka man might perform during the working day; nor must there be any restriction on the use of machinery or tools. Steamfitters were required to work with any manufactured material, ezcq>t prison made, furnished by the employer, a proviso which would compel the men to use materials made by non- union men.
Strikes were to be avoided by means of a board of arbitratbn. This board was made up of four members from the employers' association and four members from the union. Parties to a particular dispute were made ineligible to the board. In case of a dispute, work was to go on as usual, the board meeting within two working days after it had been noti- fied of the trouble, in cases where the board could not decide, an umpire was to be selected by the board, both sides were to make their argument before the umpire, and the latter was obliged to render decision wtthtn twenty-four hours. Should either employer or union wish to terminate the agreement, notice must be given three months in advance.
The men of this trade are divided into four classes: steamfitters, junior steamfitters or second men, experienced helpers, and inexperienced helpers. AH but the steamfitters rank as apprentices. Inexperienced helpers are apprentices. When they have worked at the trade three ro(»iths they may become experienced helpers. Junior steamfitters or second men are those in the last years of their apprenticeship. The
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apprentice usually serves five years, but he may become a journeyman sooner if he passes the examination given by the union. Each employer may work one second man if he has one steamfitter. If he has six steam- fitters he may have two second men and one extra second man for each additional three fitters.
The regular working hours for all steamfitters in the building trades were from 8 a. m. to la noon and from 13:30 to 430 p. m. Fot work before and after these hours, time and one-half must be paid, while double time was paid for Saturday night, Sunday, and legal holidays. In the mills, however, pipe-Utters were working ten hours, while the men re- ferred towhoworkedforcontractors that bid on mill work had a nine-hour day and were paid $3.00. The rate for the steam pipe-fitters had for years been 36>^ cents an hour or $3.6$ a day; 16 cents an hourfor helpers.
For union men, the scale of wages agreed upon in 1907 was as fol- lows: Steamfitters, 50 cents per hour; junior steamfitters (or second men), 34H; experienced helpers, 28}i; and inexperienced helpers, i8>^ cents. The men presented new agreements in 1908 and again in 1909, proposing increased wages. Both years, employers refused to sign, and work con- tinued under the 1907 compact. Gains had come by 1913, the second men being cut out entirely and a flat hourly rate of $6yi cents for steam- fitters and ^lyi cents for helpers paid union men. The long term agree- ment now in force gives the steamfitters 63>£ cents per hour to December 31, 191$, and68^cent5to December 31, 1916.
Sheet Metal Workers. A sheet metal worker, as defined in the constitution of the Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers' International Alliance, is any one of the following mechanics: "Tin and Sheet Metal Workers, Metal Roofers, Cornice and Skylight Workers, Metal Furniture Workers, Furnace and Range Workers, those making, setting, and finish- ing Metal Sash and Frames, Jobbers, Assortment Workers and Copper- smiths, and those who put on Iron Ceilings and Sidings (both interior and exterior), as well as all who do sheet metal work made of No. 10 gauge and lighter."
Excluding those who work in mills and railroad shops, there were in 1907-08 about 500 sheet metal workers in the Pittsburgh District. These were employed in the building trades and in the job shops. Three hundred and fifty of them belonged to the local union of the American Sheet Metal Workers' International Association, which had fair control of the trade. It made agreements with some of the largest as wdl as with the smallest employers, with those belonging to the employers' association and with those who were independent.
Sheet metal apprentices must register in the union and pay %yoo
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regtslration fee. They serve four years and are then examined. If they prove their ability to command the minimum rate of wages of the union. they are then initiated free of charge. The regular initiation fee is $4y An apprentice who neglects to register must pay the entire initiation fee. Not more than one apprentice for every four joumeymen is permitted by the union, where it can control. It also strictly prohibits sub-con- tracting and piece work in the building trades.
The union in Pittsburg dates back to i88a Before the time of the organization wages were $i .7; per day of ten hours. Since then the mov^ ment of wages has been gradually upward, successive steps being $1.7$. f^.oo, I3.25, fa. 50, I3.68, $3.00, $3.40, and ^3.60 per day — the rate in 1907-08; at the same time the hours going down from ten to nine and then to eight. Non-union men were paid various rates from $j.oo to >}.40 in 1907-oa
For ten months in the year there is enou^ work for all sheet metal wcvkers. About three-fourths have work the year round. With the de- pression, a number left the District, but the union's control was again in evidence in May, 1910, when a circular letter declared the rate at which the men should work: ;o cents per hour for an eight -hour day [^4.00]. A two-year agreement in 1913 set the rate at sj cents [$4.40].
Slate and Tile Roofers. Throughout the Pittsburgh District there were in the year studied about 60 slate and tile roofers' shops, employing in all about 13$ men. Of these shops. 36 employed none but unkm men, although the largest shop was "open." The membership of the union was only 63, although it had had as many as 1 17 members. The empkiyers of the trade are organized nationally as the Slate Roofers' Association. Members owned six of the union shops, including the four largest in Pittsburg. One of these later became an open shop.
Hie apprenticeship requirements of the union were three years' service, one apprentice to each shop if it had at least two men working all the year round, and r^stration of the apprentice in the union. The registration fee was $$.oo. When a registered apprentice was initiated into the unicm he paid only half the initiation fee, which was $2y
No agreements were made in this trade for a decade following I90)wben the union broke the last one with a sympathetic strike. Wages were then 40 cents an hour. From 1903 to 1907 the scale paid in the union shops was S4.00 per day of eight hours, with the usual provisionsoftime and one-half and double time for overtime and holiday work respectively. Wages in the open shops varied from 30 to 50 cents per hour. Although the panic of 1 907 threw many roofers out of work, wages were not reduced. Ordinarily, steady work at this trade lasts about seven or eight months in the year. By 1913 the union had become strong enough to secure
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another agreement, securing $'; cents an hour for that year and 60 cents an hour for 1914.
TtLE Layers and Helpers. Pittsburgh is considered by the tile layers as the best place for steady work in America. Ninety per cent of the men work the year round. There had not been a slack period for five years prior to the panic in 1907. Yet that was the unfortunate season hit upon by the men for a try-out of strength with their employers. Up to January 1, 1908. the Tile Layers' and Helpers' Union made biennial closed-shop agreements with the Tile Dealers' Association. In October. 1907, the union gave notice that at the expiration of the agreement they would want |$.oo per day, instead of the I4.40 which they were getting. The employers took this opportunity to declare for the open shop. A year later two-thirds of the tile layers were working in closed shops, but the rest were open. In January, 1910, however, with 75 per cent of the men organized, and steady work for six months previous, the men were able to make a five-year agreement with a majority of the employers.
The total number of tile layers and helpers in the District in 1907- 08 was about 200. There were two locals, one composed of tile layers and the other of helpers, each of which had about 6; members. Appren- tices were usually taken from the helpers, and were required to serve two years. One apprentice was allowed in each shop.
The union established eight hours as the working day in this trade in 1900. At that time wages were ^.00 per day for tile layers and f 1.90 for helpers. From 1903 to 1907 the journeymen's scale was $$ cents per hour, or I4.40 per day, and helpers received I2.2;. Following the strike of 1907, wages in the union shops became ^;.oo a day, while open shops were paying the old rate of I4.40. Helpers usually got $2.50 a day. Apprentices were paid I3.2; per day during the first six months, and thereafter during apprenticeship they received an increase of aj cents per day every six months. The agreement of 191D called for 60 cents per hour for a journeyman's eight-hour day, and (3.00 per day for appren- tices, the pay of the latter to be increased at the rate of ;o cents per day every six months until they become journeymen. By 1913, joumeymm's wages had risen to fy^o per day. The union does not allow piece work, but in some open shops non-union men are compelled to work by the piece.
Note. — In addition to agreements and advances noted under the above headings, the following additions to the building trades scales are illustrative both of the devektpment of new fonni of construction and of the general standards of the group which areapplied to them: asbestos workers f4.a5 per day, eight-hour day, rorty-four-hour week; cement workers — who, with a membership of ;50. are be- coming an important group — f3.$o per day, eight-hour day, forty-four-hour week; composition roofers, I4.00 per day, who are yet to be recogniicd by the Master Roofers.
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MINE WORKERS
Engaged in the mining operations of the nine counties in Western Pennsylvania claimed as the jurisdiction of District No. 5, United Mine Workers of America were, in 1907-08, about 80,000 men. About 30,000 were organized under the United Mine Workers, By 1914 this number has increased to over 40,000.
The relatively small number of men in the union gives a false impression of its power. It exercises an influence greater than its numbers. The organized men are grouped solidly in the counties nearest to Pittsburgh. Here they have incr^sed their wages, reduced their hours, and improved the conditions of labor. All around this organized field non-union men are found, but it b in the Connellsville region to the south that the greater number of non-union mine workers are concentrated. There, as well as in Westmoreland County, the miners have for twenty-five years been unorganized. Sometimes a rise in the union scale of wages has compelled the Connellsville operators to increase wages in order to prevent their men from forming a union. The hfghlT wagrr r""* "h"-^^-' ^'?v"= '« *hr iminn h^M". .'^'""' been influential in improving conditions amonj;; the non-union miners; the latter, on the other hand, have been a constant menace to the organized mine workers.
Outside the fields referred to, the union has been making steady prepress in the Pittsburgh District. During the five years from iqo^ tn ipop its membership almost doubled. In 1903 the average monthly membership was iJi59Li in 1907, 30,;87; in 1914, 43,000. in the year 1907 tHere was an increase of over 7,000, or about 30 per cent. This growth was principally in what is known as the District proper, along the Monongahela River and its tributary, the Youghiogheny. In 1907-08 the union gave its attention to completing the organization of the miners in the Allegheny Valley. In 1910 and 191 1 its efforts were spent in an unequal struggle to organize the mines at Irwin, Latrobe, and Grecnsburg, and other points in Westmoreland County. In 1912- 13 the resources of the national body were poured into the nei^- boring West Virginia fields — newer and equally unorganized, where, as result of the contracts secured, the union now claims a member- ship of 40,000. In 1913-14 the fight shifted to the Colorado field. 167
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The Strike of the Slavs in Westmoreland County was in some ways even more significant than the strug^e of the native moun- taineers to the south which took on almost the aspect of civil war. For Westmoreland County is the very gate of the coke region, which has been unorganized since H. C. Frick broke the union in the 8o's. In the early spring of i^jp^fae men, largely immigrants, struck for the union scale of wages, for a reduction in the number of working hours for check-weighmen, and for other arrangements which would put them on a par with the organized miners about Pittsburgh. Processions of miners went from one mine to the next, calling the men out; labor organizers speaking the different tongues formed them into locals. Recognition of the union finally became the underlying issue. Strikebreakers and guards were im- ported by the companies, dashes followed, and several men were killed. The strikers' families were ejected from the company houses and lived in tents throughout the entire winter of 1910-11. Thousands of dollars were spent by the employers and by the United Mine Workers in their efforts to control the situation. With the summer of 191 1 , a slack season of coal mining throughout the country made the drain on union resources too heavy to con- tinue, and sixteen months after its inauguration the strike was de- clared off, the men returning to work on such terms as they could make individually. Little union growth has followed there in the years succeeding.
Various personal and corporation policies were involved in this struggle. The fact that some Westmoreland coal is made into coke makes the ultimate outcome significant with respect to the coke regiMi proper. If the union succeeds here, it feels that it will have prestige in the Connellsville and Uniontown districts where it must deal with the most powerful business corporation in the United States committed to an anti-union policy — the United States Steel Corporation. Meanwhile, the fact that immigrant miners could be held together by union leaders through a summer and winter of great privation is significant. They showed dogged persistence in keeping up the fight to an even greater degree than they did in the mass strike at the Pressed Steel Car Works at Mc- Kees Rocks, in 1909, or the Westinghouse strike (^ 1914.
These three strikes give appraisal of the Slav as a force in the 168
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cccmomic struggles of the next decade in the Pittsburgh EMstrict. And it is to be borne in mind that today the mine workers in the Pittsburgh District are overwhelmingly Slav. During the last fifteen years there has been a marked falling off in the number of English-speaking men in the mines. Operators state that in most mines barely 2$ per cent of the men can speak English, while in a large number the percentage is much smaller.
This influx of immigrants from southeastern Europe has had two important effects: First, it has prevented the mine workers' union from improving laMr conditions m the l'iTt&lJUii;li District as fast as"it4«» improvedThem"in~rhgTafra7illiiiuis,-Mtd farther west. Each newlv_arrived immigrant tRTffRs of a job in Pittsburgh. Here he must be taught his unionism. Hisl^iorance of industrial conditions and his unfamiliar tongue make him difli- cuft to reach. The union translates its constitution and other literature into the Italian and Slavic tongues, it employs organizers who speak the languages, and it lowers initiation fees from $10 to f $.00 and fj.^o to attract the newcomer. When he has learned bis lesson he hears of better conditions in other districts, goes west, and becomes a strong union man. This process is constantly being repeated. It could be seen plainly in the mine employing 1,000 men which had to hire, according to its superintendent, in 1907, 5,000 men a year to keep up its force. As a general rule throughout the District, 3,000 men have to be hired during the year to keep 1 ,000 going.
The second effect of the influx of Slavs is that their lack of intelligence makes improved machinery and a perfected organiza- tion of the mining processes absolutely essential. There is a direct connection between the increasing number of unintelli- gent mining laborers and the increased use of mining machinery during the last ten or fifteen years. Which is cause and which is effect is difficult to determine. In a dispute over the introduction of a new appliance for dumping coal at the tipple, the operators contended that the scarcity of intelligent labor compelled them to adopt some mechanical means to dump and handle coal at the surface.
While constant immigration has kept the mine worker of the Pittsburgh District somewhat behind his brother workmen ^ -
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farther west in securing better working conditions, the union has forced up wages in the District so that the Slav in the organ- ized mines is paid from $o to 90 per cent more per hour than his countrymen working in the mills and factories of Pittsburgh at jobs requiring the same amount of skill and strength.
The hours, wages, and rules under which coal is mined in the Pittsburgh District are fixed at biennial conventions of workmen and employers. First, the operators of a competitive area cover- ing several states meet with representatives of the union and lay down the conditions under which the men are to work within their territory. After these conventions, district conferences are held to settle all local matters, and agreements are signed by both parties, to hold until the next convention. Afpypfppnts hBtyppn miners and operators were first made in 1886, but were discon- tinued'until the system of interstate convuuliuiis began- in 1898.
By means of these agreements the union in the flrst ten years cut down the hours of work about 20 per cent, while earnings in- creased almost 100 per cent. Ten hours was the working day at the outset of the decade; eight at the end. Many kinds of work, such as entry cutting, room turning, and removing clay, which are incidental to the regular work of the miner, but for which formeriy nothingwas paid, now have a regular scale. This "dead work" in a mine employing i$o men adds about $1.50 per week to the wages of each of them. It has meant an addition of about 10 per cent to a miner's pay. A company with a payroll of |8,ooo now pays $Soo for dead work, where formerly it paid nothing.
Another way in which wages have been increased is by establishing the system of check-weighing. In the Pittsburgh District the practice of having a check-weighman was established in 1898 without a strike. The Pittsburgh Coal Company, whicfa was formed by a consolidation of smaller companies in 1901, agreed at the first convention thereafter to put in check-weigh- men, if the men would agree to sign a contract not to sue for wages. It was common for men to claim a greater tonnage than the company allowed them. Legally the company could not force the men to make such a contract, but most of them signed.
An idea of the general movement of wages from 1898 on
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may be had from the following table. The complete scale for each two-year period now contains nearly aoo items, and provides a price for each kind of work that may appear. When agreements were first made only two sentences were needed.
|
A CALENDAR |
OF RISING PAY |
||||||
|
Scale— Tbinvtin jyi in. Stritntd Coal* |
|||||||
|
1898- |
1900- |
190S- |
1904- |
1906^ |
1910^ |
mt<^ |
|
|
1900 |
leot |
1904 |
1906 |
1910 |
ma |
1916 |
|
|
Pick-raining, per con |
166 |
S.So |
yv> |
Ms |
loo |
i-ts |
Si. 00 |
|
Undercutting in |
|||||||
|
.170a |
,1604 |
.1708 |
.181a |
..9.6 |
|||
|
Loading ra rooms. |
|||||||
|
per ton . |
■36 |
,4368 |
■ASf^ |
.4364 |
.4560 |
.4856 |
■MS* |
|
Undercutting in |
|||||||
|
.lOJO |
|||||||
|
Loading in rooms, |
|||||||
|
per ton |
■36 |
.4168 |
.4700 |
■«7J |
.4700 |
,Soa8 |
.J656 |
InM* Day Waf* Sealt
|
1898- |
1900- |
190S- |
1904- |
1906^ |
1910- |
1911'- |
|
|
1900 |
1904 |
1910 |
me |
1916 |
|||
|
Track liyers . . |
t2-28 |
U.f6 |
Ja4a |
Ja.,6 |
U.10 |
>3.84 |
|
|
TnckUyen'hdpers |
1-75 |
a. 10 |
a. 16 |
a.aj |
a.j6 |
a.49 |
|
|
Trappers <• |
1.00 |
1.6, |
|||||
|
Cagen . . . |
"■7» |
a.s6 |
a-4a |
a.j6 |
a.70 |
a-84 |
|
|
Dnver* |
1-75 |
a.4a |
a.70 |
||||
|
"■7S |
a. 10 |
a.4a |
a.70 |
a.a4 |
|||
|
W.ter haulers |
|||||||
|
Timbermcn. when |
|||||||
|
«nployed. . |
a. ,6 |
a.56 |
>a4 |
||||
|
presied air plants Other inside labor |
1.8s |
a.aa |
j-lb |
a.64 |
a.78 |
||
|
'-7S |
a.:o |
a.36 |
a.a) |
a.}6 |
a.49 |
■Thin vdnisthemost common in Allegheny County. fcThe 1906-08 scale was renewed for igo8-io. c The iQia-i^ scale was renewed for 1914-16. Motormen t fa.9$ per day to the inside scale in 191a.
* These are the boys who take care of the trap doors.
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Day laborers outside of the mines received in 1906-08 from It .$0 to }3.2S per day. For a number of years the miners' officials tried to secure a fixed scale of wages for outside day labor but without success until 1914.*
On the basis of the union scale, employes of the National Mining Company were able to earn during 1907 an average of $3.90 to $3.00 per day. They worked about 335 days out of the year. That was an exceptionally prosperous year, however; ordinarily the number of working days run about 300. But to average the wages of all the men working in the mines hardly gives an adequate idea of their earnings; the men must be considered in groups. Wages of inside day labor were fixed by the scale of 1906-08 at $3.36 to |3.$6 per day. Counting 33$ working days as average for 1907 the earnings of an underground day laborer were from fsji to |$76. It must be remembered, however, that in ordinary years he gets less than 300 days' pay.
A pick-miner can mine about three tons of coal a day. At the 1906-10 scale of 90 cents a ton he coukl make 92.70 a day and f6o7.;o for a year of 335 days.
Men who do the undercutting with machines are excep- tionally skilled. Two men usually work together with one machine. They go from room to room and cut a slot about six feet deep under the coal at the bottom of the bench. They were making J40, f6o, $80, sometimes even I90 in two weeks in 1906-08. To make the last, however, they often worked over eight hours. The majority of the cutters made from l3.oo to S4.00 per day; some as low as I2.S0. The annual income of the average undercutter was from $700 to $800. In this it was about on a par with the skilled men in the building trades. Both were working eight hours per day, but the undercutter probably had a somewhat smaller rent to pay, for he usually lived in a company, house.
Behind the cutters come the loaders. TKeyTftdbtThe coal which has been undercut, and load it on three-ton cars to be taken out by mules, electricity, or gravity to the tipple and dumped into boats or railroad cars. The loader works by the ton. Under the 1906-08 scale, heaveragedaboutj2.35 per day and $500 per year.
* Minimumt now wt for outside day men are as followt: dumpen, ^.)o; ram-operaton, S3.48; pushers. taoS; trimmers, ti.iy, car cleaners, b.oo. This is about to per cent over the rates paid before the outside men came under the
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The highest earnings in the District were made in the great mine, Vesta No. 4, owned by the Jones and Laughlin Steel Com- pany, which employed about 1,000 men and had an average output of almost 6,000 tons a day. In this mine, which had a thidc vein and paid according to the mine run, two average men with an electric machine could undercut five rooms of 40 tons each, or 200 tons per day. At the price paid, 5.6; cents per ton, these men together made 9i ■ -30 a day, or each of them $5.65. Some cutters in this mine drew regularly fSo and $90 every two weeks. An ordinary cutter working every day that Vesta No. 4 was in (^wration in 1907 could have earned over |i,soo. Loaders in this mine averaged almost I3.00 per day, which for the year would be tgoo. Aside from the most modem methods employed, the advantage to the men of Vesta No. 4 was the great number of days which it operated. During 1907 it worked 306 days. Even if the Vesta mine worker could make no more by the hour than the man in the other pits, his annual earnings were greater by almost a third.
It is difficult to compare wages in union mines with those in non-union, for men are not paid on the same basis. Connellsvilte miners were working ten hours; they had no check-weighman to tally their tonnage and they got no extra pay for "dead work." The rate for day laborers was in 1907-8 $2.3; per day. This was about 20 per cent less per hour than was paid to the union day laborer.
Very few miners who work by the piece supplement their regular earning by working overtime. The union discourages it. E)ay laborers do most of the overtime work. Experienced men are needed, however, to fix up the mine after the day's work is over. In Vesta No. 4, a regular night force of repair men was employed, thus doing away with overtime work. But in most mines alt repairs, changes, and the like, are done at night by day men. working overtime. Cases are cited where the same man made 1$ to 18 shifts in two weeks, instead of 12. The union has tried to do away with this extra work, but has found it impossible.
In each union mine there is a mine committee whose business it is to look after the interests of the union. The men report grievances to this committee and it takes them up with the super- intendent. It also sees that none of the union rules or the rules 17}
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of the signed agreement are violated. While it is understood between the operators and the union that there shall be no dis- crimination as to the men to be employed in the mines, the practice of signing scales for all occupations and making deductions from the men's pay for check-weighman and union dues, brings practi- cally all the men into the union, and they have at least a union shop, if not strictly a closed shop. Under this so<alled "check-' off" system, the wages of the check-weighman and the expenses of his office are collected semi-monthly through the pay office upon a statement of time made by the check-weighman. The amount so collected is deducted on a percentage basis from the earnings of all those actually engaged in mining coal. Deductions for union dues are also made through the pay office. The amount of such deduction is stated by the mine committee subject to the instructions of the men. The agreement provides that when union dues are thus paid they shall follow deductions for check- weighman, accident and death benefit, rent, and smithing.
^1 pAarly gi/pj^Yjninn jn Allegheny Countj^ there are com- pany houses for the miners. Up to 1910 the operators would not~~ let the union interfere withthe rents, which went up and down with changes in the wage scales. They rose J 1.00 a month with the new scale in 1906. A four-room house with a lot measuring up to too feet rented in 1908 for from |6.oo to $10 per month. Large houses cost more in pn^rtion. Rents of these houses were only about half what laborers paid for similar quarters in the city of Pittsburgh, and the companies as a rule kept the buildings in fair repair.* While there was wide disparity to be found between sanitary and housing conditions in the dwellings of different mining villages, the mine workers themselves expressed very little dissatisfaction with the company houses. On the contrary, these seemed to be in great demand.
Complaints were sometimes made that certain companies would not give a man a house unless he bought at the company stores. Most of these stores near Pittsburgh were in 1907 man- aged by two companies which have since been merged in the Federal Supply Company conducted by. the Pittsburgh Coal Company.
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Unlike the company houses, these stores have been at times sources of bitter discontent, the usual charge being that men who did not deal with them were discriminated against. The union has several times appointed committees to make investigations of these charges, but nothing has come of them. Prices charged at the stores in 1907 were usually those generally prevailing in the community. Fully two-thirds of the company stores had competi- tors, and this kept the prices down. In isolated communities where a company had a monopoly, prices were higher. To trade on credit the men got checks with small amounts printed on them. The amounts of their purchases were punched on these checks, and deducted from the wages. Some miners paid cash for ail they bought; others, in contrast, cashed their credit checks at a dis- count. This practice, however, was no longer common in 1907, the companies discharging men who discounted their credits.
The question of mine accidents long since became a bitter one at the conventions of District No. 5- Both everyday risks and the enormous loss of life from explosions were subjects of complaints. In Miss Eastman's report for the Pittsburgh Survey an analysis of mining fatalities in Allegheny County during twelve months showed that one-fourth of them were humanly preventa- ble,* and that the problems presented by the remainder had not been grappled with from the standpoint of prevention in the way in which European countries have addressed themselves to the same problem. During ordinary years in the Pittsburgh District, about 1 5 miners are injured and three killed for every i,oeo men employed in and aboiit the mines. From July, 1906, through June,~ 7907; there were, foi- example; 71 -fatal accidents among the mine workers of Allegheny County.f Three were due to explo- sions of powder at miners' homes. In the county there were not quite 20,000 mine workers employed. If we count the under- ground fatalities as 68, the death rate was 3.4 per thousand. This rate is greater than that of any country in Europe, and about equal to the average for the United States.J The succeeding years, 1907
'Eastman, Cryjut: op. cit., pp. 84IT, flbid., pp. 34ff. The succeeding yean have averaged more than ibU. See Kellogg, op. dt., p. 3$.
t Number ofmen killed for each 1,00a men employed — average for five yean: France (igoi-oj). 0.91; Belgium {igca-oS), 1.00; Great Britain (19(0-06), 1.18; United Sum <i903-o6), 3.39.
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and 1908, were marked by a number of horrible mine disasters in the bituminous field dT Pennsylvania. In December, 1907, there were gas explosions in two mines of the Pittsburgh District in which 274 men were killed.* The general opinion among the men in the pits was that the slaughter might have been prevented.
The Pennsylvania employers' liability law of 1907 (known as (he Casey Act) was urged by miners throughout the state. This statute removed managers, superintendents, and foremen from the class of fellow-servants, and made them vice-pnncipals for whose acts the em- ployers were responsible. As a result, operators began to take greater precautions to prevent the occurrence of accidents.
The 1907 session created also a commission to revise the bituminous mining laws of the state.
The following amendments were advocated by the ofGcers of the miners' union, not only to lessen the danger of disasters but to prevent some of the ordinary accidents which in the long run result in greater human loss:
I. That all miners employed in gaseous mines be required to pass an examination, have two years' experience, and hold a certificate.
3. That the company employ certificate fire bosses to charge and fire all shot in gaseous mines after all other men are out of the mine.
3. That it be compulsory to use safety lamps in mines having dangerous quantities of gas and where there is danger of an explosion.
4. That all mines that are dry or dusty be sprinkled daily.
5. That the ventilation be increased to 300 cubic feet for each miner.
6. That an extra fan be kept for use in case of emergency.
7. That openings be made to the surface from the inner working) of every mine.
8. That use of electricity be discontinued in mines generating gas.
9. That all trappers be at least sixteen years of age, and trap doors abolished wherever possible.
10. Superintendents to hold managers' certificates.
While some of the features suggested were incorporated in thecom- misskui's report in 1909, certain measures of safety suggested by the unkm were wholly disregarded. Four of the five members agreed to the report. The fifth member, however, Francis Feehan, president of the Pittsburgh
* Darr Mine, Pittsburgh Coal Co.. and Naomi, of the United Coal Co. Later, I S7 men were killed by an explosion in ihe Marianna mine of the PittsbunA- BuffaloCoalCo., and in 191 j, 9731 the Cincinniii mineof ibe Pittsburgh Coil Co.
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After a M:ne Disaster Miners' wives and children wailing for news from the entombed men. The ture of mine explosions, the explosibility of coal dust, and (he technique of pre- ntion have been three lines of emphasis in the work ot the Federal Bureau
i Fighters
One of the rescue crews of the Bureau of Mines wearing oxygen helmets which admil of breathing poisonous gases for iwo hours. Nol a few mining corporatioi have such apparatus and rescue ' '""' --■'■' ■ ■ ■
as instructors, and emergency r comes of a disaster.
Curiously enough, the Pittsburgh Experiment Station of Ihe B was located in Ihe old arsenal buildings of Civil War days.
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District No. $, U. M. W. of A., refused to sign it. The recommendations made by the commission were defeated and no changes in the bituminous mining laws were made by the legislature of 1909. In 191 1, James Rod- erick, chief of the Pennsylvania state department of mines, prepared a revision of laws relating to bituminous mining, and succeeded in having his recommendations passed by the legislative session of that year in spite of opposition by Mr. Feehan and his district. Mr. Roderick's revision em- bodied features of the report of the commission of 1909, to which objection was made by the unions. The 191! statute permits open lamps to be carried in some parts of mines, in other parts of which only safety lamps are allowed, and also permits the use of electricity in gaseous mines.
A state commission was created by the legislature of 191 1, to in- vestigate the general subject of itidustrial accidents and workingmen's compensation. This commission drafted a bill which was supponed by labor unions and public bodies alike, but which was defeated in the legis- lature of 1913. Further inquiry was authorized and another Ounmission report will come before the legislature of 191 j.
In May, r9o8. Congress authorized the establishment, under the technological branch of the United States Geological Survey, of a station for the investigation of mine explosions, and Pittsburgh was chosen as the location for the first station. This was evened in December, 1908. Two years later Congress definitely established a bureau of mines under the Department of the Interior, which has developed an engineer- ing laboratory at Pittsburgh and a system of mine rescue cars and safety demonstrators throughout the bituminous field. In October, 1911, this bureau held a miners' life-saving demonstration in Pittsburgh which was a signal step forward by the federal government in its program to raise the standards of state mining laws and enforcement and to carry out an edu- cational propaganda among employers and unions.
The part which the unions have thus played in the cumula- tive moventent for safety in the mining industry is in contrast to the corresponding movement in the steel industry where the hazards are equally great and for long were equally neglected, and where, in the absence of any chance for collective action or expres- sion of opinion on the part of the men, the movement for safety has come from the top.* These two employments offer further points for comparison and contrast.
'This has been true atw of the Connellsvilte region, where in recent years the H. C. Frick Company hai applied ihe general safety program of the Steel Corporatioa to the coal pits, with marked results.
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MINE WORKERS AND STEEL WORKERS-A COHPARtSON The two industries employing the largest number of men in Allegheny County are the coal mines and the steel mills.* There are'piuUablj' t^muu iilIiLe"\WJlKeis *n llie LUUniy and~7'orooo to 80,000 steel workers. In some cases the mines are owned by the steel corporations.t The nationalities of the two sets of men are similar, with a large proportion of unskilled and semi- skilled Slavs in each industry. The hours of labor in the mines are eight with no Sunday work as against ten and twelve in the mills with (up to 1910) much seven-day work. In 1907-08 the wages paid to the common laborer underground at the coal mines were $2.^6 per eight-hour day, while the wages paid to the same class of Slavs at the Pittsburgh mills were $1.50 for ten hours or I1.80 for twelve, and in the mill towns $1.65 and ¥i.98.t Meas- ured by the hour, the Slavs employed by the same company were paid 90 to 100 per cent more as mine workers than as steel workers. Again, "loaders," who follow the undercutting machines in the mines, and who were practically common laborers paid by the ton instead of by the day, earned about $2.35 to $2.80 for eight hours, while metal-wheelers and cinder-pitmen, doing similar heavy work in the mills and paid by the ton, earned $3.28 to ¥2.41 for twelve hours. The miner earned 29 to 35 cents an hour and the steel worker 19 to 20 cents.
When we come to the highest paid jobs, there is no position in the mine to be compared with the roller on a bar and guide mill or on a plate or structural mill. Some bar and guide mill rollers earned $\o to J(i6 per twelve-hour day, and plate and structural mill rollers {7.00 to $8.00 a day. But these men, though usually spoken of as workmen, are really foremen, overseeing the work
* For a detailed sUtement of labor conditions in the Pittsburgh steel industry, SM Fitch, John A.: The Steel Worken. (The Pittsburgh SurveyO
t True of Vesta mines of Jones and Laughlin Steel Co., and the National mines of the United Stales Steel Corporation.
J [n 1910 the rates paid mine laborers rose ;.j percent, while an increase of 6 percent for unskilled labor was announced by the U. S. Steel Corporation. These bases for comparisons had not, therefore, been materially changed. In 1913 a further increase of 14.3 per cent was made by the U. S. Steel Corporation, while laboren' wages in the mines increased ^.a6 per cent in 1913. The contrast in 1914 is therefore less unfavorable to the mills than in 1907-08, but now, as then, taking unskilled labor, which is the basic rate, the mine laborer still ivories shorter hours for higher pay. Day: Mill — (a.oo [ten hrs.] — (1.40 [twelve hrs.]; Mine — Sa.63 (eight W]. Hour: Mill— accents: Mine— jaK cents.
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father than doing it; and the company hires and discharges the crew on their recommendation. The blooming mill roller is dif- ferent. He actually works the levers himself, and to him may be compared the electrical undercutter, who operates the machine that undercuts the coal. The undercutter earned $3.25 to $$.00 per eight-hour day in 1907-08, and the blooming mill roller an average of {6.25 for twelve hours. The miner earned 40 to 6$ cents an hour and the blooming mill roller about $0 cents.
In another respect the mine worker's position is superior. The houses iiT'wnicn ne lives, many 6F them belonging to the company, are quite convenient, with open spaces between them, and the rentals in igoT^-oSwereaboutfz.ooper room against {4.00 paid by the mill worker. Taking everything into account — wages, hours, leisure, cost of living, conditions of work^ — it appears that common laborers employed by the steel companies in their mines were so to go per cent better off .than the same grade of laborers employed at their mills and furnaces; that semi-skilled laborers employed at piece rates were 40 to 50 per cent better off in the mines; and that the highest paid laborers, the steel roller and the mine worker, were on about the same footing.
In 1897 conditions in the mines were similar to those in the mills in 1907. The day laborer received $r .35 to $1 .50 for ten hours. It was in that year that the long strike of coal miners throughout the interstate field took place, with the result that for the ten years succeeding, wages, hours, and conditions were established by agreement between the United Mine Workers of America and the coal operators' associations. Under these agreements, the condi- tions <^ the poorest paid laborers improved perhaps 20 per cent.
The fate of unionism in the two industries is interesting and enlightening. Consider first the bearing of organized capital on the outcome. Since there have been many mine operators competing in the various markets, the cpal miners' union has been able to take advantage of this competition by playing ofT com- petitors against each other. It became a direct benefit to the operators to have wages fixed by agreements which could make the labor cost the same for all competitors. The steel workers have no such competing employers, and they do not possess this advantage. Especially since the great consolidation (^ the United States Steel Corporation, employers have been secure in fixing 179
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labor costs in other ways than by agreements with their employes.
Consider the outcome from the standpoint of effective labor organization. Prior to the Homestead strike of 1892, the steel industry was dominated by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers. There were two defects in this organization. It included only the skilled or semi-skilled and high- priced workers, and it had no effective discipline over its local unions. The situation was such that the manufacturer was handi- capped by arbitrary restrictk>ns which the national officers of the union deprecated but could not correct, while common labor did not benefit. For the sake of both the manufacturer and the laborer, the union, which had overreached itself and was headstrong in its power, had to be disciplined and was finally thrown out. Since that time the manufacturers have gone to as mad an extreme in bearing down on their employes as employes had previously gone in throttling manufacturers.
Contrast with this history that of the mine workers, a body of men of the same general intelligence as the steel workers, but whose national union is both able and willing to discipline its local unions. Leading coal operators assert that they can carry cm their business to better advantage with the union than without. If there were no union, they would be menaced by petty strikes whenever a few hotheads stirred up trouble, and at times when the operator might be tied up with contracts to deliver coal. But under the annual agreements with the union, operators are safe in making long contracts, and they can conduct their business on even closer calculation for labor than for materials whose prices fluctuate. Furthermore, this union, taking into its member- ship the entire body of workers, has been a greater benefit to the mass of unskilled labor than to the few who are highly skilled.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Accwnparison of the conditions in the numerous other indus- tries which we have considered does not show such striking con- trasts as does this comparison between mine workers and steel workers; and in a local study such as this, it would be going too far to generalize as to the forces which have pushed the workn^ in some trades steadily upward, giving them more pay and more leisure, while other trades have remained nearer the level o( 180
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TWO TYPES n workmen in Ihe mLisler industry of Ihe Pittsburgh District PMot by Hixt
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common labor. A recapitulation of working conditions and forms of organization in the different industries, however, does bring to light certain tendencies and developments which we believe to be characteristic not only of the Pittsburgh District, but of indus- trial conditions everywhere.
The combined membership of the various unions in the Pittsburgh District in 1907-08 was about 50,000.* Approxi- mately one out of every four or five workers belonged to a union, but the proportions varied greatly in the different industries.
The simplest form of organization is the local union. This is usually a branch of some national union composed of workers following the same craft. Thus Pittsburgh blacksmiths, whether working in wagon, carriage, or machine shops, or in foundries, all belong to the same local union of the International Brotherhood of Blacksmiths. When the membership is large and there are many local unions of the same trade the practice is to organize a district council. Thus the 26 local unions of the United Brother- hood of Carpenters and Joiners of America elected delegates to a Carpenters' District Council of Pittsburgh and Vicinity. It was the district councils which usually employed "business agents" to took after the interests of all the workers in the trade.
To unite all the unions of all crafts in the district there is a central body known as the Iron City Central Trades Council.f Each union is entitled to two delegates for the first 100 members or majority fraction. At the time of this investigation there
* This was exclusive of the 30,000 mine workers in unioni whose member* ship included men from nine counties in western Pennsylvania.
t An earlier central body has persisted, although its influence was practi- cally gone in 1907. The United Labor League was organized in 1^; as part ot the Km^ts of Labor movement, admitting to memberahip all local unions whether be- longing to the American Federation of Labor or the Knights of Labor, or un- affiliated with either. In tgot, unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor broke away from the United Labor League and organiied the Iron City Trades Council. This grew rapidly. The League was accused of admitting "scab" or bogus unions. The American Federation of Labor ordered all its locals to join the new organization, and the United Labor League was practically de- stroyed.
The constitution of the league had prohibited it from endorsing any political candidates. Not so the Iron City Council, and soon it was discovered that some bbor leaders were getting pay for these endorsements. Charges of blackmailing employers and misappropriating funds cropped out. In fact, developments have been very similar in character to those going forward in kindred municipal circles. Various "ihake-ups" have occurred in which oflicials have been thrown out of the organization and reform leaders have endeavored to restore confidence in the cen< tral body, among the rank and file of the unions.
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were 94 delegates to the council, representing 34 unions. The council bears the same relation to the local unions of the city as the American Federation of Labor does to the national unions of the country. It is a general legislative body concerning itself with matters of common interest and leaving matters affecting particular crafts in their own hands. In order to secure action by certain closely related trades, there are affiliated with thb city body trade sections, such as the Building Trades Council, the Metal Trades Section, and the Allied Printing Trades Council.
A further stage in united action is represented by the or- ganizations of the mine workers and the brewery workmen. These are "industrial" unions. Instead of organizing by crafts, all men in the mines, whatever their trade, join one union; and all employes in or about the breweries, whether brewers, teamsters, or engineers, belong to the union of brewery workmen.
Turning to the conditions in the various trades, wages are lowest in those occupations in which organization is most difficult, and in which the workers are compelled to make individual bar- gains with their employers. Year after year the wages of common laborers have fluctuated from }8.ooto$i2 per week; only here and there groups have gained better rates. Some strong union has given them a boost; or they have worked under the public eye where popular sentiment favored them.
In the transportation trades teamsters and rivermen had in 1907-08 for years been working for little above what common laborers earned; but the street railway employes' union had se- cured increases of from 20 to 30 per cent, and the union of brewery workmen had raised the wages of brewery wagon drivers 50 and 60 per cent above what other teamsters earned. [Both since in- creased.]
Retail clerks, as a class, gained little increase in their wages during the five years preceding 1908; but bakery workmen gained 20 per cent in the same period and more than $0 per cent from 1894 to 1908. It was not so much their union as a shortage in the supply of bakers that made their wages rise. For more than ten years printers and proofreaders in the job offices of Pittsburgh had been getting f t6 a week. In the newspaper composing rooms, however, there was constant advance through the strategic ad- vantage the typographical union had, not only because it was
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necessary for the papers to appear every day, but because of their desire to build up large circulation among the working people of the District. The brewing industry even more directly appealed to the same mass of consumers, and, while it requires but half the time to leam the brewers' trade that it does to learn that of a carpenter, bricklayer, or electrician, the brewery journeyman's union had been able to secure for him an annual income equal to that of the building trade mechanic.
Turning to the great industries subsidiary to the steel mills we see the workers with difficulty maintaining their scales of wages. Skilled machinists and molders are advanced as individ- uals, but metal trades workers as a class have gained little in wages in recent years, and increases have been secured not so much by reason of their unions as because specialization has left a lack of first class mechanics. Whenever a depression has come with many mechanics out of work, wages have been reduced. The mass of semi-skilled machine workers, drill press hands, milling machine operators, lathe hands, and others are unorganized and easily replaceable and they have had no regularly increasing scales of wages during a decade of rising cost of living. They are paid in accordance with the employers' estimate of each man's worth.
In the building trades, on the other hand, there have been, on the whole, strong unions and steady progress with increasing wages. At the time of our inquiry, indications of a movement similar to that in the metal trades were observable. Some unions were weakening, as specialization, new inventions, and organiza- tions of employers were removing the favorable circumstances which had built up strong building trades unions. The unusually extensive building operations in the past few years have more or less stayed or cloaked this trend, and concert of action among the trades themselves— where single unions failed — has strength- ened the hold of the entire group.*
* The crafts which lacked stienjph in themselves have more and more come to act through the Building Trades Council — quitting work in unison to redress the grievances of any one group, and bringing pressuie to bear on any one group which needlessly threw allied trades out ofemployment. The smaller employers, for their part, have turned for protection against sympathetic strikes and juridic- lional disputes to a builders' exchange or league, in the summer of 1913. a dis- pute over the unskilled labor used in erecting a new department store threatened to spread to all crafts and operations throughout the city, and to stave this oft, an agreement was entered into between the Building Trades Council and the
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In general, the same causes which have enabled the workers to force up wages have enabled them to reduce working hours. Common laborers have worked for many years from ten to twelve hours a day. Ten hours was in 1907 the prevailing day's work for most laborers in the city except where unionism, as in the case of the building laborers, or politics, as in the case of city employes. fixed the hours at eight. A strong organization gave the retail clerks a regular workday, first of eleven and later of ten hours. But after their organization disbanded, the state legislature had to step in to prevent excessive hours for young girls in some establishments.
Among the organized trade groups the movement toward an eight-hour day has been only in part successful. Some unions, though able to secure advances in wages, have not been able to shorten the workday. Thus, although railroad employes are unionized, freight crews have had little success in cutting down hours. In contrast, the strong union enabled street railway em- ployes to bring hours down 30 to 40 per cent from 1902 to 1907. In the metal trades the powerful unions of the 90's enabled me- chanics to establish a nine-hour day, but they have never since suc- ceeded in reducing hours below that figure. Ojwn book and job printing offices continue to work nine hours while the better organ- ized newspaper workers enjoy a seven and one-half and eight-hour day. Up to 1907 men in the breweries were working nine hours a day, and bottling house employes eight and a half hours. Since then the union has secured eight hours, not only for all bottling and brew-house men, but also for engineers and firemen who, out- side of breweries, work twelve hours per day. All the building trades have been working eight hours a day for more than ten years; and the more strongly organized trades now have a Satur- day half-holiday at least during the summer months.
PittriniTgh Builders' Exchange, prohibiting any union to go on strike, or any em- ployer to lock out men, while the dispute was being adjusted. This worked so well that without any formal compact between the two associations, committees from the two bodies settled perhaps one hundred clashes in the following year. Steam- fitters, lathers, painten. and hoisting engineers were at different times ordered back to work; and on the side of the employers, certain general contractors and planing mill operators, who had ordered lockouts, were ooli^ to put their men back. The painters' union was expelled from the Building Trades Council because of its refusal to keep the agreement; and the hoisting engineers split into two seclbns, one abiding by the decision: the other rejecting it, the latter making common cause with the bricklayers, plasterers and stone masons who are outside the coundl. This led (summer of 1914) to the breaking up of the arrangement. 184
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Practically all the building trades pay regularly time and one-half for all overtime and double time for all Sunday and holiday woric. For some classes of repair work on Sundays, boiler makers get three and four times the regular rate. Outside of the building trades only blacksmiths, molders, pattern makers, and printers are paki both time and one-half and double time.
Such a recapitulation makes it evident that the trades which have come to pay the highest wages in the Pittsburgh District and in which working hours have been most reduced are those which have had the strongest labor organizations. The increased earnings which the workers have secured have depended not so much on their skill or intelligence or on increased output, as on the strength of their organizations.
In the years under review, unorganized workers made little progress in getting better terms of labor. Employers when free of the power of unions were often willing enough to raise individual workmen, but they were not willing to keep on raising the minimum standard for all employes. When a union was destroyed lower wages and increased hours did not always follow, but invariably the progressive improvement in the conditions of employment which characterized the well organized trades was stopped.
Moreover, as our inquiry covered the period of depression, it brought out the fact that the influence of the unions in hard times in preventing or lessening wage-cuts is as noteworthy as their influence in securing advances in good times. Usually it required a union to hold the advances gained, if not actually to get them in the first place. Those workers who had secured advances through fortunate circumstances without strong or- ganizations, were quick to lose in the bad years what they had gained. But those who maintained their organizations held their ground, and subsequently were able to secure even higher rates.
There was unmistakable evidence also that labor organiza- tions exercise an influence far greater than their proportion of numbers. They set standards which employers of non-union labor found themselves obliged to approach in order to ward off organization among their own men. The results of a strike were found to be shared often by many outside the ranks who took part.
Here we have reached a point where a second generalization can be drawn from our city-wide study of employments. We have
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seen that in the years under review, taking the whole expanse of labor conditions, there was little progress, as far as the workers were concerned, in the vital matters of hours and wages, without organization on their part. In reviewing the careers of the or- ganizations, comparing one with another, it seems equally clear that it was not superior skill or intelligence that enabled some wage-eamers to build up strong unions while others failed, al- though skill and intelligence have helped. Usually it was some strategic advantage possessed by the working people. Thus we have pointed out how competition among the coal operators played into the hands of the mine workers and enabled them to build up a strong union, how the necessity of issuing a newspaper every morning gave the printers an advantage, and how brewery workmen built up a strong organization by union label and boycott.
The greatest advantage, however, was to have employers small and many and competition keen. This was the case in the building trades, and here were the strongest unions at the time of our inquiry. Building trade workers have other advantages. The location of their work is fixed and usually it has to be finished at a specified time. The employer can not have it done at another place, and he suffers if it is not done in the given time.
In general, the stronger the union the more nearly the industry in which it existed approached the local and compara- tively small-scale production of the building trades. Trade agreements between employers and workers by which both sides were given a voice in determining conditions of employment were found mainly where competing employers had to unite against a labor organization. Such agreements equalized labor cost and other competitive conditions for the employers. It was in no small part because a union scale was able to accomplish this that the workers were able to force recognition for their unions from employers and to compel collective dealing.
When, however, an industry passed under the control of a great national corporation or a trust, competition was eliminated or competitive conditions could be equalized by the dominant employer without the aid of a labor organization; and most of the other strategic advantages held by the workers were removed. The unions therefore went down before the growing aggregations of capital. Typical of the city trades in general is the fate of the
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unions of bakery workmen. In the small German and Jewish bakeshops they exercise an influence, but they can not maintain a foothold in the shops of the National Biscuit Company. Even in the building trades, the National Erectors' Association, led by the American Bridge Company, has been able to block the structural iron workers. The machinists' union was strong when employers ^vere represented by many small contract shops. Its power was broken by the appearance of large specialized shops manufacturing standard products that could be duplicated in branch factories outside of Pittsburgh. Iron and steel workers wielded a great power over their industry as long as there were many competing mills. Broken in the days of the great steel companies, their union was buried when the Steel Corporation absorbed plant after plant. And masons, carpenters, and steamfitters employed in the corporation mills long since suffered the fate of the blast furnace men and roll-hands.*
There were many signs in 1907-08 that the more intelligent workers in Pittsburgh were taking to heart in their own way the points made in the generalizations just given. They had seen wages increase, the working day shorten, and conditions of employment generally improve because of the unions' stronger bargaining power. They had come to believe that their welfare depended not upon skill, or output, or upon the good intentions of their employers, but upon their own organizations. They directed their main efforts, therefore, to building up their unions and to keeping them intact. Trade union policies were developed to these ends. The closed shop, the limit on apprentices, the use of the union label, the trade federations and their sympathetic strikes — were all intended to secure advantages which would strengthen the unions.
These had in turn become points of irritation to employers. Such policies the latter considered attempts to interfere with the business of the owners and not legitimate purposes of labor or- ganizations. They were the first points of attack in most disputes; and, as we have seen, when employers began to combine on a
* At its Toronto convention, the American Federation of Labor "declared war" on the United Statei Steel Corporation, called on the allied trades to put or^niicn in the district, and attempted to unionize the mills. These tactics were fnittleu. The unions claim to have enlisted 10.000 men, but the move was met by etpionage, "immediate discharge," and other forms of coercion, and the mem- bership dissipated.
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national scale and to eliminate competition, they usually found themselves able to overcome those disadvantages which had form- erly permitted the workers to build up strong organizations. The pendulum has swung the other way, and in more than one line — the great fabricating plants following the lead of the mills — the cor- porations have made their control absolute by hiring immigrants and stamping out organization wherever it showed among the men.
As a reaction against this manifest trend there are indica- tions in Pittsburgh of labor activity designed to contest with the great national corporations their control over the terms of work.
It is significant that in the steel district where the workers in the major industries have been defeated in the economic struggle, the socialist vote has greatly increased in the last few elections. Wage-Gamers instinctively assert a property right in their jobs. They want a voice in the management of industry for the same reason that in the range of history, wider and wider groups of the common people have wanted a voice in the government. They have come to believe that their lives and their welfare depend upon it; that they can not trust these to any class of employers, however benevolent. Their unions defeated, they turn to the government to help them control the conditions of employment.
But relief from this direction is slow in coming and new forms of self-protection in the economic field are taking head. Thus has come the spontaneous strike — the McKees Rocks strike of 1909, in which unskilled and semi-skilled men of seven races participated; and again, in 1914, the strike of over 10,000 men and women of all races and all grades of skill employed in the Westinghouse plants at East Pittsburgh, in which the mass strength of machine hands, themselves the product of open shop specializa- tion, was tested out on a larger scale.
It is significant that in these strikes a bid for control was made by the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization which proposes to substitute for the old craft organizations "industrial unions," to include all the employes of an industry, whatever their occupation or wherever they may be located. By such an oi^nization it is proposed to present a solid front to the great national corporations, while coupled with it will go political activity along class lines to gain control of the government.
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FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE CONDITIONS OF WORKING
women and children Florence Kelley
TH E factory inspector has seemed to most Pennsylvania em- ployers and to all working children a remote and inaccessible dignitary. In Pittsburgh, center of thousands of industrial establishments, there was during the year of the Survey no office <^ the state government charged with the supervision of these industries, and the number of inspectors was sadly insufficient. It was difficult to lind inspectors. Had the Pennsylvania statutes been as effectual as the best laws of any state and had the chief inspector been inspired by modem ideas of labor legislation, it would still be true that his staff of five officers assigned to the Pitts- burgh District could not by reason of insufficient numbers cover the ground.*
There was in the city no local collection of records, of cer- tificates of inspection, suits pending, work done by individual deputies, or other current material of interest to citizens whose work closely interlocks with that of the department of factory in- spection, such as local boards of health and education, and co-oper- ating voluntary agencies which have to do with working people — settlements, trade unions, consumers' leagues. Pittsburgh was entitled to a factory inspection headquarters and it was obvious that the work in the District could never be satisfactorily done until one was established.
The Gvil War may be said to have given Pittsburgh its great impetus as a producing center. For fifty years thereafter, during which it rapidly became an industrial district of the first
duded Braddock, Homeiiead. and McKcespon with their highly developed and unusually dangerous industries.
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magnitude, its scheme of government for industry remained abortive until with the legislature of 1913, new machinery for the public control and supervision of labor conditions was created for the whole of Pennsylvania.
Two methods have been resorted to in the United States by powerful employing interests of the type that brook no interfer- ence between them and their workers. One method, as in Massa- chusetts, where enforcement can be looked for from the high type of public administrator, is to block the passage oi protective laws. The other, as in Illinois, where the public has been quick to support labor legislation, is to cripple and undermine enforcement. In Pennsylvania, both methods singly and in unison have been employed with a success unapproached in any state in the Union. This article as published in 1909* dealt with enforcement in Pittsburgh from 1903 to 1908, — and as it, in fact, remained until 1913. During these ten years Pennsylvania afforded the low water mark of public efficiency in law enforcement — a danger signal warn- ing us against those forces which strive to sap whatever reser- voirs of public control may be contrived. For while my criticism was directed at the chief official (since removed) of the existing system (since changed), his inertia and maladministration were the chosen instruments of industrial interests which in other relations have found no difficulty in getting what they wanted at the state capital.
These interests did not have to be told that the central point in any system of factory inspection is the factory inspector. When this officer is able and devoted, in command of deputies se- cure like himself in their tenure of office under civil service laws, the development of effective legislation follows as surely as the vigorous enforcement of the existing statute. This generalization was especially applicable to Pennsylvania where the entire ad- ministrative system of the factory inspection department was embraced in one paragraph of an act of 1905 which placed the tory laws in the hands of a chief factory in- ixpert deputy factory inspectors receiving annum. To them was entrusted the task ns upon working hours, and safeguarding
-aciory Inspection in Pittsburgh. Cbariliii mid Tbt (March 6, 1909).
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machinery, all their functions being described in the vaguest and most general language. What was ordered in a given case de- pended in the first instance upon the point of view of the particular inspectors serving, like their chief, without protection of a civil service law.
These deputies were in 1907-08 and always had been, purely political appointees. Theirs were not even "labor" appointments. Faithful inspec- tors who insisted that the law should be obeyed, might be removed at will in the interests of powerful employers. Such insecurity places a premium upon making friends with powerful interests throughout the state, winking at violations of law, avoiding prosecution, publicity, and anything that may provoke hostility either to the department or to the individual deputy. Voting fathers who wish to have their children go early to work, and employers who desire to be let alone, count heavily against offi- cials who may desire to be faithful in the perfonnance of an unpopular task. Women and children, however subject to the factory law, do not count in behalf of such officials. Lacking the protection of a civil service law, the state factory inspectors in Pennsylvania were therefore at a serious disadvantage compared with their colleagues in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
To countervail this pressure after appointment as well as to obtain appointment in the first place, inspectors had need of influential connec- tions. Thus in 1907 one deputy inspector assigned to the Pittsburgh District was a cousin of a leading politician; another was a sister-in-law of an ex-governor of Pennsylvania; one found his backing among the German voters; a second, among the Irish.*
THE REPORT TO THE PUBLIC
The effectiveness of a department may be justly inferred
from the degree of enlightening publicity which it achieves. Under
the conditions described above, therefore, a statesmanlike chief
might seek strength in the goodwill of the public, informing it of
* The power at incompetent subordinates under this system of appcHntment it ihown in the following naive ttatement made by Chief Delaney in his report for the year ending December 31, igoS, reprding an inspector who was removed in Lmenie County: " During the five years his reports were compiled by me, he had machinery ([uarded in only eleven establishments as a^inst seventeen establish- ments in which machinery was guarded by hii successor in twelve months from the time of his appointment, an improved system of inspection that has materially lessened thenumber of accidents in that county." It was a scourge for the workers and a disgrace to Pennsylvania that under the system of appointment by political influence, an inspector of such ascertained and culpable disqualifications shouhl have held office five yean!
191
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
his work, interpreting the laws, appealing to the courts and if these failed him, appealing from the courts to public opinion. To every citizen interested in the problem of labor, his official report is of profound interest, for it is the revelation of the character and methods of the officer entrusted by the state with the important duty of safeguarding the life, limbs, health, and intelligence of future wage^amers.
In a series of lo reports J. C. Delaney, the state factory in- spertor of Pennsylvania from 1903 to 1913, exhibited the work ■ of the department of factory inspection during a period of great industrial activity.
Official reports are in themselves tests of efficiency. If they are full and clear, promptly published and distributed, the work of the department is self-evidently efficient. If, however, they are meager or muddled, the public is forced to infer that they are a faithful interpretation of the work of the department.
These reports of the department of factory inspection of the state of Pennsylvania were meager and muddled. This depart- ment cost the state of Pennsylvania many tens of thousands (^ dollars every year. Yet in Pennsylvania, alone among the states, five succeeding reports of the factory inspection department, 1903 to 1907 inclusive, had with one exception shrunk from year to year.* Such was the contempt of its chief officer for the people whose servant he was, that each was briefer and less valuable than the preceding.
The report for 1907 was the most recent one available at the time the findings of the Pittsburgh Survey were published, and it was used to illustrate the points made. As an official document issued midway of the ten years of the Delaney administration, it may well stand as an exhibit of the caliber thereof. It contains no index and no table of contents for its 57 pages, nor is the text of the labor law to be found in it. It is interesting chiefly for its omissions.
'The follomng liit shows the number of pages in the reports for the years from tgoi to 1013 inclunve:
For 1903, 190 pages For 1908, 76 pages
For 1904, 78 pages For 1909, s8 pages
For 190;, $8 pages For 1910, 68 pagei
For 1906, 64 pages For 191 1, 66 pages
For 1907, ;7 pages For 191a, 48 pages
192
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A thoroughly competent report must answer fully and clearly at least the following questions:
1. How many persons were found at woTk? 3. How many men were found at workF
3. How many women were found at work?
4. How many boys and how many girls?
5. In what specific industries and in what processes employed?
6. At what ages? 7. In what localities?
8- Between what hours? 9. How many at night? 10. If illegally, how many? 11. In what fonn of illegality?
13. How many prosecutions were instituted? ■ 3. How many were successful?
14. Who were punished for the illegalities?
15. What was the punishment?
(a) Fines? If so, what amount?
(b) Imprisonment? If so, to what extent?
16. What are the details of the unsuccessful suits?
17. What accidents occurred?
(a) How many of them fatal? (b) How many befeli chil- dren? (c) Proportion of accidents to children to accidents to adults? (d) Relation of accidents to number of hours since beginning work?
18. In what (a) industries were these accidents? (b) processes
were these accidents?
Counting the subdivisions, here are 29 questions. The report gives some answer to 1 1 of these; in regard to the remain- ing 18 we are left in the dark. It shows the employment through- out the state by counties, but nothing more definite than that. Except Philadelphia, which is identical with Philadelphia County, not a city is given separately. No statistics show the number of* w(xnen or children at work in each of the important industries — much less the number engaged in each process. Not a figure ap- pears as to employment at night or as to hours of work. A tally, it is true, is given as to the number of children found illegally at
* The number of women and children at work (for the state as a whole) dassitied according to the same trade groupings as the table for Allegheny Couniy on p. 194 was included in Ihe 1903 report, not given in 1904 or 190J, given in 1906, supplanted by percentages in 1907, given in 1908, 1909, 1910, loti and 191a. The report for 1908, issued in May, 1909. following the original publication of this review, gave supplemenlaiy tables for textile branches and sixteen selected indus- tries theretofore lumped under "miscellaneous." Omitted in 1909, 1910 and 1911 (certain industries given in the text in 1911) and given for textiles and twelve mploying trades in 1911.
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WACE-EARNiNC PITTSBURGH
work who were dismissed, and the number of factory inspection orders complied with; but not a word as to prosecutions; not a figure to show in what industries the accidents which are reported occurred, or whether the injured were men, women, or children.
There is in the report much unprofitable muddling with per- centages. The people of this country can do their own examples in percentage. What they ask of inspection departments is a full and clear statement of women and children found at work in clearly specified industries.
Turning to the Pittsburgh District, the following table is all that is given specifically as to the employment of women or children in Allegheny County in 1907:
|
MaUi |
FemOts |
Maltib,- tvetni4<md 16 ytmi |
FemaUibt- |
||
|
Iron and products . Leather and products . Lumber and products . Mercantile industries . MtKcllaneous manufactures Textiles, mills, and clothing Bakeshops Workshops . . . |
4.050 a,4oa "47 |
'.715 7 24S 11,051 'Z 7' |
1.688 170 ::^ 37 94 3 |
i'3 |
|
|
Total .... |
180,910 |
»6,ii8 |
4.875 |
..988' |
This table throws no light on the employment of women in the vast industries related to electricity or to any metal trade except iron. Glass manufacture does not appear nor does any form of food production, save only bakeshops. Yet the Pittsburgh Survey found over Soo women in the packing and other departments of the glass factories of the city, and the metal trades calling for 3.000 women in increasing varieties of work.f
'This total is 100 out of the way. All the figures are, however, exact copies of those in the report.
t Butler. Elizabeth Beardsley: Women and the Trades. 194
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The numbers of women and girls in foundries, and in nut and bolt works, toiling in soot and grime, were well known to be growing steadily. One particularly glaring omission is that of the laundresses, of whom in 1900 the United States Census reported t,oo6 in Pittsburgh alone, not including Allegheny City. In 1908, Miss Butler found more than twice that num- ber in the Greater City, for the industry had grown by leaps and bounds during the intervening years. Presumably all these branches presented themselves to the mind of the state factory inspector as "miscellaneous manufactures" employing together about 11,000 women.
Equally meager and muddled are the data concerning the nature of the industries in which the 4,875 boys and 1,988 girls in Allegheny County from fourteen to sixteen years of age were em- ployed. These 6,863 children comprised more than one-seventh of the working children of the state.
In the itemized list, as shown, glass manufacture does not appear." This industry, in which there is greater popular inter- est than in any other manufacturing industry employing children in Pennsylvania, is lumped with " miscellaneous manufactures." Under this comprehensive title 1,768 boys and 832 girls, 2,600 children, appear to have been found at work between their four- teenth and sixteenth birthdays. It would seem well worth while to itemize somewhat specifically the occupation of so large a num- ber of children, more than one-third of the whole. The glass in- dustry is sufficiently powerful to obtain year after year exemption from the requirement that children shall not work at night. Boys on reaching their fourteenth birthday were in 1907 permitted to work at night in making glass "if the usual process of manufacture . . . is of a kind that customarily necessitates a continuous day and night employment." The exemption still holds in 1914. Some glass worits it is true never employ children at night. In others, no child can find work who fails to be on hand for the night shifts which occur in alternate working weeks. In still others, while night labor is not compulsory, boys are preferred who report for it regularly with the men with whom they work.f
It would be of vital interest to citizens of Pennsylvania, —
* The 1903 report gave ttatiitics by counties and by tradei in detail, shewing 400 boy* and 76 girls from thirteen to sixteen yein of age employed in the glass industry in Alle^eny County. Thereafter these comprehensive analyses were
tSee Butler, Elizabeth Beardsley: Sharpsburg: A Typical Waste of Child- hood. P. aj9 of this volume.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
this exemption of the glass industry having been vainly assailed by the friends of children, during the legislative sessions of 1909, 1911, and 1913, — to know authoritatively how many boys and girls in Allegheny County, an important center of the industry, were employed in glass works, and how many of these worked at ntght. These things can not be learned authoritatively by unofficial in- vestigators. Why, then, were they not for these crucial years a part of the reports of the officials who had the power and duty to make continuous investigations P
Meager and unintelligent though these annual reports are, they nevertheless, more urgently than those of any other state factory inspector, demanded the scrutiny of the public. For they recorded a larger number of children found at work than were recorded for any other state.
TABLE 2. — CHILDREN AT WORK IN PENNSYLVANIA (Drawfi rrom the Reports of the State Factory liupector, igoj-ia]
|
Yt«T |
Bo,, |
Grfj |
Ta^a |
|
"90s 1904 . - . \^ : : : : : ;|S : : : ■. : '909 1910 '9"i '9«a |
16.494 31,117 a4.7« •5.99I |
■S.448 J0,03J i7.«8 |
31.943 41.140 48.519- 4<^)7' 4a.J53 33. "9 33.489 34.)i3 34.47* 37.3*^ |
• Includes pUcei of employmeoi other than industrial aublblimeiib.
The Pittsburgh District itself is primarily given over to men's industries. The significant point of the table published for Allegheny County in 1907 is the immense preponderance of men over sixteen years of age (176,(^5) as compared with women (24,1)0) and children (6.86)). Heie, if anywhere, had states- manship ever had anything to do with factory inspection for the Pittsburg District, effort shoukl have been directed toward safeguarding adult males in those onployments which involve special stress and hazard and make extraordinary demands upon straigth and life. Th«c should have been adequate reporting
.96
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FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH
and registration of the nature, occurrence, and preventability of accidents. There should have been studies, in a local office of factory inspection, of the difficult conditions peculiar to Pitts- burgh industries and of the experience of other communities and other nations which might throw light upon them. Many hun- dreds of lives would have been saved and many thousands of minor accidents prevented, if, since the beginning of factory inspection in Pennsylvania in 1889, experts from the inspectors' office had promptly visited the scene of every important accident to study it for the purpose of preventing a recurrence and forestalling sim- ilar injuries elsewhere. But statesmanship never in all these years had anything to do with factory inspection in Pennsylvania, and the consequences thereof were written large in the tabulations of death and injury made by Miss Eastman for the Pittsburgh Survey.*
It is impossible for the reader of the report under consideration to guess how many of the 39; fatal work-accidents (mentioned as reported to the factory inspector in 1907)1 occurred in the Pittsburgh District. As a tally for the entire state this is ridiculous. In the twelve months studied by the Survey, the coroner's records of Allegheny County alone showed 360 fatalities from work-accidents in and around industrial estab- lishments. Mining, railroading, teaming, and so forth, brou^t the aggregate for the one county up to $36.
In reporting industrial accidents, all American states have been remiss, when compared with European countries where accurate records are demanded. Minnesota in 1909 adopted the first effective state-wide system of accident reporting. But in New York, in preparation for the workmen's c(»npensation act of 1910. the labor department had for several years done yeoman service by publishing in detail the facts as to acci- dents in the light of foreign experience and legislation.
The chapters on accidents in the series of five Pennsylvania
reports discussed end in 1907 with the characteristic statement that:
"Ninety per cent of the total and serious accidents occur in or
about rolling mills and blast furnaces. The overhead cranes and hoisting
chains, the hasty and necessary (sic) unskilful piling up of steel rails,
* Eastman, Crystal: Work-Accidents and the Law.
t "^he chief factory inspector'i report for 1907 states that of the agj fatal acddenU reponed to him, only w fell within the jurisdiction of his department, and titat of the a.j&t non-fatal accidents reponed only 689 fell within his jurisdiction.
For tabulation of accidents recorded 1903-11, see Appendix IX, p. 44).
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
billets, etc., the spilling of mcdten metal from conveyors, buggies, the scurry of locomotives and cars through the yards adjacent to the inner works of the mills are death dealing agencies at all times.* As the law for safegHarding macbitury can not be applied to prevent accideiUt of Ibeabaof and foregoing nature, and as it is practically impossible to base the causes ef such accidents properly itwestigated. the necessity for a litUe more brotherly loce and for tbt elimination f^ much of the hurry and scurry in our iron mUtt is the more appareni."\
INSPECTION AND PREVENTION
Industries may be injurious by reason of the nature 6i the machinery or of the material used (lead, sulphur, acid) or because of dust produced in the process (steel, brass, cork) or of strain due to heat, cold, glare, darkness, or speed. Finally, an industry not intrinsically injurious may become so in a high degree by sheer lengthening of working hours, particularly when the workers are required to stand.
The wording of the Pennsylvania statute was so vague and broad that under its provisions intelligent and zealous inspectors might greatly have reduced all forms of danger except those arising from cold, glare, darkness, and speed. Visits to Pittsburgh factories in 1907 and 1908 confirmed the impression gained from the of- ficial reports that there was no comprehensive attempt to do this.
The factory inspector stated that $3 orders issued to Allegheny County employers to guard machinery were complied with in 1907. The safety inspector of one Pittsburgh company made 3,000 recommendations in seven months of the same year.t During the twelve months studied by the Pittsburgh Survey, our investigators found that 1 1 men were caught in belts and killed, one was struck and killed by the belt of a fly-wheel, one killed by a bursting grindstone, although the factory law specifically demanded that this class of machinery should be properly guarded. These figures took no account of the many serious injuries (short of death) due to non-enforcement of the same section of the statute. Where a machine was properly guarded the circumstance seemed to be due to a previous accident in the same plant.
In a cork factory which I visited with a deputy inspector, I saw scores of insufficiently guarded saws of a highly dangerous type. The
* Of $]6 wage-earaers killed in work-accidents in the year covered by the Pittsburgh Survey — July i, 1906, to June 30, 1907 — 19s, only jj per cent, were employed in the manufacture of steei.
fThe itahcs are Ihe writer's. % Eastman, op. dr., p. ill.
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FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH
deputy inspector had no eyes for these sinister objects, but confined his observation to children and their certificates. We passed a boy working at an insuflicientiy guarded saw. His hand was bandaged after having been hurt at that same saw. When I called attention to it, the deputy said that there was a specialist on the staff who devoted himself to ma- chinery and safeguards. Persistent inquiry covering a month failed to identify the specialist. He appears never to have existed.*
It is necessary to know in which industries children ate exposed to special danger in order that they may be forbidden to work in those industries. An increasing number of states pro- hibit outright the employment of children in a lengthening list of ^ occupations; and no other basis for framing such a list, attainable in this country at this time, compares in value with an accurate, minute, specific account of injuries to children in industry, kept from year to year by the state factory inspectors. The reports of the Pennsylvania state factory inspector shed no light upon this highly important subject, although Miss Eastman's cwnprehensive study revealed the occurrence in a single year in the Pittsburgh region of several fatal accidents of which the victims were boys:
A fourteen-year-old assistant chemist who was run over in the yards of the steel mill.
A thirteen-year-old boy killed on a freight elevator.
A fifteen-year-old pull-up killed by a blow from a ladle arm while sleeping in a wheelbarrow (he was working on a thirteen-hour shift).
A fourteen-year-old brewery boy caught in a pulley belt.
A thirteen-year-old brick yard boy who slipped and fell into a tempering machine.
In the United States — as shown particulaHy in Pennsylvania — there has been greater need than in other industrial countries for effective factory inspection, because the courts deprived em- ployers of the usual business incentives to caution and efficiency in the saving of life.f Under the protection of the fellow-servant
* In 1908, the United Sutes Steel Corporation appointed a central safety cominittee to promote a concerted campaign against accidents in its constituent companies, and greal strides in improvements have been made in its mills as a re- sult. (See Porter, H. F. J., op. cit. P. 34; of this volume.) But this revolutionary thange was not due to the factory inspection department of Pennsylvania, nor did the latter attempt seriously to make the standards set by these and other progres- sive employee general. In igioadepuiy state inspector complained to a company safety expert that he lacked the power which the other possessed to get action jpon his recommendations!
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
and assumption of risk decisions, and casualty insurance, employ- ers became so largely absolved from paying damages that un- paralleled indifference to the safety of employes developed * The waste of life, limb, health, and nervous energy of workingmen in the prime of life was so conspicuous in factory work in Pittsburgh in [907-08 that for one with technical, professional acquaintance with the processes of industry, the abiding impression following visits to Pittsburgh was one of horror and depression.
Relatively little of this waste was inevitable. Shafting can be sheathed, saws can be guarded, grinding wheels can be hooded and their dust exhausted, injury arising from excessive heat can be mitigated by piping air near the head of the individual worker, danger spots can be indicated for illiterate foreign employes by the use of red lights by night, such as railway usage has made a common language throughout civilization, and vermilion paint by day. One of the surest incentives to such protection is to make injuries "come higher" to the employer. Pennsylvania remains in 1914 the last of the great industrial states without a workmen's compensation system.f
There was nothing to indicate that the improvements in- stalled to effect good atmospheric conditions in work places in Allegheny County were due to the requirements of the factory inspection department.
Thus in the works of a sanitary appliance company the writer saw 18 wheds in one room so hooded as to exhaust brass, steel, and nickel filings. The metal dust saved by these devices paid the interest on the money invested in the exhaust system. In other parts of the building, however, where a single wheel was iscJated and the saving in metal dust would presumably not pay interest on the investment, the law was
* For relief policiej of certain companies in 1907-08 see Eastman, op. dt., p. 1$); for advances since, see Appendix VI, Eastnun. See also Porter, op. cit., p. 36); and Appendices I, XVII, and XX, this volume.
t At its session of 191 1, the Pennsylvania le^ilature killed in committee a compensation bill, but appointed a commission to investi^te the subject. The legislature of 191) again failed to pass a law. It is to be said for Captain Ddaney that beginning in 190; he urged the reform of the employers' liability law, and in 191: argued at length for the New Jersey compensation system. In the report for 1907 he said: "Were the great body of employes engaged in dangerous or hazaraous work a race of criminal serfs, the non-action of legislative bodies and the almost brutal but necessary frankness of judicial decisions directed against the appeal of the injured for legal redress, could not have been surpassed."
200
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FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH
not enforced. The exhaust system was not used, and workers suffered.
The appointments of the Reymer Company's candy factory in Pittsburgh were better than the law required. In one room in which particularly expensive chocolates were dipped, fresh air was artificially supplied, avowedly, however, for the good of the chocolates. It was pumped through flowing water. A similar provision will undoubtedly be required for the health of employes in the factories of all cities in which, as in Pittsburgh and Chicago, the atmosphere may be said to be "normally foul." This company set a standard which should be incorporated in law.
In the Heinz bottle works in Sharpsburg, where air had to be pumped into each machine for blowing bottles, additional air was so tubed as to form a fresh current over the head of each worker. This was a life- saving, health prolonging boon, voluntary in its inception, but sure to be* come a statutory requirement.* Similarly, fans and tubes have been installed next their "hot jobs" by the National Tube Company.
How remote the requiring of any such provision was from the plans of the existing department of factory inspection may be seen from the following:
I found Jennie O'Hara, living in Wood's Run, Allegheny, working in a stogy factory. Jennie, who was sixteen years of age, had begun to work before her thirteenth birthday, even at that time the lowest legal limit. She had never been employed elsewhere. She was conspicuously sallow and nervous. Her day was from 7 a. m. to 6 p. m., with a scant half hour for luncheon. During the Christmas rush she worked over- time until 8 p. m. three days in the week, for several consecutive weeks. Said Jennie: "Somegirlshavetostopin three months, just when they are learning. The stuff makes 'em sick. The girls often faint. In the win- ter when the windows are shut it's bad when you go in. It smells so bad. But then you get used to it."
There appeared to be no blowers or fans in this stogy factory, which employs girls varying in number from 100 to i;o, and in the winter the windows are said to have been kept shut regularly. Yet neither the Allegheny health oi!)cials nor the state factory inspectors interfered even by way of criticism in their ofTicial reports. On still, muggy, autumn days the smell of tobacco from the factory was observable in passing along the sidewalk, and the giris' clothes and hair became so saturated with the smell that when they had a meeting on the ground floor of a building, the rooms upstairs were filled with the odor.
Interesting sidelights upon the remoter effects of this complicated
*See Porter, H. F. J., op. cit. Pp. aa^ and 149 of this volume. A de- tailed act passed in 1913 calls for blowers orsimilar apparatus in all grinding rooms.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
law-breaking came from the almoner of the district in which this factory stands. The almoner's observations were that the tobacco dust is ex- cessively irritating to the nose, throat, and lungs; that girls become ac- customed to this irritation as they do to nicotine poison and continue to work while unconsciously developing incipient tuberculosis; that they work up to the time of leaving the factory to be married, after which they rapidly develop tuberculosis and become recipients of benefits from tbe simoner. Because they are not disabled while on the payroll, and some- times do not develop the symptoms of advanced tuberculosis until after the birth of the first child, the factory does not get the discredit due to it as a center for production and dissemination of infection. A physician who practiced in the neighborhood described being called to the homes of a number of the girls who had suffered acute attacks of "tobacco-heart." None had died during an attack but their vitality was being progressively diminished- Young girls like those described are benefited by the Wisconsin statute which forbids children to work in the manufacturing of tobacco before their sixteenth birthday.* The Ohio law, too, which restricts the work in all trades of girls below the age of eighteen years to eight hours in one day and forty-eight hours in one week, and sets 7 p- m. as their closing hour, is an even greater boon to girls in the tobacco trade than to those in most industries.
One of the most important of the factory inspectors' duties is to enforce the laws reducing the hours of labor for women and chil- dren. Overtime and night work, where practiced, add to the seriousness of the drains which establishments like this tobacco factory make upon physical vitality. The reports of the depart- ment, however, showed no record of night inspections made in Allegheny County.
Yet without such inspections, of what avail was the provision that women and children shall not work more than twelve hours in twenty- four, and that a boy between the ages of fourteen and sixteen years who had worked by day should not work after 9 p. m? Once a fortnight the water boys in the steel mills were working twenty-four consecutive hours and every day they worked twelve hours. Both working periods were
* At the instance of Chief Factory Inspector Delaney an amendment was enacted in Pennsylvania in 1909 providing that no minon under sixteen years might be employed in or about establishments for the manufacture or stripping of tobacco "unless it it proved to tbt iatUfaction of tbe Departmait that the datt- gfr to tbt bealtb of tbe child bat been remaned." Such provisions open wide the doon for blackmail and defeat the intent of the law. 202
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FACTORY INSPECTION IN PITTSBURGH
ill^al, but it would have required inspections after the close of the ordinary hours of a factory inspector's day to reveal this illegality. Moreover, when the glass blowers go home at midnight, or at i a. m., the boys who work with them must also go out into the early morning, no matter what the winter weather or what the heat of the furnace. With the increasing use of glass-blowing machines, the continuous tank system has replaced the smaller pot furnaces, and work at night has become the rule more than ever for men and boys alike. It was matter of common knowledge in Allegheny County in 1907-08 that boys who worked with men thus kept the same hours as men. Yet, as we have seen, the factory inspector of Pennsylvania did not oppose the exception which the glass manufacturers have kept in the body of the law throughout all these years and which has made this practice legal for glass-house boys between fourteen and sixteen years of age.
Under the constitution of the United States, as interpreted by the supreme court, even the working hours of adult men can be restricted by statute when these hours can be shown to impair the health. Thus the daily hours of labor of men in mines and smelters are in many states restricted to eight. But in Pennsylvania there was and is no restriction whatever for men, and their regular working day may be twelve or twenty-four hours without viola- tion of any statute.
For women the labor law was until 1913 unique in authoriz- ing a regular working day of twelve hours in a week ostensibly limited to sixty hours. The restriction was illusory. It was not enforceable and it was not meant to be enforced.
For example, in a prosperous drug store in Pittsburgh, women clerks were found working from 8 a. m. to 10 p. m. one day out of every week, with a half-hour each for luncheon and supper, a total of thirteen hours. The legal daily maximum, as has been said, was twelve hours. In a candy store very young girls were seen at work after 11 p. m. Their regular working time was from 11 a. m. to 1 1 : 30 p. m. and they reached home at midnight and after. They worked sixty-nine hours plus per week. In another candy store, from 8 a. m. to 6 p. m. was the nominal regular period. In reality, on three days out of the week a girl worked from 8 a. m. to 1 1 p. m. Each of these long days was followed by a so-called " short day," when she worked from 12 noon to 11 p. m. with half an hour for supper, a total of ten and a half hours in twenty-four hours. 203
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Although these were all flagrant violations of the law, con- viction was impossible, because the defense could be made that on any particular day selected by the inspector for making a charge of violation, a rest period had been allowed. Or the inspector would have had to be present to prove that the g^ris found working at night were really the same girls who had worked throughout the time alleged. If, however, an inspector attempted to look into a factory often enough in a day to prove the identity of a girl who worked throughout the thirteen hours, that girl was sent home for that day. Such a sham law* was demoralizing to every official charged with its enforcement.!
Incident to the long hours to which young ^rls were il- legally subjectedt was cruelly prolonged daily standing.
This injury is no longer open to discussion; it is universally ad- mitted. In several factories girls just fourteen years old — if indeed they were really so old as that — rt^larly stood ten hours a day, and often longer on five days a week, under the pretense of making a shmt day on Saturday. Even «iiere the children's work was as simple as wrapping caramels or packing crackers, the long hours combined with enforced standing made a hannless process highly injurious.
"Suitable seats" were required for women workers by the Pennsyl- vania law. But in no case during any of the visits that I paid with a deputy inspector did the inspector in my presence make an inquiry about seats. The mercantile houses were the greatest offenders. One Pitts- burg store in 1907 supplied four seats to every counter. In contrast, the provision for seats on the first floors of three equally wellknown Pitts- burgh stores, each employing several hundred giris, was as follows: {
(i) 16 seats to 400 girls, or 1 seat to 35 girls, (3) 19 seats to 500 giris, or t scat to 36 giris, (3) 33 seats to 600 giris, «- 1 seat to 19 girls.
'Compare this Pennsylvania law with the New York child labor statute which, as experience showi, can be enforced. A child may not work before 8 a. m. or after j p. m., and miul have a full hour free al noon. These provisioiis cannot be evadol, except thai law-breaking employers can nibble a few minutes at the beginning and end of the noon hour.
t For statements of working prls as 10 hours actually worked in 191), sec Appendix XIX, p. 493.
t For statements as to overtime in Pittsburah empbyments, see Butler, Eli2abeth Beards] ey; Women and the Trades, pp-)Si n. Friday, to dte an extreme example, she found to be a fifteen-hour day in most Pittsburgh laundiies, and cases were found where the work began at 7 a, m. and lasted throui^ut the night (p. j^a). ( Butler.op.cil., pp. joo-joi. Thirteen stores met the Consumer's League requirements in 1914. including the standard of one seat for eveiy three women. 204
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ENFORCEMENT AND PROSECUTION IN PITTSBURGH Record keeping and inspections alone do not enforce factory laws. They may secure compliance in some instances; but unless violations are prosecuted, the laws become dead letters in those establishments in which enforcement is most needed. On this subject the state factory inspector gave the following data for Allegheny County for 1907 under his "exhibit by grand divisions of industries of industrial establishments inspected":
Children dismissed Compliance with orders issued to
For want of affidavits, 98 Guard machinery, $3
For illiteracy, o Guard elevator, 8
For being under age, 1 1 Erect fire-escapes, 3
Provide water-closets, 3
Provide dressing rooms, o
For better sanitation, 33
The cases of neglect brought out by Mr. Porter's subsequent investigations of fire-escapes, dressing rooms, and toilets;* the 14 deaths due to elevator accidents, tabulated by Miss Eastman; and the facts already cited in this paper as to non-enforcement (rf safety laws, all indicate the trivial value to the state and its workers of orders issued by the department of factory inspection.
Conspicuous is the absence of a heading " Prosecutions and CcHivictions" in the "exhibit by grand divisions of industries of industrial establishments inspected."! Current publication of the exact details of all prosecutions begun for violation of labor laws has a twofold value. It is the best detenent, for employers dislike to have the community know that they are accused of break- ing the law. Full publicity in this respect is also the best assur- ance of the integrity of the inspection staff. Every prosecution of an employer is incidentally a trial of the inspection force. For when inspectors must constantly appear as witnesses in court and
* Porter, H. F. J., op. cii. P. 117 of this volume.
fThe report for 1908 (issued May ), 1909) slated that there were three proseculKms in 1907 that resulted in penalties imposed — one for employing a child illegally, and two for maintaining insanitary bakeshopsi $aj penally col- lected in each case. For the ten-year period the reports give the following num- ben (rf prosecutions brought: 190) (number not given); 1904,66: 1905,77; 1906, 100; 1907 (number not given); 1906, )3; 1909 (number not given); 1910,16; 1911, 11; 1911, as.
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endure cross-examination by able lawyers, such as employers com- monly retain, this in itself is a permanent stimulus to careful, ac- curate work and a safeguard against temptation to blackmail or to accept bribes. Where, however, mystery enshrouds the procedure of a department in relation to violations of the labor law, an in- quiring public is liable to make sinister inferences. We asked these questions in our published review of the service:
Why is there no record of prosecutions in the report of the factory inspectors of Pennsylvania in 1907?
Were there no prosecutionsP Or was none of them successful?
Are the courts so clogged that suits are brought with difficulty?
If so, why had not the department made known this extenuating circumstance?*
What, if any, is the relation between the great number of working children in Pennsylvania and this secrecy maintained by the department as to the identity of the violators of the law?
If malefactors areprotected, if neither publicity nor penalty fcdiowed law-breaking, why should any one respect an inconvenient restriction ?
How far are the goieral distrust and suspicion which attach to the dqMUtment of factory inspection in Pennsylvania due to this secrecy?
These questions were never satisfactorily answered.f
This concealment of violations of the factory laws is fortu- nately unique in the practice oi state departments of factory in- spection. Where bona fide enforcement of the laws is achieved. the particulars are published, and publicity helps to deter other potential (lenders. The omission of information about prosecu- tions was perhaps the most self-condemnatory item in the whole disgraceful report of the Pennsylvania state department <^ fac- tory inspection for 1907.
* With these questions in mind. Ibe assistant director of the Httsbargh Survey on April 33, 1908. wrote lo the chief factofy inspector for infonnadon as to the number of prDSecutions and the amount cdlected in fines. Mr. Debney replied as follows: "The report of this department for 1907 coven the year's work. It was made to the governor, and should he desire a supplement report, one will be prepared. We cannot discuss the contents or omissions of the published report with the nuny persons who seek to open correspoodence thcreoa with vs."
t For a letter puUislwd as a reply to Mrs. Kdlcy's review, see Appendix X, p. 444. The foUowing was oBtnd in eiplanatioa in a subseqaent state factory inspectors report:
"The laws prior to those recently enacted, so far as they apply to the em- ptoymoii of children, are so mttnia^ess in part and so oncoostitutMOBl in part as to have induced Mr. Caisoo, then attorney geaetal, to advise me in wiitisg to withhold further prosecution."
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LAWS. LOCAL AGENCIES. AND LAX ENFORCEMENT In the enforcement of a factory law there are at least three elements: the law itself, as interpreted by the courts; the en- forcing authority representing the state; and, finally, and far more important than at first appears, local authorities whose work in- terlocks with that of state officers. How indispensable are all three elements is illustrated by the insufficient protection which has been afforded the working children of the Pittsburgh District. In the matter of child labor and compulsory education laws Pennsylvania has always been a laggard. The fourteen-year age limit was adopted in New York in 1887. in Massachusetts in 1894, in Pennsylvania not until 190; for factories and stores, and not until 1909 for soft coal mines. Compulsory education laws were passed in Massachusetts in 1852, in New York in 1874, but the first compulsory education bill in Pennsylvania was passed in 189;. Even then the governor who signed that bill — after having vetoed a similar bill two years before — stated in his memorandum of approval that he doubted its wisdom because it violated the private rights of citizens!
At the time of the Pittsburgh Survey the child labor law of 190$ was in force, but in its most important feature, the issuance of certificates, that law in a test case had been held unconstitu- tional on a technicality, and a previous law, passed in 1901, had been declared by the attorney general to have been revived. Thou^ the fourteen-year age limit was set up for work in fac- tories and stores in 1905 this protection was rendered illusory by the provision that parents' affidavits were the sole proof of age needed.* Moreover, though children were required to be able to read and write the English language intelligently before beginning to work, the test in this important matter was to be given by those who issued the affidavits; namely, notaries public, aldermen, and similar minor magistrates. Naturally the law broke down at both these points. The affidavit, whether true or false, protected the employer absolutely, and an inspector's work was exceedingly difficult, for on him was placed the burden of proof to show that
• The following illuminating figure! were gathered by the federal govern- ment's agents in two boroughs in easiern Pennsylvania — Hazelton and Plymouth. (Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States, 207
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an affidavit was false. The employment of an illiterate child, though illegal, was very common, many if not most of the " squires" or notaries either giving the children no test whatever or requiring only that they sign their names. For part of the year 1907, the situation was made still more chaotic by the arbitrary decision of the chief factory inspector that no reading and writing test was re- quired by the law.* In this matter he was overruled by the at- torney genera], but affidavit blanks minus the reading and writing requirement had been distributed and the evil could not be undone. Until 1909 — long after the other great industrial states had limited the working day of children under the age of sixteen years to ten or eight hours — Pennsylvania permitted a twelve-hour working day for such children.
The child labor law being a state law, and the factory in- spectors state officials, the Pittsburgh District shared its disad- vantages with the rest of the state. But under amendments to the compulsory education law, passed in 1907, had the school
Volume VII, Children Uaving School for Work, p. i)i. United Sutes Senate Document No. 64 j.) Tbe ages of the children who bad left school for work during the year 1907 were u follows:
|
Jiff at Uaoini SibcA |
Children Leaving School AT Aces Stecified |
|
|
Hoidton |
nr„cM |
|
|
a 35 |
^ |
|
|
'} |
||
|
7 |
||
* In his report for 1906 this ofKcial ai^ed against any educational test as follows:
" But this aside, why should boys and ^rls fourteen yean of age and in good physical condition be withiield from learning a useful trade or from earning a neces- sary livelihood simply because they cannot read and write, or cannot explain sums in arithmetic, or tell the difference between a Iiansitive and intransitive vcrbp Though I am a warm champion of school education, I fail to see the connection be- tween the 'three R's' and the necessity for seeking employment and the ability to do the work."
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principals, attendance ofTicers, assessors, and squires in the Pitts- but^ District all been animated by well directed zeal for the chil- dren, the factory inspectors need have spent virtually no time or strength upon those below the age of fourteen except during school vacations. By their joint action the local authorities could have determined the career of all children below the age of fourteen and all illiterate children below the age of sixteen years. The amended cinnpulsory education law fixed the age of compulsory school at- tendance at fourteen years, and thus made the period uniform with that of the child labor law of 1905. Power was also conferred upon local attendance officers to perform tasks formerly left chiefly to state officers to enter stores, factories, and other places where chil- dren work, and to return to school those found working in defiance of the law.
Moreover, under this law there was a method of restraining parents from perjury, which while principals could not unaided have availed themselves of it, they might have employed with the help oi the boards of education. Had these local city depart- ments cared to keep the foieign-bom children in school to the legal age of fourteen years, they could in nearly all cases have se- cured from abroad official transcripts of the children's ages or their religious records, and checkmated the false oaths in the squires' (^ces. The practicability of this plan is proved conclusively by the experience of the New York City department of health, which regularly gets transcripts of birth certificates from every European country, including Turkey. Of Catholic children bom in this country it is not difficult to prove the age, because church records are complete and correct. Of Catholic children bom abroad it was formeriy thought to be difficult to obtain the civil or religious record, but the experience of New York City shows this to be an imaginary difficulty. Except in the case of Russia, virtually complete success attends the effort to obtain a trans- cript of the birth or religious record when the letter of inquiry is written according to instmctions from the consul of the child's native country. Native American non-Catholic children bom outside of the registration area and children bom in Russia are the only ernes whose proof of age presents grave difficulty.
In 1907, therefore, the children's laws of Pennsylvania should I*' 209
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have been obeyed to a d^ree wholly new. No concerted zeal for enforcement, however, on the part of the local authorities was discernible at the time of my inquiries. Local pressure seemed all in the direction of inaction. This absence of zeal to enforce the new provisions of the compulsory education law was perhaps ex- plained by the experience of one school principal in dealing with the eariier law. His school was the nearest to the Hamilton glass factory on the South Side, Pittsburgh. One day he found an agent of the glass works in the school yard soliciting boys to work at night in the glass works. He reported that fact to the deputy factory inspector who asked a colleague for assistance in the case, and the principal with the two deputies visited the factory together. They found children at work in violation of the law, and a fine of $iio was imposed upon the firm. This sum was afterward re- duced by Chief Factory Inspector Delaney to ¥275. Two months later the principal was dismissed.
An illustration of the breakdown in the work of both local authori- liei and itate inspectors was afforded by a seventeen-year-old Wood's Kun boy who, when the writer met him, was working for the Pressed Slwl CarCompany. Whilestill at school he had worked as a caddy and had thus become irregular in his school attendance. Before his thirteenth birthday he had obtained an employment certificate and was employed at a grocer's boy, a year before he could legally be at work. "Thesquire wai a friend of my mother," said the boy, "and he didn't ask for pay. He Juit wrote it." On reaching his thirteenth birthday (then the legal minimum age) he began to work in a box factory. By the time he was seventeen he had already worked two years in the car works, exposed to excessive heat and to incessant danger from burns due to the dn^>ping of red hot Hvets. At our last meeting he was lame from such a bum.
This boy was undersized, with big hands and feet, pinched features, and the carriage of a little old man. If he had not incipient tuberculosis hii appearance belied him. He was a pitiful example of the etTects of the failure of everybody concerned to obey and enforce the factory inspection, child labor, and compulsory education laws.
It was part of Miss Butler's field work for the Pittsburgh Survey to make a study of this all-round failure of local authorities to safeguard the child, evidences of which were to be found on every hand. Her analysis of the hodge-podge scheme of school census taking which left the truancy departments ignorant of the 210
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names and the number of children to look for; of the lack of de- tention rooms to hold children if found by the truant officers; of the inadequacy of the truancy staff; of the unconcern of many school authorities whether children were at school or at work; and of conditions resulting from this combination of lax law and lax enforcement, was brought out locally* by the Allegheny child labor committee during the child labor campaign of 1909,
The legislature of that year amended the child labor law in important particulars. The issuance of employment certificates (involving the application of the educational test) was placed en- tirely in the hands of school officials, and proof of age was required before a certificate should be issued. When the law took effect, in 1910, hundreds of children who would have been able to get affidavits under the old law were unable to qualify under the new, either because of their illiteracy, or because the records of age required proved them to be under the age of fourteen years. This inability to get certificates was incontestable evidence of the worthiessness of the old law.
The child labor and compulsory education laws can not be broken without the intelligent co-operation of the children. They know perfectly why they dodge truant officers and factory inspectors when in danger of being found illegally at work. An unobserved product, therefore, of the failure of state factory inspec- tors throughout these years to prosecute law-breaking employers, and of local citizens and municipal authorities to hold children in school, was the resultant moral harm to the latter. In the Pitts- burgh District were growing up boys and girls who had been trained to break the law in the full knowledge that their em- ployers, whom in theory they should respect and imitate, profited by their law-breaking and wished them to deceive the authorities. Every time a child was ordered by a state factory inspector to be dismissed for want of a certificate filed with the employer, yet was not summoned into court as a witness, he learned that his employer was above the law and did not need to obey it. Otherwise the employer would have been tried and fined for each offense.
The former manager of a pickle factory stated that for thir- teen years he had, as a matter of course, hired school children as
•The Pittsburgh Post.
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soon 3S th^ berry season began, regardless of the child labor law. The letter of this law was perhaps observed — though this is a dis- puted point, no suit having been brought to test it — by keeping the little children in sheds adjacent to the factory and calling the work "farm labor, " a form of work which the law did not cover. Unfortunately, also, there was a provision in the school law that the local board might in its discretion accept attendance at school for 70 |>er cent of the school year in lieu of the full school year.* These hair splitting distinctions were clear neither to the children nor to the parents, who were permanently confused by their ex- periences. In a self-governing community such practices are suicidal. A democratic republic composed of law breakers is unthinkable, and scarcely more workable is a democracy com- posed of people hopelessly confused as to the meaning of laws and their own relation to them.
RECOMMENDATIONS
In order to afford to working people in Pittsburgh condi- tions as good as were then required in the most enlightened states, the following changes were recommended in this report when brought out early in 1909:
I. The head of the department of factory inspection should be superseded by a chief inspector of proved integrity and administrative ability.
J. Tenure of office should be assured to the deputy inspectors under civil service laws.
). Local headquarters should be established in Pittsburgh.
4. The present requirements with regard to safeguarding machinery should be rigidly enforced and extended to give the inspectors control of temperature, glare, darkness, and speed.
;. Wherever a process unavoidably produces extremes of tempera- ture, the factory inspection departments should be empowered to require that air of healthful temperature be piped directly to the place where it is most needed. Tobacco workrooms should be treated as nuisances and summarily closed when unsuppiied with forced ventilation.
6. The working day should be fixed at nine hours for women and girls over the age of eighteen yean with 6 p. m. as closing hour. For boys
* Under the new school code, passed in 1911, this abridging of time is al- lowed only in places with 1 population of less than j,ooo. 212
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below the age of sixteen and girls under eighteen years the closing hour should be 5 p. m. with a maximum of eight hours of work in twenty-four hours; six days should constitute the working week.
7. Physicians and engineers should be added to the factory in- spectbn staff to study injurious occupations.
8. The list of prohibited occupations for children below the age of fifteen years now in force in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Wis- consin should be adopted.
9. The proof of age for children about to leave school should be made uniform with that now required in New York, and penalties pre- scribed for officials who vary from the methods prescribed for obtaining it.
10. The English labor laws as the highest and most applicable type of labor laws should be made the basis of a code adapted to the present industrial development of Pennsylvania.
CHANGES IN FACTORY LEGISLATION
From 1908 to 1913, advance came slowly in the directions indicated.
The legislature of 1909 reformed the system of issuing certificates, placing it in the hands of the school authorities. The passage of the school code* of 1911 carried this reform funher, abolishing the old method of census taking by assessors.
Except for gaining a higher age under which boys may not work in coal mines — the minimum was raised from fourteen to sixteen years — the child labor campaign of 1911 was itself unsuccessful. As already noted, glass manufacturers from the Pittsburgh District, for the fourth succes- sive session of the legislature, defeated the bill to abolish the "glass ex- ception" which permits employment of boys under sixteen at ni^t in "continuous" industries. An unknown political influence caused the defeat also of the bill to restrict messenger work at night to boys of eighteen years and older. This, in spite of the fact that a comprehensive study of the Pittsburgh messenger service made for the National Child Labor Committee, revealed all those temptations to immorality which accompany messengers' work at night which have been found in other cities.
In 1913 the law applying to women was amended, the new provi- sions including every woman and girl in Pennsylvania who works for wages in every kind of establishment (except hospitals, private homes, and on farms) subject to certain partial exemptions.
Under the law as amended no woman or girl may be employed
* See North, Lila Ver Planck: Pittsburgh Schools. The Pittsburgh District, p. ai?.
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more than fifty-four hours in a week, or more than six days in a week, in any establishments, except fruit and vegetable canneries.
No woman or giri may be employed more than ten hours in one day except (i) in weeks in which a legal holiday occurs [two additional hours of work may be required on three of the remaining days]; (3) when machinery breaks down for more than thirty minutes [extra work to make up lost time may be required never exceeding two hours in one day]; (3) in fniit and vegetable canneries.
These exceptions, however, do not permit more than fifty-four hours in one week, or work after the legal closing hour.
Work at night for girls under twenty-one years of age, after 9 p.m. or before6a.m., is prohibited in any establishment except in the case of telephone operators between eighteen and twenty-one years old. For purposes of enforcement a telephone girl working after 9 p. m. who ap- pears to be less than twenty-one years old must produce proof of her age.
For women of all ages a closing hour is provided.* They may not work in any manufacturing establishment after lo p. m. or before 6 a. m. except as managers, superintendents, clerks and stenographers.
Intermissions of forty-five minutes for rest and food must be given at noon or after six hours' work unless the working day is less than eight hours, when the pause may be reduced to a half hour.
If the work being done gives rise to dust, lint, gases or fumes, a separate lunch room must be provided, and no woman permitted to eat in the workroom.
Clean, pure drinking water must be furnished, and free ice.
For every three women or girls one seat must be furnished and kept where it can be easily used. Wash and dressing rooms must be available for all women and girls.
These legislative changes of 1913 alter materially the position of Pennsylvania in the scale of the states when measured by its care of the health of women wage-eamers. So long as it retained the twelve-hour day and sixty-four hour week it stood twenty- sixth in the list. Now it is excelled only by four states and the District of Columbia which have established by law the eight- hour day for women. It ranks with Massachusetts and New York in having a working week of fifty-four hours and a fixed closing hour for women of all ages. In the range of employments included it excels both these neighbor states.f
'This a true elsewhere only of Masiachuseits, New York, Indiana, and Nebraska.
t The amendments adopted in 1913 were drafted in part, and their enact- ment was almost wholly accomplished by (he etioris of the Consumers' League. 214
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CHANGES IN ADMINISTRATION Slowly, therefore, the ponderous machinery of the state was brought to the service of its wage-earning women and children. But the enforcing state authority remained the same that had blocked these gains, aggravated these deficiencies, and served these interests.
Governor Stuart in 1909 reappointed J. C. Etelaney as chief factory inspector over protests from the Pennsylvajiia Child Labor Association and many citizens. There was no alternative authority who could make good the loss when the factory inspection department fell below the highest standard of efficiency. Had Pennsylvania adopted an effective work- men's compensation law and had this proved directly and indirectly a stimulus to employers to make safe the conditions surrounding working people, there would still have been need of the highest efficiency on the part of the state officials in bringing up to the statutory minimum the least intelligent, prudent, and humane employers. Of such efficiency there was no more evidence in the reports published subsequent to 1907 than in their predecessors.
Belated in coming, the administrative changes of 1913 were sweeping. At one stroke. Captain Delaney was removed as head of the factory inspection department by Governor Tener; at an- other, a law was passed which incidentally established local head- quarters at Pittsburgh with a supervising inspector in charge. The entire administrative service of the state was reorganized as a department of labor and industries, and an industrial board was created empowered to fix standards for particular industries within the broad limits set by the law.* This means that Penn- sylvania has revolutionized her whole theory erf both labor laws and enforcement, just as Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and California have changed theirs in the interval since the field work for this investigation was performed.
Where there had been two wholly unrelated bureaus, one of industrial statistics and the other of factory inspection, both weak and inefficient, there was created a well rounded department in- cluding bureaus of statistics, factory inspection, and arbitration; and in the bureau of inspection a division of industrial hygiene. The bureau of statistics, enlarged and strengthened, became the * For text of law and appolnimenl* kc Appendix XI, p. 446. 215
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bureau of statistics and information, designed not merely to ccHn- pile tables of figures, but to bring out the facts of industrial condi- tions, methods of improving them, and the experience of other states and countries which may be made the basis for regulation. Committed to the same end of expert investigation a division of industrial hygiene was created consisting of a physician, as chief medical inspector, with two assistant physicians, a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, and a civil engineer. The duties of this division involve " constructive investigation of the widest possible scope, and the ascertainment, as far as possible, of all the more important risks of industry and the means and devices where- by these risks may be practically eliminated, to the mutual ad- vantage of employer and employe."
More important even than the establishment of the divi- sion of hygiene was the creation of an industrial board of five members, including the commissioner of labor and industries.
To quote Jasper Y. Brinton, of Philadelphia, assistant United States district attorney and president of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Com- mittee which, with the Consumers' League, was instrumental in drafting the legislation.
"The duty of this board is twofold: to make investigations into all matters touching the enforcement of the labor laws of the commonwealth, and to establish rules and regulations necessary for carrying out the de- clared policy of the state, requiring reasonable and adequate protection of the health and safety of employes. The widest powers of investiga- tions are afforded to the board, with further power to subpoena witnesses. . . . This board is not, of course, in any way a law-making body, but merely an administrative body charged with the duty of giving voice to the expressed declarations of the legislature in the light of its expert in- vestigation into the necessarily changing and frequently intricate condi- tions of different industries."
Industrial board and department are in the midst of their first year as this volume is issued. It is too eariy to mix judg- ment with hope. The system is changed, but the forces that warped to their ends the old inspection service are still as active as ever, succeeding in 1913 in killing the child labor bill and the com- pensation measures that would have brought Pennsylvania to the standard of the other great manufacturing states. The outcome of the new machinery is yet to be seen. 216
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DISTRICT
H. F. J. Porter
OTHER things being equal, the success of an enterprise is in direct proportion to its operating efficiency. That is a well established principle of industrial management. It is equally demonstrable that this standard of efficiency depends more upon the character of the working force and the system of its man- agement than upon the type of mechanical equipment. A com- petent organization can produce good results in spite of a poor equipment, whereas an incompetent organization will not only fail to make good equipment produce good work but will, in a com- paratively short time, destroy the equipment itself.
The first requisite then on the part of a modem and pro- gressive manager is to obtain the proper type of administrative organization; the next, so to equip and manage it that its original efficiency will be maintained and increased. The way to begin is obviously to select the best men available. Next, the very best mechanical devices should be supplied them and a physical envi- ronment provided which will enable the individual workman to operate those devices efficiently and which will protect him also from vocational wear and tear. Finally, methods should be em- ployed to develop his capacity and to correlate the independent units into harmonious team play.
These general principles afforded me a basis of analysis and comparison in approaching representative manufacturing establish- ments in the Pittsburgh District in 1910. With the assistance of an official of the Chamber of Commerce, 38 companies were selected as reflecting the general range of working conditions, and the managers of many others were conferred with. The tour of in- spection included 13 machine shops and foundries, seven rolling mills, four food products factories, two laundries, two glass works, one printing establishment, one clothing factory, one cigar factory, 217
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one white lead works, and one cork factory. Miscellaneous em- ployments included a street railway, a telephone exchange, a department store, and a coal mine. Certain developments are en- tered in footnotes, but the chief significance of the report is that it gives a cross-section of shop practice in one American industrial center in a given year.
The investigation covered: (i) the recruiting of employes; (2) the physical environment of the plant in and through which their efficiency must produce results; (3) safeguards against acci- dents, ill health, and other drains upon that efficiency; and (4) the development of the working force as a whole.
1 RECRUITING OF EMPLOYES
There are certain attributes the possession of which deter- mines a man's excellence as a producer. These can be classified as physical, moral, and mental, and must be considered in the order named. First in importance is the physical, for no matter how moral or intellectual a man may be, if he is a weakling, if he has not health, he can not be regular in attendance, capable <^ giving a normal amount of strength to his duties, or permanent in service. Second, he must be of good moral character, or his habits outside of working hours will unfit him for work. And third, he must, in order to think and work right, be of good mental caliber and have had training and possess the desired skill.
Selection. One would naturally suppose that in the effort to obtain an efficient working force special endeavors would be made to attract the best material obtainable in the market from which to make selections; but among the 38 plants visited 1 found very few were making such an effort.
Although all of them either were closed to the union or were open shops (except in the pattern andfoundry departments, which, generally speaking, were unionized), most were hiring their help indiscriminately, through their foreman, and had always done so. These were taking chances on finding, after spending consider- able time and money in training men for some required service, that many were either physically unfit, were loafers, were addicted to drink and therefore frequently in poor condition for work, 218
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or were stupid, slovenly, or clumsy in their methods — all traits resulting in inability to do the specific work which had to be per- formed. In any one of these cases the cost of supervision would be too high to admit of its being maintained continuously, and the unsatisfactory candidate would either leave voluntarily on account of low wages or be dropped for incompetence. Then the process of hiring a successor would have to be repeated, perhaps many times, before in the hit-or-miss process a really satisfactory employe would be obtained. Or, more probably, the foreman wearying in the hope of obtaining a satisfactory employe would retain one he thought "good enough," and so a working force of a low standard of efficiency would be established.
Now, although the foreman is the man who must ultimately be responsible for the quality and quantity of work performed by the men under him and should therefore be the judge of their skill when they are hired, there are, as has been pointed out, other characteristics besides skill which an employe should possess. These characteristics foremen are not in a position to pass upon offhand, nor have they the time to investigate them. To this duty in a large plant some one person should give his time and attention.*
Among Pittsburgh employers the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company had established such an employment department under the direct charge of an assistant superintendent. This company had in 1910 about 10,000 employes, 1,000 being women, and in order to maintain this number it hired through the employment department about 13,000 new operatives each year. The blanks used showed the effective detail with which the "hu- man resources" were made the subject of bookkeeping.!
It is of primary importance that a working organization be composed of men in fit condition, and to insure this each appli- cant should receive a physical examination before being engaged. The plan is not uncommon in industrial establishments elsewhere in thb country, and in Europe, but in none of the )8 establishments vis- ited in the Pittsburgh District, was it carried out as a fixed policy, pre- requisite to employment. The H.J. Heini Company altme provided exam- ination of employes by doctors of their own sex, and it was not obligatory.
* The abiue of iminigrants by grafting foremen was one of the cauia of the pTMScd Steel Car Strike at HcKees Rocks in 1909. The company has since es- tablished an employment bureau, with an intelligent head, and interpreters.
t See Appendix XVI, p. 461, for facsimiles.
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A physical examination was at one time required by the Westing- house Company but was afterward given up; first, because men objected to being subjected to the unusual proceeding, and second, because the supply of skilled labor was customarily low in the Pittsburgh District and all applicants were engaged except those who had a disease of an objec- tionable or dangerous character. Some effort has been made to ascertain in a general way whether a man was physically fit, but the only physical examination takes place after the employment agreement is made, and is an entirely voluntary matter on the part of the employe for the pur- pose of securing sick benefits in the "relief departments" (Appendix XVII, p. 468). It has no bearing upon his continued employment.
I found no instance where special efforts were made to detect tu- berculosis, such as have been inaugurated in New England shops in con- nection with the national campaign against this disease; nor to provide against the possibility of a contagious disease being brought into an es- tablishment by any employe; nor to determine whether an applicant was an alcoholic; nor to determine at the time of hiring him whether a man was subject to epileptic fits, fainting spells, heart failure, or any other organic weakness which would make him physically unfit for work in high temperatures or near rapidly moving or otherwise dangerous machinery.* Training. The rapid growth of industry has for many years caused a constantly increasing demand for competent workers which has kept far ahead of the supply. In certain lines, like that of steam railways, where the work is considerably diversified, the old apprenticeship system, somewhat revised, is still employed to recruit the working force, but in factory work it has been pretty generally given up.
In its stead, with the development of machinery and special- ization, the unskilled immigrants have been taught to perform repeatedly and continuously simple machine processes, thus be- coming gradually efficient at their assignment. Time studies and bonus systems have further developed routine speed. This change in the character of the work performed by the rank and file has
'The surgical organization of the Carnegie Steel Company has in 1914 entered upon the experiment of physically examining not only all appiicanli, but all employes. In (he last four months 15,000 have been so examined, and periodic examinations are planned for the future. Epileptics, nearsighted men, and the like, are to be kept from positions where they are a danger to themselves and their fellows. The Camegie Company is the first among the great industrial establish- ments employing men to attempt the plan.
The lead, however, was taken by a women-employing industry. The Central District Telephone Company has for some time required a physical exami- nation of al! applicants, covering eyes, lungj, heart, skin, and so forth, which is so thorough that only 1 j per cent are accepted. 220
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caused the all-round mechanic to disappear and has evoked a body of operatives who are in no sense mechanics but who are proficient in the one task to which they have been trained.
The monotony of the repetition of one process, however, wears upon the mind, and as there is little opportunity for shop advancement employes are inclined to give up one position in the hope of securing a better one elsewhere.
This resulting change in the ranks of employes, necessitat- ing as it does the constant hiring and educating of new ones, en- tails great waste, not only on account of the break in the routine of shop operations but because the imparting of knou^edge, particu- larly to the uneducated, is an art, and the employment of one set of men to do the teaching and of another set to supervise the sub- sequent routine operations is expensive. The problem of securing a more permanent working organization is, therefore, one of the most serious before the manufacturers of the country for solution. The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company had devised a new form of apprenticeship in an effort to meet this situa- tion. Their plan consisted of two courses: one, "ordinary appren- ticeship," open to non-technical men, and the other, "engineering apprenticeship," open only to graduates of technical schools, pre- ference and precedence being given to the sons of employes. An applicant for entrance to either of these courses filled out a blank in his own handwriting, giving his name and address and those of his father and mother, or, if they were dead, of his guardian; also the date of hb birth and the names of the schools he had attended, with a statement about the nature of his education. The latter course was very complete both in curriculum and in practical tasks, students being advanced from one department of the works to another so that they eventually obtained experience in every branch. When they had completed the course some of the grad- uates became connected with the plant as subordinate officials, others went out into the commercial offices of the company or into the field engineering corps, or left to be employed by manufac- turers who used the company's products.
S<Hnewhat similar methods of apprenticeship were also found to exist in the only railroad shops in the District that I visited; namely, those of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, a subsidiary of the New York
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Central lines, and in the locomotive shops of the H. K. Porter Company. Apprenticeship in this latter company lasted four years.
The Mesta Machine Company, a large machine shop turning out engines of all kinds as well as large mill and other machinery, sent its ap- prentices to the Carnegie technical schocJs, where practical courses in the school of applied industry fitted men to be foremen in shops and the like.*
All these companies took in boys from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, required a medical examination, and a probationary period of six months during which time the candidate's general fitness and bent were studied.
A weak feature in these apprenticeship systems was the absence of effort to retain the employe in servicef after he had been trained for it with much expenditure of time and money. The result was the annual loss and hiring of over lOO per cent of the total working organization. This constant change did not apply to the higher officials and their immediate office force, which was fairly permanent; but farther down the line where the prin- ciples of efficiency had not been instilled in the minds of foremen and lesser subordinates, changes were made on very slight provo- cation. The percentage of change was about the same that exists in shops that have no apprentices. An entire organiza- tion did not change completely each year, for a very con- siderable nucleus of permanent men remained; but people to the number of those in the organization, each of whom received a greater or less amount of personal attention, supervision, and training, entered and left it during the course of a year. Professor Commons describes the situation as it affects labor.^ Failure to sift the raw labor material that came to them, failure to develop
'This plan has been pursued in recent yean both by employers and labor union). More generatly, companies co-operate by taking students into their shops. Induitrial training and vocational guidance are being rapidly developed by the centialized board of education, since its creation in tqr i. (See Kennard. Beulah: The New Pittsburgh School System. The Pittsburgh District, p. 476.) Beginnings have been made in the direction of part time work, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, for example, giving four houn' class work a week on pay time to boys in training.
t The engineers who have been trained as apprentices o( the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company arul who leave its employ often perform a valuable function through their ability to install its products in different parts of the country and the world.
JCommons. John R.r Wage-earners of Pittsburgh. P. 113 of this vol- ume.
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its proficiency, and failure to hold it when trained, were from the managerial standpoint its great leakages.
II PHYSICAL EQUIPMENT OF PLANT AS IT AFFECTS THE COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE OF EMPLOYES It seems a commonplace to say that more and better work can be done in the light than in the dark; that when people are comfortable they can give more efficient service than when they feel hot or cold or stupid from bad air; yet few industrial man- agers with whom I talked in Pittsburgh in 1910 had grasped these self-evident facts.
Light. Many of the newer Pittsburgh plants, especially those built in the suburbs, have adopted a type of construction in which the framework is of steel and the sides are composed largely of glass. The roofs are either of the saw-tooth, depressed bay, or lantern type which are effective in making the shop light, especially if the plant is of the one-story type prevalent in the outlying suburbs. Light, in M plants and in the many-storied buildings found in congested districts, becomes a matter of up- keep as well as of structure. The results in Pittsburgh were far from satisfactory.
My visits were made in June and July, when the weather was very wann. As a rule, under these conditions all windows and doors in foun- dries, mills, and blacksmith shops were open ; in some cases even the sides of the buildings had been removed to allow the heat from the furnaces and other processes to escape. The shops were therefore fairly light. But the glass on the unopened sashes of the windows was black with soot, and in what state of light or darkness the shops would be in the winter 1 was able only to sunnise.
In towns where little soft coal is burned and the atmosphere is clear, dirty windows are considered prima facie evidence of poor manage- ment, as some means of artificial lighting is necessitated by such a condi- tkm. In Pittsburgh, however, as the smoky atmosphere outside and the dirt from the operations conducted inside very quickly blacken the win- dows, the cost of keeping them clean may approximate that of burning electric light. Many factories and machine shops have special gangs who clean windows and whitewash interior walls, but not nearly enough effort is made in this direction. The result is that since illumination by elec* tricity is costly, very little general lighting is attempted. Instead, in- 223
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dividual lamps with opaque reflectors are placed close to the place where the light is needed. Workrooms consequently are as a rule gloomy and depressing. The contrast between the intense brilliancy of light focused upon the work and the darkness of the shop causes frequent contraction and dilation of the pupils of the eyes, inducing eyestrain with accmn- panying headache and qther ills.
The preparation of foods requires good light in order that dirt which would attract flies or other vennin may be detected, all operations facilitated, and cuts and scratches on the hands of the operatives fr<Nn which infection might result prevented. At the factory of the H. J. Heinz Company both the natural and the artificial light were found to be excellent, while in an adjoining factory of similar character they were not so good, and in a large milk and ice cream depot nearby both were very poor. Incidentally, the nails and hands of the Heinz operatives were kept in order by a manicure, each receiving treatment at least twice a week.
One exceptionally bright plant impressed itself on the vis- itor's attention. This was the "white blacksmith shop" of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, the walls, ceilings, and me- chanical equipment of which are painted white and are kept so. This shop is as unique at the present time as the "white power plant " at the Chicago World's Fair was in its day, and it is worthy of note and imitation. After seeing this, it is useless to say that a shop can not be kept bright, clean, and neat in Pittsburgh.
Facilities for Controlling Temperature. Generally speaking, the factories and shops visited had ample heating ar- rangements; foundries were the exceptions. As much could not be said for the provision of means to control excessive tempera- tures; although here again the experience of different managers in plant construction, air blasts, electric fans, and air washing, was of a sort which if pooled and adapted to the needs of the different industries would have lifted the general physical comfort of work in the Pittsburgh District toa new level. The foundries represented the lowest level of plant practice on this point. Other than the two mentioned below they had practically no provisions for heat- ing except crude open braziers in which charcoal or coke burned on Monday mornings before the foundry operations began. At other times dependence was placed on the heat radiated from the molten metal and the castings. Heat from such sources is inter- mittent, and as a rule the workmen did their molding work in the 224
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cold and got thoroughly heated during the casting. The casting comes just before they go home and, in the absence of facilities for changing their moist clothing, they are made susceptible to colds and other disorders of the respiratory system.
In the Westinghouse foundry at Traffcwd City, and in that of the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company in Allegheny, an air blast foimed a very eflective heating system. In the latter plant the summer temperature was considerably modified by running this blast unhealed. The skelp furnaces of the National Tube Company at McKeesport had hollow fronts through which water was circulated, thus making their proximity comparatively bearable to the men who had to work before them continuously. In addition, immediately at the side of the men revolving fans had been placed to blow a stream of air upon them which greatly ameliorated their working conditions.*
In the Reymer candy factory an air-washing, temperature regu- lating plant which cost f 12,000 held the temperature of the air from 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in all seasons, and maintained the humidity at JO degrees, so that the preparation and packing of certain confections should be carried on under standard conditions. Work in these rooms was noticeably comfortable in the hot weather. A similar plant had been installed in the building of the Central District Telephone (part of the Bell system) Company, to cool the rooms of the "Long Dis- tance" department.! in the laundry of Brace Brothers, one of the lai^est in the East End, the heat in the ironing room, directly above the washing machines in the basement, was very high.t An air-washing and cooling system, though not as elaborate as those mentioned, had been installed, but its operation had been discontinued because the ironers ob- jected to the cool air blowing directly upon them when they were heated. The Reymer Company had experienced this same difficulty at first but met it by deflecting the current of air upward. The office building of the H. K. Porter Company had a similar installation as also had the Mo Creery department store, which served to keep the merchandise free from a great deal of soot and incidentally added to the comfort of working force and patrons.
'See alto Kelley, Florence: Factory Inspection in Pittsburgh. P. 300 of thu volume.
tThis temperature regulating system has been installed by the telephone company in the principal long distance central offices all over the country.
t Out of ja steam laundries. Miss Butler found one in which the heat-produc- ing wash room was installed on the top floor, radically ameliorating the woilc conditions in ali other departments. See Butler, Elizabeth B.'. Women and the Trades, p. 167. fThe Pittsburgh Survey.)
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Ventilation, The trend toward saw-tooth, depressed bay, and lantern roofs in the steel mills and other heavy works of the District is, of course, in the interest of coolness and freshness as well as of light in the general run of factories. Except for the instances mentioned above and the temporary installation of por- table electric fans I saw no evidences of artificial ventilation.
Pennsylvania has no state legislation calling for definite amounts of cubic feet of air per hour to be supplied to each operative. Yet it is demonstrable that with such provisions more and better work can be accomplished, often more than enough to pay for the installation, main- tenance, and operation of such a supply system. But the initial cost and the very tangible expense of running the plant, in comparison with the somewhat intangible returns in quality and quantity of work, tend to discourage managers from introducing this very important adjunct to factory equipment unless they are compelled by legislation to do so.
The absence of ventilation may have been due to the amount of soot in the air of the Pittsburgh District. Any system which would in- crease the volume of air in a factory would also increase the soot, and thb would necessitate an air-washing device and further expense. Such de- vices were to be found in the olfice buildings of the District. An excellent device which combines a heating and ventilating system and by which the air is washed was installed in that of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Rail- road. The windows were intended solely for the admission of light and did not open, the air entering and finding its exit by special ducts.
Drinking Water. The need for pure air as a basts for healthy and effective work brings us back to the consideration that however marvelous has been the development of machinery and automatic processes, the intelligence which controls at every point in manufacturing operations is human. It has both the gift and the limitations associated with animal organisms. The worker must have air and water. He can not go from morning to night without food or respite. The waste tissue worn out in the process of work must be disposed of. And when we mass these needs by the tens and hundreds and thousands in congregate work places it is not enough to give the workers merely elbowroom and shelter. Creature conveniences must be planned for as definitely as coal bins or steam pipes are planned for in the boiler room.
In the Carnegie mills, the United Engineering and Foundry Company, and in some other plants, it had been customary for thirty years, within my own memory, for an extensive bucket 226
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Fountain in Mackink Shop Waler at founlain is taken directly from a circulaiirg line, leaving no dead ends where water can stand. The line is i.^oo feet long. Water returning to the starling point is not over 7° higher in temperature. Before this system was adopted, the men often had cramps from drinking water improperly cooled. Now they rarely or never suffer that way. One fountain to every 10 men is provided
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brigade of men and boys to cany, by a shoulder yoke and wire hoop attachment, pails of water from springs situated in some instances at a considerable distance in the hills. This archaic institution persisted in Pittsburgh steel mills where hydraulic engineering had reached its highest achievements. Although the water might be cool and pure enough at the spring, it became warm in the carrying. The perspiration from the water carriers' arms dropped into it in transit, and the dirt from the ice which the mill men handled probably offset the benefits. If the companies had piped their water from the springs a quarter of a century ago they would have saved many times the cost of the present method of transportation and distribution, and would have delivered water purer and at a temperature much more healthful than that which was being provided. That the current expense of this system had not impressed itself upon the management through the records of the cost department was inexplicable.*
In contrast, the National Tube Company had filtered city water piped into their plants and was installing systems for cool- ing and distributing it through sanitary fountains. The system as laid out had no dead ends where the water could lie in the pipes and become heated or stagnant. Similarly, the American Steel and Wire Company's general superintendent stated that in plants where buckets and tin cups were used the company was arranging to replace them with automatic drinking fountains, as it considered the old system insanitary. These fountains consist of a small basin, from the center of which protrudes a vertical pipe. Out of this the stream spouts an inch or two in the air. so that a drink can be obtained without touching the metal. The water may run continuously or be controlled by a valve. These fountains if pur- chased are usually elaborate; if home-made, they are very simple.
For twenty-five years prior to the opening of the filtration plant in 190S the river water supplied to Pittsburgh was known to contain typhoid germs, and no one who could avoid doing so used it for other than washing purposes. In consequence, practically all industrial plants put in their own driven wells or, like the Homestead mills, drew their drinking water from adjacent springs
• Theie » „.,..,
Recently, a modem water supply system has displaced many of them ana the days of tbe last survivors are said to be numbered. See footnote, p. 3)3. 237
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which had a local reputation for purity. Although managen usually stated that they had their wells or spring water analyzed frequently by the boanj of health or local chemists to test its purity, as a rule no records of analysis could be found. With one or two exceptions, those produced were several years old. Time passes rapidly, and unless it is the specific duty of some one per- son to make a systematic and periodical inspection this safeguard is likely to be forgotten until an epidemic occurs.
In most of the factories the well water was filtered, but bow often the filters were cleaned was an open question. Usually the supply was so generous that it ran continuously at faucets which were distributed throughout the plant. In the rolling mills these faucets were placed at the "boshes" where a continuous flow was necessary to keep the water cold enough to cool off the furnace tools. Sometimes a cup for the use of all the men in common was attached to the faucet. Both water and drinking facilities there- fore were possible centers of danger, to which the engineers of the District were only beginning to give attention.*
Lunch Facilities. The noon hour is intended to allow time for the midday meal and for relaxation and rest from the fatigueof the morning. Many companies employing girls in their factories and stores in the city had a room with tables at which the giris could sit down and eat the lunch they had brought with them, the company providing hot coffee or tea free or at a nomi- nal cost. Two flagrant exceptions to this practice were noted.
The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company several years ago set aside a space in one of Its buildings for a lunch room ftH' nearly i ,000 gids. The giris brought their own lunch, and coffee was fur- nished free by the company. Later, when there was a demand for more room in which to install some machinery, this room was crowded out and since then the girls had eaten their lunch sitting on the factory floor and leaning against their machines or the wall of the building, as the company did not even provide them with seats which had backs.f
* The Woman't Act of July, 191), requires employen to provide a "sufBcient supply (rf clean and pure dnnking-watcT-' Department itorei are reported by the donsumers League lo be observing the law, but this is not true in general M factories.
t Today (1914) the company hat a dining room (eating 400, with separate rest Toonu, See also footnote, p. Sjo.
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In the lunch room of the United States Glass Company were s(»ie tables and chairs and a large cast iron stove for warmth in the winter. On this stove the superintendent said the girls were "permitted" to heat their coffee which they themselves purchased by each contributing a cent from time to time. On the day that I called, although the thermometer stood in the 90's, the stove had in it a roaring wood fire. I have no idea how high the temperature stood in that room, but it is safe to say that although "permitted" the girls did not that day take advantage of the extended courtesy to eat their lunch there.
The new plants which are situated outside of Pittsburgh had provided lunch rooms in their administrative buildings for the accommodation of their officials, — heads of departments and office force, — but in only two instances that came to my attention had they similarly provided for the people in theirworks. Such a lunch room offers a change of environment which makes a pleasant break in the routine and in itself has a relaxing and recuperative effect. Coffee and tea if provided, supply warmth to an otherwise cold lunch. The effect can be noticed in the work (^ the first hours of the afternoon which ordinarily are less productive than those of the earlier hours of the day. Progressive manufacturers maintain the efficiency of their working people throughout the day by pro- viding a wholesome meal at cost in comfortable rooms.
The Mesta Machine Company had a lunch counter where 75 men could obtain a good lunch at cost, and on the upper floor of the "Casino" at (he Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company there was a lunch counter for men, while on the ground floorwere bowling alleys, bil- liard and pool rooms. With these two exceptions — and the H. J. Heinz Company — I found no concern in 1910 providing lunch rooms for men.* Yet in the rough work of a mill, where the heat is likely to be excessive and to cause profuse perspiration, the men become very much exhausted and in the absence of a lunch room usually repair at noon to nearby saloons for beer or a stronger stimulant. As the effect of alcohol quickly wears off, the after effect is evident in the inefficiency of the operatives who get " dopey. " The American Steel and Wire Company experienced in another city the beneficial effects of local option, which temporarily removed the saloon from the vicinity of their mill. They stated that the number of accidents that occurred after lunch hour was reduced. This improve- ment in working conditions was subsequently lost by a change in politics which restored the saloon.
* So tar a» the general run of the steel mills go, the sittiation is the same today, 229
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Rest, Rest — especially for women workers — is not merely a question (A a noon stop but of consideration, at every point in the work, of what will ease tension. Standing at work all day is very fatiguing and progressive managers in Pittsburgh as elsewhere recognized and acted on this fact. But in some shops where women were employed there were no seats. When the superinten- dents of the factories of the United States Glass Company and the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company were asked whether they did not allow their giris to sit down when tired their replies were fairiy identical:
" Why certainly, we have no objection to their sitting down."
"Where?" was asked.
"Well." said the superintendents as they looked in vain for something on which the girls could sit, "when they are tired they can go out to the lunch room." But these girls were piece workers who would dock themselves if they left their work. Moreover, neither lunch room had any facilities for "resting," so that the opportunity offered was, I imagine, seldom exercised.
The Pittsburgh Railway Company permitted their motor- men to supply their own stools and sit on them while at work, and many men took advantage of this privilege.
Sitting continuously without a back-rest is as much of a strain on the nerves and muscles of the back as standing. In the clothing factory of Rauh Brothers and in the Armstrong Cork Works the giris were given chairs with backs to them. In the Jenkinson cigar factory and the Heinz pickle works the girls had backless stools.*
1 asked one of the subordinate officers of the cigar factory why he did not supply chairs with backs so that when the girls were tired they could lean back for an instant and relieve the strain on the muscles of the back. As things stood, they had to get up from their stools and leave the room ostensibly to visit the toilet but really for rest. He said that he had spoken to the proprietors about supplying chairs but without effect. He knew that the time saved by supplying seats with backs has always paid employers who have made the change. A similar inquiry made to a high official of the H. J. Heinz Company elicited the reply that the company had tried chairs and the girls would not use them. Thechaiis tried proved to have been made of wire with spring backs such as are used 'CKairs with backs are now provided at the Heinz wdtIo. 230
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by typewriters. This chair for factory use is absolutely unserviceable. The official acknowledged that possibly the ordinary chair would have been acceptable. McCieery's department store had seats behind the counter which the sales clerks were expected to use whenever they felt so inclined.*
A few factories where women were employed contained "rest rooms" where an employe temporarily indisposed could lie down. These were usually adjuncts to the locker or dressing rooms, with washrooms either in or adjacent to them.
Many factories had elaborately appointed emergency rooms con- taining an operating table for supplying first aid to the injured men or women, but this hospital equipment is no substitute for the service sup- plied by good rest rooms. Frequently, women who on account of house- hold duties hurry away from home in the morning without any breakfast or, what is worse, with a hastily eaten one, reach the factory faint or with a severe headache. There are periods also when the heat of the work- room or the pain from slight injury will cause a temporary weakness which an hour's rest will remove. A rest room in charge of a trained attendant who can administer simple remedies in place of the headache powders and other nostrums usually employed proves to be an actual saving to a ctunpany, as otherwise the employe may go home for the day. The presence in these rooms of an intelligent person who at times of oner- gency may get into close touch with the patient and bring to the attention of the ONnpany the knowledge of any pressing needs, also tends to weld a link between employer and employe.
The H. J. Heinz Company, McCreery and Company, and the Telephone Company had commodiously appointed and cheerful rest and emergency rooms fcff wcmien. Folding cots in the women's wash rooms of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company,! the Ann- strong Cork Company, and the Brace Brothers' Laundry were poor at- tempts to supply this need. In the lunch room of one of the factories of the United States Glass Company stood a broken down lounge. It would have required so much exertion to keep from falling off that little rest could have been obtained by using it.
Lockers. Change of Clothing. Managers in the Pitts* burgh District seemed to have confined their attention in the
* See Kelley, op. cil., p. 304. t See footnote, p. sa8. 231
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matter of clothes rooms largely to thetr women workers, whom they provided, in connection with washing facilities, with rooms which contained partitioned closets with pegs or hooks.
Steel lockers are preferable to wooden lockers and closets, as they are vermin proof. Such lockers were provided by the Armstrong G>rk Company, but the upper tiers were practically inaccessible and had never been used. When large hats became the fashion the lower lockers would not hold them, so that shelves and pegs had to be substituted until a change in fashion should make it possible to return to the lockers.
Lockers were usually provided for men in the machine shops, but they were frequently so inconveniently situated and so open to the ac- cumulation of dust that the men usually preferred to lock their clothes into their tool chests, thus keeping them clean and convenient of access.
In the best arranged shops for men elsewhere I found clothes rooms which contained washing facilities in the care of an attendant. These rooms are ventilated by a fan, and steam pipes run through the lockers. Workmen coming to work in wet weather can change clothing, shoes, and stockings few a dry outfit, and by night can change back again to their now dried out street clothes. Nothing so diverts a man's thought from his work as cold feet, and to go about all day in wet clothing lowers the vitality and invites cold and sickness, thus causing irregular attendance and consequent inefficiency.
Cleanliness. Washing pAauTiEs.* Except in the machine shops, the mills of the steel industry in Pittsburgh were not ade- quately supplied with washing facilities for the men. When you asked why, you were told that " mill men do not wash," When you retorted that they ought to be encouraged to wash and that you had seen them do it in the boshes, the managers usually said, " Yes, those who want to wash can wash there." There was a general complaint that the men in the machine shops did not use
* In I9tl, a bureau of sifety, relief, sanilation, and welfare was created by the United States Steel Corporation, with headquarters in New York, whkh has entered upon a program of sanitary rehabilitation that gives promise of equaiiing the notable advances since [908 in safety engineering. (See Appendix XX, p. 494.) The investment involved is staggenng — to make up for years of neglect; but one after another, wash rooms and locker rooms are being placed in the mills; drinking fountains and filtered water are superseding the bucket brigades, lavatories are supplanting rank dry vaults and the insanitary privies which overhung the rivers; shower baths are becoming part of blast furnace equipment, and in general new standards are being set for the Districl. The change is not confined to the constituent companies of the Steel Coiporation. Yet there remains a large (ask for public opinion in bringing old plants and laggard establishments into line. 232
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SwiMMiNO Pool W tslinghousK Air Brake Company
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either the wash basins or lockers. My experience has always been, however, that when men do not take advantage of facilities ofTered it is because there is something wrong with the facilities. Self- respecting people (and those are the people managers should en- deavor to secure and encourage to stay with them) like to appear well on the street. They ought not to be compelled to go home from work looking like hoboes and so covered with dirt and grease that they soil the clothes of people who sit next to them in the street cars, making well dressed people hesitate to ride with them.
In this matter the Pittsburgh mills were not living up to their obligations to their employes or to the state by any means, and in fact were actually maintaining nuisances in the community. For over fifty years the proprietors of these mills had seldom made the slightest effort to furnish men who wanted to wash any facility for doing so and by their neglect were actually educating them to go dirty.
The steel mills of the Carnegie and the Jones and Laughlin companies, ai^ Brown and Company, the factories of the United Glass Company, the city power plant of the Allegheny County Light Company, and the A. Garrison Foundry Company had no wash nxHns at all. The men got their hands and faces black from the grime of the work and when they wanted to clean up before eating lunch or at quitting time, had either to resort to the boshes, or to the drinking water or other pails which they themselves sup- plied privately. They brought soap and towels from home.
In contrast, the several targe works of the Westinghouse interests seemed to have adopted a common policy in regard to wash rooms, of which they had a number in each plant. These were furnished with individual basins supplied with city water caAd. They were kept in order by an attendant, who at noon and night just before "whistle blow" distributed roller towels (in- dividual towels were used for the office force) and cake soap, col- lecting them afterward and putting them away. In its new plant, also. The National Tube Company was pioneering an»ng the steel mills.
Ifasb Bowls. — A wash bowl or sin k seems to be a simple and common piece of furniture, but even a sink must be of the proper kind and con- veniently placed, equipped, and kept in order. If the individual porcelain 233
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bowl is considered too expensive, a very good substitute is an iron sink on the front and back runs of which tin basins can rest. Each man can then have his individual basin which he empties into the sink when be has washed. Such an arrangement is rapid in operation, no wails having to be made while the basin is being emptied.
It is better to have a number of these sinks scattered throughout the plant than grouped in one place. The men then find them accessible and do not lose much time in going to and fro. An attendant should keep them in order and see that soap is provided and that clean towels are dis- tributed and soiled ones collected. There should be plenty of hot and cold water at each sink. Hot water and soap are both necessary to soften the grease and dirt which accompany factory, shop, and mill work, and towels are required to dry the hands afterward. In their absence, oil and cotton waste which are more costly will be the regular substitutes.
In order to show how carelessness can affect the usefulness of a wash room, let me describe the condition of some basins that I saw at the Armstrong Cork Works. Almost all the stoppers had become de- tached and lost. As there were plenty of corks handy, however, these had been substituted; but there is a difference between 4>stopper with a chain and a cork without one. After washing, the cork was usually left in the outlet and the next person to use the bowl had to plunge his hand into the dirty water to empty the bowl. When 1 saw these basins all were full of dirty water and some of the workers were going hcnne without washing up rather than dean out a bowl. Such carelessness on the part of the management, not only in the upkeep of its apparatus but in permitting its misuse, could not have anything but a demoralizing effect on the attitude of the men toward other forms of company equipment. A more serious charge lies against them; they have unquestionably — if unwittingly — spread disease and caused preventable suffering.
Towels and Soap. — In the works where the men's hands and faces are very dirty and are apt to have cuts and open sores upon them, some- times caused by blood poisoning or by venereal diseases, the danger of passing these disorders along is increased by the use of roller towels. The manager of a towel supply company which furnished and washed towels for many of the factories in Pittsburgh as well as doing all the wash- ing for the Pullman Company in this District, told me that the company was fully alive to this danger of infection, never recommended rcriler towels, and took special precautions in handling them. Professor W. T. Sedgwick,* of the Massachusetts Institute of Techndogy, calls them a "sanitary abomination." Nevertheless, in Pittsburgh factories, wherever
•Sedp New York, S"
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any towels were supplied at all, roller towels seemed to be the rule.
A very large number of manufacturers did not supply either towels or soap; they said that the men who washed preferred to bring their own supplies. Others declared that they tried furnishing soap, but that the men took it home; that even when they tried the kind which is chained to the faucet or basin the men actually cut the chain and took the soap away. It would cost less, be vastly more sanitary, and reduce the likelihood of theft, to use one of the many liquid or granulated soaps on the market which are supplied from a "dispenser," and which allow a few drops or flakes to come into the hand at a time. One of the best of these liquid soaps will give i ,000 washes for about 20 cents. Their use is no longer an experiment, yet I failed to find more than one manager who had a soap dis- penser, and that only on trial, in his office building. It is hard to grasp that captains of industry should acknowledge themselves vanquished by soap!
In 1910 the largest electric supply manufacturing company in the District supplied roller towels, cake soap, and cotd water. In the shops of their competitor in an eastern city there was a washroom on a mezza- nine floor accessible from two stories. This was equipped with individual slate basins but no water, no soap, no towels. Which was the more sani- taryp No doubt the latter.
Shower Baths. Foundry and mill men who get very dirty and penpire freely should be given facilities for taking shower baths and for changing to dry clothes before going home, particulariy in winter when they are liable to become chilled and are thus made subject to pulmonary trouble.* Although shower baths were installed in several plants, in but one instance did I find evidence of their having been used recently. This was due in every case, in my judgment, either to inconvenient location and poor installation, to long hours of work, or to the fact that the cars on which men depended to take them home started so soon after the whistle blew that there was scarcely time to catch them. The charge that work- ingroen do not care to wash was not substantiated by the evidence. They could be seen at quitting time washing up in the boshes and in pails, and the Westinghouse men took advantage of their inadequate washrooms.
Poclt. That this is so, is evident by the patronage of the city
natatoriums, the public bathsf in the recreation parks, and the other
*A law of :9ii makes wash rooms in foundries obligatory, and during
recent months the department of labor and industry has ordered installations
throughout the Pittsburgh District.
t Among general social agencies in Pittiburgh, The Civic Club of Allegheny County has long demonstrated the gospel of cleanliness in its bath houses. At the present time, Mrs. Henry W. Oliver and her daughter, Mrs. Rea, are erecting a modem bath house near the Oliver works on the South Side, to be given to the city with endowment to cover operating expenses.
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swimming pools in the industrial districts. The fallowing record shows both the popularity of these institutions and the danger of transmitting disease through them — a danger which Pittsburgh and other cities have taken few if any steps to ward off: The Carnegie libraries at Htnnc- stead, Duquesne. and Braddock, each with ;o to loo bathers a day, changed the water in their tanks twice a week; the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, with loo to 200 daily bathers, usually let out about one- fourth of the water each day; the Turkish Bath Natatorium, with 300 to 400 daily bathers, changed the water three times weekly; the Law- rence Park recreation grounds, with soo to 800 daily bathers, and the H. J. Heinz Company, with 2$, changed every night. In the West Park recreation grounds, Allegheny, and in the public recreation grounds at McKeesport the water was running constantly.*
Water-closets. Apparently the usual method of handling water-closets on the premises of industrial plants was about as follows: First, select the most remote part of the shop, a place which on account of darkness and restricted space is useless for any- thing else. Then put in the cheapest apparatus and one that will be inconvenient and uncomfortable so that the men will not be in- clined to come often or stay long. Then when it is found that the men take home the toilet paper, stop supplying it. The men will then take in newspapers and read them. Remove the lights to prevent reading. The condition of the place will then become in- sanitary because the men can not see the condition of the seats and no longer use them as intended. When the odors become strong enough to be observed at a distance, instead of recognizing the fact as a warning of the insanitary condition and remedying it, install "disinfectant drips" of thymol or eucalyptus, which even the managers acknowledge do not disinfect and really do little more than overcome the existing odor by a more pungent and powerful one.
Superintendents of factories almost universally contended that it was practically impossible to keep water-closets in order for the class of
* At the time af my initial Pittsburgh report there was nothing in any Ui»> guage on this subject. Some months afterward accounts appeared in the technical press of epidemics of throat and eye trouble at colleees. traceable to the swimming pools. See article, The Menace of the Swimming Pools, in Tbt Sumy, July 27, 191a, describing my subsequent investigations into the sanitation of the swimming pools of New Vorli City. See also Manheimer, W. A.; The Survey, April 18, 1914.
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Locker and Lunch Room American Steel and Wire Company, Donora. Pennsylva
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Porcelain Urinal Surrounded by sheet steel scieen. Niiional Tube Company. In 191), Mf such urinals were installed by the United States Sleel Corporation. Its present policy is to place them at convenient points in every works, in the belief that ton- venienl and sanitary urinals make not only for health but efficiency
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people they employed. They were unwilling to incur the expense of such an attendant as keeps a hotel lavatory in trim, and yet they would have saved more than his salary by lessening the time wasted in those plants by the men, reading, smoking, and loafing in the toilets, which ran into a very large sum every day.
Take, for instance, a works manned by 1,300 men — a small force for Pittsburgh. Suppose that only half of these (a low estimate) use the water-closet each day, during "company time," each man staying there ten minutes. This would amount to 6,000 minutes, or ten days, which at an average wage of $3.00 per day would mean in lost time to men and management |30 per day, or {6,000 per year.
Superintendents and directors did not realize how much their badly managed water-closets were costing them. If this item of expense had been embraced in their cost system it would soon have come to their attrition. The experience of a large company in another city may be dted. The management found considerable loafing in the toilet room. The company had the room attendant take the check number of each man and the time of his entrance and exit and this record was sent daily to the cost accountant's office. The men were admonished if they spent too much time in the toilet rooms, and when their time overran a definite maximum they were actually charged for it.
The superintendents of the Carnegie mills and the H. K. Porter loa»notive sht^ complained that the men spent too much time reading in these places; yet they had only a few moments before told me that the company did not provide toilet paper and that they had all the newspapers which had been left around the shops during the day collected at night and put into the water-closets for the men to use, thus actually furnishing them reading matter. Moreover, newspapers, on account of the printer's ink, are not healthful for toilet use.
In the machine shops of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad the water-closets were on a mezzanine shelf and the urinals underneath on the ground. A large sign was posted on the shelf, which read as follows: "Use nothing but toilet paper in this closet. Smoking and reading is also prohibited." Whatever the rhetoricians might say, this notice is said to accomplish its purpose.
The amount of cotton waste which the men use when toilet paper is not supplied will surprise any manager who will thoroughly investigate the subject. This waste sooner or later clogs up the pipes and increases the expense of keeping the plumbing in order. Individual bowls are not necessary in a large plant. They require a great amount of wwk to keep them clean and the duplication of traps increases the number of stoppages 337
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due to use of unsuitable articles. The closets of shops have a way of at- tracting two-foot rules from the rear pockets of the men. These open in the traps and act as very effective stoppers in closing the pipe.
The American Steel and Wire Company appointed a committee to make a special study of wash and toilet rooms and drinking facilities. As result of its work, well appointed toilet rooms were being installed in th«r different plants. The concern was going so far as to have separate ac- commodations for boys so that they "would not become acquainted with the filthy habits or hear the profanity and obscenity so often indulged in by men in places of this kind." This is a refinement which seems illogical. The intercourse of the men should be kept decent by the presence of an attendant. The boys and men associate throughout the day and the segregation of boys in a place of this kind, except under supervision, is in itself pernicious. In one of the mills of the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, where some 20 girls worked, a small one-room frame cottage had been built and set aside for their use as a lunch room. In one comer was the water-closet. Each week the superintendent assigned the careof the room to two of the girls, whose duty it was to see that the place was kept in order. Here was at least an attempt to preserve cleanliness and tidiness, but it seemed to me uncalled for to make the girls do the janitor work. The combination of lunch room and water-closet needs no comment.
The United Engineering and Foundry Company, the Pitts- burgh Valve and Construction Company, the National Tube Company, the Westinghouse interests, and the Mesta Machine Company were conspicuous among those who in 1910 maintained sanitary toilet rooms for their shops. Each of these companies had a man in attendance whose sole duty was to keep the toilets in order. The toilets had cement lined floors, syphon flush enamel range closets with partitions which insured a semi-privacy to each man. There were cuspidors in each section. The closets were light so that the condition of the seatscould be distinctly seen. Hose attachments were installed and the room was hosed out at least once and sometimes twice a day. No disinfectant drips were used. The attendant saw that the receptacles were filled with toilet paper and that the latter was not unduly wasted or carried off; also that smoking, reading, and loafing were not indulged in.
In contrast, many of the mills of the large steel companies and scmie of the older foundries and works, — such as the brick works which are situated outside the sewage system of the dty, — 238
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had placed open privies adjacent to or over running streams of water. These places were left practically to take care of them- selves and were in a very insanitary condition.
The United States Glass Company in its South Side plant maintained open privy vaults that were disgracefully filthy. The girls' closets opened directly into the workroom, i was escorted to these by a director of the company who informed me that he had been a physician but had retired from active practice. When I asked him how, knowing the insanitary condition of these places, he could allow them to exist, he replied, "When I was a physician I gave my attention to my profession. Now that 1 am in business I ^ve my attention to helping that business make money. We have made only 1 3 per cent profit in five years and if you had been in the directors' meetings during this time you would have found that our attention was directed entirely to financial matters; we had no time to spend on sanitation."
A little more time and money on sanitation would have gotten the United States Glass Gjmpany a class of work people more self- respecting, capable, and efficient than would put up with such mare's nests; a little more efficiency in the working organization might have turned the balance between profit and deficit; a little more profes- sional conscience on the subject of the health of the workers might have contributed more to the sum of things than the increment of business acumen which this doctor-director put into his investment.
An instance of how easy it is to preach and not practice was shown by the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, one of the largest manufacturers of bathtubs, urinals, and water-closets in the country. Its advertisement in the technical press read;
"Are the toilet rooms of your factory clean, modem, and sanitary? Their condition is a daily expression of your attitude toward the health and physical wdl-being of your employes. Large employers are more than ever before realiiing their moral responsibility for the environment with which they surround their employes and surely none is more impor- tant than the toilet rooms. Would it not be worth your while to make a personal inspection to ascertain the true condition of your toilet rooms? The removal of insanitary fixtures and the installation in their stead of 'Standard' sanitary closets is your best assurance of safe sanitary toilet rocxns," . . . and so forth.
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When 1 asked the manager what kind of fixtures the OHnpany had found best for its own employes he replied: "You know the saying about the shoemakers' children going barefoot."
Their closets were below the average of decency in the District.'
Ill
SAFEGUARDING EMPLOYES AGAINST ACCIDENT
AND DISEASE
Having secured the working force, having furnished not only the tools but the shop facilities which will enable that force to work to the best advantage, the employer should see to it that its mem- bers are protected from accident and illness within his control. There is moral compunction here, but there is also an adminis> trative advantage, for there is great waste in repeatedly breaking new men in and in making good the gaps caused by temporary absence. This waste is most obvious in the skilled departments, but it is present wherever accustomedness gives speed, or team work gives group efficiency.
Fire
The most general factory hazard is fire, but for one great giDUp of industries in the Pittsburgh District that hazard is low. There is little to bum in any of the buildings connected with a steel works except in the pattern shop and the pattern storage building. These are usually built so as to be proof against fire from both out- side and inside. They are also usually protected by the sprinkler system, which is the most efficient method of plant protection so far devised, and are further equipped with fire-fighting apparatus and have a fire brigade instructed in its use. Fire insurance will cover the immediate losses on this property, and as the buildings are one-story structures, or have few people in them, the pos- sibility of loss of life is remote.
Factories in other industries present a different problem. Several stories high and containing inflammable materials and many workers, they are not safe, humanely speaking, unless they
'This company (1914) <* installing two three-story comfort stations, with sbowen, locker rooms, and toilets, for the service erf its foundry department which comes under the special slate law. Its Louisville plant has installations for t)M entire plant, but in Pittsburgh the enameling department, where toilets and bowls are ^icd, has still the same saniiaiy equipment as in 1910I 240
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can insure a rapid escape of the occupants from the building without injury from smoke, or fire, or panic.
It is usually assumed that when a tire-extinguishing apparatus has been installed in a factory and tire-escapes provided, the fire emergency has been met; that if a fire occurs it will be promptly ex- tinguished or. if not, the occupants will get out without difficulty by the fire-escapes. Experience, however.doesnotbearoutthisassump- tion.* The mere installation of a fire extinguisher does not make the apparatus effective at the critical moment. Certain persons must be instructed how to use it and this duty assigned to them. Moreover, lire-escapes, since they are not in constant use, become obstructed or broken; and people, not being accustomed to use them, are either afraid todosoorjam them and are injured in thecrush. Theladders or stairs are inadequate, and the flames and smoke issuing from the windows underneath make them fire traps rather than fire-escapes.
The time is rapidly approaching, if indeed it has not already arrived in some communities, when an architect who puts a fire- escape on his building or has one put on by the authorities, will be considered incompetent as a designer of safe buildings.
It is a truism that equipment to be kept ready for effective service must be used occasionally. Only a recurrent fire drill will solve the problem of use. That such a drill is effective in spread- ing confidence among those who take part has king been proved in the public schools. Here is all the difference between knowl- edge and ignorance. One inspires confidence, the other terror; one assures an orderly escape, and the other breeds a panic. I have in mind a New York candy factory which until a fire drill was installed was all tension whenever a fire engine passed on the street. More often than not some nervous woman in the large force fainted. Incidentally, anything which will prevent the minds of employes from being diverted from their work will increase their efficiency and be a paying investment for the employer.
I found but one Pittsburgh factory that had given consider- ation to this subject. The others said they had fire extinguishers and drop-ladder fire-escapes, but when I asked to whom was assigned the duty of using the former or lowering the latter, they gave the usual reply that "anyone would attend to them."
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In one factory a lot of rubbish had accumulated in the basement. "Suppose a fire should occur here, right now, what would you or anyone else doP" I asked. There was no reply. The building contained no tire alarm system of signals and someone would have had to cry "fire," with a probable resultant panic. I examined the fire extinguishers. Some were so old as to be useless and others so corroded at the nozzle that if they could be got to work it is doubtful whether anyone would have been able to force the plug of corrosion before the rubber tube had burst. In the Rauh clothing factory the openings leading to the fire.«scape$ were obstructed, and when we looked at the drop ladder, which a few minutes before the proprietor had said anyone could lower, it was found so bent and jammed in the balcony floor that when I left fifteen minutes later two men were still engaged in trying to extricate it.*
Several kinds of drop ladders are used in Pittsburgh, some of which are counterbalanced by weights hung on chains or wire ropes. These fust and get out of order. There is another kind of ladder which is re- quired by law in Boston, but which 1 did not see here although it is the best so far devised. This is a stairway with hand rails, counterbalanced on a brass axle by weights hung on the extended stair supports, on the cantilever principle. The stairs swing down gradually from the second floor landing to the ground when a person walks out upon them. The stair strings are so shaped that they bind on the balcony as a person goes down and the farther down he goes the slower they move, and finally they lock when he reaches the ground.
The one firm which had given serious attenti<m to the matter of fire egress was the Armstrong Cork Company. They had inaugurated a fire drill which they repeated once a month and which they executed fn* my benefit. The women left the building by a different stairway from that used by the men. The fire brigade unreeled a two-and-one-half inch base and pointed it at an imaginary fire. The drill was admirable; the work of the brigade, I fear, was impractical. In the first place, fire is the most fearful antagonist known and it requires long training to learn how to attack it effectively. In the second place, a Iwo-and-one-half inch hose in the hands of inexperienced men would damage the place with water faster than it would check the flames. Fire which has reach^ a stage requiring the use of such hose needs professional fire fighters.
Well placed buckets, water barrels, and chemical fire extinguishers, which a fire-fighting corps can handle after a little practice, are quicks and more effective implements for factory volunteers in checking an incipient blaze. There should be an alarm so arranged that its signal
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not only notifies everybody in the building on just what floor the fire is located, but also calls the city fire department.
With such an alarm an effective fire drill will get the occupants of a factory out of the building before the fire department arrives, so that the professionals can take effective charge of the situation.
The Fire Drill. The question of an effective fire drill, however, is not a simple one. When, in 1894. 1 took charge of the Nemst-Lamp Company, a Westinghouse interest in Pittsburgh, I found the factory to be an old building of brick, with so-called interior mill construction. It possessed only one stairway, and housed on its five floors somewhere between two and three hundred people, mostly women. As the building itself was full of inflam- mable material, and as it was surrounded by rolling mills and furniture storage warehouses, it was considered a bad risk, and insurance rates upon it were proportionately high. Realizing my responsibility for the safety of the employes, 1 set about studying how they could escape. The chief of the fire department, after inspection, agreed with me that the building was a fire trap, but could offer no recommendations, except more and better fire-escapes, precautions against fire, and methods of extinguishing and retard- ing its spread until the arrival of the department.
Not being satisfied, however, that even with the preventive measures introduced, the occupants of the building would be safe if a fire gained headway, I appealed to the managers of most of the progressive manufacturing establishments of the region, only to find that not a single concern had developed a scheme of rapid dismissal similar to the fire drills of the public schools. 1 then wrote to some of the largest concerns in the country with the same result. The drill master of the local board of education was ap- pealed to. After several attempts to introduce in our factory a similar drill, he reached the conclusion that the building was so different from those to which he was accustomed, the people so much older and less subservient to discipline, that he was unable to develop a fire drill which he felt would operate in an emergency. 71ie crux of the problem was a defective building from the standpoint of human egress.
Driven back on my own resources, 1 proceeded to work out a solution from an engineering standpoint. This was to arrange 243
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for what amounted to practically a separate stairway from each floor. When this was accomplished we installed a fire drill with- out difficulty which emptied the building in three minutes.
This fire drill, actually taking the employes out of the build- ing, was the first, so far as I know, ever introduced in an American factory. Yet ten years later I found no surviving example of it in the Pittsburgh District.* At the time, managers from all over the country visited our plant to see it in operation. Those who tried to introduce similar fire drills experienced the same difficulties I have mentioned, namely, that factory buildings are usually deficient in stairways. Small factories growing into larger ones, add lateral extensions to their buildings, but usually provide no additional stairways. This doubles or trebles the number c^ people who must crowd down the old exits when the shout of " fire" goes up. The same thing is true if in a new construction additional floor space on the same building site is secured not by wings but by building higher. To serve these upper stories in case of emer- gency, outside fire-escapes, originally ropes or ladders, have gradually been develop«i into a permanent feature of modem buildings. But because of their contracted space, the cut-off at the first story, and their tendency to get jammed in the case of panic, fire-escapes have proved their inadequacy in emergencies, with frightful loss of life.
My later studies for the New York State Factory Investi- gating Commission developed the principle that people should not have to remain in a burning building longer than three minutes. Every building should have an exit test which should empty it in this time. If the building fails to meet such a test it should be altered till it does, or condemned.
The Fire WALL.t Where factory buildings are too tall for separate stairways from each floor, the only adequate solution is the fire wall running from foundation to roof. This separates the main building itself into two great compartments, and the
* An act requiring fire drilli in factoricj and industrial establishments wfaeie women argirlsareentptayed was passed by Pennsvtvania in 1911. Many Pittsburgh establish inents carry it out, but the law has yet (igu) to be universally enforced, t In 1911-ia Mr. Porter was the fire expert of the New York State Fac- tory Investigating Commission, appointed after the Triangle Fire, when 14) em- floyes lost ttieir livH. The (ire wail was his major constructive recommendatUHi. t is now read into the New York law and is being adopted by architects generally. 244
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employes may escape laterally, instead of vertically, simply by passing through and closing the fire doors behind them. A lire drill will empty the employes from the danger zone within a min- ute, whereas without it, the employes on the lower stories fill the staircases, and those on upper stories are held back while smoke and panic cause death even if the flames never reach them. Fire walls are now required on new construction by Pennsylvania law. Safety Appliances and Hospital Care
There is now a general tendency all over the country to guard the employe against accidents due to dangerous machinery by installing safety appliances. The reader is referred to Mrs. Kelley's report* for a presentation of the extent to which un- guarded machinery has long been permitted in the District, and to Miss Eastman's! for a reckoning of its frightful human cost.
In the absence of governmental compulsion, exceptional employers had done pioneer safety work. The United States Steel Corporation,} to which many of the Pittsburgh mills are subskliary, attacked the problem of accidents in a very practical manner through the appointment in 1908 of a committee of safety, — since become a Bureau of Safety, Sanitation, Relief, and Wel- fare— whose inspectors examine the plants of the corporation and their equipment and submit reports of conditions with suggestions for improvement. The constituent companies also have safety departments and many of the subsidiary plants have mill com- mittees of their own. The procedure in the National Tube Com- pany at McKeesport is somewhat as follows:
The manager of the plant appoints a pennanent chairman who draws up a schedule at the beginning of the year assigning two superin- tendents of departments as members of the committee for each month. In this way the superintendents know at what time they are to serve and at all times are keeping their eyes open for matters they wish to report. This oxnmittee makes an inspection of the plant semi-monthly. Two reports are sent to the manager signed by all the members, one taking up the question of safety to employes, and the other, sanitary conditions.
* KcUey,Fk>rence: FaclMy InipectioninPittsburgb. P. 189 of this volume.
t Eastman, Ciyjtal: Work-Accidenli and the Law. (Pittsburgh Survey.)
t Ibid., pp. 344-168. Appendix 111, Safely Provisions in the United States
Sted CoTporatton, by David '^ ^ '- ^ ' " — --'-' .-»•■.-
National Tube Company, wa: XX, p. 494 of this volume.
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Once a week the heads of the various departments meet for lunch- eon, after which the reports are taken up and each superintenduit has in- structions to carry out the recommendations pertaining to his department. He is required to make a report at the next meeting.
The co-operative work of these mill committees proved so effectual that it was determined to appoint departmental committees to co-operate with the mill committees and to consist of three workmen for the day and three for the night turns. One member of each shift is changed each month so that in the course of time a great many men in the mills will have an opportunity to serve. These workmen make an inspection every week and report direct to the superintendents. I attended one of the meetings of a "mill committee" in the National Tube Company's plant at McKeesport and was very deeply impressed with the conscientious way in which their work was being carried out.
The rec(»nmendations of these safety committees, once they have proved their worth, are compiled in a code of standard safety specifica- tions, and all new machinery is ordered to accord therewith. As a result of this system the number of accidents has been materially reduced. The National Tube Company has compiled figures which show that from 1909 to 1914 there was a marked decrease in the number of serious and fatal accidents to its employes, and also in the working time lost by reascm of accidents- Similar figures for the United States Steel Coiporation show a decrease in serious accidents, and an increase in expenditure for ac- cident relief. (See charts, pages 496 and 497.)
This system of preventing accidents is supplemented by a more and more adequate system of care of injured men. Many minor cases which heretofore were not properly treated are now given the utmost attention on the ground that infection may in- capacitate men for longer periods than hurts. A speck of grit or steel used to be removed from a workman's eye by a fellow-work- man who backed him up against a wall and tried to get it out with a knife or a piece of wood. This frequently led to blood poisoning. Today it is the intention to give each case immediate, anti- septic treatment. The Carnegie Steel Company has developed* since 1909 a most comprehensive system under a chief surgeon. Fully equipped first aid to the injured hospitals are established at each of the mills, and two first class surgeons are in charge, one during the day and the other at night. A trained nurse acts as assistant to each surgeon. A folding stretcher equipped with a * For a comprehensive statement of this work see article by William O'Neill
Sherman. Appendix XV, p. 45$.
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tourniquet is placed in each mill building and there are electric wanning pads in the local station for use in case of shock. These local emergency hospitals, however, are supplemented by company wards in one of the largest city hospitals to which each case, as soon as it can be transported, is transferred in an automobile ambulance. Here X-ray apparatus and other special equipment are available, types of mill injuries are made the subject of con- tinued and expert study, and the leg and arm which in years past would have been amputated is sav«].
Every foreman receives instructions regarding the operation ctf the system. Every employe when engaged is furnished with a copy of a notice which is printed in seven languages including English. Under the old system men frequently went back to work too soon, only to break down and perhaps become permanently incapacitated. Under the new, the foreman gives the man a card to the surgeon, and the man can not go on the payroll again with- out presenting a card from the surgeon that he is physically fit.
The accident reli^ system established by the United States Steel Corporation in 1910 tides the workman over this enforced lay-off.* It also makes it to the interest of the management to get him quickly and permanently well. If expert m«lical care can cut short his convalescence it reduces the charge on the relief fund. If, on the other hand, it guards against a relapse due to premature re-employment it may save a second and perhaps greater charge against the fund. The system c^ medical super- visicHi extends over the men after they are again at work, and in case the patient does not report regularly to the surgeon his fore- man is at once notified so as to prevent a break in the treatment.
This intelligent and skilled handling of accident cases has materially lowered the mortality from accidents and rendered the results of casualties less serious. In contrast to this system de- vdoped by the Carnegie Company many of the machine shops and factories had arrangements for first aid to the injured which were absdutely trivial. A bottle of antiseptic wash and a roll of band- age tucked into the drawer (rf some clerk who was thought to have some kmndedge of how to bind up a wound was all that could be found in seme shops, while others had a Red Ooss outfit and some- tne about the place supposed to be best qualified was assigned the * See nidi, op. dt Appendix VU, p. 330. 247
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duty of applying remedies. At the Mesta Machine Company the task fell to the lot of the foreman of the pattern shop; In the Jones and Laughlin mills — which in output rank well up with the Car- nefpe Company — to the watchman at the gate.*
Protection from Occupational Diseases
Poisons, Dangerous Fumes, and so Forth. The danger attendant upon some factory occupations is crften of a different character from that which suddenly maims the body or claims the life. It may be unperceived, insidious, slowly but surely affecting the vital organs. It is just as essential that the employer protect the employe against lead poisoning and acid fumes as against ac- cident or lire. The manager who controls a dangerous process bears a moral respcmsibility for the health of employes, and the trend among industrial nations is to make the responsibility legal.
No general systematic study of occupational diseases had been made in the Pittsburgh District, although powerful chemical reagents enter in at a hundred points in manufacture.
Id the course of my tour of inspection I gained some indications of the extent of the problem. Steps had been taken by particular cwnpanies to ward off the more obvious dangers. Thus, as part of its accident-pre- vention work throughout the country, the American Steel and Wire Com- pany had endeavored to control the fumes from its wire annealing tanks.
In the annealing processes elsewhere I found no special provision other than that of a high and open room for carrying off the acid fumes from vats where nickel or tin plating or pickling of steel was carried on. It is wellknown that these fumes occasion acute and chronic inflamma- tion of the mucous membrane, as do those of brass foundries where pit furnaces for crucibles were installed. Where the Schwartz furnace is used a hood and pipe through which the fumes of the volatilized metals escape out of doors is part of the installation.
In the car painting shop of the Pittsburg and Lake Erie Railroad the paint was applied by mechanical spraying apparatus, and the assistant superintendent informed me that they had had no cases of painter's colic, due to lead poisoning, since they had installed an effective suction draft system. Previously they had had frequent cases.
• The Jones and Laughtin Company was the "tail-ender" in the accident movement among the great companiei of the Pittsburgh District. Subsequent to 191a, L. R. Palmer, an electrical engineer, wu put in charge of their safety work, and inaugurated radical reforms. Emergency hospitals and sanitary facilities have been introduced, as well as protective devices, in the first year the company re- ported a marked decrease in accidents.
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its carpenter sKops has been cleared by the United States Steel Corporation
View of Cahpenter Shop Showing piping to carry off dust from Ihc dilTerenl machines
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At the NatHHial Lead and Oil Company, where paints are manu- factured, and at the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, where lead is an element in the powdered enamd used in glazing bathtubs, high rarans and good natural ventilation were provided and respirators sup- plied. The men, however, complained that the latter were inconvenient and uncomfortable and many were not wearing them. The superin- tendents said that some men were constitutionally immune to the disease while others caught it quickly. The latter, they claimed, were immedi- ately relieved and cared for by the companies till well, and then given other work or let go. A more reasonable explanation seemed to be that certain employes had exceptionally rugged constitutbns, other; kept them- selves in good physical condition by being careful in their diet, in their habits of bodily cleanliness, and in their methods of work. Under these circumstances lead poisoning might not assert itself for years. The com- pany physician stated that he had had no serious case of lead poisoning in all his experience in the bathtub works, but neighboring physicians told another story. As many of the employes were non-En^ish-speaking foreigners, a dear and unmet obligation seemed to rest on the company to inf<Hin its men as to the dangers, explain how to guard against them, and itself make a scientific investigation of a problem which mayor may not mean the jeopardy of life and health and livelihood.*
Dust. The ordinary iron and steel foundry is a very dusty place at certain periods of the day and night during the sand- mixing process and during the "shaking-out" of the castings. The grit when breathed is irritating and often conducive to tuberculosis. With two exceptions, no efforts were made to improve these ccoditioos in foundries:
At the works of the National Tube Company a suction draft sys- tem to draw out the dust from the sand-mi:iing room had been installed. The Sanitary Manufacturing Company had given up the old method of tumbling and shaking the castings to get rid of the sand. Many of their castings are thin and there had been a large percentage of breakage. They adopted the sandblast method and operate it in an enclosed room where the workman is supplied with a hdmet similar to that used by divers and, like a diver, has fresh air piped to him from outside.
* A lead poisoning act was passed by the Pennsylvania legiilature in 191] (see Appendix XII) but upio Jaly, 1914, no attempt had been made to enforce it in Pittsburgh. The Standard Company h» added a trained nurse, who gives medical attention and advice; but in Sour yean has made no expert study of trade disease in its works, nor introduced methods for cure and prevention such as are employed by Engliih enamelling works. Its phyncian. Dr. Lansfitt, now states that they have had but one case of lead poisoning in two years; and sets his verdict as*i»t the world's experience.
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In brass and metal polishing rooms, grindstones, emery stones, and buffing wheels were as a rule covered by a hood from which the dust was drawn by suction.* In a few cases, however, these hoods were found pushed so far back by the operatives in order to get better light that they were practically ineffective. In Homestead, where fire bricks are made, the work naturally occasions considerable dust and there were no provisions for preventing employes from inhaling it.
Work which involves contact with poisons and dust has an obvious bearing on the health of those employed; there are other factory conditions in which the connection is not so obvious but which clearly aggravate disease. I did not in 1910 find any in- stance of a company taking part in the national war against tuber- culosis in ways which are open to the progressive employer. The state board of health had for some time been inspecting the facto- ries of Massachusetts for tuberculosis. In many shops the ap- plicants for positions are physically examined. In the Worcester district, employes who develop the disease in service are sent to the state sanatorium, the employer paying part of the expenses of the employe for ninety days, the state the remainder — a period long enough to make a start for recovery in incipient cases and to inculcate habits in the use of sputum cups and in right living gen- erally. Throughout New England notices about spitting on the floors are conspicuously posted and cuspidors are distributed about every room in machine shops, one being placed at each machine tool. In the 38 plants visited in the Pittsburgh District notices of this kind were seen in 1910 in the Heinz factory, and there only.
Alcoholism. Managers have been even slower to keep abreast of the physicians in another field. Those who seek an efficient working organization will tell you that they hesitate to accept chronic alcoholics, because although they may be excellent workmen when they are normal, they can not be depended upon for regular service. Yet I found no system of selecting employes in Pittsburgh which would have discovered these alcoholics, nor did I find any measure of relief being practiced which recognized the drunkenness which disrupts the force as in the nature of a disease.
• The Annstrong Cork Company his an exhaust system for runovim dust which at once saves valuable cork waste and is a boon to the workers. So also with metal filings in the main grinding room of the Standard Sanitary Manufactur- ing Company. A "Blower Act" requiring such apparatus in all grinding rooms came into effect January t, 1914.
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One manager complained that a certain bookkeeper who was a very ccHTipetent accountant never could be depended upon when any special work was to be done; as, for instance, the closing of the books for the annual directors' meeting at the end of the fiscal year. This man would always be missing at that time. It was clearly exasperating. The fact that the cause had not been associated with the effect seemed to me surprising. Students of neurasthenia state that overwork, overstrain, and work in high temperatures, all tend to physical exhaustion from which cenain temperaments seek to recuperate by the use of stimulants. A large number of people who have an hereditary organic nervous weakness cravealcobol, and indulgence in it induces a physical condition in which more alcohol is demanded until the body becomes saturated with the poison. Then a revulsion of desire takes place and a more or less normal physical state is gradually attained. This cycle is so recurrent and so com- mon as to be recognized as a disease and is given the name "alcoholism." The victim becomes incapacitated for work, gradually falls lower in the social scale, andfinally reaches the status of a dependent.
To refer to a minor symptom: The representatives of more than <»ie company told me that among the greatest banes to management in Pittsburgh were tardiness and irregulanty. The usual custom, to dock the employe for an hour's time when he turned up after the whistle blew, or lay him off for the day, only served in many cases to cost the manage- ment more in overhead expense which went on in the man's absence than it cost the offender in lost wages. I have known manager; to get better results who, instead of docking the late man, paid a bonus to all who were punctual and regular in attendance. This acted as a deterrent to the drink habit and increased the number of men who turned up in good con- dition after pay days and holidays. The problem is not past invention. A blast furnace superintendent in McKeesport cut off the bulk of the drinking among his men between heats by the simple device of having them register every time they passed through the mill gate to the row of saloons across the way.
Just as it is illogical to punish a man for being late by making him later, it may be uneconomical to put an end to absenteeism in an ex- perienced and valuable employe by discharging him without trying to help him master his fault. In Bellevue Hospital, New York, alcoholics are grouped in a special ward and given a treatment, employed by at least one Pittsburgh physician, which in the majority of cases staves off a recurrence of the habit unless the patient deliberately starts in again.
Workmen ought to be willing to co-operate in eliminating this menace to shop organization and routine. But whether they do or not, managers knowing that the inefficiency and accidents 251
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due to alcoholism are a serious source of loss, should not remain supine before the problem and chalk off to human nature what may in large measure be laid to slack discipline* or, as we shall see, to degenerating work conditions.
Alcoholism in the case of mill and furnace men, where great heat and long hours are the rule, would seem almost to come under the category of "occupational diseases."
In 1910 the Illinois Occupational Disease Commission examined 340 employes in blast furnace departments who had had mild cases of "gassing." These men had occasionally been overcome by the constant inhaling of carbon-monoxide. They were ranoved to the outer air where they recovered, and then returned to work. An excess of red corpuscles was found in every case. The men were submitted to a strength test along with an equal number of workmen not exposed to " gassing." The blast furnace men were deficient in muscular power; the majority were below the average mentality: 97 per cent admitted using alcoholic liquor. and 70 per cent admitted using it in excessive quantities. Since it is a recognized fact that prolonged exposure to carlxHi-monoxide may produce a profound impression on the nervous system, it was difficult to make deductions as to whether the sluggish mentality and muscular deficiency were due to gas or to alcoholism; or whether the alcoholism was itself a result and itot a cause growing out of the length of hours, the atmosphere in which they performed their heavy work, and the natural reaction of human nature in the brief leisure left them to turn to pleasures that are concentrated and seek stimulants raw enough to goad the fagged senses-t
The elimination of alcoholism, then, is more than a matter of prohibition during working hours or of expelling drunkards. It may hang on the whole scheme of work and call for remedial re- adjustments in hours and physical conditions. On the other hand, it may hang on the whole scheme of recreation outside of working hours, or on a combination of the two with human nature thrown in. The president of a Pittsburgh mining company, who had tried to shut liquor selling out of one of the company towns and failed, was executing a flank movement by starting a club with billiard room and bowling alleys. In a region such as this, where indus-
• The restrictions thrown around the Westlnghouse Relief Funds — providing that benefils shall not be paid for disability due to alcoholism, itimulints, brawls, etc., — undoubtedly have a bracing elTccI on an organiiation as a whole. See Appendix XVII, p. 468.
t Fitch, John A.: The Steel Workers, pp 57-58. (The Pittsburgh Survey.) The U. S. Steel Corporation has introduced oxygen helmets for the use of repair men whose work takes them into a gas-laden furnace. See Appendix XV, p. 455. 252
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tries have grown by leaps and bounds far tn advance of an adequate setting of community life, the situation calls for civic leadership as wdl as trade ability from the forceful men who would build up the productive efficiency of the industries.
Fatigue
Human fatigue, mental or physical, is like the "fatigue of metal." Up to a certain point stress may be applied re- peatedly and recuperation to a normal condition be effected, but beyond this "elastic limit" fatigue is cumulative in its effect and the natural processes can not restore the injury which has been produced except through a period of rest and specific treatment.* Sometimes, in the case of both men and metals, when this cumula- tive action has been carried too far the effect through an actual destruction of tissues and material is permanent and a breakdown is inevitable. Engineers recognize this fact in designing machin- ery, and the latter is bou^t under a guarantee that it will meet without "fatigue" the service to which it will be subjected. Nev- ertheless, care is taken that the machine should not be overtaxed, and frequent inspection is made to ascertain whether through ig- norance or carelessness it is being maltreated. When there is any evidence of such maltreatment investigation is made, the person responsible for it admonished, and its recurrence guarded against. In certain cases where it is impossible to observe the effect of repeated stress, as in hoisting chains and hooks of cranes, these are periodically subjected to the annealing process to restore their physical properties. In several shops in Pittsburgh chains have been discarded altogether and wire ropes substituted, which, when subjected to overstrain, break one strand at a time and the first one getting into and dogging the pulleys serves as a warning of approaching failure.
With these illustrations of the care which is taken of machin- ery, the lack of care of the " human parts' of the plant as a going concern stand out prominently in the Pittsburgh situation.
The length of working day, for example, is an elementary consider- ation in the matter of nervous and physical strain. Yet time schedules have not been modified according to the extent to which a given kind of
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work exhausts a man. Wherever pared down, it has been due to a very different consideration — the bargaining power of particular labor unions. Thus, we had in Pittsburgh the eight-hour day in the building trades as against the twelve-hour day of the steel mills; a whole holiday every al- ternate Saturday in the foundries in summer, as against the 36$-day year of the blast furnaces, which did not stop even for the Fourth of July.
The growing factory practice of a Saturday half-holiday in summer, usually made good by a shortened noon hour the rest of the week, and the custom of using spell hands in hot work in the steel mills, perhaps marked crude beginnings toward easing the tension where heat aggravates fatigue. Apart from them the only evidence I discovered in Pittsburgh of a rea^- nition on the part of a management of the severity of the stress to which employes are subjected was in certain departments in the telephone ser- vice, where a respite during the middle of the morning and afternoon, in one case of fifteen and in another of twenty minutes, was granted the giris, who were meanwhile relieved by others.*
The distance we have still to go in determining the relative euc* ti(Mis of different forms of labor is suggested by the findings of the Toronto physicians who constituted a board of inquiry into the physical aspects of a telephone exchange, and who held that more than five hours' rapid work a day at the switchboard as there conducted was bound to use up the girls.
The manager of a factory who has required his employes to pass a physical examination knows definitely that they are not equal in their ability to undergo stress. Other managers ought to know in a general way that all people are not equally robust any more than they are of equal height or mentality; nor is the same person always at the same level of dynamic efficiency. Especially is this true with women and with those who have passed their youth. We are only beginning to consider the adjustments neces- sary, so that from the production standpoint the curve of output may be kept as nearly even as possible, and from the human stand- point the health of the operatives be conserved.
The Shop Clinic The pioneers in scientilic management have set themselves the task of laboratory methods to study variation in efficiency as it occurs in a given shop or department.
The "preventive clinic," which exceptional works-managers * See Buller.op. cit., pp. a8a ff. See also Goldmuk,op. dt., pp. ji-^a.
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have established here and there in America — but none as yet in fittsburgh* — has possibilities as an instrument for the study of the human factor in such equations.
Here entrance physical examinations are made and periodical visits paid by a physician who examines all employes who for any reason are brought to his attention. Those examined are either treated or given a diagnosis of their case and advised to consult their own physician. At intervals, talks on hygiene are given by the doctor to the assembled work* ing force. Circulars with sanitary information are distributed. The subjects to which attention is especially given in a plant employing large numbers of women are: Common colds, anemia, immoderate use of tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco; constipation, neglected teeth, eyestrain, skin diseases, irregular menstruation, tuberculosis, alcoholism.
Such clinics help ward off the infectious diseases which untn- fonned workers bring into the factories. They detect incipient cases of tuberculosis and can be made the means of instructing workers how to guard themselves against trade dangers, such as poisons. They may prove in time valuable sources of information as to occupational disease, and like the chemical laboratories which test every heat of metal turned out by a steel mill, may watch the processes from the standpoint of fatigue and efficiency.
IV DEVELOPMENT AND STABILITY OF EMPLOYES
Traces of German influence and the beginnings of scientific management are to be found in Pittsburgh plants, more or less at variance with the methods of handling labor which have grown up in the steel industry. Yet the local methods are themselves typical, even when extreme, of much of our industrial practice, and will be better understood if we stop to consider the country- wide and often world-wide developments of which they are a part.
During the wonderful expansion in industry which character- ized the latter half of the nineteenth century, our technical schools, following the example set by leaders in technical education abroad,
• The medical service of the H. J. Heini Company has developed notably in this direction. A demist and iwo physicians (a man and a woman) are regularly engaged who render service without charge to employes. Among other employers, the Armstrong Cork Company has a physician and dentist in attendance and the Telephone Company a rounded scheme for safeguarding health — including physical examination, first aid, payment of board outside the home when there is 3 con- tagious disease in the family, sick benefit for six weeks, disinfection of instni* ments, and so forth.
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devoted their curricula exclusively to the physical sciences and applied their knowledge to the perfection of mechanical equipment in the trades. The great wealth of our natural resources, which through this mechanical development suddenly became available, attracted a flood of immigrants whose labor in turn produced a material prosperity which those who were capable and alive to the situation were not slow to grasp and develc^. Many thousands of factories, mills and industrial establishments of all kinds sprang up all over the country, each requiring one or more men to manage its working organization. As there were no schools of instraction in labor management, each of these men was obliged to evolve a method of his own and became more or less adept according to his general education, tact, temperament, and innate ability to handle men. Under such circumstances there were many instances of bad management, and some of its effects upon its victims were shown by remonstrance, strikes, and labor troubles generally.
Some of these mistakes in management resulted from certain in- grained habits of thought which are slow to change. For example, if a man were to lake his horse out in the street, hitch his traces to a post or a rock and then proceed to lash him with a whip, it would not be long before bystanders would interfere no matter whether he proclaimed that the horse was his property and that he fed and housed him and therefore could do what he chose with him, or that he thought his actions would not do his horse any harm. Nevertheless, if the man should loosen the post or the rock from the ground he could beat the horse all day long while making him drag it and no one would expostulate. We see similar occurrences in our streets even now. In other words, the horse, as soon as he is used as a beast of burden, loses his identity as an animal and certain treatment is accorded him by custom as an agent for work, and is admissible not- withstanding the fact that it tends to make the horse less capable of performing the work desired of him.
So in the field of industry, when it came to pass that many working people had to be yoked to a single task. Suppose a man were to place a number of men and women in a room, make some of them stand all day long without allowing them to sit down to rest and require others to sit all day on stools or boxes without any support to their backs. Suppose he made the room so dark that they could with difficulty see clearly; and left it so poorly ventilated that they would become poisoned by the bad air. Suppose he frequently chided and threatened them because they were not standing right or sitting as he had told them to do. 2S6
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Even if the man should pay these people — let us assume they need the money — It would not be long before there would be such a protest by the public that he would have to stop his performance.
But let this man, in addition to the above exactions, make these people do continuous hard work all day long, work perhaps of a nature subjecting them to hazard of health and limb, and at once their identity as human beings is lost; they are looked upon simply as "labor"; the fact that they are employed in productive labor and that productive labor is a desirable thing, gives the performance a sanction in the eyes of the performer and of the dowly aroused public.
Welfare Work
We in America were not quick to recognize the change in the character of the work brought in by the factory system, with its repetitive methods of manufacturing duplicate parts; nor the in- tensification of these methods by "piece work" and " rate cutting" in the era of severe competition among manufacturers.
Military Germany, on the other hand, with every citizen prized first of all as a man of war, saw the disastrous effects of abnormal competition and bad management upon her working classes in the period of industrial development following the Franco-German War, and as an imperial policy sought to bring about a different condition of affairs.
HenccWohifahrts-Einrichtungen, or" welfareinstitutions," fostered wdl lighted rooms cooled in summer and wanned in winter; bri^t, cheer- ful, and ctMnfortable lunch rooms where the working force could obtain a wholesome and substantial meal at a nominal cost; rest rooms, equipped to supply Unt aid to the injured; complete hospitals for the more seriously injured or for those who were ill; reading rooms where the best literature, both technical and popular, could be obtained and drawn for home use; lectures and classes for the instruction of those who desired to advance thonselves in their work, with social and athletic clubs, gymnasia and baths, for the pleasure, health, and physical development of the men and their families, and beneficial organizations and pension systems for sick, injured, and aged workmen.
American manufacturers who traveled abroad to learn what was being done in foreign establishments, were not slow to observe the im- proved efficiency of the operative in quantity and quality of output. They forthwith introduced many of those features into shops in this country with very satisfactory financial results and exploited their intro-
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duction by advertising their plants as "model factories," and the innova- tions as "welfare work." Tliis name, an incorrect translation of the German, was taken to imply that the new features were solely for the bene- fit of the working people when they were at bottom a paying investment. Welfare workers soon began to be looked upon as a part of the employer's method of covering up his own shortcomings or his exploitations of the employe. In some instances the resentment naturally aroused among American employes, who objected to being considered objects of charity, killed the purpose of the installation; in others (as in the Westin^ouse Air Brake Works) the name has been or is being dropped as inapprapnatc
The result is that while the process of improvement in factory ad> ministration has perhaps not been delayed by the welfare movement, it has gone forward through other channels as part of the regular course of management; through the agency of outside organizations, like the Young Men's Christian Association; through the demands of organized labor, through borough and city governments; and, above all, through factory legislation and enforcement.* The last ten years have seen a demand for increased efficiency and social refonn calling for the introduc- tion of many of the features referred to, especially shorter hours, better lighted, heated, and ventilated workrooms, better washrooms and toilet accommodations, and protection against occupational diseases and acci- dents.
] do not suppose that there is a more notable example in this country of the generous adoption of the German welfare system than that in the H. j. Heinz Company in Allegheny Gty, reference to which has already been made. Mr. Heinz, a German, absorbed the ideas which he had seen worked out in factories in Germany and introduced such as could with advantage be adapted to his business here. This business is now a large one and the company claims that its growth from small beginnings is in no small part attributable to the efficiency developed by these features and the consequent close co-operation between employer and employe. A free circulating library is situated in the main building and fre- quent lectures and entertainments are given in their auditorium. There are a gymnasium, recreation rooms, and a roc^ garden with a conservatory which supplies flowers for window and roof boxes: there are classes in drawing, cooking, millinery, and dressmaking,
* For nample, sm Appendix III, p. 414, for a siatemeftt of Y, M. C A. work for immigrants; Appendix XIII, p. 4;j, for brief Tfivmt of work of outside organizations among wage-earning women; Appendix XIV, p. 4^ for sanitiiy standards set this year for the first time by the brewery workers; and see Keliey, p. 31) of this volume for difcst of the new woman's labor law of 1913.
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College Room. W kstikchouse Cllb hast Pinsburgh
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and when a new need of this kind is discovered it is cordially met. Gatherings bring all members of the organization into close touch.* But notwithstanding the existence of this object lesson for forty years in the heart of Pittsburgh, I found that it had been very little imitated in the District. This was largely because the Heinz employes are mostly women, while the predominating industry has been that of iron and steel, which requires buildings, machinery, and operatives of so different a type that the lack of resemblance of the work has precluded comparison of conditions. Moreover, so preponderating has been the influence of the steel industryf that the conditions that have prevailed in its plants have tended to retard sanitary improvements and advances in other lines in the District.
Among other plants employing womenj the Armstrong Cork Com- pany had a supervisor whose duty it was to see that their needs were met. At the Rauh clothing factoiy, where Messrs. Rauh themselves took a persona] interest in the treatment of employes, men and wcunen were sep- arated in their work. This was also the case at Jenkinson's stogy factory. McCreery's department store was lending tuition to employes who desired to take salesmanship courses in a correspondence school. These students were invariably advanced in the organization. Qasses in sewing, dressmaking, and millinery also were held in the building, and lectures on business methods and thrift were frequently given by the manager and others whom he invited for the purpo$e.§
* Members of the Heinz family are erecting a spacious social building to take the place of the nei^boi^ood house which has long been maintained near the Alle^eny canneries (Covode House). It is for the service of the people of the District.
t In addition to safety and sanilary refonn, playgrounds in mill neighbor- boodi, viuting nurses in a few of the mill towns and resident household demon- straton in two or three of the mining communities in the coke region are today manifestations of a new order in the master industry itself.
t In its lunch rooms and rest rooms, its kitchen where lea and coffee are served free of charge and odoHess cooking is permitted; its fortnight vacation with pay, its sick benefits, pensions, and medical service, the Central District Telephone Company has adopted many of the welfare features in which the Heini plant led ; but in common with the national social policy of the Bell system it has introduced a more modem note in its physical examinations, its scientific study of workroom environment, and of work processes. For example, it devekiptd a one day of rest in seven schedule in its continuous operations years in advance of the steel com- panies.
I The McCrecry store was selected for inspection in igio as representing the highest standard then reached in Pittsburgh mercantile establishments. The four years succeeding have been yean of rebuilding, new buildings, and en- brgement in six large department stores in Pittsburg, and social work among
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Mill Towns
Turning to plants employing men: All around Pittsburgh are small towns which have grown up either as the result of the development of some natural product found there, or because some enterprise previously located in Pittsburgh outgrows its site, and unable to acquire adjacent property, has been compelled to move where land is cheap and where it will have plenty of opportunity to expand. Such a town, especially if composed of employes of one industrial establishment and their families, presents distinctive responsibilities from the managerial standpoint. In talking with employers some of them stated very positively that they did not feel that they had any business to interest themselves in what their employes did outside of working hours. Some employes also stated with equal positiveness that it was none of the employer's business what they did in their own time. When, however, what the employe does in his own time has a very decided effect upon what he does in his employer's time, it can not help but be the employer's business to interest himself in it, and when he does this in a proper way it is not only not resented but is welcomed by the employe. The suburban plant must be able to attract and hold a labor force nearby; and living conditions and recreational facilities are factors which help or hinder in doing so. The Westinghouse interests in Pittsburgh had notably recognized these respon- sibitities in their two manufacturing centers.
The Electric Club in a building belonging to the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company at Wilkinsburg, is a dub head- quarters for the engineers of the various Westinghouse companies. It contains an assembly hall where social gatherings took place frequently and where lectures of a popular and technical character were given twice a week. Some of these latter were published in the Electric Journal, edited and managed by members of the organization.
At the Westinghouse Air Brake Company's plant at Wilmerding,
employes has actively but irregularly entered into the new Kheme of thingi. Lunch and rest rooms, vacation camps, women physicians, social clubs, welfare workers, S^itunl ay closing in summer, are features in which different stores have excelled. At the same time, the Consumen' League and tabor departmcot have with the new women's taw which went into effect November i, 1913. a better instrument than ever before to enforce common standards of hours, comfort, and sanitation for all mercantile workers, a group which Miss Butler found to be among the most desperate sufferers from lack of public regutatkm. See also Appendices XII and XtX.
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John ETTA In the Frecpoit diitrkt of Pennsylva
Mariakha
The coal mining business can not draw on a cily full of workers.
The mining operator must not only build his plant, but figure out how his employes are to live. Not a little of the labor trouble in the past has been due to consiiuction of inferior houses, rented at exorbitant prices.
The Pittsburgh- Buffalo Company, under the leadership of John H. Jones, himself a practical miner, has done much to change this order in starting a number o( mining towns from the ground up, ai the same time that they have sunk their shafts from the ground down. The advances in house construction and community service give promise of similar advances in street layout and architecture in the
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The rentals in ihese mining (owns of the Pittsburgh -Buffalo Company are below anything thai can be oblained for the same money in the industtial center. Brick houses rent for S1-7; a room: frame, St.fo. The maiority of the houses are furnished with electric light and some with natural gas, hot and cold water and baths. Wholesale construction, and power and water supplies needed to run the mine, make good household service possible, even when the town starts in an out of the way mountain valley
School at Mahiann* Al revolution over the early days in the mining towns of western Pennsylvania. In bath houses, schools .and recreation centers, progressive operators are recog- izing the social element entering into the mining operations
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a town which contains practicany but this one industry, the company had established two buildings, one for the Young Men's Christian Associatbn and the other for the Young Women's Christian Association, and here classes were held in stenography, typewriting, drawing, woodworking, and in elementary engineering. There were also classes in English for Italians and Hungarians and similar classes were being started in another part of the town close to the homes of these people. Aside from its humanitarian aspect, this instruction has become practically desirable in Pittsburgh owing to the large number of foreigners who do rough work often under the supervision of foremen who can not speak their language, with resulting waste, injury, and expense. *
Classes in English also were held in a building owned by the Am> bridge Works of American Bridge Company, one of the subsidiaries of the United States Steel Corporation, and a gymnasium was located in the administration building of the plant. A very large acreage of low land, flooded in spring by the Ohio River, on the banks of which the works are situated, had been turned over to the families of employes as a vegetable farm, and a large number raised their year's supply of garden truck there.
In the office building of the shops of the Mesta Machine Com- pany, at West Homestead, there was a branch of the Pittsburgh Caraegie Library, to which the company supplied a large number of technical and pc^ular magajioes and trade papen for the employes, who had the privilege of taking them home.
The most commodious social centers for workingmen in the District are in the three Camegie towns adjoining the Braddock, Duquesne, and Homestead plants of the Camegie Steel Cc»npany. Mr. Camegie built very large and attractive buildings, each hous- ing not only a Camegie library, but class rooms, a billiard room, a gymnasium, and a swimming pool. These are patronized not only by the men, but by the women and children of the com- munities. The library is free, but for the educational and social features small fees are charged.
Subsequent to my Pittsburgh visit, the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company at its new plants at Woodlawn, has gone into perhaps the most extensive company house enterprise of the Dis- trict, and the Crucible Steel Company has plotted a town at Midland along town planning lines.t The model town of Vander- grift built by the Apollo Iron and Steel Company, the pioneer undertaking of this sort in the industry, was laid out on modem
' See Roberts. Peter: Wage-eamerj of Pittsburgh. P. )j of this volume. See also Appendix III, p. 414. f See Appendix II, p. 410. 361
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lines, but unlike Woodlawn and Midland had no special facilities for the unskilled laborers who make up the bulk <^ the force. . It had remained, therefore, up to igro, for the coal industry, rather than for steel or manufacturing, to attempt a rounded com- munity experiment, in which forethought was given to all the common factors entering into the day's work and household needs.
This was Marianna, started in the open loo miles from Pitts- burgh, by the Pittsburgh-Buffalo Coal Company. It had a thousand men on the payroll at the outset.
The houses are built of brick and wood and contain from four to five nx>nis, the larger of them having baths. They were rented at the rate of 50 cents per room per week. There was, at the time of my visit, a large store, which although not run by the company was owned by per- sons directly connected with it. The men, however, were not c<»npelled to trade there and teamsters from neighboring towns might bring their wares into Marianna and solicit competitive business. A large, well ap- pointed brick building, with billiard and pool tables and bowling alleys, an auditorium for entertainments and lectures, and a room for roller skat- ing and dancing, formed a pleasant social center. On the first fkior of this building there were also a drug store and a physician's office.
The coal tipple in Marianna was when built the largest tn existence and was designed on tines which in many respects — not the least of them the safety features — were original. The coal mine itsdf was entered from a "bath house" in which all the miners changed into their working clothes on arrival. On leaving the mine they again entered the house and took a shower bath before putting on their clean clothes. One whde floor was given up to these showers, and another floor to the clothes room. In the latter were separate baskets in which each man's clothes were packed and locked and then pulled up to the ceiling by ropes, a system copied from that in a German mine. At the base of the entrance shaft the mine was lined for a considerable distance in all directions with white brick and the ceiling was supported by iron girders. It was lighted here by electric lights so that the appearance was not unlike the subways of New York and Boston. Ventilation was supplied by fans driven by a 600 horse- power steam engine with alternate unit of smaller size for use in case of accident. Precautions to prevent accidents were taken at every point.
This company was largely a family affair and owned mines and
brick yards in other industrial towns, each one embodying improvements
suggested through experience gained at the othera. For example, John H.
Jones, president of the company, himself a total abstainer, said that ex-
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perience had led him to prefer a bar in the town, run on the canteen prin- ciple, to an attempt to enforce prohibition. In one case the amount of liquor OHisumed per person can be limited, whereas in the other beer and whiskey are brought into the homes in quantities in kegs and cases.
The town was run at the start as a "borough" under the laws of Pennsylvania by various men of the Jones family, who are practical miners and know personally a large number of their employes. This adaptation of the "borough" system in launching a new community was worked out by the president who, althou^ rather paternal in some of his methods, is broadminded enough to know that the men's wishes must be consulted. The mines are strongly unionized.
Relief and Pensions
The mining company which has to set up civilization on a mountain side along with its hoisting engines and ventilating fans, appreciates what it means to have efficient men in call. The manufacturer in the large employing center does not feel the need so keenly. Yet various efforts to build up community of interests with their employes are observable, based on the employer's desire to maintain a corps of men upon whom he can depend.
The question presents itself to the manager as one of stabil- ity, to the workman as one of security. What is to become of my employes after their efficiency has been used up in the work of the shop is a question which the average employer has not asked him- self. Much less has he come to the point of securing their willing interest and sense of partnership by assuring all who arrange to serve him for a definite term of years a year-round income or at least a pro rata payment which would enable them to tide over a period of interrupted service.
Yet employers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere get just what they pay for, and a study of results obtained where high standards of management are established tends to show that the respective bar- gains are likely to be in essence as follows: Cheap and Insecure wages: Low Efficiency, Floating Employes; or. High and Sure wages: High EfTiciency, Pennanency of Service.
Accident and Sickness Relief. Benefits to employes who have been injured or have become ill are in a limited sense guaran- tees to employes that those who are dependent upon them will be cared for in case of accident while at work. The old common law of master and servant, little modified, has been the rule in Penn-
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sylvania. At one time it was customary here as elsewhere for the manager of a factory to insure himself in an employer's liability company against the danger of being sued by an injured workman, and as soon as anyone was injured this company was notified and immediately made the cheapest terms of settlement it could with the workman. Pittsburgh employers came to believe, however, that their employes got very little of the money paid to the in- surance company, and there has been for some years past a ten- dency among the larger companies to deal with the injured person directly and during disability to give assistance based on the man's record and term of service, and his family responsibilities, apart from the question as to whether or not the company was legally responsible for the injury.* If, however, the injured person sued the company for damages he was barred out from all the automatic benefits he mi^t otherwise have secured. Some benefit plans are supported without contributions by the men, as in the case of the relief plan of the United States Steel Corporation; some by the company and employes jointly, as the relief departments of the Westinghouse companies,t to which 80 per cent of their employes belonged, the Pittsburgh Coal Company, the Pittsburgh Railway Company; and some by employes alone, as the Standard Manu- facturing Company and the Heinz Company.
In 1914, the Pittsburgh Railway Oniipany together with the Du- quesne Light Company, the Beaver Valley Traction Company, Equitable Gas Company, and other public service corporations affiliated with the Philadelphia Company, took out group insurance covering all employes in their service for one year or over- This is not only a notable departure for the Pittsburgh District in the method employed, but is described by the Equitable Life Insurance Society as, to the best of their knowledge, in point of the number of lives, the largest aggregate ever insured. The premiums are paid by the employers; and individual policies distributed to the employes, who designate the beneficiaries. Those employed two years or more are insured for an amount equal to one year's salary, pay- able in the event of death in 13 monthly instalments; those employed over
* For an analysis of adequacy of these payments, see Eastman, op. dt., pp. 1 19 S. The relief departments have tended to prevent friction and to give the employe a sense of sureness in case of accident; but until new standards were set by the relief plan of the U. S, Steel Corporation (see Eastman, Appendix VI, p. 300) had in no sense made good the lost earnings.
t For the new relief plan of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, see Appendix XVII, p. 468 of this volume. 264
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Double Houses. Four rooms and barh. Running w
Houses from Si.yso to $4,^00 are sold 10 per cenl down and iK per cent per month
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one year, but less than two, for an amount equal to one-half of one year's salary. The benefits are markedly less than the standard set by modern compensation laws, but cover all deaths, those from natural causes as well as from work-accidents.
In the matter of service pensions, no less than in accident re- lief, leadership in Pittsburgh has gone to Mr. Carnegie who, when he retired from business, established a pension fund of $4,000,000 for the employes of his 12 constituent companies. Under its provisions any employe who had reached the age of sixty years, had been at least fifteen years continuously in the service of the company, and was incapacitated, might be pensioned. An em- ploye under the age of sixty years who became permanently dis- abled from sickness or from injuries received while not on duty, might also, provided his case fulfilled all the other foregoing re- quirements, be placed upon the pension list.
The pension allowance authraized was upon the following basis: For each year of service 1 per cent of the average regular monthly pay re- ceived for the entire term of service; thus an employe who had been thirty years in the service and had received an average of I70 per month would receives pensionallowanceof 3oper cent of l70,or fai. The acceptance of a pension allowance should not debar any former employe from engaging in other business, but such person must retire or be retired from and can not re-«nter the service of the ccMnpany.
TABLE I. — BENEFITS AND PENSIONS PAID BY CARNEGIE RELIEF FUND. 1902-1910 INCLUSIVE*
|
yiet |
ActHtnk |
Dtalb Bmefitt |
Attouanas |
ma |
|||
|
■910 lis 1905 1904 ■9(Q ■903 |
fi7,777.oo 31,733.00 30.307-70 '7.MS-'S 15,033.70 ^96.187*0 106,6s j!37 19.700.90 |
fe3.496-^S 8^771-00 109.033.00 130,449.00 '01.973.50 |
J106.596.j5 94.oS3.oo 81.093.00 68.769.90 58.313.55 46.853.35 36.573.75 37.173.80 13.196.95 |
«3 16.869.60 300,545 00 310,433.70 3:6.764.05 |
|||
|
Tou |
U |
>443.39'-'9 |
>783,043.75 |
J53 1.510.65 |
li.7S6.9SJ» |
■Froni Ninth Annual Report, ihowing operations for 1910. The American Steel and Wire Company at about the same time established a pension department for the employes of its 34 works scat- tered throughout the country, seven of thenj in the Pittsburgh District,
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This department, like the Carnegie Fund, was in igio taken over by the United States Steel Relief and Pension Fund—devised along lines com- parable to the new compensation laws now enacted in 33 states — which it preceded by ten years.*
The Pittsburgh Coal Company established a pension fund to which they gave fio.ooo outright, setting aside also (3,500 worth of capital stock to be paid for by the employes. In addition, for every 3 c«its per week paid in by each employe the company contributed an equal amount. This fund supplied a pension of $10 per month to each employe who had served the company for ten years continuously, and who through dd age, accident, or sickness was permanently unfitted to earn a living.
Reymer's Candy Company gave to faithful employes of twenty- five years' standing a pension varying from $3$ to $$0 per month.
The Armstrong Cork Company paid its old and faithful employes li.oo a day for life, but reserved its decision as to who should fall into the category of old and faithful. Many of the companies interviewed had practically pensioned off some of their old hands, but expected them to do a nominal service as regularly as they were able. This method of treating employes is open to the criticism that it savors too much of chvity. They feel that they are dependent upon the caprice of the management, which they can not rely upon, and are unable to look forward with pleas- ure to their time of retirement or to live with satisfaction under the system.
Profit Sharing, Initiative and Co-operation Profit Sharing. In 1903 the United States Steel Corpo- ration announced its policy of offering 25,000 shares of its common stock for sale to the employes of its 135 subsidiary companies at |83.;o per share, and each year since then such amounts of either preferred or common stock, or both, as employes would subscribe for, have been sold to them for about the market price.
Conditions of the sale have been slightly modified from time to time in accordance with the dictates of experience, but in general terms the amounts to be purchased by employes have been limited in accordance with the salaries received by them. For instance, those receiving $3$o or
* Eastman, op. cit,. p. joo. The most comprehensive pension system inauguraied in the Pittsburgh District since ihat of the Steel Corporation in 191a is that of the Weslinghouse Air Brake Company published in Appendix XVI 11, p.
48;. Generous asare their terms, they both induce security — to the employe ir old age, and to the employer, against a shifting working force — at expense of anoi social good; namely, liberty to strike or to change employment without sacrific-
ing the accrued benefit. In this respect they make (or stagnation and subservience. In many other respects, they are a notable adva 266
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less are not allowed to subscribe for more than can be secured by about 3o per cent of their salary, while those receiving |6,7$o arelimited to about 10 per cent. Payment, to be deducted from the wages of subscribers, can be made in monthly instalments in such amounts as are desired with minimum payments of I3.00 per share. Up to three years, as much time may be taken to pay for the stock as desired, but interest at $ per cent per annum is charged on deferred payments. Dividends are credited in part payment. If the stock is held continuously and certificates are exhibited to the treasurer every five years with evidence that the holder has been continuously in the employ of the company and has shown a proper in- terest in its welfare and progress, the company will pay a bonus of )$.oo per share, and in addition a pro rata p<»'tion of the fund composed of all such bonuses which have accrued on stock returned by the employes.
Employes temporarily suspended from employment by the com- pany, as for instance through the closing down of the plant, are not deprived of the bonuses above menti(»ied nor will payment for stock be required during such suspension, nor will the time during it be counted as part of the three years allowed for payment. The employes, however, have always felt that there is a string tied to the five-dcdlar bonus pay- ments by the requirement of evidence of a "proper interest," and they have not taken stock as freely as they otherwise would.
In Reymer's candy factory I found a crude system of profit sharing extending to the higher officers, foremen, and women. The only other company in the District which had done anything in the direction of profit sharing was the H. K. Porter Company, and they abandoned the plan seven years earlier as they "found that the men showed no more interest in the ctxnpany's welfare than they had before."
Initiative and Co-operation. In a paper read before the National Civic Federation at its meeting on November 33, 1909, George W. Perkins, a director of the Steel Corporation, said:
" If profit sharing means anything, if providing for old age means anything, if caring for those who become ill or injured while in the service means anything, it should mean the fostering of the interest of men in their work, whether that work be sweeping out the office, shoveling coal, or presiding over a great commercial company. In short It should mean real co-operation between stockholders, managers, and employes. In all the inventbns and ingenuity that have been brought to bear on business affurs in the last quarter of a century nothing has been found to lake the place of a man's ability to do, — with a proper incentive behind that abil- ity,— and no such substitute ever will be found. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to American business interests of today and tomorrow
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that every man in any given concern be so associated with that concern that he will ^ve the best there is in him to the performance of theduties assigned to him."
Our discussion of these various social schemes affecting the working force has thus brou^t us to the basic problem of organiz- ing for work. It will be possible to take up only certain phases which especially impress the observer of labor administration as it is practiced in the Pittsburgh District. Dictation is of course at the opposite pole to the co-operation preached by Mr. Perkins. Yet immigration, methods in vogue in handling gangs and machine tenders, and the anti-union policies of the large plants have c<xn- bined to reduce the average Pittsburgh workman to a small o^ in the scheme of industry.
Bonus System. Acute labor troubles in the past led to determined efforts to import a class <^ tractable but inexperienced foreign labor which was subsequently trained to do the work re- quired. The stream of immigration, thus accelerated, has become self-perpetuating, and has supplanted many of the native workers. Today the Pittsburgh managers complain of the dearth of skilled men. Although they say they would be glad to pay higher wages to a higher class of labor, so far as I could ascertain no concerted effort was being made to attract such a class to Pittsburgh or to develop one there. The managers seem content to make the best of the class of help which automatically presents itself.
To meet the situation, however, a few machine shops had instituted a " bonus system," a slight modification of what is gener- ally called the premium system of wage payment, devised to make it worth a man's while to increase his output.
One of the features of this system is a planning and rate-fixing de- partment which makes a time study of the various operations and sets the time in which at a certain definite speed of machine and feed and depth of cut of a special tool the task should be accomplished. This task system tends to destroy a workman's initiative in his work and he becomes prac- tically a part of the machine.
Undoubtedly, under the intelligent study of the trained specialists in the planning department much unnecessary labor has been eliminated, and the work has been so systematized that the workman accomplishes his tasks with greater facility and less interruption than before, while his rate of wage payment is much fairer. The material is delivered to him.
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his tools are sharpened and the machine is set for him, and alt he has to do is to put the work in and take it out.
In this way almost any young man can be made a "machinist" in a comparatively short time. As he begins to pick up a little general knowledge about machinery, however, his curiosity becomes aroused about some of the things he sees about him and he volunteers the remark: " 1 should think that you would do this this way," which is too often met with the retort, "Never mind thinking, you are not paid to think. Do as you are told, we'll do the thinking." This admonition, the slogan of the system, is about as modem as the dictum of a priest of the dark ages or a ukase of the Czar of Russia. As the planning department knows that the workmen have not the data from which to make intelligent comments such an answer is pertinent, but it discourages all initiative on the part of the men and the company does not get the benefit of whatever intelli- gence they possess.
One of the effects of this system also is to discourage young men fran entering technical schools. Employers having developed a system which does not require skilled operatives, are not going to pay for skill. The Carnegie Institute of Technology stated that the graduates of the craftsman classes established in the early years received no more than the ordinary workman's wage and he therefore encountered considerable dif- ficulty in securing students, as the boys consider the time spent at school wasted. The Pittsburgh employers failed to see the advantage in hiring such men or in encouraging their training.
This arrangement of work gives fair satisfaction to the tnen until one loses his job and then he is no better off than when he went to work, as he has gained nothing which will help him else- where. When hard times in the industry come, and men are laid oS. they can do little more than join the bread line.* Moreover, the monotony of the routine causes these men to seek other work, and the percentage of loss of help of this type is very high. A natural consequence of this monotony is that men who find their conditions of work unattractive, are putting their children into offices to learn a business rather than a trade. Generally speaking, Pittsburgh managers tacitly acknowledged that in respect to building up their organizations they were simply opportunists and were temporizing with existing conditions.
* Efficiency meihods introduced in the Westinghouse Electric and Manu- facturing CoRipany and the laying off of t,ooo employes out of a total of 14,000 in the coune of six monlhi (due to the financial depreuion) were two (actors in the strike of June, 1914. when 8,000 employes were out for a month under the lead of industrial unionists.
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The Suggestion System. This losmg-oot of the individual in the matter of skill and volitioa in doing thin^ is only one^utf the story. Every man has, or thinks be has, certain needs, and ontfl these are met or until be b shown that Uwy are largely im- a^nary be will be dissatisfied. Under the dose relationship which used tocust when shops were small, the employe went directly to his employer with his grievance, they talked over the situaticm face to face, and more often than not dtssatisfactirai was removed before it readied the acute stage.
Now, however, the growth of industries has materially changed ccmditions so that in such modem industrial plantsas those of the Pittsburgh District the emfrioyercan not possibly come into sympathetic contact with each of his empk>yes. There was evi- dent need for some substitute for the old relationship in order to supply a safety valve for individual grievances; for if all channels of communicatun are cut c^, the employes naturally fed that the employer is indifferent to their needs and efficient team-work be- tween management and employes is lost.
The simplest way to bring out needs of the various individuals in a large organization and to supply a vent for grievances is through the establishment of the suggestim system.
Where such a system is in use, locked boxes with a slit in the lid through which communicaticHis may be dropped, are distributed about the works, one at least being placed in each department, in order that suggestions may be written in duplicate and on the same size paper for easy filing, pads with numbered leaves in duplicate, carbon sheet, and poicil are attached to each box, the writer keeping the copy, and the (»igi- nal going into the box. All suggestions must be signed, no anonymous communications being given consideration. Collections are periodically made and the person whose duty it is to attend to the system tabulates the suggestions in the order received, omitting the names of the writers.
The second stage in this development is the establishment of a works committee, ctnnposed properiy of representatives elected by the working organization. This committee meets weekly to pass upon the suggestions. As these are submitted to the committee without the authors' names, they are considered purely on their merits. Such a cmn- mittee is likely to exercise a severe censorship over the suggestions, as they wish the management to feel that any that receive their endorsement will be a credit to the organization.
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A list of the suggestions, with the action which the works committee takes on each appended, is posted on bulletin boards placed adjacent to the suggesticm boxes. This publicity ensures careful action by the com- mittee, develops discussion and a public opinion on the value of each to the management. A copy of the posted list goes to a second committee, composed of foremen and superintendent, which is appointed by the man- agement. When this committee has acted on the suggestions its decisions are also posted in the shop and the whole organization thus knows exactly what has been done with each communication. The recommendations of both committees go to the management for final action, and suitable remuneration is made to the authors of all adopted suggestions. Employes who have made the greatest number of adopted suggestions each quarter year are given an extra payment, and the foreman from whose department the greatest number of adopted suggestions originate, also gets financial rccc^ition in order .that he shall encourage rather than oppose the system. When properly installed, the suggestion system, supple- mented by the committee system, is essentially an educational measure. At first an employe does not know how to observe; grad- ually as his vision improves, he begins to think, then to realize how little he knows, and linally to read and study. The opportunity to indulge his growing desire to improve must, however, be sat- isfied by giving him technical and other literature to take home. When these educational measures lead employes to start courses in a correspondence school or to attend trade schools, a very im- portant step has been reached in the development of workmen who would otherwise be engrossed in the monotonous drudgery of a repetitive process. Later, suggestions of real value begin to come and empkiyes are gradually inspired by an ambition to advance. The adoption of their suggestions encourages them to feel that they are important factors in the company, and a sli^t payment makes them understand that their services are recognized. 1 know of nothing to compare with these means for stimulating internal development in a shop. But the rationale must be under- stood by the man responsible for the installation of the system and its maintenance or it will wither and dry up.
I found a suggestion system working in the plant of the American
Bridge CtMnpany. The superintendent said that they were getting a great
deal of benefit from it. A works' lunch room, the result of a suggestion,
was then being planned. The National Tube Company, like the Bridge
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Company, a subsidiary of the Sted Corporation, had some time earlier established the system in their plants both at Kewanee, Illinois, and at Lorraine, Ohio, and were considering its introduction at their plant at Mc- Keesport along lines which would be an extension of the worlu committee instituted as part of their safety campaign. In the H. J. Hdnz Company the suggestion system was in operation throughout the plant and the manager stated that they continually received valuable suggestions, that the employes mdeavored to fit themselves to make suggesticms, and in this way the whole force had improved.
Co-operative Committees. The workmen's committees are an important factor in the safety campaign.
David S. Beyer, for several years chief safety inspector of the American Steel and Wire Company, with headquarters at Pittsburgh, has described them as foUows:
"Our superintendent makes out the lists of workmen's committees for several months and posts them in the mill so that the men will see them and know some time ahead that they are to serve on the committee. They (the men) like to see their names used in this way and 'load up in advance for the time when they are to begin their service.' The men, pleased of course to meet the head of the plant (when on the committee), take considerable pride and interest in the safety work and are c<Hning to realize more fully its importance."
In other words, they begin to feel that they are an integral part of the business and proceed to assume some responsibility for its welfare.
Any system is at fault which causes its participants to load up and hold their suggestions for several months waiting till they get on the committee to deliver the goods. Every employe should be induced by a prompt payment to be constantly on the lookout for improvements, and the foreman whose men do not make recommendations should be admonished.
Through the committee system, a company can benefit by the activity of a thousand human minds. When this system is properly installed, with its works committee elected by the men, with a proper arrangement for a monthly change of one or two members so that many employes have an opportunity to serve, and with the other committee or advisory board competed of fore- men appointed by the company to serve by the year in operation, the similarity to the upper and lower houses <^ a legislature is 272
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Under Preiident Thomas Lynch, Ihe H, C. Frick Coke Company— ore of Ihe subsidiary companies of the Untied Stales Steel Corporation — is today developing a system of leaching practical housekeeping in connection wilh visiting and districi nursing in Its mining communities in western Pennsylvania. The nurse tnakes her home in one of the regular houses, furnishes it at a cost which a miner's (amily could stand, and by classes in cooking, sewing and housework — and even more especially by living the life — endeavors to build up household siandards. The furnishing of the house at Lambert Mine, shown in this and the succeeding pictures, cost Sa^9. The work is modeled after that of the Association of Practical Housekeeping Cenleis, in New York, and was taken up at the suggestion of Miss Ida M. Tarbell-
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apparent, and a first step toward industrial democracy taken. In a very short time an inert body of uninterested individuals develops into a thinking, vital force working for the success of the enterprise.
When we look back over the history of political government we can see the evolution which has taken place from the patriarchal and tribal relation through absolute monarchy and oligarchy to democracy. The patriarchal type of government was crude, but it served its purpose while the tribe was small and all the members knew one another. When, however, the tribe grew to be a nation the leader became separated from his people and lost that personal contact which gave him an intimate knowledge of their require- ments.
The evolution of industrial management has, as it were, paralleled that of political government. The small shop with its proprietor, a practical mechanic, who knows all his men, typified the patriarchal, tribal stage. This form of government in many industries gave way to the larger industrial establishment in which the employer was a stranger to his employes; his contact with them was through subordinates, jealous of their temporary power and wielding it autocratically until managers and employes became distinct classes between which there was no longer a common bond of interest. Instead of working together they pulled in opposite directions; and instead of men organized for work solely by plants or establishments, we have had the organization of employers on the one hand and of workmen's unions on the other, and the fight of the two for mastery. That is the economic history written large in the Pittsburgh District. In the dominant industry the employers, as Mr. Fitch has brought out," are in the saddle. How far the unions are able to contest or share in that control in other occupations is brou^t out by Professor Commons and Mr. Leiser- son.t
But in no industry in the Pittsburgh District did I find an instance of such a co-operative scheme of industrial government as that since worked out in the garment trades in New York, by which employer, employe, and the public sit on a joint board of control,
* See Fitch, op. cit., pp. i}9 ff.
tSee Coinmons, John R., and Leiserson, Wm, M.: Wage-earners of Pitts- burgh. P. 113 of this volume.
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having jurisdiction in sanitation, safety, and shop conditions gen- erally, while similar boards take up and settle grievances.
V
CONCLUSION
Except in comparatively few plants among those visited in the Pittsburgh District could I discover that employers were trying to improve the condition of their employes or to elicit their co- operation with the expectation of developing a higher type of organ- ization apd in consequence a better and greater output. On the contrary, their efforts seemed to be directed primarily toward a merely mechanical increase in the quantity and quality <tf output ; though of course, if at the same time some of the means instalkd for this piApose did indirectly improve the employe the employer was all the more pleased.
In defense of this statement i can point to the conditims already described. All managers complained of the dearth ci skilled labor. But this dearth was caused not only by the char- acter of effort demanded by tonnage industries, but by the char- acter of treatment accorded to labor generally in the District. The bonus systems with their planning departments and the nptt- itive character of the work were not tending to develop either skill or intelligence in the working organization. Only in fragments of the industrial area was thought given to the comfort and conven- ience of employes with the aim of enabling them to do more and better work.
The exceptions, some of them notable, have been set down, and I will not be accused of overlooking them in saying that, tak- ing the District as a whole in igio, if men wanted to wash they had to do it as a rule in the cold water of the "bosh" in which the furnace tools were cooled. Clothes lockers were scarcely known in the mills; hot water, soap and towels even less so. If men wanted a drink they were obliged to get it from a pail of dirty water. No proper place was provided where they could eat their lunch, so they went generally to a saloon across the street which offered a chair to sit on and a cheery welcome. Water-closets were in- sanitary and loathsome. There was practically no attempt to select healthy employes nor any solicitude shown to keep them healthy. Little thought was given to prevent occupational dis- 274
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ease. No attention was paid to tuberculosis or to alcoholism, for the development of which conditions in the shop are often largely responsible. Yet the managers complained because the men were addicted to drink, were tardy and irregular in attendance, and careless in their work.
In accidents, however, the United States Steel Corporation was showing the worid what it could do when finally pn>mpted by interest ; and in sanitation, since the year of my investigation, large scale improvements have been entered upon. But ten years before precedents for doing these very things were not wanting, and precedents exist today for doing many other things which would be as greatly to the corporation's interest. What has been needed has been to overcome the inertia (rf managers whose minds were molded under the fierce competition that in the 90's existed between the companies that now compose the corporation.
Every locality has a history in which some event, or series of events, have prominently figured and permanently left their impress. And it does not take long to discover, in reviewing the record of the Pittsburgh E)istrict for the past half century, that it is largely the history of the development of the Carnegie Steel CcMnpany, "which," as the historian states, "started in 1858 with a value of |i4,8oo and was sold 43 years later (1901) for nearly one hundred thousand times that sum." Such a remarkable achieve- ment has undoubtedly had a very powerful effect upon the District.
What in fact impressed me most forcibly in revisiting the field as an old-time steel man and Pittsburgh manager, was the number (rf old and dilapidated mills which in their day had been important plants. A little inquiry elicited the fact that these were owned largely by companies which were building new and up-to- date establishments outside of and at a considerable distance from the city limits and were allowing the old plants to actually work themselves out. This is only part of the change.
In the eariy years each enterprise was small, the owner was a practical iron worker who selected his fellow-workmen according to their skill, and developed an organization in which all worked together under what we have called a sort of tribal and patriarchal government which produced mutual effectiveness. This eariy owner had little knowledge of bookkeeping and was satisfied with a fair profit on his investment.
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When Mr. Carnegie entered the field he bnwght with him a knowledge of railroad organization and management which was of a much higher type than that of the ordinary mill owner. His natural shrewdness led him to demand that his investments pay as high a rate of interest as could be obtained. He was the first to develop cost accounting, so that he knew with a fair degree of accuracy not only what his product was costing him, but also, by keeping his eye on his competitors' improvements, what their product was costing them. He saw that by having better equip- ment, a greater capacity, and a more energetic organization, he could turn out more product than his competitors in the same length of time and underbid them in the open market. So he built machinery in dull times and raced it in high times, and a pack of competitors followed in full cry.
It was the pursuit of this policy that set a pace in mill ton- nage which has given Pittsburgh the supremacy of the world in the steel industry. But it has been at a fearful human cost. Its treatment of labor was followed by an equally domineering form of trade unionism, which was in turn vanquished in the Homestead riots and kept under thereafter by an iniquitous spy system. It fostered railroad rebates, opposition in state legislatures to the pass- age of laws for the amelioration of labor conditions, and support in the National Congress for a high tariff. It promoted "gentlemen's agreements" which were only to be broken. It wore out the mills and drove the less aggressive and more conscientious managers to the verge of bankruptcy. Finally, no longer able to stand the financial strain, the unsuccessful competitors combined and bought out the aggressor at his own price and the era of combinations was started. Then, with womout mills, each combination tried to pay dividends on the enormous capitalization which the promoters had saddled on to it in order to recompense themselves for their part in the transaction. In the effort to reduce the cost of manu- facture, the new management cut down wage rates, raised the hours of labor, and in other ways developed a method of treating the employe which drove the most skilled, intelligent, and self-respect- ing workmen elsewhere. Their places have been filled by foreigners whose immigration was encouraged. The effect (rf unrestricted competition was never better demonstrated. The old efficiency 276
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which came from Mr. Carnegie's original co-operative organization and its economic management, was lost. Since those strenuous days Pittsburgh has borne a poor reputation in the labor market. As few attractions are offered it, skilled labor does not come.
Fortunately for the industry, the "good times" which fol- lowed this period of combination aided the payment of dividends and allowed the accumulation of surplus for depreciation and re- newals. After awhile, when the time arrived in which it became financially possible to renovate the old mills, many of them were so far gone that it would have been necessary to rebuild and re- equip them. When it was seen that the modem machinery was larger than the old, and therefore that more ground area would be needed for its installation, that the price of real estate in Pitts- burgh had increased and therefore taxes would be inordinately high, and that restrictions against the smoke and ore dust and other nuisances were becoming severe, it seemed best to build out of town where conditions for manufacture would be more favor- able. It has been fortunate just at this epoch that the new policies for accident prevention, ventilation, and comfort, have taken hold of the younger steel managers themselves. How far labor conditions will be bettered in the new industrial towns, inwardly as well as outwardly, will depend upon just how far these new forces in mill administration win out against the old. It wilt depend on just where the financial heads will be willing that the balance shall be struck between profits and the terms of work.
As the development ct Pittsburgh has been due largely to the steel industry, so the customs and methods of the business have in the main imposed themselves on the various other indus- tries which have grown up in the city, the only difference being that as a great amount of ground area was not necessary for the accommodation and extension of these latter, they have not been driven out of town but have expanded upward in buildings several stories high.
But in the fierce competition of the last few years these in- dustries have emulated the example of the master industry and the most ambitious manager in each has forged ahead and, gather- ing around him the ablest minds and the highest skill that he could 277
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obtain, has built up a fortune for his company Uttle recking of results to the particular industry at large or to the community.
In conclusion tt should be said that there are no criticisms made in this paper which were not made to the people who showed me their plants. The spirit with which those criticisms were received leads me to feel that there is a desire to make improve- ments, and that the conditions which are not modem are so not on account of deliberate purpose but in some instances from a lack of physical ability to change at once the direction of the great cosmic forces which have been so long at work, and in other in- stances from a lack of knowledge as to how to make the change.
Pittsburgh manufacturers are probably doing vhat they can under the conditions which environ and hobble them, but with the aid of an awakened public sentiment and an ideal of enlightened management they should emerge from the serious disorder which has tapped Pittsburgh's social vitality and brutalized her labor to a recuperation full of civic and industrial virility. If they stop short in this endeavor Pittsburgh will lose her industrial suprem- acy altogether, for her efficiency of operation will follow the skilled labor which has already left her, and another city or another community offering higher inducements to labor will be her suc- cessor.
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SHARPSBURG:
A TYPICAL WASTE OF CHILDHOOD*
Elizabeth Beardsley Butler
WERE a child of Sharpsburg to wander adventuring about the streets he would find his way sharply cut off to left and right by the Allegheny River and the sheer wall of hills which run parallel to it a scant quarter of a mile back from the water's edge. Starting at the bridge which marks the boundary line between Sharpsburg and Etna (the industrial suburb next nearer Pittsburgh on the west), he could journey eastward through a narrow rectangle of workaday activities. The borough is not more than a mile and a quarter in its corporate length, yet within it he would make acquaintance nevertheless with many different races and occupations. At the entrance of the town the sordid slums give way to numerous small shops, a few factories, and characterless lumber yards, all leading in gradual crescendo to Moorhead's Iron Mill and the one rather imposing office building situated opposite it at Tenth and Main streets. From this point on, the streets grow more heterogeneous. They are lined by middle-class homes, fairly prosperous looking shops, slums, a few attractive frame houses in good repair, some stone houses, once well-built but fallen upon degenerate days, and still farther east- ward by factories once more. The atmosphere of the place, from the tube works at the Etna bridge to Tibby's glass-house at the upper end of the river front, is one of dingy, restless utility.
* For changes in child labor and compulsory education lawi subiequent to tgoBsee Kelley, Florence: Facloiy Inspection in Pillsburgh. P. i89of this volume. Tlie fourteen-year age limit remains unchanged, but was made real in 1909 by re- quiring proof of age, placing the issuance of certificates in the hands of the school authonties. For three legislatures (1909, 1911, and 191J) all attempts have failed to repeal the exemption of glass-houses from the night-work prohibition for chil- dren under sixteen years of age. The description of the town is of 1906. 279
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Among confused impressions of narrow boundaries and much doing therein, the great black mill would inevitably stand out in the child's mind. It dominates eye and ear. So too it dominates the commercial life of the town, in its power to bring prosperity or ruin. It has attracted stove foundries and kindred industries and with them molds the character of the community. About it, too, have gathered the glass-houses which, as we shall see, even more than the mill itself, set meets and bounds to what life means to the young people of the community.
Sharpsburg bears little trace of ever having been a residential suburb, and the few wealthy men who at one time lived here have moved away. Workmen, not business men, are now in the majority, — unskilled laborers, railroad trackmen, workers in iron and glass. According to the census of 1900,3 fifth of the nearly 7,000 inhabitants of the borough were foreign bom. Sincethen the Italians, for example, have spread from lower and upper Twelfth Street to Thirteenth Street, Benson Alley, and along Penn Street, where they join forces with the Poles. The latter have in- creased in number to the point of building a church and opening a parochial school for their own children. Mill men tell you that Americans, who long since refused to compete with "Hunkies" for day laborers' jobs, are proportionately fewer now among the glass blowers or puddlers; that Slavs and Italians are in demand not only as laborers but even as appren- tices for the more skilled trades. There are Greeks and Jews, but these are still few in number compared with the older Irish and Germans, The iron mill, and occasionally the railroad, employ Negro workmen, but the Negro population remains practically stationary, crowding its three or four hundred souls into a few squares of the worst slum dwellings.
These were the most obvious factors entering into the physi- cal aspect and social condition of the town when, in the winter of 1908, 1 came to study it as a place where children are bom and brought up. The characteristic industries which location and to- pography had jointly molded, the racial groups which the indus- tries called together, the cheap, inadequate dwellings congested because of the very prosperity of the town — were all so many elements in the environment of Sharpsburg children. Cheap fuel, abundant raw material, transportation facilities by river and rail had brought large commercial returns, but the children, by- products of the town's unthinking life,— what care was being taken of this yield? How far had the community assumed responsibility 380
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not merely for perfunctory school -teaching for them but for their all-round development?
THE HOMES OF CHILDREN
I n Street after street the children, largely those of workmen's families, knew i home environment of two-story frame houses built with extreme barrenness of outline, weathered and smoke be- grimed. Here and there a group of comfortably built frame houses were occupied by clerks and small business men from the city, a few by glass blowers and other skilled craftsmen, but of the 380 squares in the borough 181 contained two-story frame dwellings of the class described. A child learns early the sensa- tion, if not the idea, of " leveling down" which manifests itself even in the outward aspect of such houses; ambition and imagination are alike stifled by the sense of subordination to industry in home and neighborhood.
The United States Census of 1900 gave the total dwellings cS the borough as 1,273 *nd the total population as 6,842. The postal census taken in the fall of 1907 estimated that a thousand newcomers had settled there during the intervening seven years.* Oearly, the town could not grow up over its steep hills or down into the river. The newcomers, therefore, had been obliged to house themselves within an area small even for its former popu- lation. The result had been a slight increase of rear shacks, a great increase of room crowding particulariy among Poles and Ital- ians. While the middle class element had possibly held its own, the demand for laborers had filled whole streets with boarding houses oi young Italian workmen.
Thus, sixteen-year-old Theresa Scorzafava was found helping at home in a house with nine boarders. She had been in America eight months and had never gone to school. A father, mother, daughter, and seven boarders were living in four rooms on a third floor for which the rent was $7.00. The rooms were to be reached only by a rickety frame staircase on the outside, and water was obtainable only from a hydrant in the yard.
This family lived on lower Twelfth Street, a muddy, unpaved region
where children were many. The river overflowed frequently to the second
floors of the group of shacks which were their homes. Qose to these
shacks were two rows of dwellings, newly built, of a type scorned by English
*Th«ceiW»of 1910 gave Sharpsburg 8,1$) people.
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housing refoimers in the 40's.* Each had a door front and rear. Some were divided into two houses built back to back, each with one upstairs and one downstairs room. Before each front window stood the privy vault. There was but one hydrant for an entire row. "Glass House Row" on Main Street, at the far end of the town, was of the same type. Each of its eight bouses was divided into two dwellings of two rooms each, and the tenants who lived in a front house had to pass through their nei^bor's living room or walk around the square to reach the vault in the rear. There were four vaults (one overfilled and out of use) and but two outside hydrants for the 18 families in this row. Waste water was thrown into the street sewers. The basements of the houses were of little use as they were flooded when the river was high.
It would seem that in such districts, where a majority of the houses had no proper sewage connection and no water save from the river, imperfectly filtered, where dwellings on Main Street and on all streets south of it were affected by the floods, especial care should have been taken by the community to safeguaitl the health of the people. The board of health had no statistics of causes of deaths nor complete yearly records of contagious dis- eases. The city physician made no report to the board and al- though, theoretically, when medical care was needed, a poor family might send for the city physician, this was practically never done. When a case of illness came up the city physician turned the matter over to the county poor relief physician who had in every instance, my informants stated, refused to assist the borough in either medical care or poor relief. One case cited by the secre- tary of the board of health had occurred during a smallpox epidemic two years earlier. A boy was quarantined in a frame out-house. His mother was bedridden at home, his father worthless. The family had no means of support nor of receiving proper care, but when the case was brought to the attention of the officials, relief was flatly refused. Except in cases of smallpox, scarlet fever, and diphtheria, the majority of the people were apparently doing with- out a physician, and even in those diseases they called one only when the illness was acute. Houses were fumigated only in case a patient died. As the families lived usually in one or two rooms and had no other place in which to stay, this was but a mock per- formance. Even apart from the danger of contagion, the continu-
* Engels, Frederick: The Condition of the Working Clau in England in 1844, pp. Si, 56. New York, John W. LoveH Co., 1887. 282
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ance of lax disinfection and inadequate medical care made a high standard of health and physical vitality in the poorer districts of Sharpsburg impossible.*
THE SCHOOL PLANTS
There was much good by contrast in the school environment of the children, although here too there were serious abatements. Public Schools. The two public schools enrolled between 800 and 900 pupils. With the exception of 200 italian-born children, five Poles, and three Negroes, they were American-born whites. The build* ings were well planned and kept in repair; class rooms were light and the arrangements for heating, ventilation, and sanitation were good. The school board included two former school principals, a former teacher, and a physician; it was perhaps their combined influence which had led to the establishing of a high school class from which students were admitted to the second year in the Pittsburgh high school. No high school existed ia the borough itself. School hours were from 9 in the morning to y.jo in the afternoon, after which period the responsibility felt by the school authorities ceased and the children were free to go their ways in the only playground they knew, the street. In the larger of the two public school buildings were cement basement playgrounds, 6$ by 30 feet, one for boys and one for girb. But they were used by four grades only and during the recess period, never before or after school. The large grassy yard was kept, not for play, but as an attractive adjunct to the building. There was no gymnasium. Medical inspection was unknown. The board of health reported cases of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and smallpox in families having children in school (when the family had called in a physician), and in such cases the other children attending school from the family were kept out for thirty days. One child died of diphtheria, and although the door was placarded the principal did not know of the death until notified of the funeral. Since the city physician was one only in name and many pec^le were doing without medical care, it was possible for contagious diseases to go unreported. The principal used his judgment in readmitting a child who had been ill with a contagious disease, or in excluding one with
* Not only child labor at night, but lank sanitaiy conditions have been SulTered by the Sliarpsburg cammunity. unchanged, lo judge by two rows of double frame boiiiei visited in the nei^boihood of the river in July, 1914- Two yard hydrants are depended upon by eight houses in one row, ii m the other. A double battery of ouukle privies divKJes the court, fronting the doorsteps of each bouse, M that privacy is unimaginable. The interiors of these privies were scoured — a tribute to the standards of the immigrant housekeepera: but they could not scrub out the stench. A tile drain was supposed to carry the excreta to the river's edge, but for a week it had been clogged and the vaults were full, the seepage draining out onto the court, where children were playing and a milk wagon drove up with clanging gong. — Editor.
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evident skin disease. Between factory inspectors and school officiab, as between school and medical authorities, there was little evidence of co-operation. The principal received no reports from factories (as re- quired by law) as to children under sixteen working. Although ;o or more children were leaving school yearly to go to work, he did not know into what shops or factories they went.
Parish Schools. Of the non-public institutions, the Gennan Lutheran school had only a small number of children and no classes be- yond the sixth grade. In the two large Catholic parochial schools, Ger- man and Irish, the combined attendance was nearly as large as that of the public schools. The same laxity as in the case of the public schools pre- vailed with regard to keeping track of the children from year to year; the same lack of records as to the number who went to work and as to where they were working. Moreover, Polish and Italian children who were attending public school in the spring of 1907 were advised not to return in the autumn as two new church schools were in course of con- struction; but up 10 February, 1908, the new buildings were still uncom- pleted and a half year's school attendance was thus lost to children who needed it badly.
The parochial schocds charged a tuition fee of $a cents a month, although this was sometimes remitted, and required pupils to buy their own books. The buildings were far superior to many of the Pittsburgh parochial schools, but they were not well ventilated and one of them had no washing conveniences. Playgrounds were conspicuously absent. One school had none; the other had a brick paved playground $0 by 60 feet at the side of the building, but this was used only before school and at recess. Neither school had a gymnasium nor any regular physical drill. As in the public schools, there was no medical inspection. In one school the sister in charge stated that she received no reports of contagious diseases from the board of health but simply heard of cases through children or neighbors. She said that a child with skin disease was "encouraged" to stay at home, but she evidently did not consider the matter serious. The city physician the year before had been at the school and had vaccinated such children as needed it, but neither city physician nor health officer had visited the school during the current year, which was half com- pleted at the time of my inquiry.
No eighth grade work was taught in either of the parochial schools. What corresponded to the seventh grade class had in St. Joseph's (the Irish parochial school) an average of 1; pupils; their fellows had dropped out during the fourth, fifth, or sixth grades, at the age of twelve or thirteen. St. Mary's, the German parochial school, had a commercial class, a two years' course, for which a tuition fee off 50 was charged (covering also the cost of books), and unless a child entered this class he had no opportunity
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to finish seventh or eighth grade work. About one-half the children left after the sixth grade. St. Mary's had shown itself progressive and quick to adopt the su^estions of Father Devlin, then diocesan supervisor of scbocds, for the improvement of the courses offered. It even had a small library for the use of pupils, mainly composed, however, of children's books. An attempt had been made by the head sister to secure a branch of the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library, but this had failed as books were not sent out of the city.
In spile of many excellent features, the two parochial schoob in Sharpsburg had the common failing that the majority of the children considered their school courses finished, no matter what grade they had reached, as soon as they had made their first communion. At the age of twelve or thirteen years, in spite of compulsory education law or tru- ancy department, they either went to work or stayed at home.
LOST CHILDREN
Slack record keeping in the schools, public and parochial, slack registration outside, thus offered many a loophole for the Sharpsburg truant to escape detection. It was only for the chil- dren actually enrolled that the schools felt responsible. Of these they managed to keep a high percentage of attendance, — 9; per cent in the public schools, — and the parochial schools also had few cases of prolonged and unexplained absence. But how far the children of the District were enrolled, the educational authorities did not know.
The register assessor* who took the school census in the fall of 1907 reported 1 .099 children between the ages of eight and fifteen; yet the total oinrilment in public and parochial schools at the time was i,6s4(8ss in the public schools, $49 in St. Mary's, and 3;o in St. Joseph's), — a dis- crepancy of over ;oo which was not accounted for by the few children who came in from Etna. The use of old lists in lieu of a house-to-house canvass made the assessor's report of little value. The schools depended upon the inclination of paraits to enroll their children rather than upon any effec- tive public compulsion. Moreover, each grade teacher's report was kept independently after her own fashion, some reporting during the first month in the fall the presence or absence of children who had been in their grades in May. This lack of uniformity in record keeping made it wellnigh impossible to keep track of the attendance of the individual child from year to year.
•Act July 1 1, 1901, Section 4, P. L., page 661.
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The fdlowing table is made up from data furnished by the public schools and St. Joseph's parochial school as to the present ages of children enrolled. Assuming as we fairly may that approximately the same num- ber of children had entered school each year during a period of nine yean, this table shows that many a child had made use of the opportunity to drop out at the bidding of impulse or of financial need.
TABLE I. — AGES OF 8o6 CHILDREN IN SHARPSBURC SCHOOLS. I908
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Att |
CUUrm |
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136 |
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Ttn |
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^ |
|
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73 47 |
|
The striking fact shown by this table is that although there was a drop of ig per cent in attendance at the age of fourteen, when a child might under the Pennsylvania law of 190; legally go to work, there was a drop of 3 1 per cent at the age of twelve.
As dsewhere in Pennsylvania truancy throve through defects both in the law and in its enforcement. The borough had but one truant officer, an elderiy man, unfamiliar with foreign languages and consequently unequal to the difficult task of searching out missing foreign children. He made some use of the assessor's list, the inadequacy of which has al- ready been pointed out, and followed up children reported absent by public or parochial schods. Beyond this, however, he made no attempt to find those who had never been enrolled or to keep track of the shifting dement in the population. Although each child on the assessor's book should have been reported either as in school (with the school specified) ch- at work, the truant officer did not compare this registration list with the school record in order to detect children who had failed to report.
The actual extent of truancy, like the actual child population of the borough, was not known. Typical cases follow which sug- gest truancy not attributable to demand for child laborers, but
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SHARPSBURC: A WASTE OF CHILDHOOD
resulting from carelessness of parents and lack of vigilance among the school authorities:
J. S., Clay St.; ti years old. Had been in this country four years, and had never been to school.
A. Z., S. Main St.; to years old, and J. Z., S. Main St.; 13 years old. Both went to St. Joseph's until 1907. Went to the public school until the Christmas vacation of that year and then left 10 wait for the Pcdish scbocd to open.
M. C alley back of 7th St., 13 years old. Worked at h<Hne. Mother had rheumatism. Father a laborer at Moorhead's. Went to St. Joseph's school as far as grade 4, until June, 1907.
F. M., I3th St.; 15 years old. Had never been to school and did not work.
Once out of school most of the girls were permanently ap- prenticed to housework and the care of children; some of the boys were left to run the streets. Eight-year-old Theresa was fii^t kept at home every Monday to help with the washing for the family of 1 1 ; such an intermittent apprenticeship usually soon becc»nes permanent. Her brother, a keen-eyed, dark-skinned little Italian, drifted away from the streets which offered no genuine play place, to a factory which had a lure for ragged lingerers out- side. Any day that one chose to go during school hours to the forlorn alleys of lower Twelfth and Thirteenth streets he was sure to find the children of the neighborhood playing as best they could, — the row of 1 2 privy vaults in front of them, the waste land behind. Some of them went to school, of course, but there was no regularity about it. The street and the factory were more enticing and to the factory we were obliged to look in completing our roster.
THE WORKING CHILDREN
Data concerning 177 Sharpsburg children who were at work were secured and compiled, and upon these data the following tables are based.
Table 2, on the following page, shows the ages of 41 children under fourteen years whom we found working at the time of our inquiry:
287
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—AGES OF 41 SHARP5BURG CHILDREN UNDER FOURTEEN FOUND AT WORK IN I9O8
|
-<*< |
a»«r«i |
|
Ten |
|
|
Tw«Ive |
|
|
35 |
|
|
4> |
|
These 41 working children were all under the minimum legal age set by the law of 190;. Along with them, in the next table, are grouped 102 fourteen- and fifteen-year-old children whom we found at work, together with 34 sixteen-year-old boys who had begun work at fourteen or before. Grouped by the ages at which they started in, they show still more strikingly the tendency to- ward early employment.
TABLE 3. — AGES AT TIME OF BEGINNING WORK OF I77 SHARPSBURC CHILDREN UNDER SEVENTEEN FOUND AT WORK IN I908
|
Age at Btginning Work |
Children |
|
Six |
|
|
Ten . . . . . |
.1 |
|
U |
|
|
17 |
|
|
177 |
|
Of these 177 children only 18, as may be seen, had when they began work reached fourteen years, the age which was recognized in the majority of northern states throughout this period as the earliest at which work was pennissible. Three years had elapsed since fourteen had been made the legal minimum working age in Pennsylvania. Seven years had elapsed since thirteen had been made the minimum. The age when children might legally go to work had never been lower than twelve, yet every fifth child had started work at eleven years or younger.
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SHARPSBURC: A WASTE OF CHILDHOOD
Slatui i4 Father
Cbiidrtn Ifbotc
Sp*tifitd
Dead
Doener ot incapacitated
Living with (amily and occupied:
As day laborer
In miscdlanHHU work (mainly common labor) . ,
In miscellaneous work (partly skilled labor, as that of mixer, boiler maker, etc.)
As glass bk>weT
As puddler
As »alcs clerk
Not in country, or status unknomi
Total
"77
Of the 177 children, nine wholly supported their widowed mothers by what they earned. In other of the 33 cases where the father was dead, older children shared the burden of the family needs.
The case of Chaiies South illustrates the confusion of sentiment in enforcing the law with respect to such children. Mrs. South had been three years a widow, and Charles, thirteen yean of age, was the older of her two children. The year before the date when his case was investi- gated he had gone to work in the Pleasant Valley post office for I7.00 a RKHith, from 7 a. tn. to 8:30 p. m. daily. During the last three months he had held a position in the special delivery department of the Pittsburgh post office, working alternate weeks on day and night turn, and earning usually $2i a month. The day turn was from 7 a. m. to 3 p. m. and the night turn from 3 p. m. to 1 1 p. m. The neighbors spoke of this position as a line one. When the boy first went to work the truant officer came to inquire about him, but after the mother had explained her circumstances be had made no further effort to have the child relumed to school.
Fmn the list of occupations given, it is evident that in a majority of cases where the father was living he earned only a small wage, ft .60 to $2.00 a day, and that, even if steadily employed, ecoiKMnic pressure was a factor in leading to the attempt to add to the family income through the child's earnings. In 49 of these 19* 389
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
cases, this pressure came in the form of from one to lo younger children still in school or even below school age.
WORK PLACES The list of places of employment of the 1 77 Sharpsburg chil- dren who had gone to work at fourteen or before stood as follows:
Glass factoiy .... Pittsburgh factory or store
Tube mill
Mercantile house in Sharpsburg
Iron mill
^ovel factoiy .... Household (domestic servants) Etailroad (water boys) Stove foundry .... Bowling alley .... Milk wagon ....
Total
177
It should be noted that there was constant interchange of child workers between Sharpsburg and Pittsburgh. Many of the glass-house boys came from the heights across the river, and on the other hand some Sharpsburg children went to the city to work. Only 28 girls are included in the table. As the demand for girls in Sharpsburg was limited to the laundry and a few stores, they sought employment in Pittsburgh in the cork and pickle factories, telephone offices, and department stores. In most cases, these suburban girls showed a tendency to irregularity of work, changing from one store to another, and from one kind of employment to another, not only as seasons varied and slack times came but with the constant hopefulness of finding work a little easier and a little better paid. Sometimes apparently the change was made from the mere desire to change. One case is illustrative of many, although it can not be considered typical:
Emma B., whose age the school record gave as thirteen, was the only daughter in a German family living "down the hollow" on Kit- 290
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tanning Pike. Her father, 2 tinner by trade, had been out of work for six months. Her two older brothers were laborers, and her younger brother, Charley, eleven years old, had been with her in the ungraded valley school. One of the older boys was learning mechanical drawing at night school, and in order to pay for this course and at the same time help the family along the two younger children were put to work, Charley in a glass-house and Emma in a Pittsburgh department store as cash girl at {2.3$ a week. After the deduction of carfare and lunch money the sum that remained was so small that Emma's mother overcame the pride which had kept her frcrni sending her daughter to a factory, and Emma accordingly went to work in a cork factory for ten hours a day with occasional overtime, at I4.00 a week.
The boys who went to the city came in most cases from the pros- perous stratum of workingmen's families, and could afford to take poorly paid positions as office or errand boys, with what was felt to be the pros- pect of desirable work later on.
In the Metal Trades
It was in the iron mill, stove foundry, shovel factory, but especially in the glass-houses that boys were to be found at work in occupations characteristic of the Pittsburgh District. Big and black as the iron mill might loom in the imagination of little Sharps- burg children, powerful factor as it was in the borough life, pro- moting railway traffic and stimulating trade, it was the glass-houses which were suzerain over childhood in the town. They had use for over half the children at wages in Sharpsburg.
The iron industry, on the contrary, is distinctly men's work. Three or four himdred men were employed in the puddling fur- naces, bar mill, plate and nail mills of the Moorhead plant, and even the score of "boy's jobs" about the place were s(»netimes held by men too old to work at the furnaces. The pay of these positions ranged from 90 cents to $i.$o per day. With each shift came out "pull-up" boys to open and close the furnace doors for the egress of the white-hot iron ball on its way to the squeezer, "chain-boys," and "shear-boys" to cut the cold iron into strips, work that requires more physical strength than is ordinarily p(»> sessed by a child of twelve or thirteen years. The management asserted that no boys under sixteen were employed, yet of seven whose cases we investigated, two were found to be sixteen, four fifteen and one fourteen. Two of these seven boys had gone to 291
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WAGE-EARN tNG PtTTSBURGH
work in the mill at thirteen years of age, and the others at eleven or twelve.
The furnaces did not run Sundays so that the boys woriied only six days a week, but these days were of twelve hours each. This plant still continued an old arrangement of shifts which bote especially hard on its child workers: 2:30 a. m. to 2:30 p. m. day turn; 2:30 p. m. to 3:30 a. m. night turn. Whichever turn a boy was on, he could not have a normal division of the day into rest and work. He either came to or went from the mill during the chill of night. Whatever the effect on a mature man, it can hardly be questioned that such an unnatural extension and arrangement of working hours is harmful to a growing boy. The work done by the boys required watchfulness and care, no skill. In itself it was not dangerous, but the mill was full of dangers — swinging cranes, flying bits of hot iron from the squeezer, and various kinds of heavy machinery which sometimes slips from the operator's control. For nine out of ten boys, moreover, their jobs meant not a first step in the line of preferment, a point nearer apprenticeship in the skilled positions of the trade, but merely one of a series of laborers' jobs, first at one mill, then at another, at approximately the same wages.
At the stove foundry, on the contrary, boys were taken only as apprentices, worked altogether "by day, and had an opportunity to become skilled workmen. Of the three boys who were appren- ticed in the fall of 1907, one was nineteen, one sixteen, and one fourteen; all were working under the direction of their fathers.
Some Sharpsburg boys found work in Hubbard's shovel factory on the Pittsburgh side of the bridge. When all the de- partments were running, this plant employed about 3^0 men and boys, operating cutting machines, boring holes for rivets, straight- ening handles, "cornering shovels," and doing similar work of a sort which requires some dexterity but little skill.
The distinction in this factory between men's work and boys' lay partly in the differences in the ware, and partly in the operation of light or heavy machinery. Here too the manager stated that no boys under sixteen years,* consequently noneneed-
* The Pennsylvania laws of 1005 provided that a child fourteen yein of age. but under tiicteen, could be employed only when a certificate showing ability to read and write English, and issued by a person empowered to lake oaths, was on file m the office of his employer.
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ing certificates, were employed. Work was slack at the time of my visit, but of the six boys seen two were certainly not over fourteen years old. Four of these had begun work in the factory at thirteen and one at twelve. One thirteen-year-old boy who said he had passed for fourteen ever since he had gone to work the year before at 75 cents a day. described the work at the punching machines : " On a three-hole machine, you get a cent a dozen, and can make as much as you're able. 1 made $1.30 once. Oh, all the boys get cut or burned. Once I had my hand cut so that I had to lay off for two weeks. And then, if you don't look out, you're likely to run the scrap into your foot." One boy who bored holes in shovd handles averaged |i.$o a day. Others on lighter work made $1.10 to $1.30. The day was of ten hours with no night work. One boy of fourteen had been at work for two years. He had started packing hammers for }i .00 a day, then went to a glass factory as "sticking-up" boy for a few months, and returned to the shovel works, where he was found painting picks — a process that delays the rusting of the metal — for }i.40 to f 1.50 a day. A boy who was quick and alert could advance to the rate of wages paid unskilled men in a shorter time than he could in most of the other nearby factories. He could not, however, advance much be- yond this point. The advantage of day employment was bal- anced by the tendency to overtime, and although the boys were in little danger of grave injury, they ran the risk of frequent cuts and blisters. Burned fingers were of daily occurrence in the depart- ment where boys heated iron for the bolt makers. Some of the work, especially the punching and boring, was too heavy for chil- dren, and it may be questioned whether all under sixteen should not be prohibited from operating a machine which may involve the loss of a finger as well as from operating one which may in- volve the loss of life. It is to the interest of the community that its children reach maturity whole.
Personal dangers to minors were even more serious in the tube mill (Spang, Chalfant and Company) where Sharpsburg and Etna meet. When all departments were in operation, 236 men and boys were employed, boys as well as men working day turn and night turn:
The 17 Sharpsburg boys whom we found working there all 293
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
had certificates, and only two were under fourteen. Three were sixteen, and the others between fourteen and sixteen. They were earning frtun 90 cents to ft .35 a day, and in some cases, when they could do heavy work, $1.50. The hours were:
Day turn, 7 a. m. to la m. — 12:30 to 6 p. m. (loH hours)
Night turn, 6 p. m. to 12 p. m. — 12:30 a. m. to 6 a. m. (11^ hours)
Here, too, the boys worked day turn and night turn alternate weeks. Boys were employed in "belling" or "putting-on" in the butt-weld process. Before the pipe left the furnace a boy placed at the fur- nace mouth a bell-shaped ring. As the skelp passed through the funnel of the ball, its sides were welded together into a pipe. The "running-hook" boys attached the pipe to 2 traveling chain which carried it from the furnace door to a table where it cooled. Boys handled only the smaller pipes, three-quarters of an inch to two inches in diameter. Other boys " tended rack"; that is, operated the lever by which the cooled pipe was let down to the pile. The boys were seldom kept steadily at one kind of work.
Probably the most fatiguing job was " running hook," for here they were hurried along unceasingly by the traveling chain. " It's on the three-quarters inch pipe," said a mill man, "that the boys have to run. You'd wonder that anybody could run so fast. Men aren't agile enough to do the boys' work well. Besides, if we put men on, we'd have to pay them laborers' wages. We get the boys for a good bit less. We never have any shortage of boys; they like to work here."
Both belling and running hook are dangerous, as more than one mill boy had learned to his cost. An Italian boy, thirteen years old, who had never been in school, worked "on the hook" at the tube mill at the time of my stay in Sharpsburg. The summer before his arm had been so badly burned f nun a white-hot pipe that he had had to stop work for several days. Whoever was at fault for the accident, the child had received no pay while he was laid off. One boy had recently lost his leg while doing this kind of work, and another had had his foot crushed. Many had had fingers cut off and had received other minor injuries.
" Do you have people hurt here every day?" an employe of the mill was asked. "Every day," he answered. "Sometimes 294
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sharpsburg: a waste of childhood
five or six. Of course if the accident is a bad one I send for the doctor, but it's many a doctor's bill I've saved the company by tending the men."
The Homestead Messenger for September 12, 1907, gave the following:
Joseph Brosski. 307 Powers Alley, Sharpsburg; aged 14;
tube mill; disemboweled September 11, 1907; died at Allegheny
General Hospital. He was worker at one of the rolls; in some way
the hook turned around, the point catching him in the abdomen.
A witness said "You never can tell how these accidents
happen — it is so quick that nobody knows." This was the second
case of a boy's being killed " running hook" within the memory
of boys then in the company's employ.* Was it an equitable
contract between tube company and boy of fourteen that the latter
assumed the risk of permanent injury or loss of life as a condition
of earning his daily wageF
The Glass-houses
It has been from the glass-houses of Pennsylvania that the greatest demand has come for child workers; about them our chief interest centered in Sharpsburg. From glass blowers and glass manufacturers came the strongest opposition to the child labor bill proposed in the legislature of 1907, and through their influence was inserted the clause in the law of J905 (which still stands) that boys under sixteen might work at night when necessary to prevent waste or destruction of material.
At the extreme end of the town, occupying ground from Main Street down to the waste land at the edge of the river, was Tibby Brothers, one of the few glass bottle factories where the "pot" system instead of the "continuous tank" was still in use. There was no night shift here, butestimatinganaverageof three men and six boys to a "shop," the plant called for 300 hands (iss of them boys). The work was annually inter- rupted not only by summer heat but by floods from the river. In con- trast, on high ground and with a tank system which called for day and night shifts to run it, the plant of the H. J. Heinz Class Company was repre- sentative of the modem plant with its continuous operation. Moreover, as the same kind of bottles were made here week after week, the workmen
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
devdoped a highly specialized skill and great rapidity in manipalatioa, impossible in factories in which orders are taken for many varieties of ware. This factory had the reputation of being one of the best equipped in (be state; about 40 men with 80 boys to help them were employed on its double shift. At Clenshaw, three miles out from Sharpsburg, a third bottle factory employed seven Sharpsburg boys.
The three bottle factories at the time of this investigation had altogether about 270 boys' jobs. Some of these jobs were hdd by young men waiting for a chance to begin their apprenticeship, and fully half by boys from Etna or the Pittsburgh side. From a case investigation of 97 Sharpsburg boys employed in the ^ass- houses in 1908, and from statements made by glass blowers and oAictals at each plant, the data which follaw were obtained.*
Twenty-one of these boys were sixteen years old; but four of them had begun work in the glass-house at fourteen years, eight at thirteen, eight at twelve, one at eleven. Of the 76 boys under sixteen years of age who were at work in the glass-houses, 30 were under fourteen; and of these 30, 13 were thirteen years of age, eight were twelve, eight were eleven, one was ten. Of the 46 remaining boys (those fourteen and fifteen years of age), nearly all had begun work in the glass-houses before they had reached the age required by law. Four began at fourteen years of age, 31 at thirteen, 1 1 at twelve, three at ten, two at eight, while of five the age at beginning work could not be ascertained.
Certificates for minors between fourteen and sixteen were on the whole carelessly kept by the employers. Their registers of boys' addresses were incomplete, sometimes even those of their names. The boys were known in a general way to the men, but if one was absent his place was immediately filled. He was not sent for unless the supply of younger brothers and loungers about the factory failed. The boys themselves felt no stability in the tenure of their positions, but had a marked tendency to drift from one glass-house to another, from glass-house to mill, back to glass- house, then to shovel works or mill again. Some did not work more than three or four days a week, and children still in school were sent by their mothers to the glass-houses Friday nights or Saturday mornings to fill the places of absent boys.
• In each case stalemenis of parenis and neighbors were compared with the school record and with other documentary proof where obtainable.
296
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Holding Molds The boy al th« right wai iweke years old and had not been to school for two years
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SHARPSBURC: A WASTE OF CHILDHOOD
Robert B., for instance, eleven years old, had worked nearly every Friday and Saturday for a year past, and said that 30 others from his class were doing the same. None of these boys had certificates. One Polish woman from the Twelfth Street district said frankly that her boy was ten years old. She had never heard of a certificate or legal working age. She only knew that "the boss from 's came after him." Chariie L, thir- teen, a "sticking-up" boy, was one of the older sons in a family of nine; he had stopped school in grade one. and had worked seven yeare. John v.. twelve years old, an Italian boy who lived in a rear house in Glass- House Row, had been working in the adjoining factory for a year. His mother had taken him to the squire to get his certificate, which the squire refused, saying, "You know that boy isn't fourteen. Now if you don't put him back in school, I'll prosecute you." The result was that John worked without a certificate instead of with one.
One manager said, "Why, you talk about these little Italian chaps; they're the brightest fellows I have. One came here the other day who couldn't write his name, and 1 told him he'd have to leam how or the factory inspector would turn him out. Well, if he didn't go home and practice over night, and the next morning he could write his name well enough to pass anywhere."
It is easy to understand the lure of glass works, the unde- finable magic that chains to the «itrance-way groups of small boys who have failed to be taken on. The molten wax-like glass in the furnace, the skilful twist and turn which prepares the embry- onic bottle for the mold, the speed with which the wax bubble is made a thing of use, the white light, red glare, and shifting shadow, the dexterity of the bare-armed men, combine to cast a spell over the gaping youngsters and to arouse a compelling belief in the efficiency and commercial success of the glass blower.
The work done by the boys is monotonous but not continually hard. Six boys usually belong to each "shop," or group of three men; "cleaning-off" boys to stand by the gatherer and clean the end of the blow-pipe after the bottle has been left in the mold; a "mold" boy to open and close the molds for the blower; "sticking- up" boys to reheat the neck of the bottle before it is finished; and a " carry-in " boy to take the shaped ware to the lehr for tempering. The only heavy work is done by carry-in boys who, as 3 rule, are (dder than the others. They carry trays of bottles constantly from finisher's table to lehr. The other boys stand or sit near the 297
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
ovens. One factory which had a regular system erf pTcmotkHi paid its boys according to the following scale:
Spare boys (doing odd job*) fojj a diy
Slkking^p boys 7S a day
Oeaning-off boys 90 I day
M6I6 boyi 9J a day
Carry-in boys i.)j a day
This scale varied slightly in the other factories, oneof which paid its cleaning-off boys only 7$ cents, but its mold boys }i . 1 2, and its carry-in boys|i.io toli.75 a day. The other paid its carry-in boys $1.00 to $1.25 according to the size of the ware, and its mold boys 8; cents to |i.oo. It had become a custom to pay ;o cents extra every two weeks to boys who worked well and missed no time. This extra money was put into a separate envelope, so that the boys did not need to hand it over to their parents.
As the three glass-houses were union shops, the hours were essentially the same in all:
Day turn: 7 a.m. to 10 a. m.; 10:15 a. m, to 1 3 m. ; 1 p. m. to s p.m. Night turn: ; p. m. to8 p. m.; 8:1; p. m. to ii:)op. m.; isp.m-lo 3:30 a. m.
In the two continuous tank factories, each boy had day and night turn alternate weeks, and consequently each week he was obliged to make a change in his habits of eating and sleeping- Here where the average age was so much lower than in the irwi mill, the requirement of day and night work was even more in- jurious. The change from the heat of the furnaces to the chilly night air outside was almost sure to affect constitutions which had not yet developed much physical resistance.
In July, 1907, at the age of fourteen. Willie App died of rheumatism of the heart. He had worked in a Sharpsburg glass-house on alternate day and night turns for a year and a half. During his illness of several months he had continued to work intermittently until his strength utteriy failed. While his death may not have been due wholly to the conditiooi of his work, his physician was confident that it was hastened by them.
Two Sharpsburg physicians who had had experience with glass-house boys stated that all of them, when put to work eariy> became pale, anemic, undersized, and stunted in development. It was significant that only five of the 97 boys were glass blowers'
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sharpsburg: a waste of childhood
children. The evils of this night work were intensified when boys worked double turn, as they sometimes did to earn more money. "A good many boys hang around after day tum," said one of the old hands, "and will do night tum too if they get the chance."
It is curious that parents should have considered the glass- house the alternative for boys who for different reasons were unable to go to school.
Headaches and dim sight sufficed to take Roy H away from
his studies at eleven years of age, and the family council had put him into the glass>house. When his courage gave out because the other boys tor- mented him, he tried study again for awhile and reached grade six. Then he left altogether and for an entire year had been holding molds. He had ceased to be able to read, but bis family had never had his eyes examined nor done anything except put him to work.
Ralph and Louis Carracotta were two slight oval-faced Italian boys, thirteen and fourteen years of age, who had been working as "stick- ing-up" boys for two years. Both were feeble-minded. Their father was a laborer of rather low grade, and a third child in the family was also defective. The parents believed that as the boys were unable to learn anything in school they must choose the glass-house.
Frank S., fifteen years old. had had epilepsy since he was ten. He was working as a mdd boy. At the age of thirteen the physician had or- dered him to leave schod, and he was immediately put to work. When his mother was questioned as to possible danger to the boy if he should have seizures while at work, she replied, "Oh, the men look after him and see that he doesn't hurt himsdf."
Aside from the fact that small boys are demanded by the glass-houses, the most serious count against the work itself is the weekly schedule in the continuous plants. " Is it good, do you think, for boys to have alternate day and night turn?" a manager was asked. He shrugged his shoulders, "Well, what are we going to do about it? we can't waste the glass." This change in hours is perhaps in part responsible for the restless, unreliable disposition of many of the glass-house boys. One must be strong to stand extremes of heat or cold; one must be both strong and mature to stand such extremes and the added strain of interrupted habits of sleep. For two months in the summer the glass-houses are shut down and this period gives a further impetus to the boys' tendency 399
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
to drift. Some remain idle, and are more irregular in their work when they return to it, others find positions elsewhere, and the ability to do this increases their irresponsibility.
One boy of seventeen had worked at intervals for five years in a glass-house. He had gone to a parochial school for awhile, but had never got beyond one of the lower grades, and at seventeen he was still cleaning- off boy at 90 cents a day. When he was not in the glass-house or loafing he drove a wagon for his uncle. " He'll never amount to anything," the men said of him. " He's no good."
John C was fifteen. He had first gone to the parochial school,
then to the public school as far as grade two. At the age of eight he had gone to work first in one glass-house, then in another; then in a shovel factory, and again in a glass-house. "He's a hard one," the clerk said; "he's learned it all in his fifteen years." Then generalizing, "The boys work for two or three days, then loaf; then come back and work awhile. Friday night half the boys don't go home at all; they hang around until the next morning. What becomes of them, do you say, by the time they are twenty-two or twenty-three? The workhouse. They are no good to us any more. Why, I've seen some boys led up to the factory door by their mothers, who wanted the money most likely, and as soon as their mothers had gone, out they'd go by the other door. After a few years of this they don't care anything about their homes. They're ready to tell their people to go to hell."
Beyond all this, glass-house work offers a boy slight chance for apprenticeship. In other industries the prospect of a trade is often enough to keep a boy steady and reliable. The glass bottle blowers' union allows one apprentice to 10 journeymen; but in each glass-house there are two boys for every man. Sometimes the hope of learning the trade is held out to keep boys at work.
One boy had been promised the next vacancy if he would not go out on strike with the others. He was eighteen when 1 talked with him, still a carry-in boy, and had been working in the glass-house nine years. He thought that he might become an apprentice during the following year; he would then be obliged to work forty-five months on half pay before he would be allowed to become a glass-blower.
A young man had worked from the age of eight to twenty-six before he had been apprenticed. Two other youths, John W., twenty-one years old, and Prank W., eighteen, had worked for nine years and were still earning but 9$ cents a day.
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sharpsburg: a waste of childhood
Not many will work so long at boys' wages when they might go into another sort of factory and earn men's. When the pros- pect of learning the trade, the one thing which might have a steady- ing effect, is so slight, clearly unwholesome influences have free rein.
Thus, not only the physical effect of child labor, but its de- flection of the years of mental and social development are to be considered. Educational opportunities lost are far-reaching and fundamental. The state bases its educational requirements upon its own self-interest, its need that each future citizen shall be equipped as a producer of values for the community. Only the least that is necessary to so equip a citizen does the state guaran- tee. It requires all children between the ages of eight and four- teen to be in school, presumably because no child is equipped at an earlier age to do his share in the world's work. Moreover, it re- quires all children who go to work between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to have employment certificates which shall state their ages and which are not to be issued unless they have met the edu- cational test; that is, the ability to read and write in the En^ish language. While it does not compel further schooling in the case of the fourteen-year-old boy who can reach this standard set by the state, in the case of the boy between fourteen and sixteen who can not, it commands extension of the training period until his sixteenth year. A native-bom child of normal mentality would reach the seventh or eighth grade at fourteen years. This is a difficult attainment for a foreign-bom child, whose customs and language are different. Special training may give him a chance equal to that of the native child, but in the absence of it, the for- eign-bom child lags far behind.
Inquiry as to the grade in school reached by the 177 Sharps- burg children investigated indicated that just six had reached the eighth grade, which presumably the state considers as a reasonable education with which to start life. Forty-eight others had reached the sixth or seventh grades or their equivalents, and the rest straggjed along with varying degrees of incomplete training. Nineteen had never been to school at all. Three could neither read nor write and two were just able to write their names. Not one had had industrial training of any sort. Ill-equipped and 301
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prematurely employed, these Sharpsburg children were extrava- gant tools for the manufacturers in the community to be u^ng. They could scarcely become either intelligent citizens or good workers, and they failed on yet another count.
OF LErSURE HOURS
The state has need of citizens, not for ten hours or twelve hours, but for twenty-four. It is in the use made of leisure hours that the community is most defmitely creative, that the perma- nent content of its life is most enriched. By the use which a group of workers make of their leisure, may their training, equip- ment, and industrial life be appraised.
Sharpsburg in its uneven growth has emphasized not leisure but work. After work was over for the day — or night — what did the town offer for the recreation of the young boys and girls who were contributing to its prosperity?
The eight Protestant churches depended upon the Young Men's Christian Association as a social center. One church had a club room of its own for purely social purposes, and all members of the club were expected to attend meetings for religious instruction. G)urses in the night school of the association — reading, spelling, arithmetic, stenography, mechanical drawing — were open to pay members,* but cost extra. Non-members were admitted to the reading room, which was welt stocked with periodicals, but not to other social rooms or to the gymnasium. The majority of the younger members either attended school or were employed in offices during the day. The street boys and the mill boys were not reached. Immigrants had been kept out of the association be- cause of the prejudice of members and directors against them. A class for teaching English to Italians was, however, conducted by one of the Protestant churches. The two largest Catholic churches made some provision for the young men of their parish; one con- ducted a literary society in a small frame building, the other, club rooms in the basement of its school. In both cases a monthly fee was charged. Both had reading rooms and one a billiard room
* Jkt Young Men's Christian Association cl»rged an initiation fee of ta.oo to all, and annual dues of }3.oo to juniors (bovs between nine and fifteen). In- termediates (boys between fifteen and eighteen) and seniois (boys above eighteen) were charged f t-oo annual dues.
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a Conditions. Sharpsbukc
streets. Cetilral privy vaults used by Tamilies iti both
A CLASS-MoiisE Boy's Home s Polish, thirteen years old, 1*0 yea
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As THE Mill Sees the Town H from interior of mill yard, upon main street
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SHARPSBURC: A WASTE OF CHILDHOOD
and shower baths; but in neither place was there a gymnasium nor provision for wholesome class work. In the autumn of 1907 the public school had opened a free night school with elementary courses, but it was so poorly attended that after a month the attempt was given up.
Thus, Sharpsburg in 1908 had no club life dissociated from religious organizations, no free night schod, no public library, and no playground. "We don't need any library," said a prominent citizen, " the people all have libraries in their own homes. They wouldn't take a library if it were offered to them." The one play- ground, formeriy used by the Young Men's Christian Association, had been leased for business purposes. "The children do not need one," it was said. "They have the streets and the side of the hill." The side of the hill was often too muddy for use, but it is true that they had the streets, and on the streets were 14 bar- rooms, four poolrooms, two nickelodeons, and a public skating rink. This made up the sum of the town's attractions. In one nickelodeon the performance was confined to a rather dreary suc- cession of moving pictures, shown by a glaring light. In the other, the pictures were varied with vaudeville acts and dialogue coarse almost to the point of obscenity. The roller-skating rink afforded the one opportunity for meeting together in pleasurable activity, but to the casual observer its crowded room and close atmosphere seemed to offer stimulation to nerves already excited, rather than to give relaxation and healthful enjoyment.
Child labor grows in significance as we realize that this barren life is its connotation. That physical development should be checked is bad. Far worse is the waste of a child's faculties which strips him to mental and emotional poverty. After un- schooled children had been given to the use of manufacturers, and eight or ten hours of furnace flame had licked dry their creative powers, they were not even given a fair choice of spending their unoccupied hours well or ill. For the town to leave unrepaired its broken-down scheme of compulsory schooling was scarcely less destructive than for it to fail to make good to these unschooled children some of the educational opportunities which their early working age had denied them; or to fail to meet the need for trade training in ways which should be confined not to the children 30i
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who already had had a common school education, but should be thrown open to children whose school instruction had beoi meager and irregular, and who from unskilled boys would grow up to be unskilled men. To reach these boys there was need too of a social center beyond the influences of the streets, unassociated with vice on the one hand, and with religious instruction on the other, which should aim at physical and mental invigonttion through congregate work and play. That so many boys had alter- nate weeks of day and night work made the problem of meeting this need more difficult of solution but not impossible.
The leading officials of Sharpsburg — magistrates, members of the borough council — were well satisfied with the prosperity of the town. They saw mills and factories running, new churches being built, an increasing supply of labor. They did not feel, nor did the churches and schools feel, that the problem before Sharpsburg, as before many a community of more imposing size, was whether or not it was willing to waste its children ; waste them through neglect as manifested in miserable homes, lack of sanitary and medical care, the dead-ending of its unenforced educational scheme and its dearth of free and wholesome means of enjoyment; or waste them deliberately, by requiring of its children unhealthful and often dangerous work, through prolonged and irregular hours, in order to supply the cheap labor which its industries demanded.
For as we have pictured Sharpsburg — its narrow rectangle of flat land, seamed and blackened by successful industries; its alleys crowded with hastily erected, cheap, and ill-planned dwellings: its children, by-products, asides, of a life intent on more immediate returns — as we have summarized the effects of ill-fitting laws and unused opportunities, this fact of child labor stands out above all other facts. Unto this duress the community was suffering many of its little children to come — to child labor in shop and factory, child labor in mill and glass-house, to child labor terminating in injury to life or limb, or terminating in injury less easily seen but more terrible — in a thwarted and incomplete maturity.
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IV
THE REVERSE SIDE
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THE REVERSE SIDE James Forbes
UNDER the king's hearthstone are many cockroaches." So runs the old French proverb. The good people, the well-to-do, may deprecate the existence of those half outlawed elements in our American life which compose what for lack of a better name we call the " underworld " ; yet these elements endure and live on, like the king's cockroaches, under the reform administration of a city as well as under its misrule.
In the underworld we have the potential forces which control and manage pool rooms, gambling houses, disorderly saloons, and brothels, which "fix" juries, corrupt policemen and officials of the city government, and which repeat at city elections, voting early and often against "reforms" of any kind.
The industrial, no less than the civic life of the community is levied upon from the same quarter. The underworld preys especially upon the producing classes. It filches their earnings from the wage-earners. It recruits from them by flaunting the allurements of vice and excitement, and the apparent offer of easy money, all in marked contrast to the heavy round of factory and mill.
Thus in Pittsburgh the quick riches and easy spending of the successful in this great tapping of wealth have attracted not only the anti-social, the unproductive, and the parasitic, but have caused a constant drift of the weak and the rebellious away from the mills. Moreover, large numbers of immigrants, compelled to submit during the first years to the hardest grub stakes, are housed in the very districts relin quished to the underworid.
Thus we have a reverse side to the picture of the work and prosperity of the city. For not alone in splendid achievement over raw nature do we read the story of steel, and after their kind, of 307
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the lesser industries. The harnessing of tremendous forces for mills and road beds reduced the human unit from its high state, managers and men alike becoming reckless of life itself. The toll of industrial accidents which mounted as speed grew faster and tools more huge, has shown this fact in its most brutal fonn. It is not surprising then that in the community outside the mills, where those subtler elements which must be relied upon to oppose frailty and wrongdoing are at stake, there has been a correspond- ing lack of appreciation of human values, of what social waste this undercurrent of evil involves, or of how to master it other than to keep it under.
As in all our cities, this problem of social control has been left for the most part in the hands of the police.
I THE POLICE, AN ORGANISM It is foreign to the purpose of this paper to trace the develop- ment of the police force as a social institution. Its work lies close to crime and prostitution and violence, to political allegiance, and to the shady practices of certain of the so-called respectable ele- ments in the upperworld. So circumstanced, it has evolved a caste which wields an influence out of all proportion to its numbers. Its principal manifestations are common to every municipality; it has put its mark on many social and non-social usages and has built up a code and traditions of its own. Its potentialities for good or evil are past reckoning. Made up of a fairiy permanent rank and file, it has in each of our cities been the medium called upon by changing administrations to carry out absolutely incon- sistent policies of social control. These policies have reflected the various compromises between the laws which state and commun- ity enact in the open, and the practices which they tolerate more or less secretly; they have reflected the alternate ascendancy in political life of types as different as Roundhead and Cavalier; they have been bent to suit the exigencies of hypocrisy and cosmopolitanism, graft, business, and politics. It is not to be wondered at that the police has found difficulty in carrying out these divergent policies and that it has been subject to criti-
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cism and suspicion which others have deserved; nor again, that it has deserved such criticism. The political charlatan by his extravagances, his pettiness, his general lack of manliness, has incidentally done much to crystallize qualities among the rank and file, which in many of our cities have converted the men into accessories to crime. Nor is it to be wondered at that the police body has contrived various forms of self-protection for its members, or that the men have themselves essayed at times to play the master.* Under an exceptional leader, on the other hand, and when in a reform administration they are assured a square deal, the better element asserts itself and becomes fairly efficient. The force more often, however, presents a "dead wall" against reform from without, and exhibits a certain regrettable cynicism not only toward changes in organization but also toward efforts to remove the sources of crime.
The traditional duty of the police is the protection of prop- erty, and herein lies the first test of any police department. In whatever city habitual offenders with deft fingers "work" unmolested upon street or railroad cars, at circuses or fairs; with nimble cards or oily tongues in bar or hotel; tap imaginary wires from race track or pool room; "hoist" goods from depart- ment stores, or with jimmy and dark lantern force entrance to office, vault, or dwelling, the premise may be assumed that they work upon a business basis with the local police. In the vernac- ular, such operations are "percentage jobs."
The regeneration of such a police force must come first from the top. Otherwise the new recruits, though of good quality, are quickly absorbed into the "system." It may be remembered how a former New York police commissioner, since risen to high estate, imported 2,000 "sturdy yeomanry," irreverently styled "bushwhackers" by the unregenerate, from the crossroads and hills of his state. Fresh, clean, untainted, native bom, they were to reform, reinvigorate a police debauched by metropolitan vices. Unfortunately the keen hucksters of the crossroads
* It should be stated that the various bcDclil societid which are features of the average police organiiation, and which are often criticized as regrettable ad- junctsof the ivitem, furnish a measure of protection to their members at once against the intolerable abuse imposed by scheming politiciaos and the galling methods of bureaucrats posing as reformers."
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soon demonstrated that while Irishmen and Germans might develop greed, they themselves were possessed of insatiability and of superior cunning besides. Had the department con- tinued to have at its head men of high ideals, the result might have been different.
Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Force The observance of outward decency has always been favored in Pittsburgh and has been brought about in a measure through the influence of the strong church element in this Scotch-Irish community. For example, as perhaps in no other American city, Sunday observance laws have long been enforced on saloons and hotels. But beneath this outward observance the powers that prey early found in Pittsburgh a valuable mine, to be worked more especially by those whose weapons were of cunning rather than of violence. How many "good things" were "pulled off" in the old days, how many "suckers" were "trimmed," how many thousands of souls ruined, they alone knew. Then it was that the brothels paid large tribute; that a convention was sufficient excuse for theflocking to the city of numbersof professional criminals; that gamblers flourished; that Pittsburgh was headquarters of swindlers who exercised all the known devices for robbing workingmen.
The deep-seated cravings of the people for honesty were slow to gather headway against the various factions of the Republican machine, and the police force was without other tenure of ofRce than that assured by subservience to the faction temporarily in power. The successful non-partisan revolt of 1905 finally brought to the front men of a new type as heads not only of the police, but of the other city departments, under the leadership of an inde- pendent mayor; and in July, 1907, for the first time a stringent municipal civil service law was adopted.* Directors, superintend- ents, and chiefs of bureaus knew what was expected of them and the police department under new leadership made decided strides toward efficiency and self-respect.
The Pittsburgh police force constitutes one of the bureaus of the city department of public safety. In 1907-0811 had on its roster something less than a thousand men, and its organization did not differ materially
'The character of the municipal Civil Service CommiHion under luc- cceding adminiilrationi has militated againti the effectivcnesi of this law. 310
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from that existing in cities of equal size.* The pay of the higher officers was less than that received in New York and Chicago for similar service, and less than men with equal responsibilities would receive in business in Pittsburgh. The pay of (3.00 per day for patrolmen was less than the rates paid organized labor in the skilled trades in Pittsburgh, but above the average for the larger body of semi-skilled men in the mills.
The civil service law of 1907 gave to the new administration,! along with the good men, a heritage of men worthless and incompetent save under discipline. A number of the most incapable were eliminated and the remainder felt in general that they could trust the administration to do the fair thing by them.
Another important step was taken when, under the reform adminis- tration, the detective bureau, which hitherto had been independent of the superintendent of police, was brought directly under his control. Scmie of the plain clothes officers were good men from the thief-taker's stand- point; they knew a "gun" when they saw one and would bring him in; but the significance of the change was illustrated when Mayor Guthrie had to discharge his chief of detectives because he could not or would not get evidence against a Sixth Avenue establishment of common notoriety.
Operating in the same territory with the municipal police are county detectives under the direction of the district attorney's office, the sheriff's deputies, various private guards and detective forces in the pay of the railroad companies and manufacturing corporations, and constables at- tached to the various aldermen's courts.
Moreover, the local police authority in any city or town in Pennsyi-
* In June and July, 191), the New York Bureau of Municipal Research in- vestigated the Pittsburgh department of public safety as part of its general com- misHon (or the City Council. Iti report on the bureau of police i) a iio-pag« document, dealing nhaustivelj^ with the work from the administrative standpoint. To overcome the disorganization and inefiidency disclosed, it recommended the establishment of an adequate course of training for recruits and the training of the present members of the force, reorganization of the detective bureau, the in- stallation of complaint, record and filing division, a complete reorganization of the system of records, introducing concise daily reports and a centratiiation of con- trol in the oflice of the director. The creation of a civilian aide to the director, a ni^t court for women, the elimination of children from the magistrate's courts and the radical reform of llie latier, a study of arrests for inebriety, of discharged cases, and of police station lodgings were other recommendations. A number of ordi- nances were passed by Councils in line with the report. A civilian aide appunted by the new administration incoming toofficein i9[4, the detective bureau changed into a "secret service." and the Emerson Company engaged to install changes. To date(July, 1914) a general rehabilitation of training, administration, and service, is still a matter of the future. Excerpts from the report are published in Appendix XXIV. p. S16,
t The direct management of the force was placed in the hands of a man of very different makeup from a majority of his predecessors — an active, forceful IriuinMn, Thomas McQuaide, who kept step with the reform administration so bng as it was in power and showed himself not incapable of appreciating the possi- bilities of the office in preventing crime.
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vania may be re-enforced in emergencies by state police,* and this in turn by the militia. The state p<^ice is made up of four companies of highly trained men, mounted and organized on military lines. Their barracks are situated in strategic parts of the state, and the troopen may be found patn^ling the country roads and co-operating with forest, game, or health officials. They follow up individual offenders and are on call as a body to suppress rioting and assist tn preserving c»-der during labor disturbances. It is, however, with the municipal pirfice and with its practical control of the groups in the social order whose acts lie outside the conven- tions and sanctions of the times, that we are principally concerned.
Repression Under Reform
In Pittsburg, under the reform regime, habitual critninals were handled in a way which met satisfactorily what we have de- scribed as the first test of a police administration. In any city the practical observer within a few hours may gauge this fact by the presence or absence of pickpockets on the streets and street cars. Not pickpockets alone but confidence men, "knock-out- drop" and "hold-up" men, and other professionals understood, when the power of the Guthrie administration was at its height, that there was no buying from officials protection that protected. The amount of property saved to residents and visitors was un- doubtedly great; but this saving was not to be compared in im- portance with the effect for good upon the rank and file of the police department, particularly upon men of the detective bureau. How strong the pressure was upon the police authorities to relax, how real the strength of the threats, cajolements, and entangling devices of the underworld, only the higher officials knew.
The stopping of liquor selling in Pittsburgh brothels struck commercialized vicea blowharderthan that of anynumberof spec- tacular raids, and scores were closed. "All disorderly houses off the car tracks" was the order given the police, and these were driven from the streets where trolleys passed the doors. More- over, a large number of the male parasites of the industry, thieves themselves more often than not, and responsible for training women in theft as well as for prostitution, were driven from the city. Gambling houses and pool rooms were closed; the liquor law in general was strictly enforced; bunco games in hotels were checked.
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Systematic grafting by the police was stopped. Individual mem- bers of the force might take their chances, but even to the crooked policeman or detective, however hungry for his " bit, " Pittsburgh was "no good" and "dead." The town was closed.
Such was the police situation as 1 found it on first coming to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1907. The more or less complete elimination of graft from the force during the period studied made it possible to set off certain problems of social control, partially stripped of the element of police corruption with which they are often confused. These problems are so intricate and human that it was felt our understanding of a modem industrial city would gain something from fresh scrutiny of the strata in which they lie embedded. Hard and fast boundaries the under- world has not, but different groups have to a degree set their stamp on the habitations of men; on the haunts where the sporting element lives by its wits; on the hang-outs where the craftsman of violence and burglary lies by or plans his daring; on the common lodging houses where the local mendicants and the "down and outs" drag out a miserable existence; on the brothels where vice is to be had for pay.
II
THE UNDERWORLD To mingle among the "wise people" of the town, — those spurious wise with pallid or bloated faces, drawn-down mouths and furtive eyes; those wearers of loud clothes and conspicu- ous jewelry, — was to hear much talk of "plungers," "tips," "ringers"; of "suckers trimmed," "good things pulled off." "easy money," "steering," "doping," and the like; also more confidential talk of "fixing" and "politics," and of the "sys- tem," which, in abeyance for the moment, was to come into its own again once the accursed administration* was beaten. With alt this talk one would find the current setting continually toward
* It should be noted that Council] remained antagonistic to reform through' out the Guthrie administration; and that the district attorney's office during the same period was in the hands of the machine. It was a later district attorney's staff which, in conjunction with the Voters' League, exposed the wholesale council* manic graft throughout this period.
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certain names which for the time stood in somewhat the same relation to the anti-social forces of Pittsburgh as have the Sullivans in Manhattan.
Such a name was that of A , sUght inquiry as to whose
antecedents revealed the fact that he was not always "in strong" at the district attorney's office, nor a feared and controlling power. Some years before he had been so unfortunate as to be caught in running a crooked foot race and had served his sentence. His photograph and measurements were taken for the Rogue's Gallery, but photograph and negative had long since disappeared. A gambling house of his in a suburb of Pittsburgh had been closed under the reform regime, after which it was generally understood that he was convinced that a change of administration for the city was essential.
Associated with A in the public eye was B , also an
ex-convict and said by many to be superior to him in brains and cunning. Both men had long since discarded the clumsy anti- social methods which earlier had brought them to the penitentiary. A posed as a real estate man; B operated a small factory.
Pittsburgh papers in May, 1907, were full of an alleged "trimming" of an Ohb banker for a sum amounting to about fioo.ooo. This banker
charged that B.C , and D— -invci^ed him to New York where they
induced him to take part in a bunco card game, of the type in which the dealer pretends to be "sore" at the syndicate and willing to manipulate the cards so that "suckers" can win large sums from his associates. Such operators are known in criminal parlance as "sure thing men," as they are generally assured of their own subsequent immunity from arrest because the victims are disinclined to advertise their part in open court.
In this case the grand jury ignored the bill charging conspiracy to defraud; it was sent back by the district attorney and a second time ignored; important witnesses for the prosecution were not heard by the jury and there were other ear-marks of a "fixed" case. Up to the date of our study no action had been taken by grand juries.
A parallel to this case was the alleged swindling of a victim described
as a wealthy oil operator, of a large sum by the same gang at the same
game. In this affair also they escaped justice. Like the Marietta
banker, who was "trimmed" in a Columbus Avenue establishment in
t, the oil operator was taken to New York, which has long been
asthe"tuming joint" for similar swindles, — notably the type
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which the New York Sun dubbed "wireless wire tapping." For a long time the cwnplaints of victims, either to police magistrates or to higher officials, were in vain. The master criminals in New York had affiliations that could secure safety for the out-of-town operators. It remained for District Attorney Jerome to secure the conviction of " Larry " Summerfield and other members of his band following their longtime operations in this sphere. That no attempt was made to "turn" these "tricks" in Pittsburgh is significant. The fact that the thing was done in New York at heavy outlay for expenses, and that further division of the plunder with New York swindlers was considered necessary by the Pittsburgh conspirators, shows that they were unable to do busi- ness at the time with the Pittsburgh police.
In a somewhat different category than A and B should
be named "Buck" E , the son of a mill worker, who was
himself in boyhood employed in the mills, was later "capper" for gamblers, then saloon keeper, and finally business agent of the underworld, ready to negotiate with any official or administration willing to make a deal.
Prominent also among the many organisers of anti-social forces in Pittsburgh, and operating in a kindred field, may be
mentioned two ex-councilmen; F of the old seventh ward,
known among the brothel keepers as "King of Second Avenue"
or "Maxey the Fixer," and G , at one time alderman of the
eighth. The latter was generally recognized in the Pittsburgh tenderloin as the principal broker in a certain class of properties located in that section, as a go-between in cases when owners or managers ran foul of the law, and as usurer at high rates of interest in the not uncommon event of the negotiation of loans by their keepers. These two colleagues were indicted in 1906 for leasing properties as bawdy houses. F was Anally declared guilty, fined $3^0 and costs, and given one day in jail. G secured a "Scotch verdict," being declared not guilty but at the same time ordered to pay costs. — But more of them and their world later.
The Camp-followers of Crime The American people have been slow to team that it is dan- gerous to allow criminals of the types described to maintain a footing in any city.
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It was to G's court in the eighth ward that B succeeded in having the case against him transferred when the information had been filed before another alderman; nor did the influence of the master criminals stop with a petty magistrate of the Hill District. These same men showed an influence in the county court house sufficient to block any efforts to bring them to book. Itisoneof the elementary propositions with the men higher up in the underworld that through their control of officials, petty or otherwise, they must be able to draw such juries as they may re- quire, for their own ends or the ends of those they serve. Their highly organized following is often sufficient to turn the tide of local elections.
One of the saloons of which A was alleged to be the owner or backer was the so-called " Band-Box," on Grant Street. Its bar and restaurant occupied the ground floor of two small connected buildings which were formerly private dwelling houses. Upstairs behind the curtain "wise" people were reported to meet in secret, and here it was said that the fixing of criminal cases before trial was long attended to. To forward such ends the situation of the Band-Box was particularly convenient, having the court house on one side and police headquarters on the other.
The history of H , one of A's henchmen, showed the rise of
many of the lesser lights in the underworld. Down and out when he landed in Pittsburgh, H first worked as porter and odd-job man about different saloons, then peddled bar fixtures for the proprie- tor of a notorious place on the " Diamond, " and was finally taken up by A as a man suitable for his purposes.
Multiply H's history by a thousand, and some idea may be gained of the recruiting of the anti-social forces of a community. To the great mass of such followers, honest industry has ceased. They will live by crime, or starve serving crime, — crime whose boast it is that it "beats the game"; crime sufficiently subtle, cunningly enough contrived, to prey upon human weaknesses; crime fortified by venal alliances to the point of practical immunity. In New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, or in any large city where even an embryo "system" has taken root, behind its organ- izers troop this army of parasites who seek only a living, — night bartenders in lawbreaking saloons, bouncers in cut-throat dives, 316
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lookouts, doormen, dealers, and waiters. Among them also are the boosters, cappers, and steerers, who work upon percentages, today the false bell-wethers to rustics at a county fair; tomorrow the fleecers of workmen, coming from a factory, pay envelope in hand; again, the inveiglers of "marks" at hotel, train, or steamer, dealing the "big mit," steering the sucker to the "turning joint." Then, the riffraff of the race track, — ^jockeys, stable boys, book- makers, sheetwriters, cashiers, runners, spongers, and touts. Of the pimps and procurers who carry lechery to its ultimate levels we shall speak later.
All these men are patrons of liquor and vice resorts, and large numbers of prostitutes seek concubinage with them to escape from the more rigorous service of the brothel. Invaluable auxil- iaries to the forces of evil, their very bread dependent upon the ability to do evil unpunished, no city seeking redemption can overlook them.*
The Drift from Industry
No more dramatic study could be made than that of the individuals who in an industrial district drift into this so-called sporting and criminal life. Among the hangers-on of Newell's Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue were many former mill workers.
An interesting example was the patriarchal figure of a Welshman,
J , who was all of seventy years of age. For many years a hammerman
in the days when skilled mill men made big earnings, he was said to have saved sufficient to bring him in a small income. His children were in clerical callings, but when gambling had been last openly carried on in Pittsburgh, the father got employment as dealer for a crooked faro game. There was still even then something of the skilled workman's dignity about the old man, and white-haired though he was, he looked hale and hearty beside the pallid, hollow-eyed young rascals whose companion he had so late in life become.
* In setting forth the parasitic character ot these elements, it is not my pur- pox to under-estimale the loyalties and open-handed traits to be found among certain of them. The down-and-out who may have met only indifference and the
K*nd of existence in his own world, finds friendliness and welcome at their hands. IT do I want to ignore the exceptional bartender or race-track man who lives a
clean life. Perhaps the biggest gambler in Pittsburgh, I , a man wliose
name was lumped by the camp followers in 1907 with those of A. B, aitd C as the fourth member of the " Big Four," was a man whose personal record was said to
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Another mill man was "Buster" , who worked for "Paddy"
L , a wellknown local bookmaker. One evening I chanced upiHi a
knot of people at the Newell Hotel discussing the death of Buster, who a few days before had been brought back from Mt. Gemens, whither the sporting people had sent him as a last resort. Official diag- nosisof death — tuberculosis; unofficial, "hop," "booze," and the usual adjuncts. A subscription was being taken up to bury the man, Paddy
L and an uncle of Buster being counted upon to make good any
deficit. Buster was a Pittsburgh product. His father, a saloon keeper, had been killed in a gun play there some years before.
An interesting character among the employes attached to one of the municipal bureaus was a former prize tighter whom we will call " Doc " His life had been a varied one. Of German extraction, he had been bora on Pittsburgh's South Side. As a boy he had been known as a "scrapper" and the reputation clung to him. His father was a mill man and Doc's first job was as helper at So cents a day in a hoop mill. Later he earned 90 cents taking scrap from the shears. Still later he became a helper at li.io a day, "catching on." But he had several narrow escapes from accidents and he tired of the steady drive of mill work. He secured a job at making boxes in a bakery at $7.;o per week. Meanwhile, his fighting had begun to attract attention of small fry "sports, " policemen, and others, and his first direct enlistment in the sporting woHd came when he got a job as bartender at fi; a week — more than double his old wage. This was in a saloon at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street, kept by an ex-detective. A few weeks later the place was closed by the sherilT, but Doc stuck closely to the sporting people and was soon at the training quarters in Sheepshead Bay, New York. He claimed to have done some prize fighting in New York, Bridgepon, and New Haven, and his knowledge of Chuck Connors, Morris-t he- Handshaker, and other characters about the hop-joints of Chinatown, gave credence to these later bits of personal history.
In spite of his varied career, however, he had had a good record in the city service. At the time of a smallpox epidemic in- Pittsburgh, "Doc," then a sanitary policeman, had stuck to his post in the infected quarters, nursing and caring for the sick.
Such instances of the drift from industry into the small office- holding class by way of the so-called spotting world are not alto- gether rare. The mill worker turned prize fighter, and the ex-prize lighter turned policeman, is a sufficiently well defined type, closely afTiliated with, when not actually of, the underworld. 318
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Preying Upon Work People in an altogether different sense, this underworld drags upon the workaday life about it. The confidence gangs that fleece a banker out of $100,000 grade down to the "tin-horn" gamblers who long were familiar figures on pay days at the mills and fac- tories in and about Pittsburgh.
The operation of a "chuck-a-luck" machine or "wheel of fortune" was for many years a favorite means for separating the workman, es- pecially the foreigner, from his pay. Worthless "prizes" were given out to keep interest alive, and clever boosters (confederates) were employed who won the more valuable awards. An operator who did not clear f jo to t6o a day with a wheel of this kind was doing poorly. After fixing the local cop, or such substitute for a policeman as the neighborhood afforded, paying his boosters and the rent for the wheel, a comfortable income re- mained for the operator. These wheels were usually stationed at "pays" in the smaller boroughs, where the police, even if honest, could not always give proper protection to the workingman. Such gambling devices were popular around the holidays,* when turkeys or chickens were used as prizes.
This was the testimony given me before I came to Pitts- burgh by an itinerant crook who had visited the district five years before:
"Take a stroll on a pleasant afternoon in East Pittsburgh, Wil- Rierding, or Manchester, for example, when it chances to be pay day. The scene around some of the big mills resembles the grounds at a county fair on the 'big day' (Thursday), when the fakers and grafters have every- thing their own way. The 'strong joint' is the device operated most ex- tensively and the one that 'gets the money.' "
"By actual count, on one occasion 1 found 14 men with stands, six of them 'working the hulls, ' — the three shells and little ball, termed in England, 'thimble-ringer,' — around the steel car works in Manchester. The pc^ice of the mill towns descend on these people every now and then and have exerted themselves to exterminate the class, bag and baggage; but it is a difficult task. Many of the factories are situated 'out in the woods'; that is, in a wide space of open ground. The grafting fraternity
*At Old Home Week in McKeesport in July, 1910, there were fully a dozen such wheels turning along the river front. Among them was at least one which made no pretense of distributing prizes other than in money.
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can therefore lake their stand and note the approach of the enemy with a sweep of the eye in time to make a 'clean getaway.' "
I found their operations had become less and less frequent, not merely because of the greater efficiency of ofiiciais but because the workers, even the "Hunkies" and "Polacks," had grown "wise" and it was necessary to reach them in more devious ways.
A typical and cruel imposture practiced to a considerable extent in the Pittsburgh District, and of which foreign^bom work- ingmen were invariably the victims, was the swindle known indiffer- ently as the tin-box, handkerchief, or pocketbook game.
This is essential I V a trick of substitution. The operators were Slavs or Italians, and preyed upon men of their own race. The thief, dressed as a workingman and accompanied by one or more confederates, frequented the vicinity of railroad stations and of the mills on pay day. As a possible vic- tim approaches, one confederate drops a pocketbook in his path. The im- migrant starts to pick it up but is outdistanced in so doing by the thief, who eagerly opens the pocketbook and finds it well filled with bills. The victim asserts his right to a portion of the find, or if he is backward about doing so the other confederates mix in and advise him of his rights. The matter is hotly argued for a time, but is brought to an end by the thief who. apparently recognizing the justice of the victim's claim, or pretend- ing fear of the confederates, or of the police, proposes an equitable divi- sion. AH hands adjourn for a drink, and the thief makes an excuse to leave the party.
Another argument arises, based upon a confederate's alleged belief that the thief intends to disappear with the prize. Finally the "found " pocketbook, containing apparently hundreds of dollars, is entrusted to the victim, who as a guarantee of good faith deposits his own pocket- book, pay envelope, or watch and chain, with one of the confederates. Somewhat later the victim discovers himself alone with an old pocket- book stuffed with bills which he learns were issued years before by a defunct government, the Confederate States of America.
The pocketbook dropper is ready to content himself usually with the earnings of some Slavic workman who has just drawn his pay, or dis- played a little money in purchasing a railroad ticket.
The handkerchief and tin-box games are essentially similar in opera- tion, but are more often the result of systematic and detailed planning. A returning immigrant, usually Italian, whose savings are concealed about his person, is induced to deposit them for "safekeeping" in a tin box, or perhaps a handkerchief, belonging to one of the band. 320
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The Pittsburgh detectives seemed to appreciate the social significance of the type of swindle referred to, but as much could not be said for the courts, which often contented themselves with the infliction of a fine on the guilty party. It is difficult to get witnesses against this type of swindler, for oftentimes when an officer appears while the game is being played, the prospective victim will slip away as eagerly as the thieves, fearing detention and loss of time from his work.
Two of the most expert swindlers in the Pittsburgh District of the
class described, were a Pole, J , and his "stall " or confederate, K .
A Pennsylvania Railroad detective, who effectively protected the Union Station, Pittsburgh, from the operations of such criminals, secured J's conviction at Scranton, where he was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment. The man had been twice arrested in Pittsburgh previous to this, but had gotten off with small fines. On one of these occasions, when arraigned in court as a suspicious person, he had not denied his record, but asserted that he had reformed and showed that he had (7,000 in bank. A woman accompanying him was a prostitute whom he was taking to Giicago to establish in business.
Striking Out from the City
Under the reform administration, such lesser fry, and the master criminals as well, were not allowed to work to any extent in Pittsburgh itself. But even when a town is closed, local men of this type neither starve to death nor do they abandon their criminal ways. They are simply put to it more hardly to make both ends meet. They may "dig up suckers" (inveigle persons of means) who are to be "framed up against" (introduced to) some sort of a crooked game to be pulled off in another city by out-of-town crooks or by themselves, and for which, when the trick is turned, they are to get their share, or "bit."
Again, they may extend their operations into neighboring territory, managing a fake prize fight here or a crooked foot race there, secure gambling privileges in a nearby mill town on pay day, or operate a pool room across the West Virginia line; or they may work with " gun mobs" from other cities.
Take, for example, McKeesport, the largest mill town in the Pittsburgh District. This was in 1907-08 commonly reported
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to be a "percentage burg"; namely, a town where the local police department, for a consideration, tolerated raids by outside gun mobs on pay day at the mills. The time for the gun mob to work was strictly limited. It had to be a case of getting in to town, "tearin' 'er wide open," and "blowin' on a rattler," all in the same day. This to " cover" the " coppers. " Here the locally informed criminal had value to give the outsider. He sent the "dope" to the outside "guns," and thus prepared they utilized every mo- ment of their working time. Such a mill paid at a certain hour, for example, or the workmen had to ride on a certain car under conditions favorable for "dips" (pickpockets). Another mill had a saloon in its immediate vicinity, the proprietor of which could be "reached" to the extent of standing for "strong arm" work (hold-ups) or an occasional " peter" (use of knock-out dn^). In another town a certain class of workmen was not wise to con- federate money.
Outside Invaders
Under a reform regime, also, however well the local forces may be held in leash, we have drifting into the city a class of "take-a-chance" people, socalled because they hope by occasional and inconspicuous foray to carry off plunder which, to their way of thinking, "it's a shame to let go lyin' around loose."
Let us tell of them in words of their own cult :
Detectives the country over will recognize at first glance the por- trait of "Chappie Moran." When arrested in Pittsburgh in March, 1907, Chappie described himself as a "race-track worker"; there is a certain naive ingenuousness about an occupation so described. As a "wireless wire-tapper" Mr. Moran was well posted in all race-track vemacular; his opportunities were found also in the city crowds hurrying to the race track by car, ferry, and train. He had had a career of highly varied externals but withal, just the daily hopeless grind of a common thief. Drugs, liquor, and painted women, plus the weight of a thiefs soul, had reduced him from such high criminal estate as he may have superficially assumed, and we found him here one of the "take-a-chance" people, picked up on suspicion by the Pittsburgh police "with a record, judge, as long as your arm," Without even an opportunity to "break even on expenses," he was obliged to "dig down" for fine money and "copper" a fine of "3$ bucks"; "three hours to leave town" was the order; and 322
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"bulls" (policemen) "hoisted" him "aboard the rattler," back to New York.
Another wellknown American was sure that Pittsburgh needed a change of administration, and that badly. "Big Sam" Strosnider, "salesman, " floating into town, found an unpretentious hotel handy to the railroad station. Unfortunately for Big Sam his "mug" was known to most detectives and the Pennsylvania Railroad was prejudiced against his inviting strangers into a "friendly game" in the coaches. So Sam was obliged to " frame up the marks. " while his partner rode the " rattlers" and "turned the tricks." But "bulls," "suspicious persons,"and "hours" all came to Sam, and he also left the city in disgust and not unattended. In May of the same year, along came "Little Dan," also known as Mr. Daniel Gross, Mr. Daniel Weber, Mr. Daniel Taud, and describing himself as a "salesman." But the "bulls" got him, had no hesitation in aflfirming that he lived by the "dip," and out and away went Little Dan. In "York" the "interests" could "spring a guy" (secure a prisoner's release) as "easy as taking candy from a kid"; but in Pittsburgh the "bulls" declined to take chances, and the "good people" (wellknown members of the underworid) were under cover. A deplorable state of things.
Messrs. James Monroe and Philip Lamont paid a social visit. These were gentlemen "on the dip" (pocket -picking), and understood admirably all the operatbns of "stalling," "bumping," "ringing a thimble," and "getting a rock or a front" (a watch or scarf pin). Their business took them a great deal on street cars, on busy lines, especially during rush hours. They were extremely courteous, so much so as to decline to occupy seats to the exclusion of ladies, and they sought the fresher air of the crowded rear platforms in preference to that of the vitiated interior of the cars. Altogether, they were very wise gentlemen of remarkable vocabularies, and possessed decided affinities for "bulls" (plain clothes detectives). Some they found good fellows, "willing to live and let live"; others were unspeakable "gougers" who "wanted it all," inclined finally lo "double cross a guy at that." The Pittsburgh bulls had no use for the gentlemen, and arrest, fine, and hours in turn became their portion. Once clear of the city they would probably have told you in the back room of the proper joint in the tenderloins of New York, Chicago, or St. Louis, that the Pittsburgh bulls were "hostile," which is another way of saying "square. " And probably both gentlemen had sufficient public spirit at the time of the next Pittsburgh city election to go back to register a protest at the polls against a police administration which was "unwilling even to let a guy break even."
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National Aspects
The difficulties experienced by these gentlemen showed what a change for the better had come in Pittsburgh. The country-wide front of crime which challenges an honest police administration in any city is, however, not limited to such chance comers. We have seen how the criminal element in Pittsburgh had passed beyond the stage of the individual gang to loose, elastic, but effective confederacies of interests; how it had affiliations which count for immunity; and how it struck out from the industrial center over a comparatively wide area. As the Marietta banker duped by Pittsburgh sharpers in New York learned to his cost, these more or less coherent local groups were in alliance (equally loose but equally eifective) with similar ganglia in other great cities.
In a more overt way, the members of the underworld erf a hundred cities touch elbows through a national organization, sufficiently embracing in its membership to take a place among the fraternal societies of the country; that is, through the "American Order of Eagles."
This order was founded at Seattle in the So's by John Considine, proprietor of the original "Honka-Tonk," a place so notorious as to have given its name generally to tough dance halls and joints on the Coast. Considine was active in local politics, and saw the value of organization. In the crowd that frequented his place he found material for the first "aerie," as the lodges are called. Soon many of the guns, fixers, joint keepers, and sporting men generally of the Coast had gotten together in the new order which began to extend itself eastward through the mining states. Considine and his brother moved to Detroit where they secured the handbook privileges on the local race tracks and became, with the added prestige of the Order of Eagles behind them, more influential figures than they had been in the west. The free masonry of their kind brought the Considines into touch with the New York Sullivans, and Timothy D., the "Big Feller," was quick to grasp the possibilities of a nationalorganiiation which would include not only "guns"but the riffraff who live by and upon crime while ostensibly race-track followers or bartenders; also the so-called sporting element in general, together with slum politicians of all degrees and parties, the heelers and parasites of politics and a few prominent office holders as make-weights. Of recent 324
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years, to offset in part the malodorousness of the organization, many bona fide bartenders, policemen, small saloon keepers and middlemen de- pendent for a living upon the liquor traffic or local political machines, have been brought into the order. In spite of this last element, the order always has been and continues to be ihe one example in our American national life of organized anti-social forces. A Pittsburgh police official expressed himself as tired of pulling off Eagle buttons at the Central Station before "mugging" their wearers — an act of courtesy generally extended by police depanments to the fraternal orders.
When a branch of the orderwas started in Pittsburgh in 1900, it absorbed an old local organization made up of toughs. Its aerie stood appropriately enough in the center of the city flanked on either side by brothels. In the fall of 1907 distinguished rep- resentatives of the order from New York met the Pittsburgh representatives in friendly conclave, and at a meeting in Central Turner Hall on Forbes Street the silver-tongued Grady spoke for the " Big Feller" unavoidably detained in New York. The wait- ing cabs lined Grant Street for several blocks, while within the Band-Box good fellowship was pledged in unstinted champagne to the joys of easy money, and to the common sentiment, " to hell with reform."*
An army of persons, free spending, free living, debauched and debauching, is at once the right hand of professional crime and the left hand of political corruption in every large city. We have seen in Pittsburgh how they can not be driven from a city over- night; how their evil operations were merely curtailed by a rigorous administration, not done away with altogether. We have seen that the floating body of crooks are quick to learn the temper of such an administration and will give that city a wide berth which sets its face against their ways. But we have caught gjimpses of the inter-municipal alliances of the resident under- world, predatory, resourceful, biding its lean years.
Under a clean municipal administration, Pittsburgh was no longer a wide open city, and with the merging of Allegheny City, the District as a whole was becoming hostile to professional crim-
*J. M. Morin, director of the department of public safety under the suc- ceeding administration, was given as president of (be local aerie in the Pittsburgh Under of Maich 6, tgro.
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inals. The effect of this change on the community mi^t indeed have been far-reaching, except that the situation was after all one of abeyance; — the "master thieves" lying low, waiting, nursing relations with certain factions in local politics; a rim (^ gambling hells encircling Pittsburgh; good government people here as else- where, failing to understand the power of professional criminal "confederation," or to credit the prophecy among "wise" people as to the end of reform.
HI YEGGS There is another group of offenders, to which as yet no id- erence has been made, distinct enough to be treated more or less by themselves in the discussion of the police problem of such an in- dustrial city as Pittsburgh. The yeggs are national characters in the life of the underworld, covering even more territory in their wanderings and criminal activities than the professional pick- pockets. Distinctly an American product,* half tramp and half criminal, they are desperate and daring safe blowers, hold-up men, and burglars. They operate generally in small communities,
* The PinkertDTis thus describe the yeggs:
"Nine-tenths of this class are made up of so-calted driftwood of humanity in this country, composed of about one-half natives, one-quarter foreign descent, and one-quarter foreign birth. Most of these are mechaoics or have i>wn railroad men, iron workers, or originally in some trade; have lost their places of employment through \ibor troubles; and in stealing rides on cars, or tramping from one dty to another, they have formed the acquaintance of criminals, gradually becoming crim- inals themselves.
"A mechanic who loses his employment through a strike or otiier labor troubles leaves his native town for larger cities in search of employment, intending at first to find work and continue at it. But being unsuccessful he gradually drifts to lodging houses or to the cheaper dass of saloons, until, his money being ex- hausted, he through pure desperation starts out with some other mechanic similarly situated 'on theroad.' tramping, beating his way from one city to another, begging his meals. And it is while doing this tliat he forms the acquaintance, in camps, of the yegg, who proceeds to take him in hand to determine what his ability consists of. If a mechanic explains that he is a machinist or has been an iron worker, especially in building construction, he is gradually introduced to other yeggmen and ftnally becomes a member of some yegg tribe. They may also be recruited from ordinary tramps who are possessed of exceptional personal courage and resource. The yeggs may be said to have formed themselves into a loose confederacy, since they have a strong sense of comradeship which is superior to the boundaries of the several states and is re-enforced by a vocabulary sufficiently distinct to provide the equivalent of signs and pass words made use of in theonlinary
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especially on country post offices and banks; but they are to be found between times, and after they have grown old in the life, begging on the main streets of the larger cities, usually practicing certain types of imposture peculiar to themselves. Occasionally they are real cripples, having lost an arm or a leg while "beating the freights," but more often they simulate partial paralysis or the loss of speech and hearing.
The continued presence of yeggs in considerable numbers in any large city is generally proof positive of the existence there of a well established hang-out. This is usually a saloon or fur- nished room house maintained by a veteran of their class who has settled down and acquired sufficient local political influence to gain for his former comrades on the road a certain amount of security at least in carrying on their begging operations. The proprietor acts too as "fence," or go-between in disposing of postage stamps stolen from country post offices, or of other loot. In the go's, according to Josiah Flint, Allegheny City itself had the nickname in the underworld of "The Fence," and was on a par with Toledo as a harboring place for criminals who "worked" in other cities. These were unmolested in 1907-08 by the Allegheny officials; and, in turn, did not carry on depredations there.
Working the Factories It was my good fortune to secure some expert testimony as to the extent to which the manufacturing sites and industrial towns about Pittsburgh and Allegheny were to the begging yeggs of the middle states, what the shoe shop district of the New Eng- land states was to the Eastern tramp. The Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, the Union Iron Works in San Francisco, the Pullman Car Shops in Chicago, and the Westinghouse plants in East Pittsburgh, were looked upon by the "street men" of the land as the " best works in the country in which to make a pitch. " The following statement was written for me by a man who was an ex-newsboy, tramp kid, thief, and street faker, and whose ac- quaintance with Pittsburgh conditions dated back to 190; and before.*
iiof criminal life publbhed in the
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"There was a prevailing custom in Pittsburgh among business houses, particularly in saloons, restaurants, shoe and cJothing stores, etc, of giving away small advertising cards with the finii's name printed on one side, and on the other, a complete list of all the most important manufac- turing concerns in and around the city for a radius of ten miles, together with the days on which they pay their employes. Visiting beggars, thieves, and street fakirs knew this custom and would provide themselves with these lists before starting to 'pling" the district.
"Since in recent years ablcbodied begging had largely become a thingof the past, along-sufTeringpu blic refusing to 'give up' toast rong man, able to work, the profession was obliged more and more to depend upon special devices. Every tramp of any note sought to 'double up with a boy,' and when it became difficult even for a 'kid' 'to produce,' the beggars were driven to another expedient. They found that the only ones who could bring in the pennies were the crippled boys. If a kid had an arm or a leg off, or was lucky enough to have any other physical deformity, he was sure to be a particularly successful mendicant. Several years ago every 'jocker'* in the country had his eye on 'snaring a kid with anatural bug' (a boy suffering from a real deformity). Now when a jocker has such a boy it is customary, in making a tour of the country, for the lad on their arrival at each productive town to simplify matters by first getting a permit from someone in authority to ' beg the burg.' Ostensibly, of course, his mission is to raise enough money to buy his ticket home to his widowed mother, — always a long distance off. This is part of the system. A permit once obtained, the rest is easy. He simply proceeds from one store, office, or residence to another.
" In begging from the employes of a factory, a similar method is in vogue; the beggar who first goes to the superintendent or manager on pay day with a long pathetic tale may succeed in getting permission to go through the works; the rest is merely a matter of collecting. It isn't every mendicant, however, that is clever enough to get this permission; and not a few factories refuse to allow any one to bother their work people under any circumstances. On one occasion a jocker and kid, wellknown in yeggdom, made a complete tour of the district surrounding Pittsburgh and Allegheny and they reaped a rich harvest. The boy, although young in years, was well trained, and peculiarly fitted to successfully separate money from the pockets of the working people. 'Chi Slater* and the 'Star Kid' were the 'monikers' (nicknames) of this pair. The jocker, himself a
* A "jocker" is a hobo who takes with him a vagrant boy to do his running and various menial tasks, and to beg. The boy is usually made by his older male companion to submit to sexual abuse.
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cripple with one leg missing, was an old timer around these parts, having worked the factories for eveiy dollar he could get, and had returned after an absence of six months with a kid to complete the job. The boy, a fine looking, neatly dressed lad of American parentage, about sixteen years old, had the thumb of his left hand missing. Ordinarily this deformity would have excited little or no sympathy and would have resulted in small gain for a beggar out for 'big earnings'; but previous to visiting the factories, the stump of the boy's thumb was burned with vitriol, the flesh was then pennitted to become ragged and festered, and vaseline was applied and allowed to remain without further application. The mere exhibiting of this sore was enough to make any one 'give up.' The pair then started to work the shops, and in two months they got over $^oo. Every penny was afterward spent on the New York Bowery for 'slops' (liquor)."
On the "Main Stem"
My introduction to the yegg element in Pittsburgh occurred at nine o'clock on the first night of my stay there. It was a sum- mer evening and the Salvation Army was holding an open air meeting at the comer of Smithfield and Diamond streets. The usual crowd was grouped about the uniformed men, street trafTic was rwrmal, and nothing of particular interest seemed af(X}t. I turned to pass on. As 1 did so two men came up Diamond Street on different sides, and began to beg among the bystanders. The first "plunge" was made by a short, clean-cut yegg, who wore a high Stetson hat, striped black and white shirt, and polka dot tie. His face was clean shaven and he had a springy walk. This fellow made a successful "speil" to a number of men, finally entering into conversation with those whom in the vernacular he set out to "slug" with argument. By a touch of humor, rather characteristic of the yegg, he described himself as an undertaker. "Not a common beggar, sir," he reiterated (after meeting a pre- liminary rebuff), "I simply need carfare to Allegheny." He gleaned perhaps 40 cents in the first ten minutes.
Thinking he could be easily picked up again, I turned my attention to his comrade, a bulky man of middle age with grizzled mustache, who limped and carried a crutch. He stood outside of a clothing store, partially hidden by a show case, waiting for a likely "mark." A few years earlier only force could probably have made such a typical yegg eschew the tall Stetson hat and 329
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other habiliments of the caste of "John Yeggdom"; but with age had come an enforced moderation in his way of living, and he now wore a derby and permitted himself a mustache. Between the younger "shorty" and this riper "caneman," I chose the latter as more likely to be infonning if started right. After a few more plunges, " Shorty" quit, waving a farewell to " Sticks, " and walked swiftly away. Sticks finally found the lights of the "main stem" too public, and as he had had fair success, started down Fourth Avenue to Wood Street to solace himself with a couple of whiskies.
Cross-country "Jumps" Later, in a saloon on Diamond Street, I hailed Sticks with a yegg password. A little fencing on both sides, a "try-out" or two on "monikers" and "records," and Sticks was ready to tell his story. It brought out some common phases of typical yegg life in its national aspects which must be grasped by any city which would counter them.
Slicks was bom in a country town in Ohio, where his brother still kept a saloon, and as a young man he had lived for some time in the city of Qeveland. With a touch of pride, he said that when he had traveled with the " Peter men " or " hard-boiled " people (safe blowers), he had been known as "Cleveland Jim." He claimed to have served at least one five-year "bit" in a "factory" (penitentiary) for "Peter" work himself. Now that he was getting old he did "straight plunging" (begging) only, and was known as "Baldy Callahan." Removing his hat he exposed a head that was quite bald. He had just come in from Youngstown, Ohio, having picked up Shorty in the railroad yards. Both intended to quit Pittsburgh at once as they knew the town was "hostile," and if they had not been well "steamed up" they would not have taken a chance at "plunging" on the "main stem."
Shorty, he continued, was a "dope," and had hurried away to find a drug store where he could get some "white stuff" (cocaine) and "shoot" himself full enough to muster nerve to "make a train" and goon east. Baldy, too, was bound for the Bowery, after some years of rather successful exploits. All through the southwest, he would have me believe, even in the smaller towns, a "four-bit tip" was esteemed the proper thing to hand to a beggar, and the yeggs were making all kinds of money. Not a passenger train west of the Mississippi nor south of the Missouri but carried "high heels" and jockers, and train crews connived at their 330
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presence.* "Hard-boiled" people, too, said Baldy, were "going good" from the zinc district right down to the city of Mexico, notwithstanding the "tapping" (hanging) of "Tea" West and his partner for "plugging" (shooting) a deputy sheriff in Arkansas. According to Baldy, it had not been Tea but another yegg whose "gatling" (gun) had made a "stiff" of the "bull." Tea, loyal to his code, had gone to his death without a "squeal," So had "Denver Shine," a Negro; but on the other hand, Baldy told of the iniquities of "Riverside Slim" (another wellknown Negro tramp), who had ceased to respect some of the obligations of his kind and had been punished by a "kangaroo" court (tramp's court) and banished from the roads of the southwest. "Leadville Jimmy," who with "Texas Red" had killed "Swedish Qara" in "York," had been cornered in San Quentin prison. f
When the talk, by way of reciprocity, turned to affairs in New York,
Baldy was eq>edal)y interested to learn of the fortunes of Mickey G ,
Tom Lee's bartender on the Bowery, and he recalled with some enthusiasm Mickey's former exploits, — how when on the road he was famous for recitations and improvisation songs given around the tramp camp fires in the "jungle." That he now had a flat and a woman was a concession to domesticity which seemed to amuse Baldy immensely. He commented without bitterness upon the mushroom prosperity of "Los Slim," " Illinois Jimmy," "New Orleans Ray," "K. C. Red," and other yeggs who had gone to "keeping place" (running saloons).
The old yeggs were, to Baldy's mind, going fast. "Harrigan," who for years with "Billy Kid" had held down the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy and the Rock Island railroads, had been "done away with" (died); and "Old Baldy," whom the yeggs used to term the "best known citizen of Indiana," had also made the "big jump."
*A "high heel" is a woman companion of professionat yeggs, so named from the practice of wearing high false shoes which enable ber to pretend that the suffers from hip trouble.
fThis incident wdl illustrate* the national ramifications of the craft. Swedish Qara was killed in a yegg rendezvous, a fumiihed room house at 7^ Ddancey Street, New York. Justice later overlook the men who emptied their revolveis into the body of this woman and then calmly walked out of the house and escaped. While undergoing sentence in the Nashville penitentiary for safe blowing dynamite was smuggled in to Texas, and he with his companions blew up an entire comer of the priton and escaped. They were, however, tracked by blood hounds to a neighboring swamp and there he was shot down and killed. Lead- ville Jimmy was brought from San Quentin to New York on the old charge of murdering Swedish Clara, and was committed to Matteawan (the state institution for criminal insane). Powerful political friends in New York would have effected his rdease through a legal trick, had it not been for the strong stand taken by the state medical authorities who asserted that the man was a criminal degenerate.
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Baldy himself had been traveling in rather hard luck since leaving the southwest. The pdice had shooed him away from Oeveland and he had gone to Youngstown where, when a druggist refused him even a couple of "Indians" (cc^pers), he had knocked him out with his "sap" (crutch). He had been arrested and sentenced to f lo fine or ten days tn jail, but on giving a good "con" as to his crippled condition — he affected paralysis — the judge had remitted the fine and a policeman had seen him to the railroad yards. Baldy was, of course, not lame, and used the crutch for a "stall" (pretense). He hoped for better luck in the east, claiming old acquaintanceship with "Chi" Tom Lee, famous in yeggdom as a friend of the New York Sullivans, and he did not expect to be "bothered" at the beaches.
Sitting with Baldy in a Pittsburgh saloon, I could not but recognize how a chance meeting brought one at once in touch with almost every phase of the yegg world, its ups and downs as violent as its "jumps" back and forth across the continent. Today John Yegg "snuffs a dram" (cracks a safe) and "blows" into a "hang-out," weighed down with "junk" or "flimsy" (coin or bills), able to match coins with double eagles or to throw a note on the bar with instructions to keep the crowd drunk until it is gone; tomorrow his luck changes and he may think himself lucky if he is able to "make a sit down" (beg on the sidewalk) or even to receive a " hand out. "
Shorty was the type of young desperado who with youth in his favor is able to despise and to defy an oftentimes impotent local police. In due time he would in his turn degenerate in the estimation of the brotherhood into a mere "fatty," just as Oeve- land Jim, companion of the hard-boiled people in former days, had now become plain Baldy Callahan. How much evil already has been and will be done by this type of criminal can not be known, for the yegg road is long and devious and tens of thousands travel it.
Pittsburgh a " Hostile Town" Four years had intervened, but it still was a topic of discus- sion in yeggdom how Scranton Jimmy, in the fall of 1904, emulous, no doubt, of his fellows in other places who had developed into successful saloon keepers, had "jumped" into the Smoky City and 332
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opened a bar room in the vicinity of Diamond market; how the word was passed along the line; and how yeggs and "pan handlers" (tramp beggars) flocked into the place and celebrated with good measure the opening of a new headquarters. The history of Scranton Jimmy's place, however, was brief. During the first six weeks the police raided it twelve times; twice a week they "backed the wagon" to the saloon door and took one or more loads of prisoners to the station house. Scranton Jimmy finally gave up.
Since then no similar hang-out had been established in Pittsburgh proper; and yeggs in transit like Baldy Callahan made only temporary stops.
There were, however, some exceptions to this rule.
In the winter of igo8, 1 found a wellknown yegg, one M , posing
as a cripple, canying a crutch, and throwing out "dockets" (printed beg- ging appeal slips) in saloons on Smithfield Street. This man had served two years for bursary in the Western penitentiary at Allegheny City. He had been arrested a number of times in Pittsburgh and Altoona since 1904, and on at least three occasions had served thirty days in the workhouse at Claimiont. Working local Pennsylvania Railroad trains was also in his line. Only a few weeks previous to my interview he had been brought into the Pittsburgh police headquarters and had been released upon promise that he would leave the city. For a time he had a furnished room on Wylie Avenue where he lived with his high heel, who carried out an imposture with a crutch and a false shoe, handing out dockets.
Another exception to the general rule was "Burly" N whom
the writer found occasionally stationed on the bridge spanning the PennsyU vania Railroad tracks from Washington Street to the Union Station approach. This fellow was a genuine cripple, or, in yegg parlance, he had a "natural leg," having lost his limb a few years before while beating his way on freight trains through the Cumberland valley. However, accord- ing to his own statement, he had long been a "burly" (ablebodied beggar and tramp) before meeting with this accident. A native of Philadelphia and now only about twenty-five years of age, he had been on the road since boyhood, and had served time in various jails and workhouses. He was proud to claim acquaintanceship with noted yeggs whom i knew or had heard of. At one time, sick of the road, he had found work at window cleaning in Pittsburgh through the local police, but he had later obeyed the call back to trampdom and was now probably permanently settled in this 333
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life. N found that the Pittsburgh District agreed with him, "nobody bothered him," he could keep "half soused" all the time, and need only remain sufficiently alert to " throw his hat " (beg). The " sucker " did the rest. He was well pleased with his "earnings" on pay days at the Pressed Steel Car Works in Allegheny City.
More lately, however, having in good nature taken two buriys down to "break them into a good thing," they all grew tired of keeping one foot or arm tucked away as though injured and sought a quicker means of getting rich. Under a convenient railway bridge they "held up Hunkies" for their entire pay. The bulls got "sore" because of the "hollers" (complaints of victims). Suspicion pointed to N as sponswfor the buriys, and the Steel Car Company was as good as closed to biro untir'Whitey" O could fix things up.
The Fence
In contrast to Pittsburgh's freedom from hang-outs, Whitey Cs headquarters at 105 Grantham Street, Allegheny Qty, had long been a yegg rendezvous. Until 1908, the Pittsburgh pcJice were not in a position to rout them out of the District. So long as Allegheny City existed as a separate municipality, not only were these hang-outs allowed to flourish there, but the town was also a resort for other professional thieves from all over the country and to a certain extent Pittsburgh itself furnished a convenient field for their operations.
Whitey was one of the hard-boiled people who was "in right" with the Allegheny bulls, and could and would fix anything within reason for suitable compensation. His picture was in the Rogues' Gallery in Pittsburgh, and his furnished room house was a center for fake cripples like the docket-thrower, M. According to a police authority, this was a real "cripple factory" where young men brought in from other cities were "fixed up," — furnished with crutches, and their arms or hands bandaged in order to carry out the pretense that they were bona fide workmen who had been injured in the mills.
The leader of one gang, P by name, who had ppcvkMisly
operated in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Buffalo, sent out members to ply
their trade throughout the steel district and even on the main streets of
Pittsburgh's business section. For example, a "hand-out stiff" would be
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posted on the sidewalk outside the Duquesne Club to solicit alms. Along with the mendicant would be sent boosters, men who would pass in front of the supposed cripple and with some show drc^ a quarter into his hat. The booster was poorly dressed, and the game was that more wealthy passersby would note the coin and go him one better.
Such fake cripples are closely akin to the yeggs in their begging operations. While for the most part they differ from the latter in that they do not resort to burglary and safe-blowing, being content to commit lesser offenses, they sometimes become recruits; and they are not to be considered as working only in the pursuit of their calling. Their headquarters in saloons or fur- nished room houses are places of rendezvous for the more desper- ate yeggs as well as for men of their own class.
Thus Whitey O's was a sort of post office where tran- sients called for their mail and planned their operations. It flour- ished unmolested until, with the consolidation of Allegheny City and Pittsburgh in 1908, Director Lang and Superintendent Mc- Quaide of Pittsburgh took summary action. Within a few weeks' time the furnished room house on Grantham Street was raided on three different occasions. O was twice lined $50 in the central police court and the third time f too, sums which he readily paid rather than go to jail.
In addition to this headquarters, there were several other "sub-stations" in Allegheny City which fake cripples and yeggs used for meeting places. Six members of a gang were arrested at 206 Anderson Street, in Allegheny, and revolvers, cartridges, and steel saws were found when their quarters were searched.
The belated Allegheny raids went to prove what Pittsburgh had already halfway demonstrated, — that the closing up of establbhed yegg hang-outs by the police of an industrial city is not only a practicable measure, but will result in the virtual dis- appearance of these criminals from the neighborhood. On the other hand, the yegg hang-out if tolerated in any city is bound to infect it with evils.
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IV BEGGARS
Not only was Pittsburgh in 1907-08 "hostile" to be^ng yeggs, but considering the city's size and wealth there was com- paratively little street begging by semi-professionals, such as "down and outs" or lodging-house frequenters. As in other industrial cities where there is a more or less steady demand for labor in mills and factories, ablebodied begging is looked upon with disfavor. Even the cold of the winter brought no consider- able increase.
There was the usual number of licensed street peddlers operating as petty tradesmen, but few were in reality beggars, and very few who were unlicensed used their wares as a cover for begging. There were only a few blind street mendicants and no "black hoods," wrinkled old women dressed in shabby black, such as go about begging in downtown office buildings in New York, or at the servants' doors of private houses, i made no personal investigation, but was told that house to house begging by women with large families and long stories was common. There was also some begging at the doors of churches. But the petite who did this were of a type that showed the need of a strong asso- ciated charities rather than of police repression.
Such local parasites as existed, however, were not so vigor- ously dealt with as the visiting swindlers and pickpockets, who, as we have seen, upon their arrival in the city were promptly gathered into the police net and given "hours" to leave town. One place at least in the city was evidently known as a safe and presumably profitable "pitch." This was the bridge spanning the Pennsyl- vania Railroad tracks from Washington Street to the Union Station approach. It was here that 1 first made the acquaintance of Buriy N, whose story has already been given, and during the summer and fall of 1907, 1 observed (at different times) no less than 15 mendicants, some of them apparently yeggs. There were a few semi-professionals also to be found begging around the Diamond and in Pittsburgh's business section, of whom the fol- lowing were representative types:
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"Thuowini
IHMOWINC His Hat
Mendicant imposlor of Ihe "John Yegg" type who (lopped on Washington Street bridge above the Union Depot
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A "down and out" was observed for several weeks begging on the streets at night. The man was stoop-shouldered, hollow-eyed, and toothless, and his beard was mixed with grey. His clothes were noitde* script and he wore a battered derby hat. Although it was winter, he had DO overcoat. According to the man's story, he was a widower, sixty-two years of age; his wife had been dead a number of years and his two children were also deceased. His great grandfather, he claimed, had come from Germany to America and had been one of the first glass manufacturers in the country. He was a glass worker himself, he claimed, and formerly carried a card of the Amalgamated Association of Class Workers. Lat- terly, he had bummed about, working for a few days or weeks from time to time in the kitchens of cheap restaurants. He slept at the Salvation Army lod^ng house paying lo cents a night. He had been arrested a number of times for drunkenness and had served short terms in the local jail.
A genuine cripple — a colored man partly paralyzed — was fre- quently to be seen begging on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District, appar- ently unnudested by the police.
An Irish "widow" was found visiting the downtown office build- ings. She was dressed in mourning and claimed that her husband had been a blast furnace helper for several years previous to his death. She had been begging for a few days only, she informed me, but had realized from ^3.00 to {2.$o each day. A local charitable society had occasionally supplied her with coal. The story she told was that her family consisted of seven children, the oldest being fourteen years of age.
Investigations made by the Pittsburgh Survey into industrial accidents showed that, in the absence of any enforced system of workingmen's compensation, many widows were undoubt- edly thrown upon their own resources, and among the cases studied some took to begging, but it was usually among their own people and at church doors. Such a situation of course plays into the hands <^ impostors, and at the same time tends to break down the self-respect of bona fide widows.
Of blind mendicants, there were perhaps a half dozen local characters who were tolerated by the police, each (rf whom con- fined his (^rations to a separate locality.
A blind couple, a young man and woman, were occasionally to be seen promenading the streets in the financial and shopping districts. The man wore suspended from his neck a framed photograph of the two, pre- "' 337
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sumably taken earlier in life, and called out shrilly at short intervals, " Buy a pencil, five cents. " This couple formerly sold newspapers on the streets and, according to one police official, owned a farm in Ohio. No effort was made, apparently, either to warn them against begging or to learn other facts in connection with their history.
Another couple, a blind girl about twenty years of age and a girl companion who acted as guide, played and sang in saloons. The guide sang and the blind girl accompanied her on a mouth organ. One Saturday night, during which this couple operated unmolested at the Union Station, they collected about fij. The blind girl was a native of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, but was living at the time in McKeesport. She had en- tered the school for the blind at Overbrook, and had learned chair caning and bead work, but had not had the ambition to follow these trades in the face of the easier income to be gained from street begging. Another Overbrook pupil played a flute on a street comer.
The need was apparent for some system of placement and supervision, such as that carried out by the association for the blind in New England, which would neither let the adult blind drift into mendicancy, nor expect them to be able to gain a liveli- hood unassisted in the intense life of an industrial center.*
At the comer of Wood Street and Oliver Avenue, a blind man was to be seen through the day selling newspapers. According to the writer's informant, he had been a hard working man, — a miner, — and had lost his sight in a mine explosion. He was in effect a small merchant and the accurate way he identified the different papers he handled and made his change, presented a striking contrast to the begging letters and whimper- ing tales of some of his boy competitors. These boys were part of the sales force employed by the publisher of a fake newsboys' journal, per- haps the most perverting type of street imposture which operated un- checked in the city, and one which could have had no other effect than to teach the children habits of getting money by other means than that of eaming it. It was no less than a school of beggary.
These instances are sufficient to show the opportunity in Pittsburgh for such social police work as that which was carried on for several years by the New York Mendicancy Squad. This
■The Rttsburgh Ajsociation for the Blind was organized in 1910 "to prevent unnecessary blindness, to help the blind help themsdvei, and (o ameliorate the condition of the blind."
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was at once repressive in clearing the streets of professional beg- gars, fake cripples, and of yeggs, by immediate arrest and such record keeping as meant the full term of imprisonment for old offenders. On the other hand, it was constructive in bringing real unfortunates into touch with natural sources of help.
LODGING HOUSES
From the gambler and yeggman "higher up" in the scale, we have seen how the underworld grades down with age and vice and disability to a dreg-like stratum. Here we have not only the foot-loose and parasitic of the criminal world, but those others vho through misfortune or drink or flagrant economic injustice have dropped through from their place in the industrial world. This brings us to the problem of shelter in its lowest terms; of the sort of accommodations Pittsburgh afforded the unskilled laborer who is irregularly employed on the river or in the markets; the man who is down and out, but who formerly lived in better circumstances; the friendless workman crippled or advanced in years, as well as the so-called homeless man or vagrant who works now and then at whatever job he can pick up, who sometimes obtains an odd penny by begging or even commits an occasional petty theft.
A partial answer to these questions was to be found in a series of inspections I made of the cheap lodging-house section in the summer of 1907 when, if ever, the industrial life of the District was in full tide. I was struck with the comparatively small number of such establishments, accounted for largely by the fact that the alien laborers from southern Europe, who have become the chief factor in the manual labor of the city, are not to be found in the common lodging houses; they live with their families or herd with boarding bosses in their own sections of the city.
The lodging house population had its roots rather in the English-speaking population. It could be traced in part to the break-up of families of English-speaking mill and mine workers that occurred during the great strikes in the coal, coke, and iron regions in the So's and 90's and in the succeeding industrial up- 339
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heavak.* The exploiting, displacing, and disabling processes of a new and increasingly specialized industry, as well as the strain of machine production, have left a residue of physically weakened, discouraged, and permanently declassed men. The active agen- cies of prostitution and of the abuse of liquor and drugs all tend to augment the number of industrially unfit and semi-employed.
The cynic would have found meat and drink to his taste in the fact that among the lodging houses frequented by such dere- licts, the "mission" with its call to salvation combined with a cheap bed for the night, was much in evidence. For the municipal authorities had taken little thought of the homeless men, ofTering them only a cell in a police station or the board and lodging afforded by a sentence to the local workhouse. Beyond this, they left the matter to commercial enterprise and the sporadic efforts of mis- sion philanthropy. Half a dozen mission lodging houses were to be found in the downtown district.
No more pathetic figure may be seen than the homeless man or vagrant, who is especially attracted to the mission lodging house. As he advances in years he tends to sink lower and lower in the social scale. Looked at askance by city charitable organizations, he is told to go to the country, and there he is warned under pain of sentence in jail or the workhouse to leave and "go back to the city where he belongs." The only place where he is sure of wel- come is the mission. Faced with the problem of shelter for these cast-offs, it has been but natural for mission leaders to conduct lodging houses, and it has been but natural for many drifters to exploit the indiscriminate help given, and become mission bums or loafers who profess conversion in lively anticipation of benefits to be received. On the other hand, it is perhaps equally JnevitaMe that insincere men should have paralleled these genuine under- takings with others devised to make money out of the meager pockets of their patrons.
Of the good intentions of mission laborers; of both the weak- nesses and the personal successes which have characterized the movement in this country, a whole literature has been written.
* As expert leslimony on this point, i have already quoted the Pinkertoas, who themtelves played a prominent part in the Homestead strike of 1893. See page 336.
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With their spiritual endeavors I am not concerned; but how far in Pittsburg they maintained a proper standard of physical shel- ter for the homeless men who came to them, lay clearly within my field.
In 1902, the Pittsburgh bureau of health issued 21 licenses to establish and conduct common lodging houses; in 1903, 11; in 1904, one; in 1905, two; in 1906, three; and in 1907 prior to July, one. These diminishing figures did not mean that lodging houses had ceased to exist in Pittsburgh, or that the license fee (f3.oo) had been raised, or inspection standards unreasonably in- creased. The lodging-house keepers had simply ceased to trouble themselves to license.
A Five- to Twenty-five-cent House. Of the score of common lodging houses in the section bounded by Second Avenue, Market, Ross, and Water streets, the lowest level reached was that of the one conducted
by 0 ■ wlio *** sometimes referred to by the local newspapers as a man
of means and a philanthropist. This lodging house was situated at Nos. 405-407 Second Avenue, and consisted of two brick houses, each com- prising three stories and a cellar, which had been used as brothels until the reform administration drove such establishments otF the streets containing car lines. The main floor was occupied by the Providence Mission. In the cellar section directly beneath, the writer on the evening of his visit counted 28 Negroes occupying double-decker cots (cots slung on iron frames, one over the other). A meeting was in progress in the room over- head and the shufRing of feet, the clanging of brass, and every word of exhortation could be distinctly heard. Sleep for the lodgers was impossible until after the meeting should adjourn; nor did the sterile emotionalism going on above send down any practical help for them. A single small window at one end of the room offered the only means of ventilation, and this was closed. Gasping upon an upper bunk and spitting blood upon the dirt floor, lay a Negro, far gone with tuberculosis. In the farther cellar slept 30 Negroes, every bunk being occupied; while in a coal hole at the rear, a cot beside the water-closet was the sleepmg place of a Negro em- ploye. He was engaged at the moment in cooking supper over an oil stove for the watchman.
On the two upper floors of the establishment, the superior whites rolled upon verminous cots, or lay in weary sleep, or in the stupor of alco- hol or drugs. N^roes and whites alike were all most miserable and de- jected looking. As the place had never been constructed for lodging-house purposes, the two upper floors were divided into a number of small rooms. 341
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Two were filled with sin^c cots, each renting for as cents per night; the re- maining rooms with double-deckers renting at i $ cents per night for each bed. Both cots and double-deckers ranged so close together that it was difTicult to make our way between them and from one room to another. On the two floors there was accommodation — so called — for ijo men; but as it was summer.thebedswerenot entirely full, there being possibly a score of vacant places on the double-deckers. In the winter time, ac- cording to a statement made by the lodging-house clerk, the place was crowded to suffocation.
As we entered one of the double-decker rooms, an inmate dressed himself and started to leave hurriedly as though fearing arrest. He was a hard-faced youth, who slipped into a new suit which he explained was purchased from money given him by a market man. A room-mate was described as a former collar and cufF salesman who had once earned a salary of |3,;oo a year. He had lost his position two years since through drink and drugs, and had become a regular inmate of Q's. A former city policeman and a former official of Allegheny were also pointed out to us in this room.
On the ground floor at the back, the old yard of one of the houses had been roofed over, probably while it was occupied as a brothel, and in this additional room men were allowed to sleep on benches or on the floor for 5 cents each per night. Even on this stifling summer night, the place was well filled. In winter, prospective guests were obliged lo reserve accommodations early in the day. Toilet and ventilation facili- ties throughout were of the scantiest and the worst.
The expenses for help in this establishment were as follows: A clerk at S13, a watchman at ^7.00, and five bed makers and cleaners at J3.S0 each per week. The mission paid li.oo per night for the main floor room. With 170 double-decker cots at 1; cents each, and about 35 single cots at 2S cents each, plus the rental paid by the mission, some idea may be obtained as to the profits above any probable rental to be realized by this business. We may understand too why the proprietor did not confine his operations to this place alone, but had opened another plant on Second Avenue on the two upper floors of an old loft building.
MissroN Houses. A little farther along Second Avenue, a similar combination of mission and lodging house caught the eye. Here the Volunteers of America conducted a common lodging house, of a grade above the double-decker and dormitory type, fitted up with cubicles at 2; cents each per night. While toilet and bathing facilities were poor, the place was considerably superior to Q's; yet as a common lodging house, it had nothing especially to commend it so far as the physical
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comforts of its inmates were concemed; nor, save as the city failed to provide decent quarters, to justify its operation by a professedly religious organization.
On the Diamond, the Salvation Army was similarly engaged in the common lodging-house business. An old brothel property was occupied and shamelessly crowded with men. Every cubby hole of a room — and the building bad been constructed with a view to furnishing a large number of separate rooms — was jammed full of cots. One upper floor was crowded with double-deckers leaving scarcely room to pass; upon these for lo cents a night men slept in their clothing, no bed clothing being furnished. The lower hall was crowded with doubled eckers, and both the office and the entrance hall were equipped with convenient tables and benches upon which "drunks" were stretched. The man in charge stated that in the winter time lodgers paid ; cents each per night for the privilege of sleeping upon these benches and tables. Many of the lodgers, he said, begged their bed money nearby on the Diamond.
At 330 Liberty Avenue was found the Liberty Avenue Mission. This place boasted a gospel wagon nicely enameled, and in the meeting room a group photograph of "workers" and wagon was exhibited. In a rear room on the main floor, where the wagon was housed, were found triple-deckers adjoining a filthy toilet. A cellar beneath this building contained more triple-deckers and was littered with scraps of a bread and coffee dole.
Triple-deckers and Sanctimony. An even more pretentious example than Qs of " lodgings for charity and 100 per cent " was found at Eighth Street and Duquesne Way. Here, at the time of my visit, stood a hotel kept by the "Rev." R . An alley led to a sub- sidiary enterprise labeled " Bethel Home. " This consisted in the main of a large back room or store room of the hotel, and was equipped with triple- deckers and numerous cots.
The triple-deckers, we were informed, each furnished three men with a place to lie at ; cents a head. No bed clothes were provided. There was also a cellar filled with cots. These were in demand the year round at lo cents each per night. The proprietor, it may be noted in passing, stated that he did not believe in organized charity; that he did "practical" work instead; and atone public meeting, at least, actively opposed the proposition to establish such an associated charities in Pitts- burgh as had been bothersome to business men in other cities. He had been able to get his hotel recommended as a safe and proper place for req>ectable young men coming to Pittsburgh; and he escaped paying taxes on his lodging-house property because of its charitable pretentions. 343
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A city fireman, at an adjoining fire house, said, that following a flood, the Bethel management had been so anxious to resume its activities that cots were installed and occupied almost before the firemen had taken out their pumps, the mud and slime remaining in the cdlar.
A Poor-man's Tavern. At iij Second Avenuewas found thecmc lodging-house keeper who had thought it worth while to bother with a license. "Clem" Hackenberger kept at that address a lodging house which served a quite different class of men from those already described. Itiver men and market men were his patrons. The M brick dwelling house had cots in every room, each with a number in large figures on the wall above the bed. Placards bearing advice regarding the disposition of valuables, and warnings addressed to lodgers against causing trouble, were posted on the walls. Fresh paint and whitewash made the place fairiy clean and attractive within. Each bed cost as ""ts per night. Water was lacking save in the yard, and each floor was provided only with a common bucket; but the general appearance completely differentiated this place from the ordinary common lodging house, whether run as a mission or as a sanctimonious counterfeit of one. One felt that the tran- sients who lodged there patronized a kind of tavern which was justified by their necessities, and that it was designed for just such travelers as they; that having paid a reasonable price for its use, they went on their way. Crude, coarse, and comfortless enough as were too often the lives of its patrons, still here they might come and go escaping the vitiating atmos- phere of the common lodging house or the complications of soul and body injected into the hiring of a bed for the night at a mission.
River M en's Houses. Very different in type, sinister and squalid, was another type, a "river man's house," described by the police official who accompanied the writer as "Jennie S's old place." This house was still standing in the heart of the old noisome river section, where a trunk line railroad had pushed its way into the center of the market district. Many old rookeries, historic buildings, brothels, saloons, and lodging houses had been removed to make room for the railroad's elevated track and had been replaced by strong clean spans of steel and concrete. Such rookeries as survived looked by comparison the more hopeless and degraded. This part of Pittsburgh, the first ward, is the oldest secticm of the city. A little lower down, the famous "block house" still stands on its old site, now forming the comer of a freight yard. The street had a character all Its own, resembling the waterfront of any large city. Here all the hard, sordid life of the river centered, and to Jennie S's brothel came riv«' men, hucksters, and truck farmers, as in former days came the "Rogue Riderhoods" of the waterfront.
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Lodging-house Resort. At 104 Fourth Avenue was still another type of house, kept by a Roumelian Greek who ran a coffee room on the ground floor. The building was of brick, fonnerly a mansion, and an unusu- ally high ceilinged room on the second floor was divided into cubicles by rough wooden partitions about 7 feet in height. Over a number of these cubicles wire netting was stretched — a suggestive precaution. At the time of our visit not only men, but women with their transient guests, were going in and out of this building. A faded woman seated at a table in the hall, with a grimy register before her, supplied a sufficient index to the character of such couples as sought accommodations.
As direct result of this tour of inspection, made in company with the chief executive ofHcer of the bureau of health. Dr. James F. Edwards, and members of his staff of sanitary police, the bureau of health closed the Q and R lodging houses. The Salvation Army and the Liberty Mission were likewise enjoined. New rules were drafted. Q's place was not permitted to re-open until the double- deckers had been ripped out, the cellar lodgings done away with, shower baths installed, and adequate toilet facilities provided. Abandoning its location on the Diamond, the Salvation Army rented an old church at Thirty-seventh and Charlotte Streets.*
* in 1909 a further in vest igatton of Piltsburgh's lodging houses was made by a local committee whose object was to secure the establish menl of a municipal lod^g bouse, work test, and empbyment bureau.
At the lodging house conducted by the Volunteers of America at 343 SecMid Avenue, they found accommodations for 70 men at aj cents each per night. As the btriiding was narrow and shut in on both sides by adjoining buildings, artificial li^t was used on each floor day and night. The sleeping rooms were 6 by 9 feet in size, and the investigating committee was divided in opinion as to whether these rooms were as sanitary and well ventilated as open dormitories. The Volunteers also conducted two industrial homes in the city where men were sheltered and cared for in Tclum for work done. One of these, situated on Beaver Street, was dirty, in bad repair, and the accommodations were poor.
At the Salvation Army Shelter, 3; Diamond Street, the rooms were well ventilated and lighted, the balding clean, and there were no bad odors. 130 men could be accommodated here at it and a; cents per night. The Industrial home on Beaver Avenue conducted by the Salvation Army, one of three, was clean, sani- tary and homelike.
Q's place in Second Avenue was also visited. The Providence Mission was still housed here and there were accommodations for 7$ men at 1; and aj cents each per night. The establishment was filthy throuritout. There was a very bad odor in the wash room, and the bed clothing was full of vermin. The place again required immediate action by the board of Health and showed the need for unre- laud sanitary inspection. At ma Forbes Street, a hotel, conducted by the same management, accommodated 400 men at aj to 7; cents per night. The buikl- ing was clean, sanitary, and fireproof. The restaurant run in connection with the hold was clean and attractive.
At the Rescue Mission, Wiley Avenue, aj men were allowed to sleep all night 345
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Lodging-house Types
Even such flagrantly needed reforms can not be carried out without human consequences sometimes least anticipated. Apart from the financial loss to the proprietors, the closing of these lodg- ing houses fell heavily upon their employes. Often perhaps only the last promptings of energy induce men to accept the poorly paid work, bad food, wretched sleeping quarters, and long hours of employes in the kinds of places described. One may see in their lives how a workman grown old and cast aside, or a busi- ness man who has failed in middle life and never regained a footing, seeks to earn the semblance of a livelihood in such an environment, and to maintain a small degree of indepen- dence. Far down as they are in the social scale, such men are yet removed by a great gulf from the completely devitalized drifters who live on the doles of missions or by street begging.
Thus at 0*5 in the tiny "office" set in the narrow entrance hall was found an old railroad yardmaster, a widower, hb children grown and engrossed in their own households. There he sat at his desk, thrown in among the cast-offs of humanity, few of whom at their best had ever risen above unskilled labor. The satisfaction of toil well accomplished; the camaraderie with men skilled and usually reckless of danger to them- selves, and full of the uplift and confidence which come to masters of enginery; the habits and vocabulary, the very dress ordained by the code of an established order had been his, — and then the ambitious young yardmaster appearing on the scene pushing and driving, and finally, the older man "let go." And now, after the years spent at his post in all weathers, but always out in the free air of the railroad yards, to be penned in a common lodging house to keep track of the greasy pennies got from the hands. Even though Q's establishment had not been a credit to the city, and though his occupation was a distasteful one, 1 was ^ad for the old railroader's sake when the place was running again.
Another employe displaced when Q's closed temporarily was of a type more common to the mission lodging house. This man was younger
on chain in the miuion room. A building on an adjoining corner was in process of reconstruction by this mission, to be used for the joint puipoK of mission and lodging house, which, according to subse<fuent information, wis well run.
As result of the investigation by this committee, covering also the conditions under which the eight police stations of the city lodged an average of loo men each nighl in the year, an ordinance was passed by Council providing tio.ooo for a firstyear'soperationofamunicipallodginghouse, but was vetoed by Mayor Magee. No radical change of the lodging-house situation has been reported since. 346
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in years and served as watchman. A shifty individual, he had drifted from one knew not what evil antecedents, had been capper for thieves at a county fair, "barker" for a catch-penny show at Coney Island, a "scab" in labor troubles, a giver of false names and addresses to charitable socie- ties, but one who had always found temporary success whether recur- rently playing the role of mission-stiff, hanger-on, or impostor. WithQ's closed he dropped out into the streets, which saw him for a little time a peddler of paper parasols, soon to drift on to new enterprises perhaps, but on a plane perfectly well defined and delineated; a poor thing, morally bankrupt, yet still with desires keen enough and teeth sharp enough to pit his weasel skill against society for a little while longer.
Municipal Provision
As already stated, there was no municipal lodging house in the city like those of New York and Chicago, nor like the wayfarer's lodges conducted by the society for organizing charity in Phila- delphia. In these shelters men may earn their night's lodginp by work, and the staff undertakes to help them in ways that will lead somewhere. At the central police station in the department of public safety building, certain cells on the ground floor were set aside for applicants. These cells were of the ordinary sort con- taining only a plank bench large enough for one man to lie down upon, and a toilet. In them the men who could not crowd upon the bench, lay upon the floor. They were admitted at the dis- cretion of the desk sergeant, and no record was made of their name or of other details. An applicant was not expected to ask accommodations more than once a week, but as similar lodgings were provided in each of the eight police stations there was little to prevent a man from making the rounds of them if he chose. At the central police station, it was stated that but few arrests were made for "repeating," The men performed no work in exchange for their lodging or breakfast, and no efforts were made to put them in touch with employment upon their release. During 1908, 17,569 such lodgings were given.
At the time of my visit, 1 was told of the pathetic case of a boy of eleven who had sought shelter for the past two or three nights at the central station. Acco who had been placed out on a His hands were heavily calk
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of the hard work. His presence illustrated the underiying evil of such police lodgings; for young" and old, the hardened (lenders and those who had nothing but ignorance or hard luck against them, the sick and the healthy, rubbed elbows, and by just so much mingling did the city help to swell the fate of offenders.
Worse than no provision by the city itself, sporadic and ineffective oversight of private establishments, summed up the public policy toward homeless men in this city to which thousands come annually. They were left to become bed-fellows to disease and cell-mates to crime.
VI PROSTITUTION A great money-making and money-spending community, Pittsburgh at the present stage of our social development inevit- ably became a center for commercialized prostitution. Its sur- plus of males is only less than that of a barracks town or mining camp. Managers and laborers are alike engaged in the harder physical processes of production. They are quartered as tem- porary sojourners where conventional restraints lose their accus- tomed force, and where vents for recreation such as more leisured communities provide are lacking. Link the promptings inherent in such a situation, on the one hand to the undisciplined spendings of sudden fortune makers, and on the other to the earnings of young salaried men and day laborers, both often insufficient for family life according to their standards, and you have a social order
over night at a police station may be held for the juvenile court, or if he is o' teen the authonties of the county poorhouse at Manhalsea may be notified and be be given shelter there. For a description of the persistence in 1913 of police lodg- ing evils see Appendix XXiV, p. 516.
A newsboy lodging house had in earlier days done distinctive work, but in 1908 was temporarily housed in an old church building. Here conditions were not sufficiently bettei^-double-decker beds and insufficient bedding— to make the plate an altogether desirable alternative to the police stations. This was due in put to the fad that while a new building was being planned, the state subsidy was cut off and the management worked against great odds. The place became in time a han|t«ut for young kiafers and out-of-town boy criminals. Witb the new building opened, and an experienced boys'-club director in charge, the development of the work along different lines was begun in 1910.
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in which the mistress (or kept-woman) and the prostitute (or woman in whom many share) play their part despite the strict moral canons of an uncompromising church element in the com- munity.
Not in Pittsburgh alone, but in all the nearby industrial towns of western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, there is an unnatural proportion of single men in mills and mines. Hun- dreds of footloose wage-earners from all parts of the industrial dis- trict look to the city when bent on having a "good time," making it, in the phrase of an old sporting man, "one big Saturday night town." Yet there can hardly be a sadder picture than the " parlor" in a disorderly house where sit the daughters of working people soliciting debauch at the hands of youths of their class. My belief is that labor unions are delinquent in not engaging aggressively in efforts to educate in their members a class con- sciousness without offense. A broader, a more inspiring propa- ganda, linked to that for higher wages, should be possible to such organizati(His as the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Association of Steel, Iron, and Tin Workers, and the various railroad brotherhoods. It is surely time for us to hear the last of "mill men's houses," "railroaders' houses," and so on, in Pitts- burgh and elsewhere.
The situation which thus provokes illicit intercourse has been aggravated and exploited to the full by the business managers of vice. While prostitution has been covertly carried on in many parts of the city in flats or furnished rooms, there are two large districts which from time out of mind have been the markets for this traffic in women's bodies, by the women themselves and those who control them; and while the refonn regime attempted to root out houses of prostitution from other parts of the city and to cut off the revenues of those which remained, the houses were officially tolerated within these areas.
How centrally situated is the chief of these districts may be appreciated from the fact that the Pittsburg general post office has been in the heart of it. A step to the right or left from the southern half of Smithfield Street, the main business thoroughfare of the city, and one is surrounded by officially tolerated vice. Business buildings, fire company houses, hospitals, missions, 349
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railroad depots, the markets, the steamboat landings, and some of the hotels all rub shoulders with prostitution.
This is the section in and about lower Second Avenue in Pittsburgh proper. It lies in the territory between the heart of the business district and the Monongahela River, extending to Liberty Avenue at its lower end, and at its upper spreading through a nest of alleys lined with squalid dwellings which run up the Hill past Fifth to Wylie Avenue. Here the section flanks the tenement quarters where Jewish, Italian, and Negro households rear their children.
Prior to an expansion of the business section of the city and the establishment by the Wabash Railroad of a terminal midway to the Point, a large part of the entire area lying between lower Third Avenue and the Monongahela River was occupied by houses of ill-fame. Lower Second Avenue continued thereafter to be the main thoroughfare for these establishments, but commercial encroachment tended to spread them up both rivers along the line of Penn and Fifth avenues, and scatter them in certain sections of the East End. In the Second Avenue section alone there existed in the summer of 1907 over 300 brothels, a number consider- ably less than before the restrictive measures were enforced against them.*
The second vice district of long standing is situated across the river, adjacent to the workingmen's quarter in the former city of Allegheny. This district occupies a large area which may be said to be bounded by the railroad yards and the Allegheny River, and of which the principal thoroughfare is East Robinson Street.f
One beneficial result of the more rigid restriction of vice to these districts under the reform administration was the almost entire absence of "massage" or "manicure" parlors such as afford a cloak for prostitution in other large cities. At the more expensive restaurants, however, the kept-women of business men and politicians displayed themselves, expen- sively gowned, and they were often to be seen riding about in motor can through the principal thoroughfares. At night, among the crowds at the downtown cafes and resorts were well dressed women who, in the residen- tial sections where they lived, preserved more or less secrecy as to thdr mode of livelihood. Street walkers were very few, but there were indications that numbers of shop girls, office employes, and factory workers added to their incomes by occasional prostitution. All of these formed a fringe to the main body of the inmates of disorderly houses.
* The once notorious " Yellow Row" stood idle and condemned at (he time of the writer's visit, housing only an occasional squatter. This si down during Mayor Guthrie's administration.
t Closed in May, 191], by the Morals Efficiency Commission. 3 SO
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Types of Houses
The brothel, housed in an oldtime residence, is the typical vice resort in Pittsburgh. The colored glass doors inside the vesti- bule and big numbers are trade marks that by day escape the notice of the uninitiated. But in the evening the outer doors stand open and a light shines through the red or green glass panels of the inner door, offering a ready welcome for the young stranger whose work brings him to Pittsburgh and who may spend half a year without inclusion in any other gay company of youth.
In such establishments social lines are none the less closely drawn.
At the tofi of the scale in Pittsburgh were to be found a few houses known as ten- and fifteen-dollar houses. Here some of the inmates were French, the remainder being American-bom women.
The five-dollar houses came next. They were recruited from Amer- ican-bom and German girls. The patrons of these places were mainly salaried office men and the higher class of mill men.
On a lower level were the two- and one-dollar houses. These were by far the most numerous and were considered the more profitable. They were filled with young Jewesses, many of them American bom, with Penn- sylvania Dutch, with Irish and German, Canadians, and a few "drifters" from womout American stock. These houses were supported in the main by clerks, salesmen, mechanics, and railroad men. Each of the above contained from five to 30 girls who paid from $10 to $2^ per week for board and room and received $0 per cent commission on all earnings. A few places, however, boarded the women free, relying on the large expendi- ture made by their visitors to offset this cost.
The fifty-cent houses were conducted for the most part by Jewesses of Russian or Polish birth, and by Italians, and the inmates were mainly of these nationalities. In addition, there were a few "Hungarian houses" filled with immigrant girls from Austria-Hungary. Their guests were, as might be expected, of a mixed class, largely the rougher sort of rail- road employes, and foreigners, Italian and Slavic, able to speak a little English, and at work in the mills and mines throughout the Pittsburgh District.
Last of all in the scale were (he twenty-five-cent houses, patronized by Negroes, — mostly hovels hidden in the alleys of the Hill District, and each housing perhaps half a dozen inmates. So far as the writer could leam, these usually contained Negresses only, but there was a sprink- ling of broken down, diseased white prostitutes. 35"
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At the higher priced houses, with parlors lighted by electric bulbs and showily furnished, and the young women in evening gowns, a certain refinement in the methods of entertainment was practiced. Their appointments, and the routine of singing, danc- ing, and refreshments bore somewhat the same relation to those of low-grade establishments that an expensive restaurant does to a cheap lunch counter. As one went down in the scale, the fur- nishings became less comfortable and more crude, conventions more businesslike, the dress of the inmates more tawdry and sug- gestive. Slot machines took the place of musicians; the drinks became cheaper but more insistent. Active efforts were made to increase profits by such devices as lewd dances, exposure of the person, nude acrobatics involving the genital organs, and other methods to stimulate the sexual passion.
Women of the Underworld
Let us look more closely at the kinds <A women who follow the calling in a city like Pittsburgh.*
World-wide Aspects. While organized vice lays tribute on the youth of both sexes in every community, the prostitute, like the pickpocket and the yegg, is not confined to any city. The trade can be thrust out of any locality; but its sources are inter- national.
[t is a far cry, for example, from the " Big Number" houses of Pitts- burgh to the dives of Hong Kong. In the fall of 1907 Pittsburgh brothel- dom of the prosperous class was full of excitement over reports of the murder at Hong Kongof a woman we will call Gertrude Ware by a former United States sergeant of marines. The motive of the crime was robbery evidently, as the murderer soon afterward opened a dive at Chefoo with the proceeds. The story of this girl, who was from Youngstown, was not without its human appeal. She had some ability as a singer, and had be- come a favorite with such rich men as these girts are able to win. She was a "boarder" in a Second Avenue house when in 190$ Beattie S. had come to Pittsburgh to recruit girts for "American houses" in Manila, Shanghai, Chefoo, and Yokohama. Beattie S had herself once t>een one of Oeo T's tKurders, but now had wonderful stories to tetl, wore bizarre costumes, was waited upon by a Japanese maid, and had a number of small pet
« Appendix XXI t. p. J07.
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Japanese dogs. She called herself the Countess Plavako and said her husband was a Russian count who had escaped from Siberia. So much of a sensation had she created in the Pittsburgh sporting district that Gertrude Ware consented to go back with her. The car in which she had left Pittsburgh for San Francisco was festooned with roses, the reputed gift of a coal operator, and champagne had flowed freely in her honor for days and nights before. The night previous to leaving shehad won fSo on the wheel in a Penn Avenue gambling house and was sure she would have luck in her travels. Two years later her body was found jammed into a trunk after strangulation. The sergeant of marines was later hanged for his deed. No wonder Second Avenue buzzed with comment on such dis- torted bits of fact as the newspapers published!
The story gives us a glimpse of the way in which the scales of the trade balance, — French prostitutes in Pittsburgh's Second Avenue section, the export of white prostitutes to the Orient in such numbers that Judge Wilfley at Shan^ai found the term "American girl" synonymous with the lowest forms of vice. The Federal Immigration Commission of 1910 brought out authorita- tively the international aspects of the white slave traffic, and the prosecutions under the Mann act have since shown its interstate ramifications.
The Drift from Workaday Life. It is, however, the local aspects of the traffic that most deeply concern a given com- munity, the less spectacular drift from the ordinary walks of life to this underworld. The country girl and the low-wage city employe are alike victims. The girl whose heredity is a pre- disposing factor, the half-idiots whose sexual impulses are exag- gerated by the taint which robs them of mental balance, are quick to be gathered into the web. Young girls who come from house- holds that are barren of affection, or squalid, or monotonous, too often fall easy victims of the lure of ease and excitement which the life seems to offer. Many prostitutes are, we know, them- selves working girls or the daughters of working people, and vari- ous attempts have been made to gauge how far economic pressure is behind their downfall. That it is an important factor in many cases, both with them and with their brothers, is clear.
Over one of the Second Avenue houses of the medium grade pre- sided a woman still in the early thirties. She conducted a two-dollar
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house, frequented largely by railroad men. Possibly it was chance that first sent these visiton to her establishment some years bef<»T, but sheim- proved her opportunities and it paid her to be known as keq>cr of a rail- roader's bouse.
This wiHnan could not, like so many of her class, boast of having come of a "good family, " but she supported her mother who was living in a neighboring town and visited her regularly. Early in life she had learned that little girls who begged pennies on the streets and chanty at the servants' doors of the prosperous might find ways to supplement the rather scanty gains of mendicancy. Later, as cash girl and saleswoman in a local department store, she had learned that security of position and advancement on the payroll could be hers as long as she proved accnnmo- dating to certain superiors. She next found it easy to become the mistress of a professional gambler, himself the black sheep of an old Pittsburgh family. This connection lasted nine years, or until the man left her. Then, her education in vicious living completed, she bought the goodwill of her present establishment. A number of inmates in the bouse were also former department store clerks or saleswomen.
Miss Butler in her study of the working women of Pittsburgh* cites the following illustrative cases of girls who had succumbed to the moral jeopardy of the shops:
Rose was employed at the ribbon counter. She had a mother and two sisters dependent upon her, and her mother was always urging her for more money. She began while still in the store to "make money on the side." The management discovered this and dismissed her. She left for a city in CHilo; went into a house of prostitution there from which she sends her mother money. Her wages at the ribbon counter were |6.oo a week.
Vera is twenty years old. Four years ago she was employed as a salesgirlat $3.$oa week. After a year she left for another store where she was employed as a cashier at a salary of |io a week, for making concessions to her emptoyer. After two years she left the store for a house of prostitution.
Jennie came to Pittsburgh from Akron, Ohio. She had no friends in the city and was obliged to be self-supporting. She obtained a position at |6.oo a week as a saleswoman. After five months in the store, she consented to be kept in an apartment in the East End. She still keeps her position in the store.
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Colored Girls from the South. Nearly every house of prostitution in Pittsburgh carried a staff of Negresses engaged as maids, cooks, or laundresses. These young women, coming from the South, eagerly accept the comparatively high wages offered and often take service ignorant at least in part of the real char- acter of their employers. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that they generally become corrupted and publicly or secretly form irreg- ular relations with men of their race who live upon them. This is one and not the least source of Negro prostitution in the North.
The largest number living as prostitutes in Pittsburgh found places in the alley houses of the Hill District, whose patrons were men of their own race or Italian and Slav laborers. In addition, prostitution was widespread among large numbers ci indigent Negresses on the Hill. Their earnings were wretched, they were the "body snatchers" of their color, and the men they decoyed into alleys and robbed were usually as outcast as themselves.
For every Negro woman of this type it is safe to say that there is a Negro man who lives upon her gains supplemented by such petty thefts as he may be able to commit. G>caine and vile liquor, a complete lack of proper hygienic precautions, bad food and wretched housing, all combine to use up the Negro woman of this class more quickly than the white prostitute.
One July night with a police official as companion, 1 made a tour through this section of the Hill District. In one alley, a rather hand- some Southern Negress, with jewels in her ears, stood outside her empty house and watched with envy her neighbors in evil who made money while her own house remained "dark." A transgression of the police rules regarding the sale of liquor in her establishment had brought this punishment upon her.
In sharp contrast, a young Negress wasted by tuberculosis was seen in the vile tenement building then standing, known indifferently as the "Stockade" and "Tammany Hall." With a mixture of Greeks, Syrians, Arabs, Poles, Italians, and Russian Jews as her neighbors, she was the only one of her color in the building. She occupied two tiny rooms opening on an interior court, and although the night was stifling her bed- room window was nailed tight, — for protection, as she hersdf explained. She sat in the other room playing with her dog "Rags," a Skye terrier, and listened while an Italian neighbor ran a gramophone belonging to 355
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her. She had some "real nice times," she said. She "took two kinds of medicine." A cuspidor on the floor and a row of patent medicine botdes on the shelf told the story. Glad to talk with someone, she explained that coming from the South where she had left a child with her parents, she had answered an advertisement for a domestic and had teamed later that the placeof employment was a "sporting house." That was seven years ago; now she was twenty-five, and cooked for the day shift in a house on Sachem Alley for |6.oo weekly and meals. Fonnerly she had cooked for the night shift at $8.00 weekly and meals, but she was no longer strong enough for this night work. Not being able to afford any better rooms, she had come to the "Stockade," where she paid {7.00 a month rent.
The Woman IN THE Alley. On this same stifling night, when to protect her own body this Negress employe of a brothel deprived herself of even the little air that could find its way into Tammany Hall, another tragedy was being enacted a few blocks away.
In a noisomealley whose shacks were tenanted now by famOiesof Italian workirig people and nowby Negroes, a young white woman lay on a doorstep gasping for air, choking down a little water from time to time, and then spitting blood into the gutter. Fourteen years of the life of Pittsburgh's brothels had brought her to this; but though she was the wife of a N^ro, and was now deserted and dying, awaiting only the ambulance and Marshalsea (the city pothouse), she could say with pride "my father was twenty-seven years a yard master on the B. and O." Fdlowing betrayal, she had come from a West Virginia railroad and manufacturing city to Pittsburgh, and this was the end.
The Negro madame had been very kind to her. She had trusted her for four months' board, had given her eggs, milk, and best of all, whbkey. Insurance!* "Oh, well, the madame deserves ^1 the insurance she will get."
The madame, as she sat on her door steps, looked every inch a business woman. The ready clinking handbag at the belt, the keys by her side, and a certain avidity of gesture all gave the impression that per- haps the dying woman was not such a "dead loss" after all. Just then an attractive young mulatto woman wearing a flowered silk kimono, red satin slippers on her feet, and red roses in her hair, came up the alley followed by a young Negro with a guitar. They were, it appeared, daughter and son- in-law of the madame of the house. Soon they were making music to the delight of a score of Italian children who with their parents jostled
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prostitution for living room in the alley. The yard master's daughter, declining to call for an ambulance "till tomorrow," thought she "certainly would enjoy the concert. " From time to time, the children crowding eagerly about the players shut off the little aJr about the sick woman. Then the madame, shaking her big bunch of keys would bid "them Dagoes" keep back a little and not "step on the lady."
At short intervals prospective patrons received an encouraging word or gesture from the madame, her pocketbook open to receive fees and make change. From time to time one of the Negresses sitting on the stoop would get up and stroll inside with a guest. Soon the couple would come out again. The man would walk away and the girl would take her place again on the stoop and resume the thread of gossip she had dropped.
The Street Walker. There remain few further stages in the span of a woman's life in the underworld. The reproach of street soliciting in Pittsburgh did not exist so far as the principal thoroughfares were concerned, but along Ross Street in the appro- priate shadows of court house, jail, Bridge of Sighs, and morgue, the most wretched of the outcasts " played dice with the work- house."
On a night as hot as the one just described the bodies of three women, sdf-slain, lay on the slabs beneath the glass-topped cases of the All^heny County morgue.
Rose, a young white prostitute, had drunk carbolic acid after a quarrel with her "lover."
Madeline, a young mulatto prostitute, had drunk carbolic acid after a quarrel with her "lover."
X, weary of the life of an actress in one-night stand companies, had cut her throat in a shabby hotel.
Weary with fruitless sauntering, two prostitutes came into the morgue to satiate a curiosity which it was said had kept a constant stream of their kind in and out all day. It was the only building in the street open at that late hour, entrance to which involved no expenditure. To those not knowing its character the place looked rather cheerful, too. It was at least brilliantly lighted and white and clean.
The younger prostitute, a Scotch-Irish girl, drew the police inspec- tor's attention to her hair, lately dyed chestnut. It had been black, she said, but Mack was "too common." The girl and her history happened to be familiar to my informant, who had known her as a domestic, as an unmarried mother betrayed by an employer's son. as a kept mistress of the 357
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SODS of wealthy mm, as an inmate of a brothel, and finally as too vile and drunken to be of value, reduced to the street and the cotnpanionsliip of the Jewess who came in with her. This latter, a fleshy "body snatchcr" in pdice slang, was too gross to inflame even a drunkard; so she acted as a sort of scout for "Chestnut,"sharing her wretched gains.
Gertrude Ware, the " top notcher," and at the bottom of the scale the body snatcher under the Bridge of Sighs; — these were buoys which marked the course to which this undercurrent in the life of the community was setting.
Profits" Under the glamor <^ the life, the ribs of a hungry business showed through. Its details are prosaic and sordid enough were it not for the lure of mystery with which the silence of respect- able people invest it, and for the tinsel and conviviality which its promoters skilfully throw about it, while they batten on what ignorance, need, and one of the strongest animal impulses throw into their net, and what the whole force of convention tends to hold there. The landlords who own the houses, and rent them at figures which could not be paid by ordinary tenants, pocket the profits from these women's bodies as surely as do the madames. Certain plumbers, house furnishers, grocers, and marketmen, find here good customers. The fl6rists, druggists, and physicians who serve them, the telephone and telegraph companies, are paid from the same pocketbooks; the brewers and whiskey dealers grow fat with the proceeds.
The very existence of many of the Pittsburgh houses was undennined by the p<dice order of the Guthrie administration, prohibiting the sale in them of intoxicating drinks. A number of Second Avenue women informed me that they had for months been running behind from ^50 to }3$o weekly. Take, for example, one establishment the character of whose business may be judged from the fact that |i6,ooo was paid within recent years for its goodwill and fixtures alone. Notwithstanding the high fee charged, the proprietress asserted that the running expenses ordinarily ate up every dollar of "legitimate" intake. The profits came almost entirely from the sale of alleged champagne to its patrons, sons of
* For estimates of Morals Efficiency Commission s«e Appendix XXII, p. 508.
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rich families, or from the sale of "wine" bought ostentatiously by the financial "sharks" and "pikers" of Pittsburgh's bucket shop and "sport- ing" contingent.
Every first class brothel visited had stories of wealthy patrons who on occasion had lain intoxicated in the place for a weekat a time, obediently signing checks when presented with a bill; as, for example, "Seventy-five bottles of wine at $10.00, fyjo.oo." And if the victim objected to the amount of the bill, 7$ "dead soldiers" would be brought up by the maid from a stock receptacle in the cellar. Under the new order of things, this class of business was all but impossible.
An indication of the business ramificalions back of prostitution is the fact that " Maxey the Mixer, " indicted for trafficking in houses of ill-fame, was the Pittsburgh agent for one of the best known brands of champagne.
The Purveyors
With such secondary interests at stake, prostitution be- comes, at the hands of its primary purveyors, not the supply erf a demand as old as human nature, but a business, artificially stimu- lated for business ends, reaching out for the girls it shall hire out, reaching out for the men who shall use them, that it may make its own gains.
When to such a situation is added the customary divorce between municipal enforcement and the statute laws which penal- ize prostitution and make it a crime to rent property for such pur- poses, the way is open for police blackmail, from the patrolman to the man "higher up," for the political fixer, the bail giver, and the money lender, — all capitalizing the law-breaking element in the community and selling protection for sums which come from but the one source.
In Pittsburgh, the taxes of a large proportion of the build- ings used for purposes of prostitution were paid under names which were seldom to be found in the city directory. How far these names represented the actual ownership, or to what rank of life the men bek>nged, was a matter of surmise and speculation.
The go-betweens and active promoters in the business were of a stock which, by one of those vivid contrasts as old as written history, has contributed some oi the most fearless and self-forgetful leaders to the religious and civic life oi our cities.
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In a majority of the brothels not operated by Negresses, the proprietresses were Jewesses, and the men who financed them were of the same race. And of the same race were a majority of the pimps or cadets who lived wholly or in part on the earnings of the women, — these last the meanest in the whole coterie of those who take their dues from prostitution. The payment the pimp takes is easy living; but he becomes not merely a drone but an active agent of evil, by seducing girls and by swelling the ranks of voters who owe allegiance to the political leaders of the underworid. In the higher grade houses in Pittsburgh men of this class were not allowed to collect a girl's earnings, and their presence was discouraged as far as possible. Proprietresses knew from experi- ence that the influence of these men made a "parior" girl discon- tented, and desirous to try the more independent life in a flat or furnished room house. But in the meaner places, where giris are used as remorselessly as are men in some of the legitimate indus- tries, the proprietresses were compelled to defer more largely to the cadet class, whose chief business it was to entangle "new" girls and to hold them through the "protection" they offered when the girls got tn trouble in these houses or at the hands of the police. Though the authorities were unwilling to admit that the number of such men had reached proportions which approximated that in the cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, their evil faces were only too frequent a sight in the cheap lunch rooms and pool pariors on Third or Penn Avenue; and from her "furnished room" on Federal or Tunnel Street in the Hill District the white slave, colloquially a "sweater," was led to "work" daily to some squalid den.
In these dens, ^en the brass check system prevailed, the inmates often did not receive any money, the men whom they maintained collecting their wages. The girls worked in two shifts, a ni^t shift and a day shift, but thou^ those in the latter re- turned home, their day's slavery was not necessarily over. These unfortunate women could seldom get a dollar for themselves, as the class of patrons they attracted were not able to give much "stocking money, " and the cadets habitually searched them to pre- vent their hoarding money and escaping their life of temporary servitude.
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Restriction
Prior to the advent of Pittsburgh's reform administration, the police, and especially those "higher up," gained no inconsider- able spoils from this evil. However, as officers and men had not been woiiiing under civil service rules, they lacked the necessary permanence in ofRce and the identity of interest to make the or- ganization, like the police in many large cities, a single active, dominant power. They had, therefore, been obliged to take the "smaller end" of the graft and the larger prizes "got past" to the politicians.
On the coming in of the reform administration. Mayor Guthrie and his advisers recognized the menace to their adminis- tration d so fruitful a field for public scandal as this large area devoted to prostitution, and the inconsistencies involved in allow- ing its promoters free play. Their policy was not to suppress the traffic, but to cut down its amount, its profits, and its graft. The city in effect tolerated it in the two districts already indicated and under the following regulations:
I. No intoxicating liquors to be sold.
3. No soliciting on streets or from windows.
3, No disorder in houses; music to be confined to rear rooms.
4. No robberies of guests. $. No abuse of minors.
6. No cadets to live in the houses.
7. No house to front on streets having car lines.
8. Houses to be open to police inspection.
By thus practically licensing vice in the districts indicated, the power of the dishonest elements in the police department and in other branches of the city government as well, to levy extortion and black- mail on keepers of disorderly houses, was considerably curtailed.
The first regulation, that prohibiting the sale of intoxicat- ing liquor, was looked upon, even more than the restricting police boundaries, as a measure that would cut down the amount of prostitution by striking at one of the vital sources of profit of the resorts that remained.
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The cheaper establishments were the hardest hit. Inmates and proprietresses alike tacked the acquaintance of wealthy men from whrni they could borrow money; and as most of the houses of this class were in- dividual enterprises, the political weight of a "chain of houses " was lacking and money was not to be had readily from "fixers" to tide them over the period. Moreover, the clientele was larger and less wellknown, and doorkeepers of necessity much less particular than in the better class of houses, thus making it easier for police stool pigeons on the lookout for evidence to gain entrance. In such cases the chief burden fell upcm the wretched inmates, who were obliged to accommodate more men and to eat poorer food in return for their exorbitant board money.
Police detectives and stool pigeons were alert to detect evidence of liquor selling, and as the fixers were unable to act, "take-a-chance" proprietresses and inmates ran serious risks of being dragged to court, fined, and having their houses closed for a time. One woman who had grown rich in the traffic c(»nplained bitterly that after twenty-two years in the business and after never having been arrested before, she and her girls had been c(»npelled to ride in a patrol wagon. They had not even been allowed to take carriages t
The director of public safety estimated that 40 per cent of the houses went out of business because of the liquor order.
Of equal moment were the steps taken to rid Pittsburgh of the large number of pimps by arresting them on the charge of vagrancy. When they could not show a legitimate basis of liveli- hood, they were given workhouse sentences; and by this means the bulk of them were driven from the city. They did not go far away, however, and were kept in funds by prostitutes through the Pittsburgh post office. The majority of these orders were payable at Youngstown, Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia, neighboring cities which afforded temporary quarters until the men were able to return to Pittsburgh in safety.
Their action was one reflected in many ways within the whole quarter. As we have seen, throughout the underworld the period was one d abeyance,* and as election time approached there were not wanting signs of the police getting more out of
■ Under the incoming ad miniit ration, that of Mayor William A. Maget, outward decorum wis preierved in the diitricti, houses were kept off the or tracks, but liquor selling was resumed in the brothels, new houses were pe^ milted to open in tenement neighborhoods of the Kill Disirict, and gambling houses re-opened. In 191a the city administration was made the object of ittack for conniving ii these conditions, by a citizens' committee, under the leadership
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hand, and of the purveyors of vice seeking alliances that through a change of administration would put an end to these policies of semi-repression.
Commercialized Recreation
Throughout the reform administration the social observer could not fail to note how little promise mere police repression gave of satisfying the community's need for an adequate policy toward the social evil. While, as a rule, outward decorum prevailed, upon Saturday nights the demoralizing influence of an officially defined district could be witnessed in the bands of youths who passed through the streets in the downtown section visiting the "sporting houses" — the name by which houses of prostitution are generally termed in Pittsburgh as in other cities. This term is part erf the pitiful hoUowness of the life; the inmates are "sporting girls," and visitors of the callow type prefer to be described as "sports." For it is boyhood as well as girlhood that commercialized prosti- tution must win if the business is to be profitable. The conversa- tion, gestures, and general deportment of these bands who passed from one house to the next "jollying the girls" differentiated them from the vicious or confirmed visitors.
Saloon keepers who know the value of plate mirrors and bright lights, in contrast to the gkxnn of office and shop and the dinginess of cheap lodgings, are no less good psychologists than are the business managers of prostitution. Those who would supply counter social attractions could learn something from both and especially from the latter who, even in catering to the sexual im- pulse, think it worth while to appeal to the esthetic sense.
Another Saturday night scene in the market section of the
of William H. Matthews of Kingsley House, based on investigations carried out for this committee by a staff working under Robert Wilson, the Scrantan detective who ran down councilmanic graft in Pittsburgh, In 1913, a second agitation led by the Voters' L.eague was successful; and throughout 1 he remainder of his administration Mayor Magee carried out policies formulated by an aggressive Morals Efficiency Commission; leading in [913 to an act of legislature creating a Morals Bureau. The Armstrong administration had the support of a strong church element in the elections of 191], but on assuming office some of his minor appointments were so flagrantly of the "underworld" that Ihey were recalled when their records became known. Six months had all but elapsed before he was practically forced to make appointments to the Morals Bureau. These commanded respect but did not in- clude any one of the three most active members of the former Commission. It is not safe to prophesy which of the contending elements in the community will fix or hold the policy of the administration toward the underworld. See Appendices XXI and XXII, pp. ;oi~j09.
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town was the turning out of doors at a few minutes b^ore mid- night, in accordance with local saloon regulati(Mis, of the crowd of young men and women gathered to eat, drink, and "see life" in a rathskeller known as the "Oub." It was a type of cafe which, under various previous administrations, had been a most potent element for evil.
These scenes well illustrated the failure of this city of a thousand churches to provide clean centers of recreation which could successfully attract the crowds of young people in search of a good time; the failure also of our bulky budgets of laws, which protect property so well, to safeguard the subtler human values.
The pimp, as we have seen, is a professional recruiter of young giris; but in his revesting craft he no more than personi- fies the destructive forces in society, some as old as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, some as new as the department store, as factory wages below the standard of self-support, as public dance halls adjoining barrooms — forces which break down the moral fiber of a generation. They turn the years of adolescence when the creative faculties of youth normally seek refreshment and gaiety and companionship, into years of tragedy. Season after season the story is repeated in stupid round. If every pimp in Pittsburgh were hanged on the court house "hump," it will still go forward as long as the influential people in the community fail to provide ampler and less commercialized outlets for the spirit of youth, as long as the merchants and manufacturers of the country pay many giris wages which are not enough for subsistence, much less for normal amusements, and as long as young men's earnings are not enough to establish a home and family. Until then we are dealing, not with the old problem of the sexes — which will re- main— but with a problem aggravated and distorted not merely by the promoters of vice, but by stockholders, proprietors, and complacent church people.
Vice and Disease
The outcome is not merely the toll of broken women, but
disease of body and mind. For the modem brothel is more than
an unconventional channel through which the simpler forms of
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natural intercourse can be obtained by those who will. The city which harbors it is harboring an educational center in the unnatural vices which even the stoutest advocate of personal liberty must admit betoken degeneracy. Abnonnal practices of course crop out sporadically in all communities, and moral perverts have long been a recognized type among institutions for defectives. But within the last twenty-five years, especially since the coming of the French prostitute, new and degrading levels for both sexes have been reached by commercialized prostitution in the United States, To the oriental methods so introduced American bom wwnen have been obli^ more and more to conform as a matter of " business" in the high class resorts. As already noted, Frendi prostitutes were an important feature of the f lo houses in Pitts- burgh. On Second Avenue were three houses having exclusively French girls as inmates. At the other end of the social scale, post cards and pictures were at different times circulated among the gangs of Italians and other immigrant laborers in the Pitts- burgh District, advertising these abnormal forms <rf interccurse in the grossest detail.
On the final social aspect of prostitution, 1 can do no better than cite a Pittsburgh physician of standing:
"Only the family physician who has learned to recognize the protean manifestations of venereal diseases among his patients has had an idea of the ever increasing extent of this curse of civilization. I need only mention the brides who go to the gyne- cologist's table during the first years of their married life, the chronic invalids, the childless homes, the blind and deaf and dumb asylums, and the hosts of tabetics, h«niplegics, paretics, hepatics, and mental and physical cripples who owe their afRiction directly or indirectly to venereal diseases. . . If a young man practices sextial intercourse for ten years before marriage in a lar^ city, the chances are that he will have had gonorrhea two or three times and the chances are about one to four that be will have had syphilis . . . The danger <rf any individual contracting a venereal dis- ease increases with the number of different persons with whom the individual has sexual relations; therefore the prostitute is the principal source, the chief factor in the spread, in ever increasing circles, of disease and disaster throughout the body politic."
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VII. SOCIAL POLICE
Only a large investment of time and means, coupled with complete police and institutional records, could enable us to judge how far, in such an industrial community as Pittsburgh, its reverse currents can be traced to sources elsewhere than in dvic environinent and individual character. Crime and vice are older than cities, and cities older than factory production: it would be stupid to attempt to consider them the special offspring of indus- trialism. Yet the preceding sketches would be incomplete did they fail to bring out how, at many points, economic forces enter in to sustain, or exaggerate, or thwart untoward tendencies in the social life.
It is usual to recognize that a great industrial center at- tracts the professional criminal. The great mass (rf property assembled there calls him as carrion the buzzard, but between him and his prey stand the police, and, according as the police may or may not be ctHnplaisant, he may or may not prey uptm any given community. Therein, we have seen, lies our first test of the machinery of law and order.
It is less usual to recognize that a great industrial center generates its own social renegades ; that a seeping-off process swells and perpetuates the groups of the underworld that have been des- cribed. Therein lies a more formidable test of the machinery of law and order, and, beyond that, of social statesmanship.
The early settlement in the Pittsburgh District of a tena- cious, hard-driving race, Scotch-Irish, at once aided the material development of the region and determined the local standards of morality. Their rapid accession to wealth (competence or pub- lic office absorbing a large portion of the original population) prompted successive waves of immigration by those content to begin at the bottom of the industrial order. Scotch, Welsh, English, and German came, and, filling for a generation or two the posts of labor, sought for their children employments easier or more remunerative. Latin and Slavic peoples poured in to (ill their places, and industry, leaping forward, demanded larger and ever larger draughts of laborers. The result has been to establish a cosmopolitan city of which the rulers are English speaking, their 366
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racial dependents filling the thousands of minor positions, — bank teller and policeman, city magistrate and prison keeper, clerk and labor boss. A non-English-speaking population performs the crudest manual labor and crowds the industries.
Thus, at first glance, the early coming races seem to have made good their escape from the yoke of hard labor; but we must take into consideration the more subtle processes ctf nature and admit that success in arriving at softer and better paid employ- ment may in itself provoke more acute forms of discontent. The pressure of competition, acquired tastes, and the natural call of instincts all tend to deflect a certain percentage of the original racial community from business, office holdings, and salaried posi- tions into another groove — that of the so<aIled sporting worid. The dues of apparent freedom from productive effort are being exacted from these refugees from labor, in so far as their children lack the robust qualities which the fathers have forfeited. How- ever the resident stock may affect to place the burden of lawless- ness and crime in the community upon alien newcomers, an honest search will show too clearly that the American bom bear here, as elsewhere throuf^out the United States, a distressing relation to those features of our civilization at once the most hopeless and shocking. Whether it is justifiable to attempt to connect their personal derelictions with the general social discon- tent of the times 1 leave to more ambitious judges. I believe, however, that there is warrant for study and research with a view to reconciling the American-bom child to labor.
In a community where, without money, life is intolerable to most of the helot type, we find numerous "crimes" against prop- erty, cc»nmitted not by habitual outlaws and recidivists, but by older men bankrupted in the struggle for existence, and by younger men who lack the virility either to struggle or to renounce. Such a crime is nearly always sporadic in execution, fatuous in concep- tKHi. and depending on the good or ill will of those mulcted, their caprice, the pressure at the offender's disposal, and a thousand other chances, all remote from justice, result tn his going unpun- ished or not. How many forged checks for small amounts turn up in Pittsburgh annually? By their number we might measure (Hie of the by-products of a material civilization. What is the
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value of goods annually purioined from the Pittsbui^ department stores by the daughters of "somebodies'7 The back rooms of police stations and private detective agencies, the inner rooms of lawyers, could tell some of the story. Drawn by the magnetism erf accumulated riches and the relative prosperity of many of the doorkeepers of wealth, we find the native bom, guilty of occasional attempts at plunder «4)ether by graft or swindle, lapsing into the predatory class.
Lower in the social scale, and more often found in the cruel light of police courts or the isolation of jails, are those who fed the same impulse, but, lacking means, tradition, or imagination, express themselves in cruder anti-social, anti-moral forms. The camp followers of saloon and brothel and gambling joint, the petty office holder, small ward grafter, and the managers of lean and little business enterprises defrauding those a stage more ig- norant than themselves — make up a penumbra to the groups of the underworld we have described.
It is, no doubt, the startling features of the crimes of aliens that, in American cities, fix so much popular attention upon them; that, and our natural tendency to punish those of the lowest social order who infringe. The former Mafios gains notoriety by his importation of threat and knife, spectacular forms of lawlessness. The Slav drinks, batters, and sometimes slays. The Jewish pai^ asite of eastern Europe reasserts his old work relation of panderer. usurer, and liquor seller. Thus foreign convict types, no less than native yeggs and pickpockets, add their quota to the resident criminals of any American city. But the great bulk of those whose strange names find a place on the police dockets or are haled to court by constables are recruited from a different sort. They are the inarticulate rank and file; whose burdens, being the heaviest, are naturally held to the strictest accounting. Ignorant, uncouth, illiterate, compelled to adapt themselves mercilessly to entirely new conditions of life, labor, speech, and conventions, they blunder into the pdice net, and receive almost inevitaUy the meed of their helplessness. Southern Negroes, Italians, Slavs — they clog the courts, crowd the jails, rot and choke in the upper tiers of our prisons, go to the gallows or the electric chair, crazed, screaming, but always inarticulate. The tragedy of the foreign-
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bom worker in America has never been told; the fraction of it will never be told.
In the giris from farm and small town who drift into a life oi pfXKtitution by way of factory, housework, and department store we catch a ^impse of still another human current — for the brothel itself rears no children, and draws on the homes of the plain people for its recruits.
Native bom, foreign bom, dty bred, country bred, changed conditions brought in by modem industry, have thus given new persHiality and volume to the back-set currents of our cities. These currents reach far into the social order; and for any perma- nent change in them we must kx>k to forces in education, in law, and in the economic life. None the less, in such a period of change, the part played by the police must become a force for reaction or for progress. In so far as its members are or are not alive to the awakened social conscience of the times.
Tme, they are charged with onerous and widely differing functions, some of which have at most been but referred to in these pages. We look to them to protect dwellings and business houses from depredations; to regulate traffic; to enforce theliquor law and the city ordinances; to put down riot; to prevent resort to personal vengeance; to see that the law has its course — yet, inevitably, in the course of these duties, they are obliged to deal with individual cases which in the mass present what we call social problems. Moreover, in this enforced service, methods have been demanded of them other than those of the big onlooker, with a stick to preserve fair play. Whether they have wanted it or not, they have become part of society's machinery for dealing with misfortune, maladjustment, disease, and vice — part of the machinery of local government over which the municipal struggles <rf our generation have been carried on.
The sphere of social action which opens up before the police will be simplified for us if we begin by noting certain relations it bears to the general community life.
POLITICAL REFORM AND THE POLICE First, every movement toward clean government makes the police problem simpler by stripping it of that element of cormp- tion with which it is generally confused. '*' 369
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To begin at the bottom, through the semi-outlaw groups which comprise the underworld, a formidable number of votes can be mustered by the political machine which wishes to contnd the municipality for its own advantage and that of privileged inter- ests.* No element can be swung at the polls so successfully as that which is promised protection against the enforcement of the law. When hangers-on of saloon and brothel, race track, gambling house, and pool room are granted immunities, the police must, perforce, recognize in the grantees an authority higher than the law;t the fixer outranks the judge. More sinister, there arises in the police mind the feeling that semi-outlaw groups are to be taken for granted, its own monile is destroyed, and the way open to corruption. Yet we have seen how, under a reform adminis- tration in Pittsburgh, police graft was reduced to a minimum and it was possible to set off various problems of social control as things by themselves.
The matter reaches both ways: only as the political move- ments for reform reach such a stage as to wrest the police dq»rt- ment from its traditional alliances can we give a fair trial to the possibilities of a social police.
Only, on the other hand, as reform administrations realize the crucial importance of the police department can reform be for any length of time secure.
PUBLIC POLICY AND THE POLICE In the second place, the police, as now constituted, is not a legislature, and can not work to advantage so long as we fait to clear up responsibility for formulating the social policies it is ex- pected to execute. When laws for a city are written on the statute books by up-state legislators, and when it remains within the power of the local mayor and council to disregard those laws and stand, as they choose, for a "wide open" town or a "closed" wie, we have a situation which usually leaves it to the police depart- ment, actuated by such influences as are in control, to decide when and where it shall proceed against offenders.
'This proccK wiis visualized in the PitlsbuTgh election of 191J, when tbe superintendent of the city almihouse at Marshilsea delivered *t 1 polling place 30 inlinn vaten to iwell the count of one faction.
fSee Appendix XXIV, p. jaa, Sesuons of Trial Board Secret.
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We have seen how this double standard of law and enforce- ment long demoralized the police arm under corrupt r^mes;at all times it is a deplorable makeshift for open and sustained public p<dicy on the part of the people as a whole. With respect to the difficult question whether commercialized prostitution shall be regulated or abolished in a city the size of Pittsburgh, the police is faced with the still greater crevice between outward taboo and secret toleration. Moreover, it is dealing with a resourceful and entrenched offender. Yet prior to the movement which started with the Chicago Vice Commission of 191 1, the efforts of American cities to cope with commercial prostitution were sporadic and lacking in coordination of purpose among the different agencies concerned, public and private.
The social evil may well be taken, therefore, to illustrate the necessity (in each field of social control) of a rounded city program, embracing the police and other community forces reached.
We have seen how the business of established houses was under- mined by the Guthrie policies, which prohibited the sale of liquor, stepped soliciting from windows, and restricted the use of musical instruments as a means of attracting custom; how the brothel was relegated from all streets carrying car tracks; how the street-walker was banished from the main thoroughfares and the pimp was hounded out of the city. From such a situation, the standards of enforcement could either have fallen back or gone forward to a point where the city would no longer oRicially federate this deplorable traffic. With the retirement of Mayor Guthrie they fell backward; and it remained for the Morals Efficiency Commission in 1912-13* to retrieve the lost ground and cany refonn to a point beyond that in 1907-08. These developments tend to confinn, rather than weaken, the following conclusions then reached by the writer:
" By closing permanently, say ten brothels, each week,
upon each side of the river, a militant police department,
hdd to results as rigorously as public opinion now holds the
* For an interpretation of this work by a member of the commiiiion see
Appendix XXI. Asapennanent instrument fordealingwith the problem, it secured
Icgjilatian creating a Bureau of Public Morals in the Department of Public Safety,
to be governed bf a board of seven members appointed by the majfor. A half year
elapsed before Mayor Armstrong, under pressure, made the appointments, arid as
thb volume nes to press Uuly, >9>4) the new board has still to organize its work.
Its personnerhM commanded public respect; it can employ a superintendent but
it largely de " " - ..
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police to accountzbility for house bursary, could in a year rid the city of every known brothel. That there would bean accompanying increase of the present number of prostitutes living more or less secretly in flats and furnished rooms is to be apprehended. The pdice could deal effectively with any such increase by giving prostitutes the option of going else* where or living in the workhouse.
"The change, however, could not be effected perma* nently or humanely merely by such a pdicy of repression. Emergent funds, either public or from private charitable agencies, would be needed to bridge the way back to the ordinary walks of life for such as could be reclaimed in this way. Sick and worn-out prostitutes as well as those who had fallen from inexperience should be properly cared for and furnished with transportation, in some cases, after due in* vestigation has shown that parents or other proper guardians will receive them. A residue of professional prostitutes, thoroughly confirmed in their mode of life, would remain. The permanent segrqation, not only of idiots and imbeciles, but of recidivists or confirmed felons in Indiana and other progressive states, points the way for dealing with this residue. Farm colonies for male vagrants under compara- tively long commitments (such as are carried on in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland) could be established for females."
The city which made such an attempt with energy, courage and persistence could become the first clean city in the country. Courage in plenty would be needed by Pittsburgh or any other city possessing the hardihood so to grapple with this evil. The sinister influence behind the business would find many mediums by which to mislead the public Professional policemen or others whose opinions are in many cases worth- less or open to impeachment would be quoted as alleging the evil to be a necessary one. Liquor dealers and other tradesmen would protest openly or secretly, and the politicians would do all in their power to render the cleansing movement abortive and temporary.*
It will be seen that in such a program by a city administra- tion pledged to high ideals, two govemmetital powers are invt^ved, the one executive, vested in the police, which, if capable atid deter- mined, can, in my belief, eliminate commercialized prostitution 'See Appendix XXII. p. J07, Eicerpts from Report of Morals EWkitncf
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from any American city; the other, legislative, involving not only what the state enacts, but what the community wants. Efforts to correlate these two powers have resulted, on the one haitd, in experinnents in state controlled police, especially in liquor law enforcement; on the other, in the home-rule movements, vesting greater legislative authority in councils or city commissions. A further trend — in education, health, and factory inspection — is toward administrative boards given wide latitude in applying to local conditions the broad tenns of a statute.
What is very dear is that we need to bridge the gaps if the police is to do its work. No matter what laws may be upon the statute books affecting'prostitution, not until a community unitedly and openly voices its desire is the police likely to be aaxad&i the power necessary to carry them out in any consecutive way. And only when the extent of prostitution and the diseases which have their roots in it become common knowledge by campaigns of outspoken public education, similar to that in the case of tuber- culosis, is the electorate, and the men and women whose choices make up public opinion, in a position to voice a constructive policy (far broader than police action) with respect to sexual intercourse.
PUBLICITY AND THE POLICE In other words, our third consideration is that the problems faced by the police department should not be locked up in rogues' galleries, but should become part of the sober understanding and knowledge of the community. The Pittsburgh public had no means, in 1907-08 — nor now — for knowing who own the brothels in which its daughters are ruined and its sons infected, yet that is only the beginning of what it needs to know — what conditions of city life and wages postpone marriage and draw the young men of the working population to the brothel for their pleasures, what brings the daughters of workingmen to the same houses and thence to the police courts. The man on the beat has not the least significant testimony to offer as to why the streets are crowded afternoons and evenings with young giris idling about cheap theaters, moving picture exhibits, and the like, all potential victims of the seducer.
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The standards of the police themselves would be the first to undergo a change for the better through a process of publicity and education.
While in the civil government of English-speaking peoples our peace officers may be traced back to the old Saxon Watch and Wand, the city policeman, unlike his country cousin, the coo- stable, may be traced also to recruits from the galleys. Turn to Balzac, Hugo, Dickens, LeSage, and the other writers of the picaresque school, from the days when Guzman de Alemon wrote his tale of Lazarillo de Tonnes, and we find the ex-criminal who sells himself to society as a man-hunter, who speaks the argo of the criminal and thinks in his terms. Many of the features which now characterize the police department are the natural effects of this process of evolution.
It has been this detective element which has tended to give tone to police work as a whole. (An ex-pimp and an ex-thief were two pro- fessional "guns" on the Pittsburgh staff in 1907--08.) The tendency to crystallize the work of the department in the phrase "set a thief to catch 2 thief" is one which has inhibited the natural development of the police department into a modern and scientific agency of society. The stool- pigeon* should no more set his stamp on the whole force than tbe bragging cop in the station house. Already the better class of officers fail to enthuse over the policeman who boasts of regularly breaking so many night -sticks a month on the heads of his prisoners, or who takes to himself credit for having "nailed to the cross" a particular offender who has been sentenced to 2 long term of imprisonment, and who, perhaps, in the process, has awakened his captor's strong personal resentment.
With such a radical change in viewpoint, the language of the underworld, the criminal jargon employed alike by pdice oflicen and thieves, would no longer impose its trade terms, its savageries and ob- scenities upon the police. Upon the new order, a thief would be no longer a "gun" or a "dip," nor his female companion a "moll," a "bun- dle," or a "hoister." The unfortunate woman of the street would no longer be termed a "cruiser," a "hustler," or a "body snatcher," nor the victim of thieves or swindlen be contemptuously referrwl to as "mark" or "sucker." Moreover, by the restriction of this jargon to the thief world, one common bond of comradeship between the police officer and the thief would be destroyed. Too long has the policeman
*See Appendix XXiV, p. 53;.
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gone to school with the thief in order to team his code. In doing so he has not only adopted the thieTs vocabulary, but often his moral standards as well.
By the breaking down of the bonds between the police and the underworld, of which this vocabulary is the symbol, and by creating new and common ties between the police and dynamic public intelligence, the cynical attitude taken by the latter as a class toward the existence of evil — which is the result of their intimate association with it and its dangerous toleration by the public — could be successfully combated. The point of view which sees in the professional thief simply a justification of the maintenance of a police caste dominated to a considerable extent by an approximation in mind and purpose to that of the criminal would lose its power. With a p<^ice actuated by these new ideals, it is hardly necessary to state that blackmail and extortion by members of the force would, in time, be curtailed.
The physical examination of applicants for police appoint- ment has served to raise the efficiency of the police force in our cities; the extension of the civil service has given it backbone; the inclusion of courses not only on laws and rights, but on elemental social ethics and social needs, in the schools of police instruction — in addition to the facts of local geography, traffic rules and the like— would give impetus to such a movement.*
THE COURTS AND THE POLICE This socialization of pdice outlook and service is but part of a general tendency to readjust the processes of courts and cor- rectional institutions to new theories oS penology and life. Those who are interested in analogies would find in the extreme indi- vidualism of industrial Pittsburgh, coupled with the Calvinistic tenets of some of its strongest elements, a reason for the tena- cious emphasis locally upon repressive and retributory methods in the treatment of (lenders. For ,the police problem, intimate and intensely human as it is, reaches far. It opens up the old conflict between personal liberty and governmental control. It
* noDeer work has been done by Major SylveiteT, chief o( police of Wash- ington, through the Interoatioaal Assodation of Police Chiefs, io raising the sUndiiFds of police procedure.
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is part of the newer battleground between the semi-reli^us ideas of punishment and the modem theories of refoimation and prevention. A theoretical discussion of these contrasts would carry us beyond the bounds of police administration, but their bearing on certain practical phases of the latter can be brou^t out.
The reproach of the old-time police officer was that, like Poo-Bah, in the "Mikado," he sometimes attempted to serve both as judge and as executioner; ran his man up an alley, made him pay hush money, and let him off. In the development of centralized police systems the tendency was to eliminate not only this personal graft, but all discretionary action as well, on the part of the patrolman, and thus to limit the duties of the police to mak- ing arrests and gathering evidence for the courts to act upon ac- cording to the law. But while the law has laid down in black and white what penalties the courts shall impose and for what offenses, the plain fact remains that the judges have been faced not with crimes and misdemeanors, but with offenders, with the men whom the police have arrested.
The outcome has shown that the three options of discharge, fine, and imprisonment, long the only recourse of the courts, founded as they were on a retributory idea of justice, are poor and insufficient means with which to prevent wrongdoing. In various progressive states, therefore, both in this country and in Europe, a new agent of the courts has been created in the person of the pro- bation officer, to whom offenders are paroled instead of being sent to prison. They return to their homes subject to good con- duct. Vested with much of the discretionary power which has been taken from the police officer, the probation agent supplies a flexible relationship between court and offenders which keeps the latter under supervision until they have proved themsdves fit for entire freedom. The probation officer is not a limb of vengeance: he is a friend, responsible to a judge.
Under such a system the minor court, from the legal view- point of punishment, becomes a major court from the social standpoint of prevention, because it first has contact with poten- tial lawbreakers — with the rank and file at a stage when they are open to constructive work.
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These minor courts, reaching back to the earliest Anglo- Saxon precedents, have been the slowest to feel the more acute social conscience of the times. Their attitude has been analogous to that of police circles. In Pittsburgh the magistracies are in fact agents of the police department.*
The eight magistrates are appointed by the mayor, removable by him, assigned by the director of public safety, and hdd court in the police stations. They have but one session of court each day in the week, con- vening at eight o'clock in the morning and adjourning, usually, two hours later. During sessions the outer room of the statbn house is transfonned for the time being into a court room, the magistrate taking the place of the police sergeant at the desk and the prisoners in turn are brought out from the cells. Spectators stand outside of the rail. Children are held for the juvenile court, alleged felons for the grand jury, and the great number of petty offenders and misdemeanants disposed of summarily by the old unsocial routine of line or short term commitments to the county jail or workhouse. There is no alternative of probation.
It is an axiom in these courts that the police magistrate will ludd any prisoner whom the department of public safety desires held,' and this fact is proof positive that the police dominates the bench. As a result, the fine points in a particular case for lawyers and "fixers" have to be developed later on, when the case is tried before the higher courts; this tending to one good result, the cutting out, to a large extent, of the shyster lawyer, so familiar a figure in the police courts of other large cities. Thb absence, however, is compensated for by petty political leaders who perform for voters friendly to their interests the usual offices which are required of them.
Legal training is not a prerequisite to holding office. In Pittsburgh, some magistrates have been painstaking and common-sense men; but, as a whde, the application of law to the everyday offender has been at the hands of a succession of appointees, in cahoots, not infrequently, with the underworld, whose malpractice has been an outrage and the subject of repeated scandal, t
Nor do the magistrate courts represent the lowest ebb of maladministration. They are comparatively new, coming in with the development of the centralized police system. The old minor seats of justice are the squires (known as aldermen in the cities),
'See AppcDdii XXIV, Police MagUtraies' Courts, p }i8.
t See BlaxtcT. H. V.. and Kerr, Allen H.: The AldenneD and Their Owns. The Pittsburg District, p. 1)9.
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one for each ward, borough, and township, without records or supervision, dependent upon a fee system which puts a premium on litigation and lends itself to all manner of petty persecutions. The creation of a county court in 191 1 offered the option of a clean channel in minor civil cases, but in criminal matters, where a preiiminaiy hearing is required, the alderman's jurisdiction remains intact, their practices and those of their constables, un- regulated*
The latter serve as peace officers, but with considerably wider powers than those of a city policeman. The alderman is allowed a fee of ;o cents for every witness sworn the first time, and a lesser amount for each successive swearing of a witness. The manner of paying for the services of these officials shows how their powers are likely to be exercised in all parts of the field legally open to them in direct proportion to the personal monetary yield.
The constables are altogether too frequently of the ward heeler type known to every resident of doubtful character in the neighborhood, "wise" to every possible petty dicker and deal, and thoroughly alert to the opportunities of their position.
For years, constables on the Hill and in the tenderloin dis- tricts regulariy reported, along with their fellows, that there were no houses of prostitution and no establishments selling liquor ille- gally within their precincts. Among the initiated the ceremony (tf this reporting is known generally as the "Blind Man's Parade." The constables have been less nearsighted of recent years, but the phrase is crammed with the general contempt in which the whole procedure of the law has been brought in the working people's districts.
The aldennen among (he large, fcveign-bom populatk>n of mill workers on the North and South sides, those among the immigrant and Negro populations on the Hill and in the tenderloin, may be said to secure the "cream" of criminal cases of minor importance for the whole city. Petty offenders against municipal ordinances, "drunks," "vags," and so forth, do not come before them, but are tried in the police magis- trates' courts, as the handling of these cases is comparatively unprotitaMe
* See Koukol, op. cit., p. 61, and Roberts, op. cit., p. 33, of this volume. Sec also B1axt«r and Ken-, op. cit. Tbe Pittsbtvgh District, p. im-
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from the standpoint of the fee system. The aldeimen generally engaged in the real estate business act as notaries or insurance agents, sell steam- ship tickets, or collect rents and accounts. This sort of brokerage con- stitutes the private business and unofficial life of the "judge" orsquire. But let a constable enter with his prisoner or a possible litigant: the usually dingy quarters takes on a changed appearance. The squire drops his character of broker, and the place is forthwith a court of justice. To suit the convenience of the judge, cases are heard at all limes of the day or night, even on Sundays, and in the evening the offices in these districts are frequently crowded to the doors with litigants and their friends, or "hangers-on."
In 1907-08 two justices' "shops" in the Hill District were char- acterized at certain hours of the day by the presence of notorious Negro and Jewish bullies, pimps, and steerers, who were "in right" with the local politicians. They lounged about and paraded before the door, waiting for business to turn up, holding whispered conferences with each other, or bustling into the shops in company with prisoners or com- plainants whose value to them in "coin" for services to be rendered they had already discounted to the last dollar. One of these shops in par- ticular was made the political headquarters of the Negro element in the quarter by a swaggering crowd of "bucks" who dressed in flashy clothes and wore imitation diamonds. The leading local politician of color used to appear in his motor car and be greeted with due deference by the evil- looking Negro constable attached to this particular office, who thus showed his superiority over the ordinary kuterer and hanger-on about the office door.
Still, even such a paradise of petty graft seemed to some to indi- cate but a passing of the good old times. A Polish constaMe on the South Side who for years had been a "runner," as he phrased it, for one of the busiest justice shc^ in the city, tdd the writer that the Polaks and Hunkies and Dagoes alike were "getting too civilized." He said that the wholesale drinking bouts which often characterize important domestic events among the foreign-bom workers, and, through mis- demeanors and breaches of the peace which usually accompany them, fumbh rich harvests for the justices' shops, were no longer so universally indulged in as was fornieriy the case. Thb change had occasioned a sad shrinkage in revenue for the worthy constable and his master.
The situation possesses particular significance, because the victims of this judicial abuse are in the main working people, toilers in the mills and glass-houses, alien in birth and speech, and 379
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until recent years, at least, totally helpless and inarticutate.* We can sympathize with the exploited prostitute, the thief, and the population fringing the underwoiid which yield their own rev- enue for the aldermen's courts, but the injustice committed against them is of small moment in comparison with that to which the foreign-bom working population has been subject in these institutions of the law in Pennsylvania. The conditions obtain not only in working class districts in the city, bQt generally throughout the coal regions of Pennsylvania, as well as in the mil. towns outside of Pittsburgh.
BECrNNINGS OF PROBATION
Whatever promptings toward modem constmctive methods may have come in the courts of higher jurisdiction, they have not beea vital enough to pervade these lower chambers which are in closest contact with the people. Moreover, at the time this inves- tigation was made Pittsburgh, in common with the rest of Penn- sylvania, had no probation for adults whatever. A beginning toward this broader social equipment was to be noted in the juve- nile court and in reformatory institutions for boys and girls Marked advances have come in the higher courts as result of laws passed in 1909 and 191 1 .
Without change in powers and jurisdiction, the four courts of common pleas of Allegheny County have been consolidated under a presi- dent judge. Three of his eleven associates are assigned each month to sit in ' Quarter Sessions and the Court of Oyer and Terminer, before which crim- inal cases are carried for jury trial after indictment by the grand jury.
Under the adult parole law of 191 1, whenever any person is sen- tenced to the penitentiary, the court, instead of pronouncing a fixed lerai of imprisonment, ts required to pronounce an tndetenninate sentence, stating the minimum and maximum limits; the latter never to exceed the maximum penalty for the offense. Upon recommendation of the board of inspectors of the penitentiary the state pardon board may release such convicts after their minimum sentence is served.
With exception of murder, incest, and certain other major crimes,
* The reaction of such conditions on the general attitude of foreign worken 10 the forcH of government was llluitrated in the Westinghouse strike in 1914. when the feeling toward the deputy sheriffs and police at East Pittsbuigh was colored by past experiences of lodging houses raided and foreigners "shaken down" in the squires' courts.
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the judge may, in the case of first offenders, suspend sentence and place them on probation for a definite period.
Under these laws the Court of Quarter Sessions of Allegheny County appointed an adult probation officer in the latter part of 1910; 3j; offenders were placed on probation in 1911, 446 in 1913. and 539 in 1913. To him, also, were paroled from jail and workhouse 16 prisoners in 1911,63 in 1912, and 112 in 1913. A card index system has been estab- lished upon which a history of the probationer is kept; monthly reports are received from them, and a ledger account kept with any who are re- quired to pay in money to the county for costs and restitution. These payments can be made in instalments, thus minimizing the old system where, when a fine could not be paid in full, the man served hb sentence, not unlike the old-time prisoner for debt.
In other words, an effective beginning has been made in breaking away from the rigid notions of making the punishment fit the crime, in the direction of treating the criminal in the prisoners' dock as a man who is capable of rehabilitation in the community.
Under a new county court created in Allegheny County in 191 1 ad- vances have been made in the direction of imposing social control over a class of offenders who theretofore had largely gone without effective restraint. A non-support law was passed in 1913, under which a colony of from 30 to ;o deserting husbands and fathers have been kept at the workhouse, the county paying each family 6; cents a day. This provision is applied where disciplinary means are needed, or in default of bond, but the vast bulk of non-support cases are handled on probation by the probation officer of the Court of Quarter Sessions. Four hundred and ninety-three such cases were so handled in 1913, and ^38,249.68 turned over to the families by the probation officer; 604 cases in 1913, and 173,024.38 so turned over.
W^ith these advances in mind, the basic need in Pittsburgh b seen to be a thorough rehabilitation of the scheme of minor courts with which the offender first comes in contact. This calls for eliminating the aldermen and replacing the crude magistrates' benches with a municipal or county system, as competent in criminal procedure as the new county court is in civil.*
* With the latter advance should go fresh scrutiny of the laws to which the obtuirc wagc-oirner and householder roust look for hi» dvil richts. Many of the loan shirk abuies have been stopped in the city of Pittsburgh, out the laws which b practice require a lessee to waive exemptions on his hoiueliold belongings, which cubic (be bmdbrd to seize thero for » full month's rent in advance if his tenancy TODS over i day, which leave him without equity in goods purchased on the in-
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A second great need in treating delinquents is the need for greater coherence in the scheme of court administration. The common pleas judges are assigned in rotation to the Court of Quarter Sessions, and none gives up his entire time to the exact- ing problems of the criminal branch. There are no lines of admin- istrative responsibility running down through county judge, magis- trate and alderman, which would bind the system into a fabric of fair play and consistent treatment of all offenders. Even in the juvenile court this dislocation of machinery too largely negatives the work of probation officers. Children are held in police stations* overnight and haled before the magistrates in the morning, in- stead of being taken immediately to the house of detention for juveniles and thence to the juvenile court. The latter sits but once a week, and the judge often serves no longer than a month — four sessions and then a new judge to gather up the strands of dis- traught young lives. There is need to take to heart the marked advances in systematization of the Chicago municipal courts, which not only cover the city get^raphically, but are developing func- tional tribunals, such as the court of domestic relations.
In the third place, there is need for making the probation work for adults in the higher courts really that. As yet, the single probation officer, with his two clerks, can carry on little more than high class parole work with the large number c^ cases assigned to him. The men and women report at his office. His report for 191 ^ was a plea for assistance which would enable him to carry probation out into the community. The constructive case work of the juvenile court probation crfficers, in helping young offenders to make good, affords an example of what should be done for adults in home and workshop and neighborhood. Pro- bation should be made applicable also to others than first offenders.
In the fourth place, once the minor courts are rehabilitated, probation work for adults should be entered upon directly with the group of greatest promise — the minor offenders. Pending such rehabilitation, the law seems to give ample warrant for the
sUlment plan if he has not made the last payment, and which leave him the common prey of ambulance chaser and company claim agent, need re-examination as to their suitability to modem conditions.
'See Appendix XXIV, Juvenile Delinquents, p. 510. 382
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higher courts to apply their probationary powers extensively to offenders who are summarily sentenced to jail or workhouse by magistrates and aldermen.
A ROUNDED PROGRAM
In general, the need in Pittsburgh is for a constructive social program to prevent and eliminate crime — a program in which the courts and penal institutions, prosecuting officials, probation officers, and police all have important parts to play.
In such a program there is difference of opinion as to how far police activity should be stretched. The development of aggressive detective work on the part of district attorneys apparently ovedaps the new field before the police. We have not yet worked out a technique for apprehending grand as well as petty social crimes. When there was notorious grafting in the old city councils of Pittsburgh nobody thought of turning in a police alarm. The policeman on his beat is the first to collar a hungry snatch-thief who makes away with a loaf of bread; but not until municipalities have developed bureaus of weights and measures do we find any checking of the wholesale stealing by bakers who sdl underweight. The regulation of lodging houses, which have been de- scribed, fell in Pittsburgh under the health authority. The police station was in the same building as the health bureau, and itself fur- nished hundreds of lodgings as bad as any condemned by the health officers. Obviously, without close co-operation between these two agencies no satisfactory control over the lodging house evil could be effected. To turn to another field, the report of the Chicago vice commission, made since this Pittsburgh investigation, recmnmended no less than three new agencies to deal with prostitution: (i) The creation of a morals commission; (3) the vesting in the health department of the power to dose brothds on the ground that they are centers of infection; (3) a county committee on child protection. Pittsburgh has, in 1914, set up a niOTals bureau within the department of public safety more or less co- ordinate with the bureau of police. Opinion thus differa as to whether success in social control will lie in the multiplicaticm of specialized agencies or in extending the responsibilities of those already existing. In the former case, we can hold that the police department must develop a broad social program to meet the needs which the congestion of our cities demands, and in the latter that, if it is rd^ated to the position of pre- serving outward law and order, its work must be closdy corrdated with the other agencies to which this specialized work is entrusted.
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To the mind of the writer, it is time to reverse the ingrowing tendency of the police department. Its positive development, more than that of any other department of municipal government, has been neglected. The police themselves do not realize their potentialities. Their energies, hitherto consumed in defensive measures, can be released for aggressive social work. In numbers they are the second largest force throu^ which the city has to act. They are enlisted for life. In discipline they are one of the few forms of absolutism at the service of a democracy. Before dis- carding this instrument of local government as negative and anti- social, its constructive capacities should be tried out.
The fields before police and probation officer are in many respects distinct: they represent two arms of the law; but in the one case, as in the other, a new rapproachment to the problon of crime is needed; and to this the modem police officer, no less than the modem court probation officer, can give eicpression in his work. Such a program calls for more than his standing guard over what is valuable or patroling an unstable suzerainty over such groups in the community as those described in the eariier sections of this study.
In exploring the possibilities for social service on the part of the police, let us distinguish between individual offense and organ- ized forms of depredation. Organized law breaking dates back to antiquity, but the modem city has added new forms to the old.
ELIMINATION OF ORGANIZED CRIME The first duty of the police should be to eliminate organized and professional depredation and to strike at those interests which profit by it. We have shown that, at least as far as offenses against property are concerned, the sum total of depredati(ms committed by individual law-breakers or "lone wolves" is small in comparison with the actual money loss suffered at the hands (rf professional criminals who associate together under loose but effective confederacies, extending in some instances throughout the country.
Among the first measures to be enforced would be those making for the pennanent elimination from our municipal life of the more or less loosely organized professional criminals, such as pickpockets and confi-
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dence men. If they could be banished from Pittsburgh under the re- fonn administration, they can be banished from all cities. An honest police department, unhampered by political interference, would have little difficulty in restraining the criminal activities of local thieves and gamblers. The mandate of an efficient police head, "No tricks to be turned in this town," would be sufficient, for the most part, to bdd these in check and to regulate or completely break up "joints" and "hang- outs. " Yeggs could be controlled by a police governed by the idea of the prevention of crime, no less than by one set upon the punishment of criminals. Their wdl established headquarters would be broken up. As tbe yegg spends much of his time on the railroads beating the freights, co-operation with railroad police departments would be important. With the establishment of work colonies, after the European models, it would no longer be tolerable to turn out-of-town vagrants loose at the city limits; their place of residence could be held responsible for their seques- tration. The work of the state constabulary in suppressing gambling joints and black-hand headquarters in the remote districts of Pennsylva- nia illustrates what a thoroughly equipped force could do in running out kindred hang-outs in the mill districts. Further, an effective social police would keep a watchful eye upon those parasites who prey especially upon the workingmen, — (he instalment and loan sharks, bogus employment agents, the real estate swindler offering to sell house sites which he does not own, and the small-fry confidence man who hopes to catch the work- tngman's savings by the inducement of a supposedly quick return on small investments. It would regulate strictly the sale of drugs, the use of which weakens the moral fiber and leads to crime, prostitution, or pauperism. A case in point was the prevalent sale of cocaine in Pitts- burgh in 1907-08, especially to Negroes.*
A social police then would eatly recognize the dilTerence be- tween the agencies which organize, aggravate, and profit by crime and anti-social living, and the individual offender. It would seek to stamp out the fonner. It would seek to deal with the latter with greater constructive imagination and de^wr understanding of human nature.
* How far and by what means dninkennes) may be eliminated from »uch an industrial community, both because it is an economic evil and a contributing cause of Clime and vice, an questions demanding exhaustive scrutiny in themselves. No attempt was made in this study to investigate the sale of liquor or ihc machinery for repeating it ill Pittiburgh.
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BUREAU OF PREVENTION
To Strike at the business end and organized forms of vice and depredation may be considered both a means to protect society against criminal operations and to restrict the recruiting of crim- inals. It would seem that the time is opportune to create a bureau of prevention which would balance the detective bureaus and give tone to the work not only of patrolmen, but of detectives alike.
To such a police force the enforcement of a statute prohibiting the night empk>yment of boys as messengers would be of as direct concern as to the factory inspector. By eliminating the procurer, by rigorously enforcing the law with respect to the age of consent, and by ejecting all minors from disorderly houses, a social police would strike at the sources of supply of commercial prostitution, just as the Guthrie administra- tion struck at its sources of financial support. In a city like Pitts- burgh, to which immigrants, ignorant of the language and unacquainted with the district, come in great numbers, a squad of uniformed inter- preters could be at the stations to meet and direct these newcomers. If they were a different sort from the average functionary of the petty court, who is a crook with a double if fluent tongue, their function would be as serviceable as that of the traffic squad. Handbooks interprtting the laws in the different languages, such as those that mill and mining com- panies get out with respect to the precautions against accidents, would put the newcomer in touch with American institutions and ways of justice, reduce personal violence, and prevent a great mass of fraud. The service could be extended further to include an office of information and l^al advice.
Such methods as are here suggested are, after all, details, experiments which would have to be tried out and modified, no doubt; but basic is the requiremmt c4 a regenerative spirit in the force manifesting itself alike in thought and act in its relatioas to everyday people. There is prime need of a police wliich shall act as good neighbor and friend, and irtiich shall temper, rather than accentuate, its representation of the law imposed upon an alien people by the dominant English-speaking race.
More immediate, however, even than its respcmsibility toward the prevention 6[ law-breaking would be the resptmsi- biiity of a social police toward those vho come in coUisifm with the force of the law.
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FIRST OFFENDERS AND ROUNDERS
First of all should be noted the possibility of lessening the number of first offenders, such as "drunks" and "disorderlies," by allowing the policemen a somewhat wider but more specific latitude in the making of arrests, and by convincing them that the preservation of order rather than a high number of indiscrim- inate lock-ups is the proper basis upon which to build up an indi- vidual's record.
The work done by Chief Kohler in Oeveland and under Mayor Whitlock in Toledo in reducing the number of arrests of occasional offenders, the majority of them of foreign parentage, are cases in point. Following English methods, at instigation of the late Mayor Gaynor, each New York policeman is supplied with a pad of summons blanks on which he takes the name and address of the offender, and which, at his discre- tion, he can use instead of making street arrests. This method is capable of wide application in dealing with every one but the professional crim- inal. From the point of view of criminal procedure, the greatest advan- tage coming from this lessening of the number of arrests lies in the fact that the workingmen who form the great bulk of first offenders are thus kept from intimate association with professional criminals in police court and jail, and (Tom the debasing influences which pervade the atmos- phere of such places.
In the Pittsburgh police station first offenders and old are locked into the station houses together. Neither should be there in numbers. The cutting down of arrests would keep out many a young man in his twenties;* a more rational treatment of rounders would cut the visits of the latter.
Wise as might be some of the magistrates in dealing with human nature, if left to their official devices their treatment was largely limited to fines and imprisonments. The utter in- adequacy of the fine in dealing with houses of ill fame illustrates the weakness of the first method. A fine is a small deterrent to a
• The report of the New York Bureau of Rctcarch in 1913 pCHiited out that so kmg » the magulralei' courts were not kept open during the entire day 1 penoo arrested after 1 1 a. m., and in some scciions of the dty even earlier, was required to remain in a cell for the night or procure bail. More important, it showed thai 41 per cent of the total number of arrests were for drunkenness, as against less than so per cent in New York, and that more than 4$ per cent of arrests resulted in dis- cbarge; indicating among other things a great bulk of fruitless arrests and need- less incarceration). See Appendix XXIV, p. 518.
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"madam" — it merely acts in place of a license; but it places a girt more fully in the toils of her keeper who puts up the money. As to the second method, a study made for the Pittsburgh Survey by Frederick A. King* of a number of recidivists on the records of the Allegheny County workhouse at Qaremont, the jail and the police courts brought out the footlessness of the short tenn sentence.
SCIENTIFIC TREATMENT
The dimination of the repealer by the cumulative sentence would both reduce the number of ineffective arrests and release the energies of the police department for other work. 1 n the case designated as that of "Red McHugh," who was committed 19 times to the county jail in three years, once to the penitentiary, and 92 times to the workhouse in a period of forty years, there were under the present endless methods 1 22 police problems, when there should have been but a fraction of that number. With the lessened number of cases coming before the courts we should look for new and scientific standards of treatment for those that did come. The sending of persons charged with intoxication to the hospital ntha than the jail is indicative of a trend of method and enlightened opinion which had not yet. in 1907-08, been reached in Pittsburgh. The establishment in New York of psychopathic pavilionsf to which attempted suicides as well as persons charged with intoxica- tion, or the excessive use of drugs, or who manifest any other aberrations, are committed by the courts for examination by ex- pert alienists, carries the method forward by another stage. The system of farm colony and hospital care of drunkards by Massa- chusetts, as diseased persons rather than as offenders, and the recommendation by the Chicago vice commission that women be permitted to voluntarily place themselves in hospitals for the cure of venereal disease are other illustrations of the common field of work of physicians, alienists, policemen, and courts.
Such a program of enlightened standards with respect to
■See AppendUXXIll. p. jio.
t FoT description of antiquated padded cell in PittsbuTgh's centnl staiiot house, see Appendix XXIV, pp. jao-pi.
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misdemeanants and felons would, through probation,— and If that failed through reformatories and the indeterminate sentence- give those who are not confirmed law-breakers a chance to re-estab- lish themselves in ordinary life. It would employ every means of industrial education, physical rehabilitation, surveillance, and institutional discipline to forward this end; where these failed, it would altogether abandon the repeated short-term sentence for recidivists, and would permanently quarantine them from the community by means of the indeterminate sentence. It would, through systems of prison employment and payment of prisoners, save the families of convicted men from suffering and disintegration. Equally important, it would, through systems <rf probation and parole, return to the community to be producers those men whose continued incarceration is worthless for themselves and sodety. Here we have a clear line of demarcation between the old and the new views of treating the convicted man. The detective bureau of the present system keeps track of the professional criminal- knows when he is to be released, meets him outside the walls, and maintains over him such close surveillance as, while usually not effective to prevent his subsequent lawbreaking, crftentimes pre- vents his earning an honest livelihood. Even more tragic is the fact that such policies are extended to the man who has only once offended. It is with the latter that, first of all, the probation and parole officer should direct their energies, not as with potential lawbreakers, but as with potential citizens, who can be helped into renewed self-confidence, self-conquest, and self-dependence.
CASE WORK
The social police officer is in a sense in a more strategic posi- tion than the probation officer, for the first deals with the man before he has been brought to court; he has in reserve the services of the latter.
Let me illustrate by the mendicancy squad which under the Low administration in New York dealt with a special class of offenders. On its repressive side, the work included the vigorous prosecution of knavish im- postors with whom all other means had failed, and with whom discipline was the only alternative; on its constructive side, it emphasized the necessity for finding or creating employment for those physically incapacitated from
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nonnal employment who, without such help, inevitably lapsed into the chronic mendicant. The work called for active co-operation upon the part of the police at large, from magistrates, probation officers, hospitals, charity organization societies, and employers. For instance, a Greek boy who had lost the use of an ami in a woolen mill and who had been a beggar and companion of thieves since he was twelve, was sent for seventeen weeks to the Polyclinic Hospital, and there his deformity was cured. A boy picked up in Union Square, emaciated, hungry, a bit out of his head, could speak no English. Police interpreters failed to make themsdves understood; language after language was tried, until it was found that he was a Dane who had fallen from the foreyard of a Norwegian bark- entine off Cape Hatteras, sustaining a concussion of the brain. Eicpert medical advice was secured, a brother found in this country, and after an operation which removed the pressure upon the brain, he was sent back to Copenhagen to his parents for a new start. These cases, out of bun* dreds, are typical of the constructive social work which opens before the police department.
In conclusion, we may compare the social responsibOity of the police department with that of an equally rudimentary agency — the almshouse. The almshouse was formerly the economic waste bin of the community, just as the jail was the catch basin of its disorders. In the early days there was no discrimination whatso- ever—idiots, children, prostitutes, the insane, the aged, the dis- abled, even the misdemeanant all were herded together. The effect was to reduce all to the same level. One by one the special classes are being excluded from the almshouse, and more effective provisions made for them elsewhere. Thus we have hospitals for the insane, colonies for the epileptic and feeble-minded, schools for the blind. In some states the almshouse, so far as name goes, has dropped out altogether. In reality, it has become a hospital home for the aged.
Similarly, to a certain degree, the jail has been raided (rf conglomerate inmates. In Pittsburgh, in 1910, the children were at last removed from the jail to a separate detention building. In the most enlightened states — though not as yet in Pennsyl- vania— all convicted men are removed to special institutions, leaving the jail merely a house of detention for accused men awaiting trial.
The present work of the police is analogous to the work of 390
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almshouse and jail before their modern reform. The people dealt with by the police, so far as method goes, have remained largely an undifferentiated mass. Our scrutiny ctf the wide gamut of hu- man capacity and offense which these men and women represent Jays bare the need for a new squaring with responsibilities by the police authority — and by the public for which it acts.
Only so can we hc^ to apprehend and thwart not merely offenders of the widely variant groups but the causes, social and economic, which prompt, sustain, and exaggerate offense.
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APPENDICES
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APPENDIX I
REPORT ON L\BOR CONDITIONS, STOCKHOLDERS' COMMITTEE UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORA- TION, APRIL 15, 1913
REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE At the annual meeting of the stockholders of the United States Steel Corporation held April 17, 191 1, the following resolution was adopted:
Resolved, That the chairman shall forthwith appoint a committee of not more than live persons from the officerj, or stockholders, of this Corporation, to investigate and report to the Finance Committee, as soon as may be, but not later than October 1, igrr. as to the truth of the statements contained in a certain article appearing in the March number of the AiurkaH Maga^iu, under the title , Old Age at Forty, and that such report, together with such comment as said Finance Committee may desire to add thereto, shall thereupon be printed and mailed to the stockholders of this Corporation.
Pursuant to such resolutions, Hon. E. H. Gary, chairman of the Board of Directors, appointed the following committee:
Thomas DeWitt Cuyler, of Philadelphia, Stuyvesant Fish, of New York, Darius Miller, of Chicaeo, Charles A. Painter, of Pittsburgh, Charles L. Taylor, of Pittsburg.
The absence of several members of the committee, immediately following its appointment, prevented a full meeting until October 31, 1911, on which date the committee met for organization, electing Mr. Fish as chairman. Between that date and January 13, 1913, several meetings were held, at one of which Charles M. Cabot, the author of the resolution, and John A. Fitch, the writer of the article — Old Age at Forty — were present. They, with three members of the committee, held an alt- day conference.
At the meeting held on January 13, [913, William H. Matthews
was chosen to act as secretary of the committee. Since that date he has
devoted his entire time to visiting many plants of the Corporation, has
interviewed workmen, superintendents, and ofTicials, business and pro-
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fessional men in the mill towns, and has been in conference constantly with one or more members of the committee.
From the data gathered by our secretary, together with that ob- tained by the members of the committee, who, accompanied by Mr. Cabot on the committee's invitation, visited many of the works in the Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh districts — giving to such inspectioo all their time from April ) to April 13 — the facts and recominendatioDS which fdlow are submitted.
As a result of the several meetings held by the committee for the study of the article under discussion, as also through conference with Messrs. Cabot and Fitch, it seemed that the main questions calling for consideration were:
(4) The seven-day week, ind long turn, (b) The twelve-hour day, (r) The speeding of the workmen, (d) The repression of the men.
Before taking up these questions sin^y. we believe we but state the facts in saying that no one of these practices was inaugurated by the United States Steel Corporation. Rather were they in vogue, to a greater ' or less degree, in the various companies which were brought into one when the Steel Corporation was organized.
(,a) The Seven-day Week and Long Turn Until recent years the seven-day week has been the general rule and practice followed in all the operations which are necessarily continuous, particularly in that of blast furnace work. Nor was it always confined to departments where such continuous operation was a metallurgical neces- sity. Recc^iiing the harmful effects of such a schedule of work, the Finance Committee of the Corporation, on April aj, 1907, adopted and transmitted to the presidents of all subsidiary plants of the Corporation the following resolution:
On motion, it was voted to recommend to ail subsidiary companies that Sunday labor be reduced to the minimum; that all work (e:ueptiDg such repair work as can not be donewhite operating) be suspended on Sunday at all steel works, rolling mills, shops, quarries, and docks; that there shall be no constructioD work, loading or unloading of materials.
It Is understood that it is not at present practicable to apply the recom- mendation to all departments, notably the blast furnaces, but it is desirable that the spirit of the recommendation be observed to the fullest extent within reason.
While the efforts made by individual officials to cany out the recommendation of the finance committee resulted in some progress being made toward compliance with the same, in many plants it was disregarded
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in whole or in part. The explanation of this failure to detach from the steel industry the seven-day schedule of work may be best found, we be- lieve, in that zeal of operating officials for output, exclusive of all other considerations. This being contrary to the pdicy of the board, and at variance with the resolution of its Finance Committee, a telegraphic order of a peremptory character was issued by Judge Gary on March i8, 1910, to the presidents of all constituent companies, reading as follows:
Mr. Corey, Mr. Dickson, and I have lately {pven much seriou* thought to the subject-matter of reaolutioD pasted by the Finance Committee April aj, 1907, concerning Sunday or seventh day labor. Mr. Corey has written you on the sub- ject within a day or two. The object of this telegram is lo say that all of us expect and iosst that hereafter the spirit of the resolution will be observed and carried into effect. There should and must be no unnecessary deviation without first taking up the quesrion with our Finance Committee and asking for a change of the views of the committee, which probably will not under any circumstances be secured. I emphasize the fact that there should be at least twenty-four continuous hours' interval during each week in the production of ingots.
(Signed) E. H. Garv.
Whether viewed from a physical, social, or moral point of view, we believe the seven-day week is detrimental to those engaged in it. While not wishing to imply that the method adopted by any individual official or any combination of two or more methods would be the best to meet requirements in all mills, we are strongly of the opinion that no matter what alleged difficulties in operation may seem to hinder the abandonment of the seven-day week, they must be met.
The records of today indicate that with the exception of two or three plants, the seven-day week has been relegated to the past.
The resolution of the Finance Committee, as subsequently em- phasized by Judge Gary, was strictly mandatory in character and should, in our judgment, be absolutely enforced at all times, in all mines, mills, shops, railways, docks, and works of the Steel Corporation. Any tendency on the part of anyone to disregard the spirit or the letter of such order should be sufficient cause for removal from service.
Closely allied with the questicm of the seven-day week is that of the excessive hours of labor involved in continuous processes, caused by the changing of the working shifts from day turn to night turn and vice versa. An examination of the time sheets of many of the mills shows that this practice has been entirely abolished in many of the departments and not in others. We recognize that at rare intervals there may come emergencies and unusual conditions that would make absolute enforce- ment of any exact schedule of work hours impracticable, a fact equally true in any fidd of industry and commerce. Our investigation, however, leads us to believe that it is feasible and practicable to eliminate the long 397
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turn formerly followed in the changing of shifts in continuous process work, and that it should be done. Further, that conscientious effort should be made by all to reduce to a positive minimum any undue length in work hours that emergencies and unforeseen conditicnis may sometimts demand.
(h) The Twelve-hour Day
To ascertain the number of employes of the Steel Corporatioa working on a twelve-hour schedule (exclusive of officers, managers and clerical forces), we have examined the records of 175.715 tnen. Of this number we find 45.248, or 35K per cent, are at present working twdve hours per day. Generally speaking, this schedule of work finds its larg- est proportion in those departments which are more or less continuous, such as rolling mills, open hearths and blast furnaces, where the percentage working twelve hours varies from 50 to 6a The explanation of such fact may be found, partly, at least, in the introduction of a large number of mechanical improvements which have steadily cut down the exhausting drudgery and the severe physical labor that was characteristic of many of the processes in the earlier years of the iron and steel industry. The actual physical labor invdved in many of the positions is, today, much less than in former years, this being especially true of the open hearth and blast furnaces, where the intermittent character of the work is such that there is less call for actual expenditure of physical energy than in many of the eight- and ten-hour positions.
Notwithstanding this fact, we are of the opinion that a twdve- hour day of labor, followed continuously by any group of men for any considerable number of years means a decreasing of the efficiency and lessening of the vigor and virility of such men.
The question should be considered from a social as well as a phys- ical point of view. When it is remembered that the twelve hours a day to the man in the mills means approximately thirteen hours away from his home and family — not for one day, but for all working days — it leaves but scant time for self-improvement, for c(»npanionship with his family, for recreation and leisure. It is important that any industry be considered in its relation to the home life of those engaged in it, as to whether it tends to weaken or strengthen the normalness and stability of family ]if& By a reasonable conserving of the strength of the working population of today may we be best assured of a healthy, intelligent, productive citizenship in the future.
We are not unmindful of the fact that the twelve-hour day has, by its general acceptance and practice over a considerable period of years, become firmly entrenched, and that any sudden or arbitrary change
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would involve a revolution in mill operations. Nor are we at all sure that it would be possible for any one employer, or any number of em- pk^ers, to inaugurate a shorter hour system, unless a similar policy should be adc^ted by all employers engaged in the same industry.
We do bdieve that following in the wake of other betterment of conditions in the steel industry, there will naturally come a shortening of the hours of labor and the eventual abolishment of the twelve-hour day, which will tend toward increasing the efficiency and resourcefulness of the winking population and for that reason bring benefit to both employer and employed.
That stq>s should be taken now that shall have for their purpose and end a reasonable and just arrangement, to all concerned, of the prob- lems involved in this question — that of reducing the long hours of laboi^ we would respectfully recommend to the intdligent and thoughtful con- sideration of the proper officers of the Corporation.
(c) The Speeding of thb Workmen In the article which is under discussion, considerable criticism is made against the system of payment of wages by piece work. We do not believe that there has been evolved any fairer or more generally accepted method of payment for labor. Likewise, what is known as the "bonus" system which has been largely employed by the Steel Corporation as an incentive to increase in output and efficiency, is objected to as tending to result in a system of speeding harmful to the men.
That there is possibility of abuse in these systems is true. Have there ever been devised rules of procedure in any field of industry free from such possibility? Our observation of labor conditions in the mills of the Steel Corporation does not lead us to bdieve that there is either desire or tendency on the part of foremen and superintendents to pursue these policies to a point that would mean harm or injury to the men under their charge. It is, of course, within the province of the Board of Directors, and they should employ the necessary means whereby they would always be conversant with and able to promptly check any ofliciai, who in his anxiety for output, becomes disregardful of the possible injury to his men by overspeeding and excessive strain.
As general operating policies, we believe the "bonus" system and the payment of wages by piece work to be of advantage both to employer and employe, guarding as they do against that dead level of wages re- gardless of the ambition, the resourcefulness, the efHciency of the indi- vidual concerned. They are the exemplification of that tsprit dt corpt that is essential to the success of all enterprises; they are but a part of 399
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that spirit of contest and competition that is characteristic of all Amencan life, whether it finds expression in the school romn, on the athletic fieU. in the target contests of anny and navy, or in the legitimate striving tor "place" amongworkmen, foremen, superintendents, managers. and higber officials in any field of commerce and industry. Through their operation, the qualities of perseverance, ingenuity, and grit have opportunity for e]q>ression, development, and reward.
As stated above, these special bonuses are offered as an incentive for increase in output and efficiency. That they should find fair and just distribution among all whose efforts and labor contribute to any resultant increase in production, or economies, would seem to be a subject calling for consideration and action.
(lO The Repression of the Men
The Steel Corporation has made efficiency the one standard by which continuance of employment in its plants is determined. If we are to understand the term "repression of workmen" as a criticism of and ob- jection to this defined policy, then the implied charge is true. If, on the other hand, it involves the question as to what measures the officat of the Corporation should adopt for the suppression of organizations that in the past have, at times, proved irresponsible and incapable of self-control, that have advocated and ofttimes insisted upon what are bdieved by many to be fallacious theories and practices, then, at least, the charge may well be open to discussion.
As a committee of stockholders, we do not believe the final sdution of the problems involved in this question has been reached. We do believe the present methods are preferable to the old for all concerned, and that the Steel Corporation, in view of the practices often pursued by labor organizations in steel mills in past years, is justified in the position it has taken.
That the method of employment of today must prove to be the best for the future is a question on which there may well be a difference of opinion. The interests of society and the community at lai^ will not best be served by that type of mind, whether it be employer or emi^ye, which bases action on the assumption that might makes right. On the contrary, the adjustment of the relations between employer and employe is a task for men oF sound minds, reciprocal natures, tm>ad sympathies and courage, men who believe that the future may be made better thaa the present. May it not be reasonably hoped that such men, whether they be officials or wage-earners, may more and more be found working together to bring forward the day when employer and employe shall enter into a common administration of industrial interests? 400
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In the article under discussion, Old A^e at Forty, mention is made of the general social welfare policies inaugurated at different times by the Sted Corporation. It would seem to be in the province of this report to briefly outline those policies, and to consider their value as affecting the relationship of employer to employe.
Safety Department
It is not necessary here to trace the growth of the earlier efforts made by different subsidiary companies toward the prevention of acci- dents, to the time when they found their culmination in the organization of a central committee of safety early in the year 190S, which committee was given the power to examine all the various plants of the Corporation, and as rapidly as possible to bring every mill to the highest possible point of effectiveness in accident prevention.
That committee has and is carrying on a determined and effective campaign for safety all along the line. Its work is considered as important a subject as any that the Corporation has to contend with in the manu- facture of its products. From the start it has worked on a sound, vigorous and scientific system of accident prevention.
The central ofRce of the Safety Department is in New York, in charge of an acknowledged expert, with several assistants, and supple- mented by local safety committees in each of the subsidiary companies, which, in turn, are supplemented by sub-committees of foremen and workmen all striving to study and safeguard the lives and welfare of employes.
During the years igio and igii, there was expended {1,750,000 for safety, and large appropriations have already been granted for a con- tinuance of the work. Gratifying results have been accomplished, as evidenced by the fact that the percentage of serious and fatal accidents throughout all the plants of the Corporation shows a decrease of 43 per cent since 1906. This reducticm of serious and fatal accidents, based on the nonn^ number of onployes (300,000), means 3, joo less in 191 1 than 1906.
Prevention is but the first step in the system of accident and relief work as carried on by the Corporation. Neariy every plant has its emergency hospital equipped to render first aid to any workmen injured. Each mill has its surgeon and nurse to administer promptly the necessary assistance in case of accident, and the company provides efficient hospital treatment, either in its own hospitals or those of the com- munity.
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Voluntary Accident Relief Plan
In spite of all precautions taken and all effons toward prevention, there will occur many accidents in any large industry, involving temporary or permanent disability, and sometimes death.
To Andrew Carnegie, the steel industry is indebted for the first voluntary relief measures, in 1901. he created a trust of |l4,ooo,ooo, the income of which was devoted, within the Carnegie interests, to the relief of families from whom the breadwinner had been removed by accidental death, to the temporary relief of those employes meeting with work-accidents, and to the pensioning of superannuated employes, and those permanently disabled. From this fund, there was disbursed in nine years the sum of $i,7$6,9j$.$9 among 9,746 employes.
Wtat has been the pdicy of the Corporation in this matter of ameliorating the conditbns which accidents often bring to the homes of its employes!"
in May, 1910, it established a plan of relief whereby it made voluntary provision for the care and benefit of all employes injured, and for the families of those killed, in a report of this nature, we can not discuss the considerable detail of such a system. During the years 1910 and 191 [, |),l3),O00 was paid in aid of workmen who were injured in the mills, and to the families of those men who were killed in service.
In addition to this voluntary relief on the part of the Corporatioii, there exist in some of the subsidiary ccnnpany plants employes' bene- (icial associations for insurance against sickness and death from causes other than mill accidents. To the funds of these, both the men and the company contribute, and in their administration there is a simDar partner- ship. That there should be an extension of this form of insurance would seem to us desirable.
Pensions
in addition to voluntary accident relief, the United States Sted Corporation appropriated in January, 1911,3 fund of ^000,000 for pen- sion purposes, which was combined with the fund of $4,000,000 which had been established in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie, for the benefit of the employes of the Carnegie plants. The income from the aggregate amount is now being used for the benefit of all employes of all the sub- sidiary companies of the Corporation. The pension obligations of those subsidiary companies, which had put into operation pension provisions prior to 191 1, were assumed by and merged into the new fund.
The record of operations of this fund for the year 191 1 were as fdlows:
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Totilnumberofpensiaiwn December 31, 1911 1,606
Number of pennons granted during 191 1 )6j
Total disbursements during 191 1 ^348,480.37
Average pensions granted per month #>o-73
Avenge age of employe) pensioned 66 3-3 yeiis
Average l^gtb of service of pensioners 30 4-ro "
Sanitation and Welfare
We have found that much attention has been given to the matter of sanitation in many of the mills. Pure drinking-water systems, sanitary lavatories, locker rooms, shower baths, and other like provisions are being established in many of the plants. Not all have traveled as far nor as diligently along this line of improvement as we think they might.
Along the line of general welfare work, scattering efforts arc being made in the way of providing places of recreation, such as club rootns, playgrounds and other agencies for the families of employes. District nurses have been employed by some of the companies; sanitary engineers by others. Specialists have been employed to investigate and report on all questions affecting social welfare. An educational movement along these lines is now being inaugurated, and when that same energy and uniformity of practice that is characteristic of the safety department ^al] have been brought to bear on the question of welfare, either directly or by co-operation with agencies already at work in the towns, much of penna- nent value can and, we believe, will be accomplished. With the question of shorter hours of labor is closely allied this one of providing means and places by and in which the leisure hours gained may be profitably spent. It is not a question for the Steel Corporation alone. Rather is it one to which society as a whole may well address itself.
During the year 1911 the Corporation expended $i,3so,ooo for this general betterment work.
Stock Distribution
In the year 1903. a plan was inaugurated, under which shares of preferred stock were offered to all employes and which practice has con- tinued yearly since. A premium of $; per annum for five years is paid on each share of preferred stock purchased by employes under this plan.
As of December 31, 191 1, 34,588 employes were stockholdera under this plan; their aggregate holdings amounting to 103,24$ shares of stock.
In response to the 1913 circular concerning employes' stock dis- tribution, the following table shows the subscriptions thereunder:
NuwduT 0/ Em- Nimibtr e^ Sbarn
tiojts StAseribint 0} Slick
Emi^oyes receiving leu than t8oo per year . i$,349 ly^ajS
Employes receiving fSoo to (3,500 per year 30.096 3 ji3$f
Employes receiving over (3,300 per year . . i.joi 8,666
Total y6,^6 6i>)J4
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While in the mills, we have made special point to ascertain fnoi the workmen themselves their attitude toward this plan, and we have found most of them well infonned as to its provisions. Many with whom we have talked were holders of one or more shares of the stock. Our belief that the plan has encouraged thrift and stimulated the men to save was but strengthened by the remark vdunteered by several of the men with whom we talked — that they "had never saved any money until they began this way."
An impartial examination of all the facts presented in this report will show that much work has already been done by the United Sutcs Steel Corporation for the betterment of conditicms under which thdr employes live and work.
We believe there is evinced a widening sense of social responsi- bility: an increased willingness to accept the heavier burdens and obli- gations which have come with the development of modem industry. Yet, not less evident is the fact that there is necessity for still larger acoxnplish- ment in the future. Elsewhere in our report we have suggested some of the lines along which that should be wrought.
It may not be amiss to say that the resolution passed by our fdkw stockholders imposed a task upon this committee requiring much labor, careful investigation, and conscientious consideration. To approach the questions raised by the article under discussion with fair and open minds; to ascertain and present the real facts; to search for the practical, rather than the theoretical; to reach conclusions that should not be affected in any way by opinions gleaned from this or that possibly pre* judiced source, whether of employer or employe — in that spirit have we endeavored to do the work entrusted to us. To that high tribunal, that final court of appeal — public opinion — we submit our conclusions and recommendations. The dissatisfaction and unrest which plainly exist in the industrial world today will not be lessened or removed by a policy that limits itself to a fault-finding, destructive line of action, but rather by one that will in tangible, definite fashion recognize and follow that con- structive and conserving leadership of which we believe there is evidence, both in the ranks of employers and employes.
There may be those, perhaps, who will accuse us of unwarranted optimism in expressing the hope that the men who, in the manufacture of iron and steel have been so successful in the invention and application of wonderful mechanical appliances, who have won success in the adminis- tration of immense enterprises — that these same men will lead and achieve in the just solving of the social and human problems that in this same industry press for answer.
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The publicity accorded by the Steel Corporation quarterly in Us financial statements, and monthly in its tonnage statements, has placed it in this respect far in advance of other corporations, and by doing so has gained for it the confidence and trust of the public.
In conclusion, we respectfully recommend to the Board of Directors of the Steel Corporation that hereafter, and at stated periods, a statement shall be submitted to the stockholders, dealing with the questions dis- cussed in this report, so that correct and reliable first-hand information may be available as to the advancement and betterments being effected in these equally vital and important fields of endeavor. Respectfully submitted,
Stuyvesant Fish, Thomas DeWitt Cuyler, Darius Miller, Charles A. Painter, Charles L. Taylor,
Committee of Stockholders. New York. N. Y., AprU i}, 1913.
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APPENDIX II
COMMUNITY CONTRASTS OF 1914 IN THE HOUSING OF MILL WORKERS
1. A SOHO HILLSIDE
THE PERSISTENCE OF SANITARY NEGLECT IN CENTRAL PITTSBURGH
Abraham Oseroff*
Within ten minutes' walk of the "Schenley Farms," where some of Pittsburgh's finest and richest homes are grouped; within view of tbe University of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie Institute of Techncdogy; and as a next-door neighbor to several rich and influential churches. lies a sectionoftheSohoDistrict which is burdened with nearly every one of the long list of housing evils to be found in our large cities.
Fifth Avenue and Forbes Street are the main arteries along which well-to-do Pittsburghers are carried downtown to their work in office or store. Above the Twenty-second Street bridge. Rook's Hill bends these streets almost to the edge of the bluff that overhangs the Monongahela Riverand the huge furnaces of the Jones and Laughlin steel mills, tbe ex- tensive plant of the National Tube Company, and Hussey and Company's copper works. Qinging to the hillside of the narrow belt between, desig- nated in its various parts as Rock Alley, Rock Street, Maurice Street, and Comet Street, in an area of something less than 33 acres, are 14 tene- ments, 15 two-family dwellings and 36 one-family dwellings; 65 houses in all.
• The results of investigations carried on by Mr. Oseroff in March and April. 1914. His findings fairly duplicate the conditions found by the E*JttsbuTgh Survey in the Soho District in 1907-08. Adequate housing laws and ordinances have b««a passed in the inlerval as result of local movements for reform. This Soho District, which is not wholly unrepresentative of tenement conditions throughout the dty, shows the crying and unmet need throughout all this period for enforcement of those laws and ordinances.
It indicates the bulk of neglect which faces the new director of the depart*
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n Forbes Slreel and live storks in the rear. No fire-escapes.
lofatnilies, A photograph of this building w n Ihe Bureau of Health Report for 1907. It
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They are workingmen's homes, if homes they may be called, pro- viding living quarters for 136 families, 40 of whom in turn give shelter to I30 boarders: a total of 619 persons in all.
A dismal, unkept, uncared for rut, running into the hillside, bears the designation of Rock Alley. It is lined on both sides by a variety of houses built at an almost equal variety of angles. One bouse here takes care of five families, and on the cold March morning of one of my visits its tiny attic room was doing its best to provide space for six sleeping mill workers with the two windows and the only door tightly closed. Another
SoHO Hillside The district covered by housing icudy is shown by heavy shading
house has, as an appendage, a little frame shack which does service as a kitchen. On this same March morning, with the thermometer hovering about the freezing point, a family group was eagerly crowding about a little stove in one comer of the room. John, the oldest of the children, spoke up and said: "Gee, mister, the stove is the only warm spot in this house." And he was right, for the wind and the snow found no difficulty in crossing the fragile barriers of doors and windows and took full advantage of the many crevices between decayed boards.
The population of Rock Alley is even more diverse than are its houses. Unassorted there are living side by side, a mixture of American, 407
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Welsh, Irish. Hungarian, and Polish famSies, and, indeed, a Gennan boarder in the crowd.
Rock Alley, in spite of its many other afflictions, has not escaped the pnvy vault nuisance. It has full share of insaniiary, disease breeding vaults without sewer connection, ever ready to spread contamination and endanger the health of the neighborhood. Down Rock Street runs a long, open wooden sewer drain carrying sewage from both alley and street toward Maurice Street below. Rock Street residents are not wd) versed in the best standards of sanitation and the drain becomes the rest- ing place for innumerable empty tin cans, worn-out brooms, aid shoes, and other articles equally foreign to the lap of a respectable sewer. As a result, during rain or when its sluggish way is otherwise forced to capacity, it overflows into cellars and basement kitchens.
The tenement shown in the foreground of the picture of Rock Street redeems itself, in part at least, for it is one of the very few houses of the district affording inside water-closets for its families. Their neigh- bors across the way are less fortunate, two families depending for toilet accommodations on a dry privy vault placed under a side porch adjacent to the kitchen.
Maurice Street, one of the main thoroughfares of the district, forms a connecting link between Forbes Street and the plants bordering the district. Here for the first time a tenement court is to be encountered, consisting of an old frame shack at the rear, occupied by four families; a brick hovel in the front by one; and a brick house by four. For these nine families and boarders the sole water supply is one hydrant adjacent to a pnvy vault.
On Cornet Street are houses in the last stage of dilapidation, but still occupied, and still a source of income to the landlord. Basement rooms are plentiful and foul, insanitary privy vaults open to the sight of all passersby.
The worst housing conditions of the district, however, are to be found on Forbes Street. Here, in a long row of houses and tenements, almost every one in utter dilapidation, is a total neglect of most of the essentials of sanitation. The houses are breeding places of filth and disease, and some are veritable fire traps. One of the larger of the tene- ments, typical in most respects of the rest, is a dilapidated frame structure fronting two stories on Forbes Street and four stories in the rear. In aj rooms, 1 7 of which are betow the street level, and four of which are totally dark, it houses, in dark, damp, poorly ventilated, overcrowded quarters, 62 persons, besides providing stable quarters for a huckster's horse. The apartments consist of either two or three rooms and the rentals vary
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from S4-00 to f8.oo per month. The total monthly rental of this tene- ment reaches the sum of $71.
The privy-vault nuisance in this section is pernicious in the highest degree. In an area extending over no more than three city squares there are 37 unsewered vaults over which are 73 compartments. They are arranged usually in battery style, their seepage running down the hillside. Back of Forbes Street, in many cases, the ground to the very houses, and often even under the houses, is thoroughly permeated with sewage, foulness, and dampness. Wherever one turns the foul odors pervade the atmosphere like the very essence of civic neglect. What an anomaly we have herel The Schenley Farms district, with its wonderful semi-public buildings and magnificent homes, produced by Pittsburgh's millions, and these squalid hovels and dilapidated tenements — they, too, a product of the same process. The people who live in them are fairly representative of the unskilled working population of the district.
The nationalities represented are as follows:
AmericaD 77
Irish 93
WeUh 3S
Slav lai
Austrian 19
Magyar 9
Russian 35
Polish 119
English 6
Hungarian 6;
Gcnnan 13
Scotch 4
Total 619
The adutt male population is dependent for employment chiefly on the industrial plants mentioned. Two hundred and twenty-one out of the 34$ male workers are living on budgets ranging from (1.35 to |3.$o per day. Besides the boarding system, 37 women and eight children help by getting employment outside the home.
The average rents they pay from these incomes are shown in the following table:
Uoop 6.19 P
. 9 per month
3 rooros 7.43 per month
4iioonu 9.41 per month
Six of the families live in one-room apartments, 45 families living 409
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in two-room apartments, 41 in three-room apartments, 36 in foor-nxmi apartments, and the others in live or more rooms.
Altogether out of ^giS living rooms 8; are below street levd, and iS totally dark.
Yet we must not get the impression that the situation b wboUy dark. A re>awakening, due to the recogniticHi of bad housing amdhioas in Pittsburgh, has shown itself in legislation refonns ai the hands of dvk organizations- The Chamber of Commerce Housing Ctmimittee has de- veloped a plan for the building of small, sanitary dwellings fat wn-king- men which seems practical, as well for the investors as for the prospective dweller. Why is not this district a Ic^cal one for the inauguratioo of the committee's plan? Perhaps then, too, prophecy may become fact, and " Instead of the thorn shill crane up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the mynle tree. And they shall build houses and in- habit them, and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of tbetn."
A FORERUNNER OF MODERN HOUSING DEVELOPMENT FOR INDUSTRIAL SECTIONS
W. C. Rice Midhnd Intproveroent Company
Midland, one of the new industrial towns of the Pittsburgh District, is located j? miles southwest of the city on the Ohio River. Its site is 60 feet above high water mark, r,3oo acres of practically level land, having sufficient slope to insure good drainage.
The town was founded by the Midland Steel Company in 1906 when it erected a blast furnace and coke oven plant at this point, and laid oat a community in the usual checker>board fashion. All lots were made rectangular, fmn 3; 10 50 feet in width, and from lao to ijj feet in depth. The policy was to erect fairly good buildings, and certain re- strictions were enforced as 10 the distance from the street, and the cost. Such shacks as were necessary during the construction period were raicd on the completion of the blast furnace plant. No alleys were permitted, except in the rear of the main business street, fw alleys invariably become a dumping ground for refuse and are always the last to be paved.
The original plant site was taken over by the Pittsburgh CrudUe Steel Company, a subsidiary of the Crucible Steel Ccmipany of America. 410
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in 191 1, and the unsold portion of the town site comprising 600 acres was afterwards acquired by the Midland Improvement Company, also a subsidiary of the Steel Company.
The curved and winding streets and many small parks which make up the new plan is the work of those who thus acquired the property. In this residential section all dwellings must be brick, concrete, stone, or other fireproof material. No small out-buildings are permitted other than a neat garage, lots averaging $oby 13$ feet, and but one building on a lot. Every construction must cost not less than $3,500, and be at least 30 feet from the property line. However, frame or stucco houses are per- mitted provided they cost not less than $3,000 if erected on lots where restrictions are less rigorous.
The policy of the Improvement Company has been to encourage in every way civic improvements and the general good of its people. During the last year, the company has built several hundred houses and employed a firm of architects of national standing to design houses very different from the store-box type so common in industrial towns. The picturesoppositepage4ijshow jo houses, sin^e, double, and triple type, designed and patterned after houses in Essen, Germany. Notice the window-box effect. The company provided the plants for these window bones, graded and sowed the lawns, provided window shades to insure uniformity of color, and provided screens. These houses are occupied by foremen, mechanics, and clerks, and have been given the sobriquet, "Toy- land." Other pictures show stucco and clapboard houses all separate, with gas, electric light, furnace, bath, and other conveniences; separate houses of brick construction, two or three of each design scattered throughout the plan, also modem in every way; and xAid concrete-poured houses con- sisting of four large rooms with gas, electric lights, inside toilet, and running water. This last construction is indestructible and germ-proof, as the walls, floor, and roof are solid concrete.
The original layout provided for the segregation of foreigners (mostly Italian, Croatians, Lithuanians, and Poles, together with Jewish shopkeepers) to the extreme west end of the town. This rule has been followed in the larger development of the town. These houses are built in pairs with 10 feet space between them; contain five large rooms, equipped with gas, electric light, running water, and toilets, fireplaces, mantels, and porches. They rent up to $13 per month, 30 percent less than inferior houses in other industrial towns in the western end of the state. The Negro population, which is not large, has a nearby section in the same end of the borough near where the foreigners live, and have been given the same careful attention.
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The company believes that the conveniences offered produce an environment doing much toward the education of the next goKration, if not the present, in household standards. Meanwhile, restrictitMiS as to the number of men sleeping in one room are insisted upon.
Owing to the lack of houses in Midland, those contttdled by the Crucible Company are in preference given to their employes. However, houses are being erected by individuals at many points.
Upon acquiring the town site, the Crucible Company found but <Hie paved street. A number of streets have since been paved, trees planted, and storm and sanitary sewers laid. A number of the residents along sections of the town where the streets are running east and west, and where traffic is light, have petitioned the borough council to have the cart-way, or between curbs, reduced to 34 feet, leaving a grass plot eight feet wide between sidewalk and curb. This adds much to the general appearance and reduces the cost of paving. Streets running north and south are 50 feet wide with lo-foot sidewalks. The main business street. Midland Avenue, is 6; feet wide; Park Place, east and west, are both 6$ feet wide. These streets bound Lincoln Park, which consists of six acres of almost level land given to the borough by the parent company for a public park. In the center of this park a lake is projected which will be used for bathing in the summer and skating in the winter.
The Cleveland and Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania lines, west, has recently purchased at Midland considerable grounds to be used for yard facilities. There will be no grade crossings from the town to the steel plant, as subways are to be provided for such purpose.
To encourage garden improvements, the parent company appn^ri- ates each year a considerable sum of money which is divided among the different sections as prizes for the best lawns, floral designs, porch boxes, window boxes, vegetable production, and grounds as a whole. It also offers garden patches for cultivation, free of charge to those who apply.
Judges are selected from the various industries of the town who award prizes, each fall, to those who show the best results. All residents are permitted to enter the contest, only one prize being given, however, to a single individual. Condition of the ground is considered and also the time the contestant has had for its cultivation. The foreigners enter these contests and frequently carry off the prizes, which is eminent proof that the company's policy of education on this point is well taken, and the money thus spent is well spent.
The company has also donated a band-stand in one of the parks and the local band has been fortunate in finding members who have played in some of the best bands in Europe. Opposite a group of 30 houses on
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Poured Conckete Houses. Midland The Midland Improvement Company has tried out Mr. Edison's invention. The concrete is poured into frames, and practically no wood enters into Ihe con- struction. TKe tenants are foreign mechanics of a high order; rent S14 per month: selling price ti.900. The experimeni of the poured house is still in process, these Midland houses being pioneers of Ihe lype, and attracting visitors from all parts of the industrial district
TfcNANTEU BY OwNERS
Not all Ihe homes in Midland are company houses by any means.
The dwellings on this street are biick and frame, seven lo ten rooms: owned by high grade mechanics, clerks holding responsible positions, and professional people in the community
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Triple Houst. Tovland
Hollow Tile and Cement To)'land is Ihe name given lo a row of liie and cemeni houses buili ifler German models, making perhaps the most atlraclive industrial street in Weslem Perrsylvania, The houses still have to win their way wiih American lenanis. Mechaniijs, clerks and department foremen rent Ihem al Irom $ii lo $37 pei monih. five lo seven rooms. Selling price For double houses $5,400 lo §6,000. lo per cent down, one per cent per month with interest
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Rice Avenue, the parent company has provided a playground i^ich is maintained by the residents in that vicinity.
The water furnished Midland is filtered, and is furnished at low rates. No charge has been made the borough so far for fire hydrants or other water consumed. Neither is any tax charged to the board of education for water furnished any of the school buildings.
To keep up with the increasing population, the board of education is endeavoring to provide sufficient school buildings in different parts of the town. Two are now completed, and a third is about to be erected. Schofds are graded, with high school facilities. The board is at present negotiating with the Improvement Company for two and one-half acres of additional ground surrounding the central school for a playground and breathing spot. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently ap- propriated $30,000 to the borough for a free public library, which is to be erected in the vicinity of Lincoln Park on a plot of ground donated by the Improvement Company.
The borough council recently let a contract for a new municipal building with white tile front, to cost about $30,000. One-half is to be used for administrative purposes and the other for the town's fire appar- atus. The assembly hall in this building will be placed at the disposal of the people for all social center work.
When dam No. 7 crossing the Ohio River at Midland is completed in September of this year, it will enable the Crucible Fuel Company to ship coal from their mines in Greene County to the Midland plant at all times of the year, thus enabling them to operate their present coke ovens continuously. The steel plant is a modem one in which safety engineering matches the town planning of the village.
Other industries are locating at Midland, notably a foundry and construction company. Although the borough was only incorporated in 1907, the present population is 5,000, and in the next few yean will be more than doubled. Two churches and two missions have been erected. Midland is a prohibition district, and its town site lies so high that malaria is unknown and the mosquito finds no breeding spots. The tax rate is the lowest of any borough in Beaver County. Altogether with Steel Company and citizens working in harmony it is hoped to solve here many of the difficult problems of the modem industrial town.
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APPENDIX III
Y. M. C. A. WORK FOR IMMIGRANTS IN THE PITTS- BURGH DISTRICT
H. A. McCONNAUGKEY
Immigratioo SccrelaTy Y. M. C A.. Pittsburgh
Beginning in 1909 the Pittsburgh Young Men's Christian Associa- tion has been carrying on active work in the interests of coming Americans or, in other words, of the immigrant population of Pittsbui^. Up to that time the association work of this industrial center had been con- ducted <Hi strictly conventional lines. The new work was made possible by the coming of Lyman L. Pierce as general secretary of the Y. M. C A. of Pittsburgh, under whose administration the association has made remarkable progress in other lines than its outreach among immigrants. In less than five years, three equipped buildings have been opened in various parts of Pittsburgh and, more important, a new and more dem- ocratic spirit has found expression.
In developing its Y. M, C A. work for wage-earners the Pitts- burgh District drew on the national movement in the same fidd. It secured two of the six young men who under Dr. E. A. Steiner went to Europe to study and live in those sections of southeastern Europe that furnish the bulk of our present immigration. At the end of fourteoi months they returned to this country to work in behalf of immigrants under association auspices. E. E. Bohner was in 1910 engaged by the Westinghouse Air Brake Company to conduct the work for foreigners at Wilmerding, the industrial town where the Y. M.C A. has taken strongest root. In the fall of 1909, the writer had begun the organization of im- migration work under the city association. Dr. Peter Roberts, sec- retary for immigration of the International Committee of the Y. M. C A., who had made earlier surveys of Pittsburgh and Wilmerding was called in to look over the ground and help plan and place the work.
From the start the system of instruction devised by him has been used in the classes for beginners.
The first emphasis was upon English classes. Every year up to 1914 an average of about $00 men have studied under the direction of 414
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Teaching English with a Hatchet
By object and action, an American without knowledge of foreign tongues, can,
under the Roberts system, imparl i working knowledge of English to a class of
mixed nationalities. Italians, Slovaks, and Magyars are in Ihis group being taught
by Mr. McConnaughey {who is shown with the tool in his hand, as an object lesson)
Bovs OF A Mill Section Reached through the community centers. Over-nighl and week-end c within a radius of five miles of Pittsburgh, give ihem a tasle of outdoor life ai acquaintance with Ihe Young Men's Christian Association
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the association. The public schools under the new central board are now ready to undertake English instruction wherever it is needed in the city, and the present policy for the Y, M. C A. is to co-operate with them and to conduct classes in out>of-the-way places that can not be covered by the public schods.
To cover the summer months, extensicm work has been developed. Vacant lots are secured wherever possible in the foreign sectitms oS the city. Where there is no vacant lot, permission is obtained of the dty to use 3 block of a public street for certain hours of the evening. Here a stereopticon lantern or moving picture machine is operated nightly. The subjects of the lectures include: Prevention of Tuberculosis; Prevention of Infectious Diseases; Life of Lincoln; Life of Washington; Yellowstone National Park; Discovery and Early History of America, and so forth. Last year we tried out for the first time preparing the lecture material in brief, having it translated into eight languages and photographed on lantern slides. In this way the explanatory slides alternate with the pictures and people of many languages enjoy the entertainments and get the benefit of the instruction. Last summer the attendance was 300,00a The number of lectures has been greatly increased through the coopera- tion of the Daughters of the American Revolution Society. Through the efforts of Mrs. Samuel Ammon of Pittsburgh, chairman of Patriotic Edu> cation, their collection of historic lectures has been made available and prepared in seven languages. *
Another phase of the work has been co-operation from Pittsburgh with the Y. M. C. A- secretaries at port cities in caring for arriving im- migrants, and plans for receiving and safeguarding all arriving immi- grants are in process of arrangement.
In civics, a number of young lawyers have instructed the men who have applied for their citizenship papers. The names are secured frun the court register and notices of these meetings sent to all men who have applied for citizenship. We are conservative enough to fear that we might do some harm by a widespread effort to induce the mass of foreign men to take out their citizenship papers. We believe that the moct ambitious as a rule are the ones who seek to do it on their own initiative. Moreover, the result can be only good of helping these who would become citizens at any rate and by influencing them during the period in which they are most concerned about this phase of their Americanizatimi. This year we have had 3$o of these men comprising 1 1 nationalities in citizenship classes.
After coming three evenings a fine-looking Lithuanian turned up at the next sessitm full of jubilation. He said " I have just secured my
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Russian SiNcrNC Circ
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papers. I tried twice before and 1 failed. One time 1 paid a lawyer $;o. Now you helped me and I have them." Another man from an outlying borough, attacked by rheumatism in the middle of the course, dragged himself to the class on crutches. Another, a Pole, was saved from serious troubles regarding his witnesses because of his connection with the classes.
Each summer we use the contact afforded by the outdoor educa- tional lectures to get in touch with groups of boys in the industrial sections. At points outside of the city and beyond the scope of the Pittsburgh Playground Association, playground work is conducted during the day- time with such success that two equipped playground centera have been made permanent. Groups of boys ranging from twelve to sixteen years of age are taken on hiking, over-night and week-end camping trips. In this way large numbers who can not get away for an extended vacation really get a taste of the joy of outdoors. Eight centers for this work are cmi- ducted this summer. The boys have the unusual pleasure of cooking over an open fire where the smoke blows in the eyes, and of sleeping under the open sky where the song of the katydids is not drowned by the roar of passing trucks and street cars. Around the camp fire before bedtime the last ten minutes is given over to the discussion of some scheme that will reach the heart and quicken the aspiration.
Recently the Pittsburgh association has inaugurated a plan of community boys' work in remote parts of the city. The first place in which it is being adopted is in the Homewood district.
An attempt has also been made to bring out before the public the racial values and the picturesque and artistic features of the foreign nation- alities. To do this we have conducted for three successive seasons an AH Natbns Singing Contest at which various groups of men and women sing in their native language. Six nationalities have provided men's choruses, some furnishing more than one chorus. At these meetings we arrange for an interpretive and patriotic address. Two years ago Dr. Steiner spoke and last year Jacob Riis. This has been worth while and has done much to popularize the singing of these different national groups. They are now called on for public occasions and have a new recognition in the community.
There has been development outside of Pittsburgh in the Western Pennsylvania field. The Wilmerding foreign branch association has grown to more than 400 members of 17 different nationalities.
The foreign Y. M. C. A. (Airbrake Welfare Club) is fitted up with game rooms, educational and social rooms and eight first class shower baths, all features popular with the men.
One piece of work of this association under Mr. Bohner has been
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to interest children and adults in cleaning up a patch of ground that was used as a dump for tin cans and transfonning it into a first class pliy- ground.
The Pittsburgh association has for five years co-operated in edu- cational and social work mth the Pressed Steel Car Company. This company employs about 5, joo men when it is working fully, a very Itiff per cent being immigrants. Each year the foreign people themsdvts have taken a larger part in the activities. The result is that the pcc^ who live in "Presiton" feel a local pride of which they knew nothing live years ago.
The state committee of the Y. M. C A. has during this fiv^ year period carried on work in conneaion with mining commuoitits. First aid to the injured work has played a large part and mining insti- tutes have been a leading feature. For the past year, owing toachuip in the plan of organization of the state committee, some of this work has been discontinued. It is hoped that local associations in the neigh- borhood of the mining distrias will undenake the work.
Recently (1914) the Harbison and Walker Brick Refractories Can- pany of Pittsburgh have secured Ira D. Shaw, formerly engaged in the mining work of the international cimimittee, to devdop welfare work under association auspices in their various plants in Pennsylvania.
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MANUFACTURING A PLAYGROUND ,s Done at Wilmerdihg. bv the Young Men's Christian Associsi Brake Company
Site in foreign section of U'ilmetding proposed for playground. Full of mud- covered with stones. (In cans, broken boriles, and so forih. Ai leasl loo small children lived within joo yards and they had no place lo play
66,000 tin cans were gathered; 750 children collected them. Twenty volun- teers— foreign-speaking men— helped count the tin cans and pay the boys and girls one cent per doj;en
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APPENDIX IV
THE JEWISH IMMIGRANTS OF TWO
PITTSBURGH BLOCKS
[19081'
Anna Reed
The greater part of the Jewish community of Pittsburgh is situated in what is known as the Hill District. This immigration brings with it characteristics so entirely its own that much that is significant of the com- mon life was found summed up in a study of the families of two blocks in the heart of this district. A census of them proved more surely than even those of us who had long been residents in the neighborhood would have anticipated, the permanence and stability of this new dement in the populaticH]. The two blocks reflected the sort of foothold which is open to this distinctive people in what is for most purposes a purely industrial center; what relation their new occupatitms bear to their training and experience in the old countries of Europe, and what, as measured in terms of livdihood and accomplishment, comes to them in this new setting.
T^e blocks selected were two adjoining Center Avenue at different points on the incline of the hill. Pittsburgh has no really large tenement houses. These homes were originally built for two families, and while some still contain but two, many have been converted so as to house a great many mwe. In the process of rebuilding, downstairs front rooms have been changed into small stores where grocers, butchers, and tailors supply the needs of the neighborhood. The houses are of brick, and many are garnished by a government license sign, which indicates that somewhere in these already crowded quarters, a small stogy factory is located which sells in the larger market. The many synagogues where the men still wear the dd-time praying shawls, and each repeats for himself in monotonous, low, musical tones the ancient Hebrew prayers, bring into this capital of the steel district the wonderful and fascinating spirit of the East. The Cheders, where the Hebrew language, which every hard- working father and mother, no matter what else is sacrificed, feels must be * PabUtbcd in Cbarititi Mtd Tht Commatu, January j, 1909. 419
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
taught to the boys, and the Kosher butcher shops, where the dietary Inn are still observed, are all distinctive of a people which, though it adopts American customs, still keeps many of the traditions in its own communil life.
There were 1,080 people in these blocks, 817 of whom were Jewish. Of the 143 Jewish families, 1 to were from Russia, 27 from Roomania, five from Austria-Hungary, and one from Germany, — all largely from small towns. Among them there were very nearly three hundred children of school age or younger.
A third of these families had been in America over ten years and two-thirds over Ave years. Of course, the fact that the census was taken in a year of industrial depressicm may have Had a large influence on the comparatively small number of more recent immigrants in residrace in the neighborhood, for these would have less resources to keep them in Pittsburgh during a period of hard times. But the actual number of stable family groups was very considerable, as shown in the fcdlowing classification:
|
Umd^a |
ttoB |
SlolO |
totom |
90ioJfl |
|
|
Years in America Yean in Piltsburgh . |
:: |
g |
5« 49 |
39 |
18 17 |
This permanence as an element in the citizenship of Pittsburgh is in contrast to an uninterrupted shifting among them as tenants. On the one band, the latter is merely a reflex of the success of particular families in making their way and raising their standard of life; but the greater part of it is due to the lack of proper houses at a fair rental in Pittsburgh. It is a common occurrence for a family to move from place to place in an effort to secure more livable quarters. One family went through the tor- ture of moving six times in one year. Two have lived from ten to twenty years in the same place, eight from five to ten, 46 over two, while 87 hid been living in their present homes less than two years.
Unsuspected by the casual visitor, there is a background of tragedy and national crises to such a neighborhood. Among the great nations of Europe, Russia and Roumanta have absdutely refused political and in* dustrial freedom to their Jewish subjects. TTie concrete forms which oppression and restriction assume are very real: prohibitions against their owning land, their exclusion in one part of Russia from the learned professions, in another from taking part in a government contract, and in 430
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JEWISH IMMIGRANTS OF TWO BLOCKS
whole districts from owning their own homes. Here in these blocks there are many families who have lived and traded in daily terror of an out- break or of the tyranny of an unscrupulous governor; who have been deprived of the rights and privileges of citizens and yet subjected to the full strain of military law and the brunt of religious persecution. You chance to meet a man in the comer grocery — he is tall and gaunt; his long beard is well sprinkled with gray. On talking with him you find he has served in the Russo-Turkish War, that his only son served for four years in the Russian army, and that a "pogrom" finally drove him to leave everything behind and flee to these shores. One man was robbed and his family outraged, — a son and brother-in-law killed in a recent massacre; another man, already past forty, had to take up his burden, and, like the pilgrims of old, go forth and search for a new tunne, because the edict had been ^vcn in Moscow.
It was found that 41 of the families had come for purely religious and political reasons, 93 to better thdr economic condition, and 34 had followed relatives, friends, and townsmen who either sent for them or urged them to make the journey. Indeed, this persona! relationship is on many counts the most important factor in swelling the population of a Jewish neighborhood. As a rule, no matter how poor the immigrant may be, he saves, often by the most drastic measures, to send for some loved ones. Such was the experience of a young man, educated in the public schools of Roumania, who had suffered in the uprisings there. His first employment in Pittsburgh was with a local druggist. He went through the usual apprenticeship, and soon another brother had come over and was wwking as a barber. They saved and sent part of their earnings to their parents in the old country, while the first, by work and study, prepared himself for entrance into the local college of pharmacy, was graduated and his earning capacity thereby increased. Then, the parents, a sister and two brothers were brought over and, when an opportunity for buying a drug store offered itself to him, the combined forces of the family made the purchase possible. Today, after eight years of hard work, he owns a well established business, is married, and the entire family seems welt started on the road to success.
The question of what a man does, when he comes here an uninter- preted stranger, is interestinf^y reflected in these two blocks. The stogy industry and peddling are dominant; of those who have become st<^ makers, four were students, two grocers, one was a peddler, one a tailor, one a lumber trader, one a merchant, and another a butcher.
The peddlers represent an even larger variety of skilled trades and other occupations. A jewelry peddler and a rag peddler were printers;
421
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
a weaver, two lumber dealers, a gardener, and a grocer have become peddlers of clothing; a carpenter sells pictures; two blacksmiths, a tailor, and a fanner are peddling rags. Of those who were skilled, a gddsmith has become a presser, a shoemaker is working at iron beds, an umbrdli maker runs a pool mom, and a Hebrew teacher is now an egg-candler.
In contrast, and much more encouraging, are the six blacksmiths, II tailors, three barbers, two bakers, three shoemakers, two printen, a locksmith, a machinist, a plumber, and a glazier, who started and coo* tinue to use the trades ihey learned in the old country.
One of the most interesting facts brought out was that the number of peddlers grew from lo in the old country to 38 on their arrival in Anier* ica, and to 33 as the first work in Pittsburgh, dropping again to 17 who are peddling at the present time.
The following table compares occupations in the old country with those practiced in the new:
|
Old |
Ntm Cmmtr, |
|
|
Store kee |
J7 10 3 |
|
|
7 'i |
||
|
Fictory workers Factory owners Restaurant keepers Lumber dealers Gardeners, farmen, etc |
9 i 4 4 3 7 |
|
|
Traveling talesmen Miscellaneous |
■ Under miaceilaneous were classed a foreman, maniger, agent, cootnctor, collector.
The meaning of this table will be made clearer by telling two stories: one of a man who is succeeding, and one of a man who has known the ke«n anguish that to the great masses of men is involved in the words "hard times." For the results of an industrial depression show themselves with promptness in such an immigrant neighborhood. One man, married and the father of three children, was employed as a porter in a downtown store. He was thrown out of work, and to the terrors of rent was added the fact that his wife was soon to give birth to another child. Four weeks after- ward, the landlord levied on the furniture for the unpaid rent, and the 433
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JEWISH IMMIGRANTS OF TWO BLOCKS
weak, under-nourished mother became temporarily insane. She was placed in a sanatorium, two of the children were sent to a day nursery, and the youngest child — too young to be taken by the nursery — was sent to a private family. And then, for the man, b^an the stnig^e to get work. He bought a small quantity of fniit and peddled it in a basket from house to bouse. He was arrested one moming in a freight yard, where he was charged by the yard pcJiceman with stealing. He was acquitted at the trial and the police sergeant claimed that cases of injustice of this kind were not infrequent. Next, he secured work as janitor in a hospital at fj.oo a week, and after a time his wife's condition improved and he was able to reunite his family. Thereupon, he borrowed }io and bought a second-hand pushcart with a license, and now he is once more trading in fruits and vegetables in his strug^e against odds to care for them. An- other man, forty-eight years old and the father of 1 1 children, had spent his early life in a small town. His first job on coming to New York was that of a ckithing operator. The overstrain of the sweatshop caused the only too frequent breakdown in health. Two years later he came to the Pittsburgh District, where, as a peddler in the country towns, he gradually reined his strength. Today, he owns his home and has a paying grocery business.
Of the 363 non-Jews in these blocks, nine out of ten were Negroes; and among them four questionable houses were found. Such an en- vironment, with the change frcmi former sunoundings and c(»diti<ms, does not always work out satisfactorily; the higher cost of living, the severe strug^e for existence, the sudden transition from oppression to freedmn, often have a deteriorating influence. They result in cases of wife-desertion, in laxity of religious observances, in gambling sessions at the coffee-houses, in occasional moral lapses, and in contempt for the ideals, customs, and beauties of the traditional family and religious life of the old country. Yet, as a whole, we know the people of these bk>cks, and (rf the hill, as immigrants who have suffered oppression and borne ridicule; who in the face of insult and abuse have remained silent, but who have stamped on their countenances a look of stubborn patience and hope — always hope — and of capacity to overcome.
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APPENDIX V
THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH [1907-08]*
Helen A. Tucker
Today it is the young norttt>bound Negro with whom we reckon in Pittsburgh. Seldom is a white-headed N^ro seen on the street; but rather the man on the sand cart hard at work. That with every year there is an increasing migration from the South to our northern cities is known in a general way; but if our estimate of these newcomers is to be worth anything, it should be based upon something more than impressions gained from those we notice on the street cars (the best are too well be- haved to be conspicuous), from loafers at saloon doors, and frcmi news- paper accounts of Negro crime. Here, too often, the knowledge of white people ends. Of the industrious, ambitious Negroes, they know little; and of the home life of those who are refined, nothing at all. As a man who officially comes into daily contact with the criminal N^ro said to me, "All must bear the reproach for the doings of this police court 10 per cent-" Anyone who is sufficiently interested to desire more accurate infonnation as to Pittsburgh's Negroes than may be gained by a walk down Wylie Avenue wilt readily find signs enough of the differentiation that is rapidly taking place among the members of thb race. White with the increasing influx a class of idle, shiftless Negroes is coming, who create problems and increase prejudice, a far larger number are taking advantage of the abund- ance of work and of the good wages, and are rapidly bettering themselves. There is here a chance, such as perhaps few northern cities give, for the industrious Negro to succeed, and he is improving his opportunity.
There was a considerable Negro population in Allegheny County before the Civil War. Both Pittsburgh and Allegheny were important stations of the underground railroad, and many a man and woman sought refuge here from the nearby slave states. In Allegheny a school was founded for them before the end of the half century. The growth of the Negro population is shown by the f<dlowing table:
* Published in Cbttrilits and Tbt Commons, January j, 1909. 424
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THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
|
l-MT |
Nltmb€r |
r^ |
Nnmbn |
|
iSio . |
iSSo ■890 '900 |
7376 |
|
|
Isfc : : : : ; : |
|||
|
■870 |
4^59 |
37.8J}' |
■ 1910, 34^17-
These figures show a steady increase except from iSjo to i860, gradually reaching the point where the N^o population doubled in a decade. The marked increases from 1870 to 1880 and 1890 to 1900 are probably due to the fact that in those periods more Negroes were able to get work in the sted mills. The percentage of Negroes in the total population of the county was 3.3 per cent in 1880, 34 per cent in 1890, and 3.6 per cent in 1900. Three^uarters of the Negroes in the county live in Pittsburgh* .... (and) more than half of these are males.!
The principal Negro street is Wylie Avenue. This leads up to the Hill District which, forty years ago, was a well conditioned section. Now it b given over largely to Negroes and European immigrants. FOTty- ei^t per cent of the Negroes in Pittsburgh live in wards seven, eight, eleven, aitd thirteen. [Old numbering.] How fast this movement is taking place is indicated by what a cdored woman told me who keeps a grocery store on Wylie Avenue near Francis Street. When she opened there three years ago, there was scarcely a colored famfly in the district. Now there is another grocery ston, a shoe store, and two confectionery stores, kept by cdored pecq>le. Horton Street nearby is filled with colored people who have recently come from the South. There is a tendency on the part of the Negroes, however, to get out from the center of the city, and fully a quarter of them live farther out in wards nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. In all, 63 per cent of the Negroes lived in 1900 in six wards.
In these wards there is a large foreign element. In the seventh, eighth, and eleventh wards there are many Russian Jews. A Negro church in the eighth ward was stM last fall for a Jewish synagogue, and the Negro ctmgregation is building in the thirteenth ward. In the twdfth ward, where many of the Negroes live who work in the mills, they have for neighbors the Poles and Slavs. The wdl-to-do Negroes of the city are moving out toward the East End.
Two or three apartment houses have been built especially for Negroes, but in general, though living in certain localities, they are not segregated. This does not mean thai there are not some Negro streets,
* I9ii>, aj,63j. t ■9>o> ■(>$.} malet to loo females.
425
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
but very often a row of from three to seven houses will be found in which Negroes are living, while the rest of the street is filled with white peopl^ Again, a single Negro family may live between two white families. Whts Negroes gain a footbdd in a new street in any numbers, the Americam move away; but the Jewish immigrants do not seem to object to living near them, sometimes in the same house. And this is true of more than the poorest of them.
In a way the Jews have been a help to the Negroes, for they will rent houses to them in localities where they could not otherwise ga le many cases the Jews have bought or built houses, filled them with N^ti tenants at high rents, and thus paid for them. But the Negroes have learned from these experiences, and many of them have started to buy homes. They have decided that they might as well buy houses for them- selves as for the Jews.
The poorer Negroes live in a network of alleys on either side (rf Wylie Avenue in the seventh and eighth wards. For years the conditiwis here have been very bad from every point of view. There are respectable people living here, but the population consists chiefly of poor Negroes and a low class of whites. As a result, there is much immorality in thb section — speak easies, Cocaine joints, and disorderiy houses abound. I think 1 never saw such wretched conditions as in three shanties on Poplar Alley. Until a year ago many of the landlords had not complied with the law requiring flush closets, and 1 found old-fashioned vaults full of filth. Where the flush closets had been put in they were in many cases out of repair. In some alleys there were stables next to the houses and while the odor was bad at any time, after a rain the stench from these and from the dirt in the streets was almost unendurable.
The interiors of very many of the houses in which the Negroes live were out of repair — paper torn off, plastering coming down, and windows broken. The tenants told me they had complained to the landlords and had tried to get stmiething done, but without success.
The twelfth ward near the mills also has some bad conditions. In Parke Row and Spruce Alley, on the day of my visit, the rubbish, which is removed only every two weeks, was piled high. On top of one pile was an old dirty mattress. The houses 1 visited in Parke Row were so dark that it was necessary to use a lamp even at midday. There were also depress- ing conditions among the Negro homes on Rose, Charles, and Soho streets. While some of the more ambitious are moving out from these unhealthy localities, many who would like to move have not the opportunity. One of these said to me, "The only place where there is plenty of room for Negroes is in the alleys."
426
.d,Google
THE NEGROES OP PITTSBURGH
Yet even the very poorest Negro homes are usually clean inside and have a homelike air. It would surprise one who has never visited such homes to see with what good taste they are furnished. There is always some attempt at ornamentation, oftenest expressed by a fancy lamp, which is probably never lighted. Almost every family except the very poorest has a piana The best Negro houses — usually not in Negro districts — are what people of the same means have everywhere. I was fortunate enough to visit at least a dozen of these comfortabte, well fur- nished, anractive homes and in them I met courteous, gracious, and re- fined wcrnien. Only in Spruce Alley and Parke Row did 1 find disorder and a general indifference to dirt, and there were some exceptions even there. The hopelessness of keeping clean in such a location may have had som^ thing to do with these conditions.
Compared with certain of the foreigners, the Negroes do not over- crowd their houses, but they do often shelter too many people for comfort or decency. I visited a house of three rooms where a man and a wife, live diildren, and a boarder were living. I n another house, also of three rooms, there were a man and his wife, her mother, two children and a lodger. These I think are not unusual cases. I also found a family of ten in four i«xns, and another family of seven and a boarder in three rooms. Where a house of four rooms is taken by two families, they do not often take lodgers, but if one family takes such a house it usually can not meet the expense alone. What is more serious than the number of people in a house is the carelessness in allowing young girts to sleep in the same room with men lodgers. Such a case was that reported by a probation officer of the juvenile court, of a girl of fifteen who slept in the same room with her father, two brothers, and a lodger. It was "nothing," she told the court; the man was "an old friend of the family." The suggestion that she occupy the vacant room in the house plainly surprised her.
The low ebb of living conditions in a Negro neighborhood is illus- trated by Jack's Run, a narrow deep ravine leading down to the Ohio River between Bellevue and Allegheny." Here, during the past six or seven years, about one hundred and seventy-five colored people from the rural districts of North Carolina and Virginia have found lodgment. Engaged chiefly in domestic s^vice and common labor, they have settled here because the rents are cheap. Mixed in with them is a class of low whites, and the standards of civilization are sucked down by immorality and ne^ect, for the run is practically isolated from the rest of the world. A missitm Sunday school connected with the white Presbyterf '■ — *■ ■"
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
Bdlevue has been held there for about five years. The superinteiKlent of this mission, who is a colored man, has endeavored to reach the children of the run. As he feels the Sunday school alone can not do this, be is working to get a day school there. To be sure, the children are enrolled in Bdlevue or Allegheny, but he says they really do not attend. A long climb up the hills shuts them off, and the white children pester them when they show themselves. It is hard to know what could be done to better the conditions in a place like Jack's Run, but up to the present time, with the exceptioi of this one man, few people have tried to find out. The run has few visitors, and these are not altruists. " I have seen a polttidan here," the superintendent told me, "and an insurance collector; but never a preacher."
Twenty per cent of the men follow manufacturing and mechanical pursuits. Because of the abundance of work good N^ro mechanics have no difficulty in keeping busy, though they have made little headway in the unions. An occasional Negro is a union member, as, for instance, four or five carpenters, a few stone masons, and a few plasterers.* Here as elsewhere, they gain admission easily only to the hardest kinds of work. The Negro hod carriers indeed make up the greater part of the hod car* Hen' union. In McKeesport there are but two white hod carriers. In Pittsburgh and the vicinity there are over a thousand colored hod carriers. The colored stationary engineers and firemen have a unitMi of their own, the National Association of Afro-American Steam and Gas Engineers and Skilled Laborers, incorporated June, 1903. It was once a part of a white organization. It has three locals in Pittsburgh and it has been allied with other labor organizations and represented in central labor bodies, but it is yet rather weak. Three or four colored contractors hire plasterers and masons.
Early in the 70's a few colored men found work in some of the mills. One of the first to employ Negroes was the Black Diamond Mill on Thirti- eth Street. There were a few here before 1878. In that year, throu^ t strike, Negro puddlers were put in, and since then the force of puddlers has been made up largely of Negroes. About the same time Negroes were taken into the MoOThead Mill at Sharpsburg, and also, through a strike, Negroes got into the Clark Mills on Thirty-fifth Street. Since 1893, there have been Negroes in the Carnegie Mills at Homestead. It is the pit- vailing impression that numbers of Negro strike breakers were imported at the time of the "big strike," but I have been told by an ofTicial of the Carnegie company, by a leading colored resident (rf Homestead, and by a
428
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THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
Negro who went to work in the Homestead Mills in 1893, that this was not so. Word was given out that anyone could tind work who would come, the Negroes with the rest. N^roes were brought up from the South at this time to take the place of strikers in the Clark Mills. . . * Unquestionably Negro strike breakers have been brought to Pittsburg but I judge not in any large numben. When the mills were last running full there were about lao Negroes at the Qark Mills, 136 at Homestead, and about too in the other mills of the Carnegie company, making in all the Carnegie works 346 colored men. A conservative estimate would put those at the Black Diamond and Moorhead mills as at least 300 more. Many of these mill men are unskilled, but at the Oark Mills two- thirds, and at Homestead nearly half are skilled or semi-skilled. It is possible for a man of ability to work up to a good position.
A small but increasing number of N^roes are on the city's payroll. On the date of my inquiry there were in the employ of the city of Pitts- burgh, 137 persons of Afro-American descent, or one out of every 3)7 of the Negro population, while a total of 63$ directly profited by the 991,943 paid annually in salaries to colored persons. These city employes include laborers, messengers, janitors, pd icemen, detectives, firemen, letter carriers, and postal clerks, and their salaries range from }j$o to f i.joo a year.
The first Negroes to set up establishments of their own, dating back twenty years and more, were the barbers and hairdressers. For- merly these had much of the white patronage, but they are gradually losing it. With a few exceptions, notably the Negro barber in the Union Station, their shops are now found on Wylie Avenue and in other Negro localities, and are patronized by Negroes.
The eight business enterprises listed under " miscellaneous" include an insurance company, a stationery and bookstore, a men's furnishing store, a photographer's gallery, a real estate company, a loan company, a shoe store and repairing shop, and a manufactory of a hair-growing preparation, which has sent out 6; agents. The insurance company has aS agents, all of whom are ccAored. Several of the barbers have laundry agencies and bo<M>blacking stands, and some have baths. There are at least a dozen men who own their horses and wagons and take contracts for hauling and excavating. One of the largest of these Negro contractors was em- phiying 13$ men. Another employs 30 men for hauling, and also works too to 300 men on asphalt paving. There are many more men who own
Pittsburgh Survey.)
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
a horse or two and do general expressing. One of these told me that he spent his lirst ^ijo saved after coining to Pittsburgh for a horse, which left him with a capital of 75 cents. He now owns four horses. A Negro has had one of the stalls in the Allegheny market for many years, and there is another in the Diamond market.
A partial list of Negro business enterprises,* with the number em- ployed is as follows:
|
No. of Firms |
PtTunt |
|
|
Barbers Rcstaunnis and hotels Grocerio, poultry, etc |
30 'a 1 3 4 3 3 1 |
9 1 |
|
Hauling and excavating Saloons aod cafes . Printers |
170 1 |
|
|
Confectioners and bakeries Cateren Miscellaneous |
M 6lo4 lO} |
|
|
ss |
5'7^J4« |
One of the niost successful Negro business men lives in Homestead. As a small boy he moved from Virginia to Ohio, and came to Homestead in 1879. Up to 1890 he was an engineer on the river, the only Negro to hold a chief engineer's license. Then he went into boat building and built 3 1 river steamboats. Five years ago he organized the Diamond Coke and Coal Company, in which he is now master of transportation. There are 10 men in this company; the others arc white. They own a mine, docks, and steamboats, and employ about a thousand men. This cdored man owns considerable property. He lives in a large comfortable bouse and owns one on either side which he rents. His older son entered Penn Med- ical School last fall. His younger son was captain of the Homestead Hi^ School football team. His daughter, who graduated from the high school and had an additional three years at the California Normal School, is teaching in the South. She could not get a school in Homestead.
n Pennsylvania, for the Carrtegie
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THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
It is noticeable that the Pittsburgh Negroes show an encouraging variety in their independent business enterprises as well as in their general occupations. Of course, they have usually been able to go into only those that require small capital. The Negro who comes to Pittsburgh or any northern city with no capital, no business experience, and no business traditions, and succeeds even in a small way in the midst of such competi- tion as he must face, is doing remarkably well.
But the mass of the Negroes in Pittsburgh are found in the same occupations that are t^n to them in most northern cities, with perhaps fewer men ($8 per cent) and rather more wcmien (90 per cent) in domestic and penonal service, and more men in manufaauring and mechanical pursuits than is usual. This shifting of the men's activities is due to the nature of the industries in Pittsburgh, to the fact that the city is rapidly growing, and consequently that there is much building going on in which labor can be utilized, and to the fact that Negroes gained a foothold in some of the mills during the strike periods. While the largest and best hotels no longer have colored waiters, many are still employed in hotels, restaurants, and cafes. Comparatively few Negroes are employed as poners and helpers in stores, while large numbers are employed as team- sten, probably more now than in 1900, as most of the sand wagons and other hauling carts are driven by them. There are also many coachmen and chauffeurs.
While the Negro men find a varied field for their labor, compara- tively few occupations are open to colored women. There is one woman who has conducted a very successful hairdressing establishment for twenty years, and a half dozen others have opened little shops. A dozen or so find work as clerks and stenographers in offices and stores of colored men, but most are working as maids or laundresses. There are about a hun- dred dressmakers and seamstresses. That there is not a greater variety of openings for colored W(»nen works a great hardship.
In 1900 the Negroes of Allegheny County paid taxes on property valued at ^),ooo. Since that time wage-earning Negroes have com- menced to buy homes in still larger numbers. They usually pay some- thing down and the rest as rent until the entire sum is paid. In Beltzhoover there is a settlement of a hundred or more families more than half of whom are buying homes. To buy a house of any kind on small wages means industry and many little sacrifices. One couple whom 1 visited in Beltzhoover were buying a house of five rooms with a piazza and a generous sized frcHit yard. The husband, when he was married, had saved ^00, which went for the first payment. In the four years since then they had paid $800 and they had |i,ooo more to pay. He was a
43"
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
janitor getting (48 a month, while his wife made f6.oo a week as a seam- stress. To increase their income, they rented out a room to a man and his wire who paid them }io a month. They also raised and sold chickens which brought in additional money. Most of the houses which colored people of this class are buying are valued at from fa,;oo to $3,300. On Francb Street, near Wylie Avenue, there is a group of five stx-room houses occupied by Negroes. Three of these families were buying their houses. One of the men was a waiter, one a porter in a bank, and one owned a horse and wagon and did expressing.
The following experience, told me by a Tuskegee graduate, u an eiumple of what may be done in Pittsburgh by an industrious Negro who is ambitious to establish a home: "I came to Pittsburgh in March, 1900," he said, "on a freight train, arriving about 3 a. m. I asked for the police station, but they wouldn't let me stay there when they found 1 had jo cents in my pocket. 1 was turned up Wylie Avenue and finally came to a colored lodging house. All the beds were full, but they said that I could sit in the rocking chair for the balance of the night for a quarter. The next morning I started out to look for work and found it in a brick yard where I worked until August. Meanwhile 1 sent for my wife and child. My wife, who is a dressmaker, soon found work. She happened to sew for the wife of the manager of one of the steel mills. He asked about me and said he thou^t he could give me something good in the mill. I went there in August and have been there ever since. Now I am a heater. All you see here was gotten tc^ether in the last seven years. " This man and his wife have paid $4400 for a six-room house and have furnished it attractively.
The churches have the same prominent place in Negro life in Pitts- burgh as elsewhere. They include one Presbyterian, one Protestant Episcopal, one Congregational, one Roman Catholic church, ten Methodist churches and between thirty and thirty-five Baptist churches and missions. The largest is the Bethel A. M. E. church on Wylie Avenue, which has recently been built at a cost of $50,000. Colored slaters and roofers, colored plasterers, and three colored carpenters were employed in the building of it. The interior decorations were in charge of a Negro firm. The building, together with the land, is valued at not less than $1 io,ooa The people give liberally to the churches; Bethd raised over |io,ooo in ten months toward paying off its mortgage.
But there is a large number not reached by the church in any real sense. Though the new Bethel church is in a district where the alleys and all the bad conditions they imply are numerous, the pastor's plans for the year as he outlined th«n were: first, to pay the debt on the church,
432
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THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
second, to have a revival to fill it up. Not a word was said of the great need for active social work at its very doors. The rank and file of the forty or fifty Negro ministers in Pittsburgh and Allegheny have not a very high order of equipment or ethics. There are notable enceptions. I met one minister who seemed filled with the desire to work for the betterment of the Negroes of his neighborhood. In connection with the new church which he was building he was planning to have a day nursery and kinder- garten and, if possible, a gymnasium. He hoped to have a deaconess to visit the homes and was also trying to organize a colored Young Men's Christian Association. At a meeting last fall in his church, the fcJlowing subjects were discussed:
"What is the influence of the Sunday school on the children?"
" Is the church acc<Hnplishing the desired end toward the masses?"
"Practical education and character making for the masses."
Some of the laymen among the colored people, especially the
women, are working in similar directions. In 1880, in a small six-room
house, a group of these started a Hrane for Aged and Infirm Colored
Women. The present beautiful home on Lexington Avenue was built
in 1900 at a cost of $42,ioa. It contains 31 rooms, six bathrooms, and a
hospital room. The furnishings cost about yaS.ooo. Several rooms were
furnished by the different Negro women's social clubs. The home is
attractive, cheery, clean, and well managed. The WtH-king Girls' Home
was similariy started three years ago by some colored wnnen who realized
how much it was needed. Girls coming to the city not only found it
difficult to get boarding places, but they were sometimes directed to
undesirable bouses.
The State Federation of Odored Women's Oubs, formed five years ago, is raising money to establbh a colored orphan's home in New Castle,
Pennsylvania A colored auxiliary to the Juvenile Court
Association was formed in 1906 to care for colored boys and girls between nine and twelve years of age who are brought to the court. The auxiliary also pays board for a group of cdored children who are in institutions out- side the state. One member is a faithful vcdunteer at the juvenile court. More than twenty-five social clubs are formed of ccdored women. The leading social organization for men is the Loendi Qub. Besides this and other private associations there are many such orders as the Odd Fellows, Masons, Elks, Knights of Pythias, and True Reformers.
Since 1874, when separate schools for Negroes were abolished, the adored children have attended the public schools with the white children, and all the educational agencies of the city are open to them. I was told that while a few stood well in their classes, the majority lacked concen-
»»' 433
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
tration. One principal attributed this to the impoverished hone con- ditions, Uck of food and housing; while another principal to whose school came many of the children from the alleys, laid their backwardness largdy to their irregular attendance and immoral tendencies. It was agreed that the average colored child required about two years Iraiger than the white child to finish the grammar grades
In writing of the Negroes of Chicago, Mr. Wright says "Wlul Chicago Negroes need is a great industrial school to teach Negroes do- mestic science and the skilled trades." Greater Pittsburgh has a school that should do this work. As early as 1849, Charles Avery, a Methodid minister of Quaker descent, who was much interested in the colored people established for them in Allegheny the Avery College Trade School. M his death he left the institution an endowment of 96o,ooo which has since increased in value, and it has also received a yearly appropriation from the state. The school is controlled by a board of trustees, of whom six are colored, three white. The principal and teachers are colored. The courses which have been offered include millinery, dressmaking, uiloring, music, some English courses, and s<Hne domestic science. Last spring, a hospital department was organized under separate charter and offen a training course.
There is no doubt that the Avery schocd is not fulfilling the purpose for which it was founded. It is inferior in equipment and in methods and does not employ trained teachers. It is not reaching the colored boys and giris of Pittsburgh and giving them the up-to-date training which they so sorely need in those trades in which they can earn a livelihood. It shouM be crowded and would be if it were offering what the people want. In- stead, the enrollment at the end of the school year is about one-third what it was at the beginning. There is no difficulty in placing respoon- bility for success or failure, for the superintendent is also secretary and treasurer. The colored people have brought many complaints to the trustees in regard to the management of Avery but no action has been taken. Here is a clear cut illustration of a badly managed trust fund.*
* The lituatioo hisnot materially changed in five years. In 191), thele^ lature discontinued in appropriation. Lait September, the institution begu its school year with an enrollment of 140. It closed the year with a daily tvengi of til during the month of June. The same superintendent continues u secitti:; and treasurer of the board, which is composed of nine directors, six of vbom lit colored and three white. Conditions In the dormitories were reported to be de- plorable by an investigator who visited the school in July, 1914. There are 41 separate twdrooms in the dormitory, each containing a little more than enoojli Space for a bed and a chair. In 30 of these rooms entered, only one had a window. The general condition of the whole institution, dormitories, class rooms, and hos- pital, was reported insanitary. — Editor.
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THE NEGROES OF PITTSBURGH
Of the 1,134 cases brought before the juvenile court in 1906, 168 (14.9 per cent) dealt with ccdored chfldren. The court records show most miserable conditions in the home& from which such children corner Usually both mother and father are working away from bc«ne all day, $0 that out of school hours there is no one to look after the diildren. They stop going to school and begin to stay out late at night, and the descent to petty thieving and other offenses is swift and easy.
The percentage of commitments among the adult Negroes (14 per cent) is all out of proportion to their percentage in the population (j.fi). Women are most commonly arrested for disorderly conduct;* men for fighting and cutting, petit larceny, and for gambling, of which craps is the favorite form. There is much drunkenness. For some time the police department of Pittsburgh has been warring against the sale of cocaine. To the mind of the warden of the Allegheny County jail the greatest sin^e cause of crime committed by Negro men and women is the use of this drug.
It is evident that the Negroes of Pittsburgh are making commend- able pn^rcss along industrial lines. Some few have been conspicuously successful, while many more arc earning a comfortable living and attain- ing pn^rty. N^roes of this class present no special problems, for they are usually good citizens and are educating and training their children to be good citizens likewise. Their needs are the needs of the rest of the community. They would be benefited by better housing, better schools, better sanitation, and a clearer atmosphere. But the problems in con- nection with the poor, ignorant, incompetent, or vicious Negroes are many and pressing.
We have seen the need for eradicating the sale of cocaine, which drags men under; and we have seen the need for rousing and equipping the ambitious among them through industrial training, comparable to that offered the southern Negro by Tuskegee and Hampton. A few of the more obvious needs of the people who live in the alleys are day nurseries to care for the babies of mothers who must go out to work; some sort of supervised play after school hours, either in connection with the schools or at playgrounds; for the older children of these same families, settlements; and most pressing of all, a building on lower Wylie Avenue for social purposes with free baths, club rooms, a gymnasium, and other amuse- ments as a counteracting influence to the saloons and pool rooms that abound in this neighborhood. There ts now no place in Pittsburgh where a young colored man, ccmiing a stranger to the city, as so many are coming
* See Forbes, James: The Reverse Side. P. 35$ of this volume. 435
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
cveiy year, may find innocent diversion and helpful companionship.* It is beccming increasingly clear that these needs must be met by the N^toes themselves. A few, singly or in small groups, are already working fn social bettennent, but so far there has been no concerted, organized action. Left to themselves the Negroes are slow or unable to organize, but until they do. much of their efforts as individuals will be wasted and but little definite good can be accomplished. If the white people who have had greater experience in dealing with civic and social needs realized this and extended to them their co-operation, the community as a whc^e, no kss than the Negroes, would be richly repaid.
* A colored branch of the Y. M. C. A, has been opened in the Hill District. In ^mnasium and other facilities it ii ai yet inadequate, but the resktcnce bidU- ing in which it is housed affords the nucleus of a promising social center.— Editor.
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APPENDIX VI
THE COST OF LIVING IN PITTSBURGH AND IN OTHER AMERICAN CITIES COMPARED, 1909
In Pittsburgh the cost of living is high, not only as compared with the wages received by the workers, but as compared with the cost of living in other American cities. A study of rents and retail food prices in certain cities in the eastern, central and southern parts of the United States was made, in 1909, by representatives of the British Board of Trade.* The point of view from which rents and prices were considered was that of typical workingmen's families. In presenting the results of this inquiry the Board of Trade compared the returns for different cities by means of index numbers. These index numbers show rents or retail food prices for each city as percentages of rents or retail prices in the city of New York. In the tabulation which follows the series of index numbers for rents is given:
|
City |
IndtxNum- |
CHj |
liid*xNum- |
|||
|
htrijot Am(i |
bertforRaUs |
|||||
|
St. Louis. . . . |
101 |
New Orieans . . |
7> |
|||
|
Savannah . |
7' |
|||||
|
NewVofk . . . |
100 |
Louisville akago . |
T 70 |
|||
|
Pimbucgh . . . |
94 |
Milwaukee Lawrence |
66 64 |
|||
|
Memphis . . . |
9) |
Oeveiaiid |
6^ |
|||
|
Oncinnati |
if |
Patenon |
63 |
|||
|
BrocktM . . . |
§ |
|||||
|
BMton .... |
8^ |
Augusta . |
||||
|
Binniiwbam . . . Philadapbia . . |
81 |
Detroit . Fall River |
J7 |
|||
|
Newark .... |
Baltimore |
M |
||||
|
77 |
Uwell . |
$3 |
||||
|
Attanu .... |
76 |
Munde . . . |
44 |
* Cost of living in American towns. Repent of an inquiry by the Board of Trade into working da» rents, housing and retail F^ces, together with the rates of wages in certain occupations in the principal industrial towns of the United States of America.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
It will be noted that rents were higher in Pittsburgh than in any of the other cities included in the Board of Trade's study except New York and St. Loub.
The index numbers for retail food prices are given in the table which follows:
|
Imdtx |
Itidtx |
||
|
cay |
N»mb*rt FoodPrie4t |
at. |
Nmmitri |
|
AiUdu .... |
IS |
New York . . . |
100 |
|
Newark .... |
Paterwn |
100 |
|
|
Brockton |
106 |
Oevdand . . . |
99 |
|
BoMon .... |
IO{ |
Louisville . . . |
H |
|
Lawrence |
lOJ |
MuDde .... |
|
|
Savannah |
104 |
St. Louis . . . |
97 |
|
AugusU .... |
lOJ |
Providence . . . |
97 |
|
Baltimore . . . |
% |
||
|
Philadelphia . |
|||
|
Duluth .... |
96 |
||
|
MioneapoIi^I Paul . |
95 |
||
|
UweU .... |
Chicago .... |
94 |
|
|
Fall River . . . |
Mih^kee . . . |
9) |
|
|
N^^uns '. |
101 |
andnnati . . . |
93 |
|
100 |
Detroit .... |
91 |
In but seven of the 38 cities for which statistics are presented in the table were retail prices higher than in Piltsbureji. The hi{^est figure for any city, that for Atlanta, is 109 and the lowest, that for Detroit, is 91. The relative figure for Pittsburgh is 102. This figure is higher than the figures for the large cities New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Qeveland, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Of the cities for which the relative figure is higher than for Pittsburgh thne, Atlanta, Savannah, and Augusta, are southern cities.
The index numbers of the table on the following page represent rents and retail food prices combined.
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COST OF LIVING COMPARED
|
ImUx |
/•tdM |
||
|
NuwAtftjM |
Nuwhtrifor |
||
|
ca. |
RtiOiand |
cay |
RMUand |
|
Rami Food |
RtUttlFooi |
||
|
PriasCom- |
Priai Com- |
||
|
Hmtd |
bintd |
||
|
Atlanta .... |
101 |
ancinnati . . . |
91 |
|
Brockton |
Uuisville . . . |
9> |
|
|
New York . . . |
100 |
Augusta .... Philadelphia . . . |
9» 91 |
|
91 |
|||
|
Pittibtirgh . . . |
Pateraon |
9' |
|
|
Cleveland . . . |
90 |
||
|
Boaton .... |
99 |
Fall River . . . |
9° |
|
MemphU. . . . |
99 |
Lowell .... |
S |
|
Newark .... |
P |
S3fc, : : |
|
|
St. Louis. . . . |
88 |
||
|
% |
86 |
||
|
Savannah . . . |
Milwaukee . . . |
86 |
|
|
Lawrence |
9S |
Muncie .... |
8} |
|
NewOrleaoi . . , |
» |
Detroit .... |
Si |
Of the 37 cities included in this table only one, Atlanta, has a higher index for rents and food prices than has Pittsburgh. The figures for Brockton and New York are the same as the figure for Pittsburgh.
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APPENDIX VII
ADVANCE IN THE COST OF LIVING IN WORKING- MEN'S FAMILIES SINCE 1907
Wages in a number of trades in Pittsburgh have risen since 1907. The amount of the advance in the money wages of common labor in the steel milbfrom 190710 1913 has been shown.* In judging what these changes in wages have meant to the wage^imers it b necessary to allow for changes in the cost of living.
Retail prices are much hi^er today than in 1907. The course (rf the retail prices of foods of the sort consumed in workingmen's families is shown by "index numbers" compiled by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.f An index number is a device for presenting statistics in relative figures: thus, prices for a series of years may be represented as percentages of prices in some one year or of average prices far a group of years. Index numbers for retail food prices are published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the United States as a whole and for each of the principal geographical divisions. The figures for the United States, for the north Atlantic states and for the north central states, for the years 1907-13, inclusive, are given in the following table:
|
Index numbers for the |
|||||||
|
UntitdStaUi |
North AOatOk SiaUi |
North CMtrd SUu |
|||||
|
Avenge for the years .890-99. inclurive |
100.0 |
,«.. |
loao |
||||
|
:^ 1909 1910 1911 1913 19IJ |
I3J.9 IJO-I 137.3 144.1 •4).o |
IS:? iji.a I3S.3 |
iji.j IJ9-I 1470 iil |
'SeeCommoiu, John R.:Wage-eamen of Pittsburgh. P. 119 of this volume, t Bulletins of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retail Piico and OM of Living Series; No. 13, pp. 11 and if. 440
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THE ADVANCE IN COST OF LIVING
The relative figures of each senes presented in the table show retail food prices in the years 1907-1 3 inclusive, as percentages of average prices for the years 1890-99 inclusive, in the territory to which the series relates. It will be seen that, from 1907 to 1913, prices advanced in the country as a whole from [3$.9 to 163-4, ■>< ^^^ north Atlantic states from 123.9 to 156.3, and in the north central states from 136.0 to 167.8. These figures indicate an advance in prices, during the period of six years, of 30 per cent for the United States as a whole, of 36 per cent for the north Atlantic states, and of 33 per cent for the north central states.
While Pennsylvania is counted, in most statistical classifications, as one of the north Atlantic states, the city of Pittsburgh has, in its loca- tion with respect to markets and sources of food supply, more points of resemblance to the cities of the middle west than to those of the north Atlantic seaboard. This is significant in view of the fact that the rate of increase in retail food prices has been appreciably higher in the north central states than in the north Atlantic states.
The cost of food is but one of the factors that determine the cost of living. In workingmen's families it is, however, the most important factor. A larger proportion of the total income is spent for food by families having small incomes than by families more comfortably situated.
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APPENDIX VIII
STATISTICS FROM PITTSBURGH INDUSTRIAL DEVEL- OPMENT COMMISSION
Using the census of 1910 as a basis, the Pittsburgh Industrial De- velopment Commission has put out a series of pamphlets setting forth the claims of Pittsburgh as an industrial center. The census bureau re- compiled its 1910 figures to show the peculation and manufactures for a temtoty with a ten miles' radius for each of the larger industrial centers. This recapitulatbn gives the population of the Pittsburgh metroptditaa distria as 1,042,85;, the fifth such district in point of numbers in the country. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston only outranking it. The following table from the same source shows the number of establish- ments, capital, wage-earners, wages, and value of products of the industries employing 5,000 men or over within the Pittsburgh metropolitan district:
|
Induilrm |
menis |
Capibd |
Avtragi Nnmin |
ToLdpaid in lfif» |
ProJmtts |
|
District total , . Can and general shop construction and repain by steam railroad companies . |
16 |
»64>.Sa7.<M6 8,684,83a |
9.4J8 |
»90.nS.843 6.6os,68i |
JS78.8 15.493 16.804^ |
|
Electrical machin- |
|||||
|
ery, apparatui and supplies. . |
.8 |
48.184,808 |
8,030 |
4.760,067 |
20,a6o,i6j |
|
Foundry and ma- chine-shop prod- |
ai8 |
70.s8j.1a8 |
18.454 |
13,780,153 |
53,4 ".013 |
|
Glass . . . |
37 |
ao.79S.<M3 |
6.943 |
3,648.95" |
8,765,900 |
|
Iron and steel blast furnaces |
'} |
100.116,10$ |
S.0S |
4.317.097 |
8S.584JJS |
|
Iron and steel, steel works and rolling |
$4 |
aj4.689.014 |
JMS6 |
35.935^8 |
337.i8fto77 |
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APPENDIX IX
INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS IN PENNSYLVANIA
Figures drawn from annual reports Department of Factory Inspection* State of Pennsylvania, 1903-12
Faltil Acciitnlt Nott-faitU
1903 160 8j6
(367) (3,406)
1904 "58 4"7
190} 161 oaj
1906 60 844
(M7) (3.136)
'*^ (4?) A
1908 114 i,3;6
1909 147 3,34S
igio 188 1,494
1911 176 a,70i
1913 ao] a,866
Statistics for accidents are presented in such different ways in the different reports that these figures may or may not be comparable. Fig- ures for 1903 are for those "which ordinary prudence and a proper concern for the safety of employes might have prevented." Those for 1906 and 1907 are entered only as accidents "over which this department has jurisdiction." The figures in parentheses for these years include all accidents reported to the department; whether the figures for other years are or are not inclusive does not appear.
The classification as to seriousness of injury varies in different reports, and in the above all non-fatal accidents are lumped together as such. For the first time, the 1910 report carried a table of accidents classified by cause and nature of injury; but not by industries or counties, nor whether they befell men, women, or childreniin igii there was another and more meager classification; in 1913 a third kind.f
An act of July, 1913, requires (under penally of |ioo) all employers to make report of accidents to employes to the new Department of Labor and Industry, settmg forth "the name, address, and nature of the business of the employer; name, address, sex, age, nationality, and occupation of the employe; date, day of week, hour, place, and character of the accident, and the nature of the injury, and the duration (rf the disability, or prob- able disability, as far as the same can be ascertained. Such employer shall, also, upon request of the Department of Labor and Industry, make such further report as may reasonably be required by it. "
* Kelley, Florence: Factory Inspection in Pittsburgh. P. 197 of this volume.
tSee Eastman, Crystal: Work-Accidents and the Law, p. in. (The Pittsburgh Survey.)
443
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APPENDIX X
PUBLIC REPLY FROM THE STATE FACTORY INSPECTOR
A large part of the material incorporated in Mrs. Kdley's report was published in Charities and The Commons, March 6, 1909. As a public reply the following letter was given to the press nine months later by the chief factory inspector:
Pittsburgh, Pa., Dec 1;, 1909. Mr. J. C Ddaney, Chief Factory Inspector, Harrisburg, Pa. Dear Sir: —
Having carefully audited my report cards and reviewed "Re- marks" on same, I would respectfully submit for your consideratim the ftdlowing observations and deductions. I find in the 464 factories and mills visited an average of 90 per cent good as against a perfect plant The general conditions throughout were very satisfactory. Safety ap- pliances were carefully looked after and the sanitary conditions as regards ventilation, toilets, dressing rooms, and dining rooms were especially good in our larger factories and mills. The employes, both females and minots, arenot oppressed and seem very contented with their duties. In the^ass factories, and where the greatest number of children are employed, the firms are careful as to securing affidavits and conform to the requirement! of the law as to hours, literacy, and so forth. In the reports where no affidavits have been found fifteen were employed to deliver papers and cir- culars after schod hours, others had been recently employed, claiming their afRdavits were with former employers, some few through carelessness hid not been asked to supply them. In 176 bakeries the average was 7$ per cent good. Of course, the larger and more modem shops are practically perfect, the low percentage applying mainly to the foreign shops and those conducted in cellars where light and ventilation are usually poor. In some of these places I have found some very objectionable features. In places where permits were not found some had been issued, but through cardess-
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REPLY FROM STATE FACTORY INSPECTOR
ness or lack of knowledge as to the importance of them had been mislaid or lost entirely.
The larger and higher class factories manufacturing cigars are very good. Some in old buildings manufacturing cheap grade are not up to the standard. E>epartment stores, hospitals, and homes are very good as far as I have inspected, also the laundries and dairies; one of the latter when improvements are completed along hygienic lines will be ideal of its kind.
I have found the blanks overlooked in many cases, in some places no instructions as to the printed matter required by factory law having been given. 1 would particularly mention the accident card, and the poster for employes under sixteen years of age; more attention should be given to its revision. I trust this will prove a satisfactory summaiy of my six months' services.
Very truly yours,
(Signed) Margaret A. Winans.
APPOINTMENTS UNDER THE ACT CREATING A DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND INDUSTRY, 191). See P. +16
Governor Tener appcuntecl is cominiMioiier John Price Jicluon, dean of the engineering school of the state college. Dr. Jackson selected as chief factoiy inspector L. R. Palmer, an electrical engineer in charge of the new safety work of the Jones and Laii^lin Steel Company, and originator of the National Council of Indiislrial Safety.
In January, 1914, Governor Tener appointed to the industrial board, with Commissioner Jacluon as chairman, Mrs. Samuel Semple. president of the State Federation of Pennsylvania Women; George S. Comstock, past president of the Engineers Society of Pennsylvania; Frank S. Cronin, president of the Philadelphia Central Labor Union, and George W. McCandless. Mr. McCandless retired and Major John P. Wood, wool manufacturer and vice-president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturer' Association, was put in his place— to make good, it is stated, the
Sveraor's promise that one member of the board would represent the association, r. Wood IS identified with the interests which defeated the child labor law before
It of District No. 5, United Mine Workers of America, was appointed supervising inspector, with headquarters at Httiburrii, in the fall of 1913. OtTices were opened, but under the appropriation available, the inspection force has to date Qaly, 1914) been limited to Sve men and two women, without laboratory equipment or adequate clerical force. In addition to routine inspections, five industries have been made the subject of special Investi- gation*— bakeries, the tobacco workrooms, foundries, hotels, and mattress fac- tories. Eighty prosecutions were entered in the first three months and orders issued to every foundry in the District to install washrooms and toilets uiuler an act of 191 1, hitherto unenforced.
445
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APPENDIX XI
AN ACT CREATING A DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND INDUSTRY. 1913'
CfMtinf a DtfatUfunl of Labor ami Industry: .... titaKitbing an Inita-
trial Board; . . trtmsftrrint tb* partrs and dtUits of tbt Departmtnt «f
Factory InipMtion to lit Dtpartmtnt of Labor ond Iniuttry, and ahoUibmt
lb* Dtpartmml of Factory Insptdion; . . . . Oc.
Section i. Be ii enacted, &c., That there if hereby established a Depart* ment of Ijbor and Industry, the head of which shall be a Commissioner of Labor and Industry, who shall be appointed by the Governor, by and with the OHueiit of the Senate, and who shall hold office for the term of four years from the date of his appointment, appoint, and may at pleasure remove, all officers, clerks and other employees of the Department of Labor and Industry, except at berdn otherwise provided.
Section 3. The Ciinmissioner of Labor and Industry shall forthwith ap- point, upon enterina upon thedutiesofhiloflice, one Chief Inspector of the Depart- ment of Labor and industry, and who shall, during the absence or disability (rf the Commissioner of Labor and industry, possess all the powers and perform all the duties of the said commissioner, except the power to make appointments, and who, in addition to his duties prescribed by this act, shall perform such other duties and possess such other powers as the Commissioner of Labor and Industry sitall pre- scribe.
Section 3. The office force of the department, excluding that (rf the difTeicnt bureaus shall be a chief clerk, two copying clerks, a sten(^Tapher who shall be a typewriter, and a messenger.
Section 4. The Department of L.abor and Industry shall be divided into three bureaus, as follows: —
I. Bureau of Inspection;
a. Bureau of Statistics and information;
3. Bureau of Arbitration, — together with such other bureaus as the Commiuioner of Labor and Induatiy may deem necessary, and shall, with the consent of the Governor, from time to time, establbh.
Section j. The Commissioner of Labor and Industry shall establish and maintain branch offices in the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and in such other cities of the Commonwealth as he may deem advisable. Such branch offices ■hall, subject to the supervision and direction of the Commisskmer of Labor and Industry, be in immediate charge of such officers or employees as the said com- missioner may designate; and the reasonable and necessary expeniei of such offices shall be paid as are the other expenses of the said Department of Labor and In- dustry.
Section 6. The Attorney General shall have authority to employ, and may at pleasure remove, an attomev of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, who shall represent the Department of Labor and Industry, and shall take charge of and assist in the prosecution of actions and proceedings brought by or on behalf of the said Commissioner, or of the said Department, and who shall act, geneiajly, as legal adviser to the said commissioner. The Commissioner of L.abor and Indusby ^all have further power to employ attorneys and counsellors at law, to be desig- nated by the Attorney General, to assist the counsel in special actions or pfo> ceedinn, or generally m performance of his duties.
The said Commissioner of Labor and Industry may purchase such suppliei and materials as may be necessary in carrying on the work of his department. * For appointments under the act, see preceding page. 446
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DEPARTMENT OF LABOR ACT OF I913
Section 7. The Bureau of Iiupectioii, subject to the supervUion of the ONnmbnooer of Labor and industry, shall have charge of all iiupcctioiu made punuant to the provUions of this act, and thai! perfonn nich other duties as may M assigned to it by the Comniissioner of Labor and Induitty. The said bureau shall be UDder tbe charge of the Chief Inspector, hereinabove provided for, subject
■ ■ - ■ - r and Industry.
, ^. , I, divided into four
grades, as follows:—
1. Inspectors of the first grade, — of whom there may be fift)^ in number, and not less than five of whom shall be women, and such additional inspectors as tiie commissioner may deem necessary and proper to appoint, from time to time.
a. Inipectors of the second grade, — of whom there shall be two in number, and who shall act as Supervising Inspectars, with offices at the cities of E%ila- ddphia and Pittsburgh, respectively.
3. inspecloisof the third grade, — of whom there shall be two, one of whom shall be a woman, and both of whom shall be physicians, duly licensed to practice medicine in Pennsylvania, and who shall act as Medical Inspectors.
4. Inspectors of the fourth grade, — ofwhom there shall be four, one of wliom shall be a physician, duly licensed to practice medicine in the State of Pennsyl- vania, and who shall be Chief Medical Inspector; one of whom shall be a mechanical enpneer, and expert in ventilation and accident prevention; one of whom shall be a chemical en^necr; and one of whom shall be a civil engineer, and expert in lire prevention and building construction.
Section 8.' The Commbsioner of Labor and Industry shall, from time to time, divide the State into dbtticts, and shall assign to such districts such inspectors and supervising inspector as may, in his judgment, appear expedient; and shall, from time to lime, assign and transfer such inspectors from one district to any other district, or to special duty in any bureau of the said department; and may assign an inspector to inspect any special class of factories or establishments, and may assign one or more of Ihem to act as clerks in any office of the department.
The Commissioner of Labor and Industry shall visit and inspect, or cause to be visited and inspected, during reasonable hours and as often as practicable, evei^ room, building, or place, where and when any labor is being performed which is affected by the provisions of any law of this Commonwealth or of this act, and sliall cause to be enforced therein the provisions of all such existing laws and of this act, attd the rules and regulations of the Industrial Board hereinafter provided for.
The Commissioner (rf Labor and Industry and all inspectors may, in the discharge of their duties, enter any such place, building, or Toma, whenever tbey have reasonable cause to believe that any such labor is bdog or will be performed therein.
Section 9. The inspectors of the third grade shall, together with the Chief Medical Inspector, hcreinaDovc provided for, inspect all rooms, buildings, and other l^accs subject to the provisiDas of this act, throughout the State, with respect to the conditMns of woili affecting the health of persoi» employed therein, and shall
Glam such other duties and render such other service as the Commissioner of bor and Industry shall direct.
Section id. The inspectors of the fourth grade shall constitute a divisimt of industrial hygiene, which shall be under the immediate charge of the Comoiis- tioner of Labor and Industry. The members of the division of industrial hygiene shall nuke special inspections of factories and mercantile establishments, and all rooms, buildmgs or other places subject to the provisions of this act; and shall caadtKt special investigations, throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, rriative to industrial processes and conditions. The members of such divisioo ■hall prepare material (or leaflets and bulletins, calling attention to dangers in particular industries and the precautions to be observed to avoid them, and shall perform such other duties and render such other services as may be required by tbe " ' ' :r of Labor and Industry. Each member of said divinoa shall make
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BUREAU OF STATISTICS AND INFORMATION Section 1 1. The Bureau of Suiutics *nd Infonnatioii ihall be andet tbc immediate char^ o( a chief of the bureau, subject to the direction and rapnvijioa of the Commisnoner of Labor and Industiy. There shall also be in the idice of said bureau an auistant; one itatiitician; one filing clerk and one copying clerfc; and three collectors of statistics. It shall be the duty ol said bureau to Iwep in touch with labor in the Commonwealth, especially in relation to conunercia], in- duttrial, physical, educational, social, moral, and sanitaiy conditions of wage- eamers of the Commonwealth and to the productive industries thereof: alio to collect, assort, publish, and sjrstematiie the details and ifintrH information re- garding industrial accidents and occupational diseases, their causes and (fleets, and the methods of preventing and remedying the same, and of providing axa- penution therefor; also, to make inquirv and inveiti^tion into the condition, welfare, and industrial opportunities of all aliens arriving and bdng within tbc State, and to gather information with respect to the sup^y of labor afforded by such aliens, and ascertain the occupations for which aliens may be best adapted, and to biing about communication between the aliens and the several industris requiring labor; and to collect, assort, and publish statistical details and general information relative thereto.
The chief, or duly authorized deputy, shall have power to issue subpoenas, administer oaths, and take testimony in all matters relating to the duties herdn required of said bureau. Any corporation, firm, or individualdoing business within the Commonwealth, who shall ne^ect or refuse for thirty days to answer questions by circular or upon personal application, or who shall refuse to ob^ the subpoena and ^ve testimony according to the provisions of this act. shall be liable to a penalty of one hundred dollars, to be collected by order of the Commissioner of Statistics in an action of debt, in which the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania shall be plaintiff. This Bureau shall also be required to collect, compile, and publish annually, tbe productive statistics of manufacturing, commercial, and other business interests of the State.
INDUSTRIAL BOARD
Section la. There is hereby created and established in the Department of Labor and Industry an Industrial Board, to consist of the Commisnoner of Labor and Industry, and four additional members, to be appointed by the Govetnor, by and with the consent of the Senate, — one of whom shall be an employer of tabor, one a wage-earner, and one a woman. The said additional memlicrs shall be designated by the Governor to serve until the first da^ of Januaiy in the years one thousand nine hundred and fifteen, one thousand nme hundred and sixteen, one thousand nine hundred and seventeen, and one thousand nine hundred and dghteen, respectively. Upon the expiration of each of the said terms, the term of office of each associate member thereafter appointed shall be four years, from the first of January. The Commissioner of Labor and Industry shall be the chairman of tbc said board. Vacancies shall be filled by appointment, for an unexpired term, is the same manner as provided for the appointments of the previous iM^cn of the office in which said vacancy occurs.
The Commissioner of Labor and Industry shall receive no additional com- pensation for services as member of tbe said board. The four associate memben shall each receive a compensation of ten dollars (fio.oo) per day, and expense* actually and necessarily incurred while engaged in the pei^ormance of their duties.
The board shall appoint, and may remove, a secretary, who shall receive i salary to be fixed by the board. The Commissioner of Labor and Industry shall
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DEPARTMENT OF LABOR ACT OF 1913
detail, fmm time to time, to the assbUnce of *aid board, luch employee) of the Department of Labor and lndtutry a* the board may require in aid of its work, and laid board is empowered to employ experts for spedal and occasional services. The counsel to the [jepartmeat of Labor and Industry shall act as counsel to the board, without additional compensation.
The board shall hold stated meetings, which shall be open to the public, at least once a month during the year, and shall hold other meetings at such times
and places as may be ncccuaTV. Such meetings shall be called by the chairman o: 'Ty of the board. The board shall keep minutes of its proceedings, showi :e of each member upon every question, and records of its examination ai
other official action.
Section I j. The Industrial Board shall have the power to make investiga* tioni concerning, and report upon, all matters touching the enforcement and effect of the piovisions of all laws of the Commonwealth, the enforcement of which shall DOW and hereafter be imposed upon the Department of Labor and Industry, and the rules and regulations made by the Industrial Board in connection therewith; and to subpoena and require the attendance in this Commonwealth of all witnesses, and the pioduction of books and papers pertinent 10 the said investigation, and to examine Ihem and such public records as it may require in relation to any matter which it has power to investigate. Any witness who refuses to obey a subpoena at the said board, as hereinabove provided for, or who refuses to be sworn or to testify, or who fails or refuses to produce any books, papers, or documents touching any matter under investigation or eiamination by the said board, or who is guilty m any contempt after l>nng summoned to appear before the said board as above pro- vided, maybe punished as for contempt o( court; aitd, for this purpose, application may be made to any court within whose territorial jurisdiclion the said contempt took place, and for which purpose the courts of the common pleas of this Common- wealth are hereby given jurisdiction. In the course of siich investigation each member of said board shall have power lo administer oaths. Each member shall have the further power to make personal investigations of all establishments in this Commonwealth where labor is employed.
Section 14. All rooms, buildings, and places in this Commonwealth where labor is employed, or shall hereafter be employed, shall be so constructed, equipped, and arianf^, operated and conducted, in all respects, as to provide reasonable and adequate protection for the life, health, safety, and morals of all persons em- ploynl therein. For the carrying into effect of this provision, and the provisions of alt the laws of this Commonwealth, the enforcement of which is now or shall hereafter be entrusted to or imposed upon the commisiiofMr or Department of Labor and Industry, the Industrial Eloard shall have power to make, alter, amend, and repeal general rules and regulations necessary for applying such proviaons to specify conlitions, and to prescribe means, methods, and practices to carry into dfect and enforce such provisions.
Section ij. The rules and regulations of the Industrial Board, and the amendments and alterations thereof, may embrace all matters and subjects to which power and authority of the Department of Labor and Industry extends, and ^all be distributed to all applicants. Every rule or regulation adopted by the board shall be promptly published in bulletins of the Department ol Labor and Industry, and in such daily newspapers as the board may prescribe, and no such rule or regulation shall take effect until thirty days after such publication. Any employer, employee, or other person interested, either because of owneiship in or occupation of any property affected by any such order or regulation, or otherwise, may petition for a hearing on the reasonableness of a rule or regulation. Such petition for hearing shall be by verified petition, filed with the said Industrial Board, setting out specifically and in full detail the rule or regulation upon which a hearing is desired, an«l the reasons why such rule or regulation is deemed to be unreasonable. All hearings of (he board shall be open to the public. Upon receipt of such petition, if the issues raised in such petition have theretofore been adequately considered,
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the Industrial Board shall determine the same by confinning, without hearing its previous detennination; or, if such hearing is necessary to dctennine the oat laised, the Industrial Board shall order a hearing thereon, and consider and de- termine the matter or matters in question at such time as shall be prcscribtd. Notice of the time and place of such hearing shall be given to the petitioner, and to such other persons as the Industrial Board may find directly interested in sock decision- Section i6. Every person who violates any of the provisions of this ict. or any of the rales or regulations of the Industrial Board, or who resists or inter- feres with any officer or agent of the Department of Labor and Industry in the per- formance of his duties in accordance with the said rules and regulations, shaH be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor; and shall, upon conviction thereof, be punitbcd by a fine of not more than one hundred dollars (f loo.oo), or by imprisoniDenl not exceeding one month, or both, at the discretion of the court.
SKtion 17. There shall be created in the Department of Labor and In- dustry a Bureau of Mediation and Arbitration, the head of which shall be a cbid of bureau.
Section 18- Whenever a difference arises between an emplc^er and lu) employees, which cannot be readily adjusted, the chief of the bureau shall proceed promptly to the locality thereof, and endeavor by mediation to effect an amicable settlement of the controversy. If such settlement cannot be effected, the dispute may be arbitrated by a board composed of one person selected by employer, and one person selected by employees, and a third who shall be selected by the lepre- sentativesof the employer and the employees; and such third member of the bcanl shall be selected and appointed within a period of five days after the matter bu been submitted (or arbitration, and, in the event of any such appuntment or selection not being made within a period of five days, then the Chief of the Bureag of Mediation and Arbitration shall constitute the third member of the board, and be the chairman of the board; and if such third representative is chosen, by the two representatives of the employer and employee, within five days, then a chiimMn of the board shall be established by the boaid itself. A submission to the boud shall be made in writing, and the parties thereto shall agree to abide by the deter- mination of the board. Said boanl shall render a written decision within ten days after the completion of the investigation, one copy thereof to be filed in the buicaa. and a copy to be furnished each party to the controversy. The chief of the hutean shall make an annual report of his work, containing such information as the Com- missioner of Labor and Industry may request.
Section 19. The Commissioner of Labor and Industry may anign to this bureau, from his department, such clerical assistance as, from time to time, he may think necessary.
Section 3i. Upon requisition of the Commissioner of Labor and Indusliy. the Board of Public Grounds and Buildings shall furnish suitable accommodatkoi in the State Capiid building for the use of this department.
Section a j. All of the powers and duties now by law vested in and imposed upon the Department of Factory Inspection, which is hereby abolished, ire no' hereby vested in the Department of Labor and Industry.
Section 34. This act shall take effect on and after the first day o( June, out thousand nine hurulred and thirteen.
Section aj. All acts or parts of acts inconsistent herewith be and the sane are hereby repealed.
The ad day of June, A. D. 1913.
JOHN K. TENER.
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APPENDIX XII
OCCUPATIONAL DISEASES ACT
SUBSTANCE OF ACT PASSED BV PENNSYLVANIA LEGISLATURE. 191J
For the protection of employes exposed to lead dusts, lead fumes, or lead solutions, while engaged in the manufacture of lead products, the employer shall provide properly ventilated and lighted rooms, sepa- rated from other rooms, with floors that may be washed.
All floors shall be cleaned daily by wet methods or by vacuum cleaner.
Where there are fumes or dust arising from machinery or handling, the employer shall furnish proper hoods and covers for machines, connects! with dust collecting system.
Employer shall provide washrooms, separate from workrooms, equipped with lavatory basins, at least one basin for each five employes. Employer shall furnish nail brushes, soap, and at least three clean towels a week for each employe, free of cost; he shall also allow at least ten min- utes before lunch hour and before closing time and must furnish a shower bath for each ten employes and shall furnish soap and two clean towds a week for each employe for use in connection with shower bath. Time allowance of at least ten minutes twice a week shall be allowed for bath, and record shall be kept of each time bath is taken, which record shall be open to state inspection.
Employer shall provide dressing room with double sanitary locker for each employe and shall provide separate eating room. No employe must be allowed to take food or drink into workroom.
Employer shall furnish suflicient drinking fountains.
The employer shall furnish a clean suit of overalls and pair of jumpers each week, and shall furnish at all times an effective respirator for each employe.
Each employe must use the washing facilities as often as time is
granted ; must use eating room, and must wear at all times while engaged
at work a suit of clothes provided, and remove same before leaving, at
close of day, keeping his street clothes and work clothes in separate
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lockers. Employes must also keep respirators clean and use same wboi at work.
Employer shall post in all rooms a notice of the known dangmof occupation, as provided by Department of Labor and Industiy.
Employer shall cause examination once a month by a physician, of each employe, for symptoms of lead poisoning, time allowance being made for each employe at employer's expense.
Physician shall keep record of all cases of lead poisoning in employ- er's office, which record shall always be open to state inspection, and within 48 hours must send duplicate of report to the State Department of Health, Harrisburg, and Department of Labor and Industry, blanks for which shall be furnished by Department of Health. Employer must within five days discontinue such employe from employment where he is exposed to lead fumes, dust, or solutions. — Digest by Department of Labor and Industry, Harrisburg.
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APPENDIX XIII WOMEN WORKERS AND SOCIAL AGENCIES
Miss Butter's Women and the Trades,* presents a review of the social work carried on among wage-earning women, inside and outside their places of employment in 1907-08. It remains true in 1914 that only a small fraction of them are reached by outside agencies aside from the churches- Gains, however, are to be recorded. In its new and well equipped central building the Young Women's Christian Associatbn carries on evening classes in sewing, millinery, gymnastics, and so forth; reli^ous meetings at noon time in factories; a stamp savings system in the same; and a vacation camp. The association has yet to reach the rank and file of girl wage-earners, especially factory employes. The Council of Jewish Women carries on a vacation camp at Bradford Heights, where 100 working girls go in a season, those earning more than l7.oo a week paying I3.00 a week; those earning less, free. The various settlements have working girls' clubs, and in summer they join in the parties which go out to Lillian Home, the country place of Kingsley House. The Council of Jewish Women and, more recently, the Catholic Woman's League are active in securing employment, and as result of investigations conducted by Miss Annie E. McCord, vocational guidance work is carried on under the Central Board of Education. The Western Pennsylvania Association of the National League for Women Workers, started in 1910, has built up a membership of 300 in nine evening clubs for girls. These are setf-goveming and aim at self-support. The association has conducted a vacation house at Pennsville for three years.
The Wnnen's Trade Union League has not been able to get a foothold in Pittsburgh, although an unsuccessful effort was made at the Oliver works.
The Child Labor Committee and the Consumers' League of Western Pennsylvania are the channels through which the ebb and flow of public interest in factory legislation and enforcement, affecting women's and children's labor, expresses itself. It is to be noted that there is no corresponding public organization whatever actively interested in the conditions of men's labor.
Only those retail houses which comply with the following con- ditrans in regard to their women and minor employes are eligible to the White List of The Consumers' League:
* Butler, Elizabeth Beardsley: Women and the Trades. (The Pittsburgh Survey.)
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A minimum wage of f6.oa a wMk must be paid to adult laleswofflen with one year's experience. A weekly half-holiday must be given dutint two summer months. Hourj of work must not exceed ten. Overtime must b« compensated. The requirements of the Pennsylvania state laws governing women and minor employes must be observed, and one week vacation with pay after one year*! employment.
WHITE LIST
The Consumers' League recommends the selling conditions in the following retail houses:
McCreery and Company, W. W. Wattles and Sons,
Joseph Home and Company, Hardy and Hayes Company,
Boggs and Buhl, Geo. K. Stevenson and Co.,
Meyer Jonasson and Company, The Presbyterian Book Store,
Paulson Bros., United Presbyterian Board of Publication,
J. G. Bennett and Company, Kurtz, Langbein and Swarti. The Malley Company,
APPENDIX XIV
LABOR UNION HYGIENE FOR BREWERY WORKERS
(Hygienic provisions embodied in contract signed April i, 1914, between the brewery workers' unions of Pittsburgh, and the breweries of the District.) Following precautions shall be taken for sanitary and healthful protection:
(a) A lunchroom with seating capacity for every employe; same shall be properly heated and ventilated.
(b) A separate wash-stand for every ten (10) employes, soap and towels to be furnished by employer at necessary intervals.
(c) A separate locker shall be provided for every employe.
(d) Toilets shall be sanitary and separated from the lunchroom.
(e) Drinking water shall be provided for, under sanitary con- dition.
(0 Every shop shall contain the necessary emergency supplies for accidents, etc.
In addition, local No. 32 inserted this provision: "No empb)ye shall be forced or required to work at varnishing without the necessary safety appliance and precautions being furnished and utilized."
And local No. 144 (Bottling House Employes): "Men employed at the bottling machines and Pasteurizers shall be provided with goggles. to be furnished by the employer."
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APPENDIX XV
SURGICAL ORGANIZATION OF THE CARNEGIE STEEL COMPANY
Wm. CNeill Sherman, M. D. Surgeon-in-chief, Carnegie Steel Company
The primary object of first aid is to furnish an aseptic dressing that will prevent infection of the wound; its further activities are to supervise the removal of the injured to the home or hospital and to render appropriate assistance in cases of shock, heat prostration, gas poisoning, freezing, and so forth. The perfection of a surgical organization of a large corporation is dependent upon three factors: First, properly equipped and organized emergency. Second, the intelligent co-operation of all em- ployes. Third, education of the individual.
Surgeons and assistant surgeons are appointed by the Carnegie Steel Company in the towns in which the works are located. Their work was in 1909 brought under a chief surgeon. It is the aim of the company to secure the services of the best men in their respective communities. A yearly salary is paid which is commensurate with services rendered. In works employing t,3oo men or more, the surgeon has an assistant whose duty is to respond at such time as the surgeon in charge should request. The doctors are subject to call at any time, the company having an option upon their services. They are constantly within telephone com- munication. It is the duty of the plant doctor to give first-aid lectures and instructions, to make visits to the injured in their homes, and to render the surgical attention necessary.
The Standard Emergency Hospital is a building 40 by 60 feet in size, divided into the following rooms: waiting room, redressing room, operating room, ward room, bathroom, nurses' room, laboratory, and X-ray room. The Standard hospital is the type used in all plants em- ploying 1,800 men or more. For the smaller plants, units of the large hospital are used, as the case may require. These hospitals have the same equipment found in the most modem hospitals. The redressing room is used to treat the cases as they report. Dressing hours are set apart on three days of the week, at which time the cases for redressing report for treatment. The operating room is used to perform minor operations and 45 S
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WAGE-EARN[NG PITTSBURGH
to treat the more serious accidents. A ward room of three beds is used only for emergency purposes, that is, shock, hemorrhage, heat strdic, cramps, or illness of any kind in which the patient should be kept at rest before being moved. The bathroom contains a specially designed bathtub, so that the patients can be entirely immersed in either hot or cold water, as the case may necessitate. The nurses' room is so arranged as to afford the greatest comfort and privacy to the nurses on duty. The laboratory consists of a complete X-ray apparatus, microsct^, and other necessary equipment for scientific examination of blood, secretions, and so forth.
The surgeons at the emergency hospital are assisted by graduate nurses (female) who are constantly in attendance. These nurses are selected according to their special fitness and ability. It is their duty to render treatment in the minor injuries (small scratches, bums, and so forth), to assist the doctor, and to supervise in the general cleanliness and operation of the hospital, under the doctor's directions.
The co-operation of employes is essential if best results are to be secured. A circular letter is given to each employe as follows:
TO THE EMPLOYES OF THE CARNEGIE STEEL COMPANY
It is the earnest with and desire of the company that every man injured re- port at once to hi» foreman, whowill issue an order on thecompany doctor. Eveiy case, no matter how slight the injury, should be pven thon>u|^ surgical treatment.
In the past, many cam of a serious nature have resulted frarn the failure to report to the company surgeon, by whom every etTon is bdng made to render the most efficient treatment and remove many of the complications which have oc- curred from Ihe failure of patients to comply with the rules.
Do not make any attempt to put anything on injured parts, or to treat them in any way; go to the doctor at once, follow his directions to the word; never remove a dressing, and report to the hospital only when told to by Ibe company surgeon.
The application of poultices, ointments, and greases to the wound often mult in blood poisoning.
Always remember that slight injuries often cause the most serious compli- cations, even to Ihe loss of limbs and life.
Finally, be guided by the instructions of the surgeon in charge. Failure to comply with these rules will be dealt with by the superintendent or general super- intendent.
The following letter was issued to the foremen relative to the use of a "foreman's card," which is self-explanatory.
TO THE FOREMAN^-
The enclosed new form is to be used in issuing an order on the company surgeon in all future accident cases.
Every man before he can be treated at the Emergency Hosfutal must re- ceive this form, signed and filled out by the foreman. Before becan return to «ork it must be signed oy the attending surgeon. This will prevent many cases of bkxtd 456
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EMERGENCY HOSPITAL EQUIPMENl Carnegie Sleel Company
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iU
1°
i il
9 i^
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SURGICAL ORGANIZATION
poisaaing aod serious complkatioiu which have occurred in the put from in- jurict which were not promptly »nd properly attended to.
Under no canditioiu shall theforemanaHow the return to duty of the injured cnploye iritbout the usnature of the company surgeon.
Any violation of the above rules shall be dealt with by the general super- intendent.
The "foreman's card" is an ofTicial order on the doctor to render surgical attention. Should the case be of a trivial character, the card is signed and handed to the foreman, allowing the man to return to work. Should the injury be of such a nature as to necessitate the patient being taken to the hospital or his home, the card is held until such a time as the attending surgeon thinks is safe for the injured man to resume work. Instructions written in seven languages are printed on the back of the card, so that employes shall have a perfect understanding. Should the men be unable to read, the system is explained to them by the foreman or an interpreter.
FOREMAN'S CARD:
|
Plant Dale |
Hour A. M |
|
To Company Surgeon: |
P. M |
|
Check No |
Address Witness |
|
Foreman. |
|
|
Date |
Company Surgeon.
juries arc to be attended to by the company surgeon and his directions folkiwed.
This order must be ugned by the sui^eon before the injured man can return to work. Any bills incurred for doctors atliet than company doctors will not be piid by the company.
Any violation of the above rules will be taken up for consideration by the general superintendent. Approved by General Superintendent.
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Upon the arrival of the patient at the Emergency Ho^ttal the case is attended by the company surgeon. An immediate report of the accident is made out, four copies being made, one of which is sent to each of the following: company surgeon, general superintendent of works, casualty department, and chief surgeon. A report is made out in every case, regardless of the character of the accident. Upon the recovery of the patient, a final report giving necessary data is filled out, the same pro- cedure being fallowed as in the preliminary report. This gives a brief history of the case and gives all the information necessary. Records are kept and notes made upon the back of the immediate accident report by the plant surgeon, giving the date of surgical attention and notes as to the progress of the case.
The education of the employe in first aid is accomplished by the organization of first-aid squads throughout the works. The revised American Red Cross Text Book on first aid is used as a standard work. Each class is given twelve lectures and demonstrations. Competitive meets, at which prizes are given to winning crews, are held to stimulate and maintain interest in first aid.
The system, as at present organized, can be best illustrated by following the different steps in the treatment and care rendered injured employes. If an Injury occurs it is immediately reported to the foreman in charge, who makes a written request to the works doctor to render treatment. If the injury is a minor one, the patient is taken to a con- veniently located stretcher box, where a first-aid package (sealed and aseptic) is kept. This package contains one ampule of aromatic spirits of ammonia, one triangular bandage, one roll gauze bandage, and one gauze compress. The necessary dressings are applied by the captain of the first-aid squad, and the patient is directed to the Emergency Hospital for treatment. Should the injury be of such a character as to render the patient unable to walk, a Reeves stretcher is obtained from a stretcher box, and the patient is wrapped in a blanket and taken to the Emergency Hospital by the first-aid squad. The patient is given the necessary treatment by the attending doctors and nurses, after which he is either sent to his home or to a general hospital, where the case is placed under the care of the chief surgeon. Special arrangements are made whereby private accommodations are provided for all cases. Operating room nurses, ward nurses, surgeons, and a special trained anesthetist are in charge of the patient, thereby assuring the best of attention and ultimate results. When the patient recovers suflUciently to be discharged, he is referred to the works doctor. Automobile ambulances are used to trans-
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SURGICAL ORGANIZATION
port patients from places of injury to the hospitals, and from the hospitals to their homes.
The advantages of a surgical organization must be obvious to all those familiar with large industrial corporations. This will be readily observed by a comparison of antiquated methods formerly in use with those of the present day. Employes have been educated so that they now willingly go to the Emergency Hospital to have their minor injuries treated. Many of the serious complications in the past have had their b^innings in minor injuries which were not scientifically treated, the consequence being infection (blood poisoning) of the part, resulting in permanent disability, loss of the injured part, or death. An investiga- tion of the records during the past four years, 1910-14, shows that there should be but one infection in a thousand cases, providing the injuries are promptly treated. Under conditions which existed in the past, it was not uncommon to have from ; to 60 per cent of the cases infected. At the present time, practically all the infections are due to carelessness on the part of the injured and failure to report promptly for treatment. The advantage of having the injuries heal without infection can be readily seen when we remember that it takes three and a half times as long for an infected wound to heal as it does a non-infected wound. Serious eye com- plications frequently result from the crude attempts of unskilled fellow- employes to remove foreign bodies from the eye. As a result of the strict enforcement of a rule prohibiting this practice, the number of foreign- body cases has greatly increased because alt the cases are now reported for treatment ; however, in a series of 6,800 cases there was not one with serious complications.
While the "safety organization" is playing an important part in the general uplift of working conditions on railroad and in other hazardous employments, and will, doubtless, materially reduce the number of acci- dents, we may not even hope to reach a point where the heavy machinery and equipment of today can be made proof against bodily injury, or as someone has rather tersely expressed it — "fool-proof." From the present outlook, we feel constrained to believe that there will always occur a certain number of accidents resulting from ignorance, carelessness, and other conditions over which the employer can exercise no reasonable control.
Where the safety and preventive measures have not been entirely efTective, the physician or surgeon steps in; he has heretofore been re- garded with almost negligible consideration in most industrial organiza- tions— to be consulted only where extreme conditions demanded the employment of his services. But now the econtHnic value of safety appli-
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ances, which is becoming so apparent to everyone, is exerting an educa- tional influence upon employers, many of whom have already seen the further advantage that may be attained by the addition of a surgical force to their organizations. My own opinicm is that every large indus- trial enterprise should have a properly equipped emergency hospital, together with such surgeons, nurses, and other attendants as conditions may seem to warrant.
While the surroundings and the character of the employment will always, to a certain extent, determine the number of injuries, the results of these injuries can be greatly reduced in seriousness by prompt and skilful treatment. The failure to properly administer first aid, and the subsequent lack of efficient surgical attention, has in the past added to the death list many whose lives might have been saved, and has steadily recruited the anny of the maimed and crippled, with which the streets of our large cities are so familiar.
1 might emphasize here that efTiciency in surgical attention is the keynote — the fate of the injured man frequently depending wbcdly upon the intelligence and skill of the individual who applies the first dressing It will thus be seen that to get the best results there should be a complete surgical organization; and this organization should work in harmony with officers and subordinates, as the co-operation of all is essential to the success of the movement. Where the number of accidents is large, a chief surgeon should be in responsible charge of the work; and in surreal matters he should not be subjected to the handicap of the restrictions of well meaning lay officials, who sometimes have decided opinions of tbor own upon subjects entirely foreign to them.
The pioneering in this field for the present is being left to swne of the larger corporations, but the stupendous benefit that is already ap- parent from their operations is beginning to act as a leaven among the smaller manufacturing interests, and in the near future a general improve- ment may be expected in the present conditions.
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Visiting Nurse. Homestead In six mill towns the Carnegie Company has added nursel to Ihe regular works organization. The nurse visits the homes and gives advice in nursing, care of chil- dren, housekeeping, and saniiatbn
West Penn Gymnasium Since 1909 the Carnegie Steel Company has centralized lis major surgical work in special private wards at the West Penn Hospital Pittsburgh where modern equipment is installed. Exercising machines are shown here for Ihe relief ot injuries to joints, bones, and muscles, thereby reducing Ihe con\alescenl time of mill patients
OXVCEN HtUMET
Repair man equipped against gas poison- ing ready lo enter a blast fuinace. The equip- ment used is that developed in mining, applied to furnace work by Ihe Carnegie Steel Com- pany since 1911
Vanadium SiEtL Bone Plate and Si-«t»> Employed to hold badly displaced bona in Ihe serious fractures which occur in Iht ton- nage induslries. In iSi cases ihis method hit been successfully employed. This pioceJu" has materially reduced the extent of perniinfii disability
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APPENDIX XVI
APPLICATION BLANKS AND FORMS. WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC AND MANUFACTURING COMPANY
Fotm P-IMI— Bsv. I
WetiiiiihonteElectric&Maiinfactnriiig Company Eut Pitblnrii, Pi.
APPLICATION
Application for position a
Address*)
Name
Age
Nationality Married or single
Height Weight
General Education
Technical Education Where Years attended... .Degree..,.
Special Education
Special Experience
Can begin Minimum salary expected
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PKAcnCAL EX- PEBIENCE WITH |
PLACE |
<?«SSI' |
n,o^"5o |
SALARY |
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References
Reasons for desiring new
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To it filled out in applicant's own handioriting and returned to....
Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturii^ Company Pittsburgh, Pa.
...191...
Address \
Application for position as Dau...
Name
^p
Country of birth When naturalised, tf of foreign birth
General education
Technical education
Line of special study
Date of graduation from technical school.
Note employed? Could begin work days of ter engagement.
Reason for wishingto make a change
Salary expected
podtloa Qln a itatMiiMit ot c
Reference as to ability and characUr asfollotcs:
'hkh th* ■ppikuii
on th* otbM lida)
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WESTINCHOUSE BLANKS AND FORMS
Westraghonse Electric & Mannf actoring Company
Gentlemen: —
M has applied to this Company
for a position as , stating that l„ was employed
by you as a under the supervision of
M during a period of.
from to
In orio thai ihi WociiuhsaK Ettctik k Hit. Co. m* Im IMj infcttDed u ta bt pcnoail dunenr lai qualiicHuiu br the pofitioii be which I h»i nxle mSaaon, I nfeutKhof inrbtmcrcmpkiTEniBd nqutKud uiheriitncbof the tud drnpuiaof cmplarcn ■« wheiB I hive Anwrij worked (s lin to the ibevc umcd Coapuv all inior- madon thtj mty hive in their ponenoa, whether ihown by my pencAil recwv, or othe^ wiee, u CD nv pertoaij chukcnr ud ibo nr quililkatHot for the paatioD for which I hive hemn ippbed, ind the reuoa why 1 wu diKhuved at anil lerrict, upon ut iBquity thai nwT he made of theia. or dlher of them, by nid WcMID^WUK Electric ll Muiir>CIIlria|
^ Empkiyoicat Af«Bt
Yours truly,
(Signature).... CTitl*)
The above named applicant was employed as a
from to , the cause for
leaving being
While in our employ . '^ services sadsfautory and we
re-employ . "". gl* a member
of labor ot^anizations
Remarics: —
Date Signature ..
Title
463
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RECORD OF EMPLOYMENT
NAME
ivs)mik'
'ITrthCrty
ifSff
CMbo' Birth
Hava you avw w«rti«d
S;?»;w.'e'i.T8a departments i,.s;xs'^i:ui
Commanoad Work —
Forni UIB— Rm. 1 ADVICE OF WORKMEN REQUIRED
To the Employment Dept. Date 191
Help ae follows is rehired in Sec Dej4.
Ocrapatlo
Cued all prevlolM reqncMa for >
Pleaee send for , v>ko»e
addreaa is No Street City
State Night Tvm—Day Tvm
Vnle«8 the address is given the man triS caU at the Emphjf' ment Department.
In eaee the above-named fails to report within three dajft subatHute another name.
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WESTINGHOUSE BLANKS AND TORMS
ADVICE OF WORKMEN SUPPLIED
Mr... Mr...
Dept...
has been
engaged as a at
per hour, to fin yottr order (^.
n Mb to Kip«t fw Wnk, lUi Slip Hot U l*luMi to EBpl>T««t D<9l.
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ADV FUL |
ICE OF E NAME |
Nfiii |
fiEH |
EN1 |
AH |
HOURL IkM. (Mh. 1* |
VPAYR |
ME OF |
VORKS |
Fom HPLOYE |
[8 |
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taiMlw»*MrtMi^«i*rt |
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OCCUPATION |
DATE |
I..T, |
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r«M |
<^ |
r«Mi |
<b. |
r*ik |
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lu. |
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A«s. |
Ftb. |
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'■ |
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" |
" |
•• |
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Apf. |
Apr. |
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Hay |
N... |
Ii»y |
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Dk. |
JUM |
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MM |
(1 |
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to A.... |
B |
QUI WITHN DISC |
QUIT KITHOUT NOTICE RFAftON |
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lARfiED.. |
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
FoHi sn Bn. I
MWIGE OF EMPLOTES IIUIT DR DBCHUGEI
RUSH
NOTICE filVEH I«1
WORKMH SEC. CHECK HO.. _
QUIT WITH-WTTHOUT NOTICL OISCHARSED. COLLECT CHECK-rES-HO
DATE 191 f- J- REASON
WOULD <HOT> BE>EHPLOY. (H0> OBJECTION TO RE.EIIPL0riM6 IH AHOTHER OErT.
CHIEF COBT CLIRK aCNrRAL FOHMAN
HAS (NO) TOOL ACCOUNT. VALUE OF TOOLS NOT ACC'TD FORS. .. (DHAIL IH INK ON BACK.)
IS <NOT) MEMBER OF RELIEF. R. 0. NO
BUPT. RKLIKF DCPT.
Digitized .yCOOgle
WESTINGHOUSE BLANKS AND FORMS
|
ABVICK OF TRANBFKR |
Form l»»U-ReT. B 3P WORKS BMPLOYKU IVif No. |
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T....„.„=,«.. |
T....™...oro |
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SIC OEPT. |
«e. |
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OHtCK NO. RATE |
CHECK MO, RATE |
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OCOUMTION CLASS |
OCCUPAT.0N CLASS |
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FOREMAN |
FOREMAN |
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UN. FOREMAN ^^^^p |
1 NelHl OEN. FOREMAN L .„ . |
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T»l.«ounl«]ju.t.d T«l Dft. |
DiMolTnniftr |
Pay Roll Di., |
Employ Otpt. |
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F«nnMUihiwlM)ntrM(«rlim«tt iiMiit iHt icc* |
pt thil card «*tM t»ol KCMjirt hM h*e» adfuilHl. 1 |
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APPENDIX XVII
RELIEF DEPARTMENT,* WESTINGHOUSE AIR BRAKE COMPANY
GENERAL
I. The "Relief Department" is a department of the Company's service in the executive charge of a Superintendent, whose directions in carrying out its Regulations are to be complied with subject (o the control of the General Maiugcr, except in tuch maiten as are under the control of the Relief Committee or the Treasurer of the Company.
3. Wherever in these Regulations the following words occur without qiuli- flcations, they will have the meaning defined as follows: "Company" wilt mean The Westinghouie Air Brake Company; "General Manager," "Board of Dine- ton," "Treasurer," and "Relief Department" or "Department," will mean the General Manager, Board of Directon, Treasurer and Relief Elepartntent. n- speclively, of said Company; " Relief Fund, " " Workmen's Compensation FuTid." "Relief Committee" or "Committee," "Superintendent," "Medical Enminer" and "Actuary" will mean the Relief Fund, Workmen's Compensation Fund, Re- lief Committee, Superintendent, Medical Examiner and Actuaiy respectively of said Relief Department.
). The object of the Department is the continuation of a trust fund knmn as "The Relief Fund,"farthepavment of benefits to employees contributing tbtre- to, who are to be known as members of the Relief Department, when uikder these Regulations such benefits are awarded for total disability due to causes other thaii accident arising out of and in the course of their employment by the Company and for the payment of benefits to their dependents, next of kin or benelidaries designat- ed by them with the approval of the Superintendent when under the Regulations such benefits are awarded on account of death due to causes other than such acci- dent; and the creation of a further trust fund to be known as "The Workmen's Compensation Fund," to consist solely of contributions made by the Company and the earnings by investment thereof, for the payment of compensation to employees of the Company when under these Regulations such compensation is awarded tot total or partial disability due to accident arising out of and in the course of theit employment by (he Company and for the payment of compensation to their de- pendents or next of kin when under these Regulations such compensation is awarded on account of death due to such accident.
* Established May ist, 190); effective June ist, 190); amended regulatioDi effective January ist, 1914.
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Also to perform luch ocher duties and functions as are ptescribed in these Regulations or may be imposed by the Board of Directors.
4. The Company shall have general charge of the Department; guarantee the fulfillment of its obligations: have the custody of all moneys atkd assets belong- ing to the Relief Fund and the Workmen's Compensation Fund and be responsible for their safekeeping and investment; pay into the respective fund interest at the rate of (our per cent per annum on monthly balances in its hands and all interest or other earnings derived frominvestmcntsof moneys of the fund; supply the nee* essary facilities for conducting the business of the Department; and pay all <q>erat- ing expenses thereof.
J. The Superintendent shall have charge of all business pertaining to the Department. He shall employ such clerks and other assistants as may be necessary, prescribe the fonns and blanks to be used, certify all bills and pay-rolls of the Department, sign all orders for payment of benefits, furnish to the Committee such reporu as they may require, decide all quesiioni properly referred to him, and exercise such other authority as may be conferred upon him by the General Manager or the Committee.
6. There shall be one or more Medical Examinen. appointed by the General Manager who shall, subject to the c<Hitn>l and approval of the Superinieodeni, have general supervision of the Medical affairs of the Department.
7. The Medical Examiner shall make the required physical examination ol applicants for membership in the Relief Department; prepare applications; re- port the condition of sick or injured members; pass upon when members are dis- abled and the cause and extent of disability and upon when they are able to work; pass upon proofs of the fact and cause of death; certify bills for medical and surpcal treatment, medicines, hospital charges and appliances; and perform such profes- sional and other duties as may be required by the Superintendent.
8. Medical Examiners shall not personally give surgical or medical attend- ance except as prescribed by rules of the Company and shall not accept fees for such service.
9. ThefiscalyearoftheDepartmentshallbepn with the first day of January of each year.
THE RELIEF FUND
10. The " Relief Fund" will consist of contributions from members of the Rdicf Department, income deiived from investments and from interest paid by the Company and of appropriations by the Company, when necessary to make good
1 1. The moneys received for the Relief Fund shall be held by the Company in trust for the members of the Department and their dependents, next of kin or other beneficiaries, to whom benefits have been or shall be awarded against such luitd. The Committee shall provide for the investment, and any changes therein, of money which is not required for immediate use. All checks must be counter- signed by the Treasurer. All compensation awarded against the Relief Fund is hereby declared to be a Spendthrift or AlimenlaTy Trust for the support of the cestuis que trtisteni. No assignment, mortpge, pledge or anticipation of the same 469
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or of any payments to become due thereunder will be recogniied or bind the Foad or be valid thereagainit.
15. The Company being the Tniitee and Guarantor of the Relief Fund, the investments shall be in such securities as shall have been approved by the Compuy and shall be in the name of the Company "in trust for the Relief Fund."
[). If the amount contributed by members of the Relief Fund with inlenst and other income shall not be sufficient to provide the benefit awarded, and ample to secure their prompt payment in full as they become due, the Company shall advance from its own funds whatever sums may be necessary for this purpne. reimbursing itself out of surplus only when the contributions of members with in- terest and other income are more than sufficient therefor.
14. If at any time there shall be a surplus after making due allowance for liabilities over and above what is required to provide for the full and prompt pay- ment of all benefits and a reasonable contingent fund, such surplus may be applied to increase the benefits to members in such manner as may be determined, upon advice of the Actuary, by a vote of two-thirds of the Committee, approved by the Company.
I ;. The condition of the Relief Fund at the close of each fiscal year shall be audited and reported on by a competent person or persons selected for that purpose by the members of the Committee who represent the members of the Relief De- partment and all payments due or to become due, upon death and disability bene- fits awarded by or claimed from the Relief Department, shall be valued by the Actuary.
THE WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION FUND
16. The "Workmen's Compensation Fund" will consist of contribntioas made solely by the Company out of its own funds, income derived from investments ■nd from interest paid by the Company, and special, further appropriations by the Company, when necessary, to make good deficiencies.
17. The moneys paid into the Workmen's Compensation Fund shall be hdd by the Company in trust for the employees of the Comjiany and their dependents, next of kin or other beneficiaries to whom compensation ^all be awarded apinsi such fund. The committee shall provide for the investment, and any changEi therein, of money which is not required for immediate use. All checks must be countersigned by the Treasurer. All compensation awarded against the Work- men's Compensation Fund is hereby declared to be a Spendthrift or Alimentary Trust for the support of the cestuis que Irustenl. No assignment, mortgap. pledge, or anticipation of the same or of any payments to become due thereunder will be recognized or bind the Fund or be valid thereagainst.
18. The Company being the Trustee and Guarantor of the Workmen's Compensation Fund, the investments shall be in such securities as shall have been approved by the Company, and shall be in the name of the Company "in trust for the Workmen's Compensation Fund."
19. The Company shall contribute each year to the Workmen's Compensa- tion Fund sufficient to provide the benefits awarded and to secure their prompt payment in full as they become due and to make good all deficiencies of such Fund.
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30. The condition of th« Woriunen's CoDipenutkm Food >t the close of each fiscal year thall be audited and reponed on by a competent person or persons selected for that purpose by the G>mmittee and all payments due or to become due, upon death and disability compensation awarded by or claimed from the Work- men's Compensation Fund, shall be valued by the Actuary.
31. TheCompany reserves the right to withdraw the Workmen's Compensa- tion Fund from the Rdlef Department, to set it up in a new Department or to discontinue the same eicept as to compensation theretofore aivarded.
RELIEF COMMITTEE II. There shall be a Committee composed of eight members and aChainnan to be known as the Relief Committee constituted as fdlows:
(a) The General Manager of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company shall be ex-officio a member and Chairman of the Committee.
(b) The other memben of the Committee shall be chosen annually in De- cember, to tnve one year from the fint day of January next stuxccding, or until their successors are chosen and shall qualify, as follows:
(c) One-half shall be chosen by the Company and one-half by the employees who are members of the Relief Department from among themselves on basis of membenhip in the different districts as provided in the following section.
33. The members of the Committee chosen by the members of the Relief Department shall be elected by ballot, one member to be elected by the members employed in the iron and brass foundries, to be designated " District No. i ;" one by the members emph>y«l in the store-keeping, account and drafting departments to be designated "District No. a;" and two by the members employed in all other departments, to be designated "E)istrict No. 3." the vote being taken and certified under oath by tellers selected by the Committee. The member receiving the high- est number of votes so cast in each district shall be declared elected.
3). In balloting for members of the Committee each member of the Relief Department shall be entitled to cast one vole.
34. For the Committee to serve during the fiscal year, 1914, the members elected in May, 1913, shall continue in office until January 1, 191;.
aj . In the event of termination of the service of any member of the Com- mittee, or of hb withdrawal or loss of membership in the Relief Depanment, his membenhip on the Committee shall thereupon terminate.
36. Any vacancy among the members elected by the contributing employees shall be filled by the succession to the position of the employee who received the next highest number of voles of members of the same district from which the re- tiring member was elected.
37. Any vacancy among the members chosen by Ihe Company shall be filled by appointment by the General Manager.
38. The Superintendent shall be Secrelaiy to the Committee.
39. The Commitlce shall have general supervisbn of the operalionsof the Department and see that they are conducted in accordance with these Regulations.
30. The Committee shall hoM stated meetings once in three months, at such 47"
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
time and place at they shall detemuDC, and thall roeet at other times at the call of the Chairman.
31. It shall be the duty of the Chairman to call special meetings of the Ghd- mittee upon the written request of three of its members.
3a. Amendments to the Regulations of the Department may be proposed to the Committee at any stated meeting, by any member of the Conunittec. Amendments so proposed may be acted upon only at a subsequent stated or spedd meeting; but no amendment shall be operative unless adopted by a vote in the affirmative of a majority of the whole Committee, approved by the Board of Direc- tors, and duty promulgated by the Superintendent; and any amendment so adopted, approved and promulgated shall be binding upon the Company and the memben of the Relief Department and all persons claiming through them from the date specified in the promulgation of the same, except as regards benefits awarded prior
APPLICATIONS 3). Membership in the Relief Department shall be based apoa an applica- tion in the following form;
APPLICATION FOR MEMBERSHIP IN THE RELIEF DEPARTMENT OF
To the Superintendent of the Relief Department:
I, of in the County of
and State of , now empik^
by the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, do hereby apply for membership in the Relief Department of said Company, and consent ana agree to be boiittd by the Regulations of said Relief Department and by any other Regulations of said De- partment hereafter adopted and in force during my membership.
1 ALSO AGREE, That the said Company, by its proper agents, and in the manner provided in said Regulations, shall apply as a voluntary contribution, and I hereby authorize it, so to deduct and apply, from any wages or salary earned by me under said employment the sum provided in the Regulations of the RelieF Department for the purpose of securing the benefits provided in the RegulitioDS for a member of the Relief Department, in receipt cil my then regular salaiy or wages.
Unless 1 shall hereafter otherwise designate in writing, with the approval at the Superintendent of the Relief Department, death benefit or compensatton after providmg for my burial at an expense not exceeding (100.00, shall be payable 10 my wife, if 1 am married at the time of my death, or, if I have no wife living, then to my children collectively, each to be entitled to an equal share or, if there be no such children living, then to , if living, and if not living
then to my father and mother jointly, or to the survivor, or, if neither be living then to my next of kin, payment in behalf of such next of kin to be made to my 1^1 representative or if there be no such next of kin the death benefit or compensalioa shall lapse, and the amount thereof shall remain as a part of the Relief Fund or ibe Workmen's Compensation Fund, as the case may be, without claim for the sane. I expressly stipulate that my marriage shall at any time, ipso facto, have the dfcci to substitute my wife in the place and stead of any beneficiary theretofore designated to receive said death benefits or compensation in the event 0! my death, if she be then living.
Any funeral or other expenses incident to my death, which shall have been raid by the Superintendent of the Relief Department in accordance with Ihe Regulations, shall be held to be in part payment of said death beiKfii or compensi- 472
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WESTINGHOUSE RELIEF DEPARTMENT
tioB and shall be deducted fram the total amount thereof before payment to the person or penons entitled to receive the same.
I FURTHER AGREE that in consideration of the contributions of uid Company to the Relief Department, and of the guarantee by it of the payment of the bendiis aforesaid, the acceptance of benefits from such Relief Feature, for injury or death, shall operate as a release of all claims against said Company for damages by reason of such injury or death which could be made by or through me, or by any beneficiary or beneficiaries (except a right, if any, to claim under the Regulations of the Pension Department of the Company) and that the Superin- tei^nt may require as a condition precedent to the payment of such benefits, that all acts by him deemed appropriate or necessary to effect the full release and dis- chai^e of the said Company from all such claims, be done by those who might bring suit for damages by reason of said injury or death; and also that the bnnging oT such a suit by me, my beneficiaty or legal representative, for the use of my bene- ficiary alone, or with others, shall operate as a release in full to the Relief Depart' ment of all claims by reason of my membership therein.
I ALSO AGREE, That this application, upon approval by the Superin- tendent of the Relief Department, shall make me a member of such Department on and from the date specified in luch approval and constitute a contract between myself and the said Company, governed in its construction and effect by the laws of the State of Pennsylvania, and that the same shall not be avoided by any change in the character of my service, or locality where rendered, while in the employment of said Company, not by any change in the amounts applicable fram my wages or salary to the Relief Fund, and that the agreement that the above-named amounts shall be appropriated from my wages or salaiy shall apply also to any other amounts
n appropriation and asrignment in advance of such portions of my wages or salary to the said Company in trust for the Relief Fund, for the purpose of maintaining my membership in the Relief Department, which assignment shall have prece- dence over any other assignment by me of my wages or salary or of any claim upon them on account of liabilities incurred by me.
I ALSO AGREE, For myself and those claiming throu^ me, and for my beneficiary or beneficiaries, to be especially bound by Regulations Nos. 109 and 1 10 providing for final and conclusive settlement of all claims for benefits or contro- versies of whatsoever nature by reference to the Superintendent of the Relief Department and an appeal from his decision to the Committee, with the privilege of retort to the Courts only when these remedies shall have been exhausted and as set forth in Regulation No. 1 10.
I ALSO AGREE, That any untrue or fraudulent statement made by me to the Medical Examiner, or any concealment of facts in this application, or any at- tempt on my part to defraud or impose upon said Relief Department, or my re- signing from or leaving the services of the said Company, or my being relieved or discharged therefrom, shall forfeit my membership in said Department and all benefits, rights or equities arising therefrom except that such termination of my employment shall not (in the absence of any of the other foregoing causes of for- feiture) deprive me of any benefit or compensation to which I may be entitled by reason of disability beginning and reported before and continuing without inter- ruption to and after such termination of my employment, as provided in said Regulations.
I CERTIFY that I am years of age, am correct and temperate in
my habits and that, so far as 1 am aware, I am now in good health, and have no injury or sickness, constitutioiul or otherwise, except as shown on the accompany- ing statement made by me to the Medical Examiner, which statement shall con- stitute a part of this application.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have signed these presents at in
the County of , State of , this day of
473
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A. D. ig . this ipplication to take effect A. D. lo .
or on such subsequent date as may be designated by taid Superintendeot; pnvidtd, however, that if I becorae disabled before said dale and continue disabled beyond said date this application shall not take effect until the first day after my recovcfy. The following changes were made bdore executioo.
Signature of ApplicanL
The foregoing application is approved at the oflice of the Supetintendent tt the Relief Department at in the Gwnty of
, State of this day of ,
A. D. 19 . to take effect the day of A. D. 19 .
Superintendent of the Relief DepaTtmenL
}4. The last application in the foregoing form which shall have been made by an employee, shall be known as his principal application.
3j. Upon the approval of the principal application by the Superinienduii, he shall be a member on and from the date specified in such approval, and the Super- intendent shall issue to him a certificate of membership attached to a copy o( the Regulations then in force.
)6. If any applicant for membership has phywcal defects which would pre- clude the approval of hi] application if presented unconditionally, his appltcatka may nevertheless be approved, provided he executes an agreement in writing satisfactory to the Superintendent, to the effect that he shall not be entitled under his membenhip to any benefits for disability caused by, arising from, or growing out of such defects, such agreement to be atladied to and made part of his said application, and such modification of the foregwng preKribed forms of the Piwdpal Application is hereby authoriied.
yj. If an employee, entitled to become a member upon passing a satisfactoiy medical examination, and who has not previously been examined and rejected, shall have executed 3 prescribed form of " Preliminaiy Application, " but shall not have had opportunity to be examined before the date specified thereon for hb application to take etTect, he shall be protected by such preliminary application, under and in accordance with the temis of the prescribed form of Principal Applica- tion from said date until he shall have had opportunity to be examined: provided, however, that he shall only be entitled to benefits payable on account of injury of death caused solely by accident arising out of and in the course of his employmait and if his Principal Application is not approved, his rights and obligations in tbe Relief Department shall cease from the time of medical examination; and if be shall refuse or neglect to be examined when opportunity for examination is offered, his rights and obligations in the Relief Department shall thereupon cease.
38. An applicant, protected in accordance with the foregoing against accident only, shall not be required to contribute.
J9. Empteyeo of the Company now in its empk>yment tnay become mem- bers of the Relief Department, without regard to age or health, in their respective, appropriate classes, by making application for admission, in the form prescribed, 474
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prior to January I, 1914: >fl*r which day, no applicant will be admitted at an ag« beyond 50 yean or without a medical examination.
40. Eveiy preient member of the Relief Department shall continue to be a member of the Relief Department; but if not heretofore a member of the class therein corresponding to his r^ular wages or salary, he must enter such class and become entitled to enjoy the benefits thereof and be required to make the con- tribution specified therefor in these Regulations in order to be eligible to enjoy for
-hitmelf and his family the privileges and benefits of the Pension Department. The class of every member shall be determined by the Superintendent. Consent to such transfer shall consist in the acquiescence of such member in the deduction of the appropriate contribution from his wages, salary or benefit.
MEMBERSHIP
41. All employees of the Company, who, under the Regulations, shall con- tribute to the Relief Fund, shall be designated as "members of the Relief Depart-
43. In referring to employees of the Company the word "service" shall mean employment by this Company, and the service of any employee shall be r^arded as continuous for the time during which he has been continuously in the employment of this Company.
43. There shall be five classes of members. The class in which an employee shall be a member, shall be detennined by the amount of his ordinary regular monthly wages or salary, omitting from consideration overtime or occasional toss of time, as follows:
MonMj Pay Oast
Less than H$-(*'> 'st
fjj.ooor more, but less than fjj.oo .and
i^yooorman, but less than tjyoa 3rd
Vjyoo or more, but lew than t^yvo 4th
f9j.ooormore $th
44. No employee shall be required to become a member of the Relief De- partment; but preference in laying off and taking on employees will usually be given to such members or persons offering to become such.
4;. The class of a member shall be determined in case of claim for benefil or compensation by the contribution made by or for him immediately prior to the disability or death.
46. An employee cannot remain a member in a class higher than that allowed by bis pay.
47. The Superintendent has authority am) the duty to change the class and contribution of a member when his wages or salary call for it. If a member de- clines to permit such change, the Superintendent shall have authority to cancel his membenhip.
48. Any member may withdraw from the Relief Department at the end of any month upon giving notice to the Superintendent before the twentieth of that month on the prescribed form of withdrawal notice, which will be furnished upon request.
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49. The Cominittee, on recommendation of the Superintendent, shall have authority to cancel the membership of any member upon receiving reliable evidesa of habitual or frequent drunkenness, disreputable at unlawful conduct at any tim^ or for persistent disregard of the Regulations by such member while disabled. Written Dotice of such cancellation tA membership shall be given the member, iitd refund of contribution, if any due, shall accompany the ttotice aiul be specifically mentioned therein.
JO. Any member who is furloughed, suspended or otherwise temponrily rdieved from the service for a specified time, may retain his membenbip duri^ such absence by paying his contributions in advance. His Foreman or Head of Department shall notify the Superintendent at the bepnning of such absence, specifying the time set for return to duty, and if at that time the member does noi return to duty his membership in the Relief Department shall thereupon terminate, unless otherwise previously arranged by him with the Superintendent.
Any person who shall, in accordance with these Regulations, be awarded compensation for partial disability due to accident arising out of and in the coarse (rf hb employment by this Company and who is reemployed by this Company may continue bis membership in the Relief Department in the Class in which hii reduced wages or salary shall place him.
$1. When a member resigns from the service, or leaves the service ivithout notice, or is relieved or discharged therefrom, his membership in the ReKrf Depart- ment shall terminate with his employment, and be shall not be entitled to claim any benefits thereafter, except such as he may be entitled to by reason of disability beginning and reported before, and continuing without interruption to and aflci such termination of employment.
S3. Any member of the Relief Fund who became a member of Ttaa We>t- inghouM Air Brake Company Employea' BaneflcUl Aswciatioii pnviotn ta At^gDSt 38, 1895, and has held continuous membenhip since that date in that Association, and in the said Relief Fund, may continue membership in the Relief Department after leaving the employ of the said Company, provided he resides it Allegheny or Westmoreland Counties; but shall in such event continue bis member- ship in the first class only, and shall contribute therefor in advance at the rate c( 60 cents per month.
$). When a member absents himself from duty for a period of six days with- out the permission of his employing officer previously obtained, or without giving reason for absence, satisfactory to his employing officer, he shall be held to have left the service without notice, and his membership shall be held to have terminated on the day preceding such absence. If such member be reinstated in the service he may also be reinstated in membership upon approval of the Superiniendeni.
J4- If a member is relieved from service and is afterwards re-employed, he may again become a member of the Relief Department, although then over fifty years of age, upon application at the time of re-employment, upon passing a siti*- factory medical examination in which his physical condition at the termination of former employment will be i^ven due consideration, and upon approval of his appli- cation by the Superintendent.
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if. When a member b in arrean for three months, bis membership shall thereupon cease. (See also Regutations Nos. (^ and 91.)
^ If a member resumes work for the Company with the approval of the Medical Examiner and the Superintendent, before he has been in arrears three months, he shall be protected from the time of resuming worlc, and the arrears shall be paid on the next pay-roll.
$7. Members shall keep their Foreman or Timekeeper informed of their
$8. A member's place of residence when on duty shall be held to be the last address given to his Timekeeper or Foreman.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF MEMBERS
{9. The word "contributions" wherever used in these R^ulations shall be held and construed to nia to such designated proportions ot the wages or salary payable by the Company to an employee, as it is provided in these R^ulations that the Company shall apply, for the purpose of securing the benefits of the Relief Fund, or to such cash payments as it may be necessary for a member to make for said purpose.
60- Contributions shall be made monthly in advance at the following rates:
lit Class, wages less than f)j per month $ .jo
and Class, wages tii to $$$ per month 7j
jrd Qass, wages t$$ to {7$ pel' month 1.00
4th Oass, wages (7$ to fg$ per month i.3f
jth Class, wages )95 and over per month i.jo
61. Contributions for each month mil be due on the first day of that month, and will tmlinarily be deducted from the member's wages or salary on the first pay-roll of the preceding month.
63. If deduction of a member's contribution from his wages or salary is omitted in error, the fact that such deduction has not been made shall not debar him M' his betteficiary from benefits to which they otherwise would be entitled, but such deduction shall be made from ivages or salary payable thereafter.
63 . When a member has no wages or salary due'lo him, any contribution due from him must be paid in cash in advance to the Superintendent; otherwise he will be in arrears. (See also Regulations Nos. j$ and 91.)
64. No member will be permitted to fall in arrears for contributions while drawing benefits from the Relief Fund for disability. A sufficient amount will be withheld from benefits to protect dues for one month in advance during the con- tinuance of disability for which benefits are payable, provided an insufficient amount is due the member for wages or salary on the Company pay-roll.
6$. No deduction on account of contribution to the Relief Fund shall be made from the pay trf an applicant for membership, and no increase of deductions shall be made for increase of class without instructions from the Superintendent, and any deduction made to the contrary shall be held to have been made in error, and shall be due the applicant or member as a refund.
66, In determining contribution for a part of a month, the amount for each 477
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day shall be one-thirtieth (rf the amount for one month, and the amount for an; other part of a month shall be determined by multiplying the amount Soi one day by the number (tf days in such part, adding to make even cents when fnctioM
67. In determining the number of days in the part of a month (or which contribution is to be collected, the actual calendar days shall be computed, begiit- ning on the day on which the application takes effect.
68. When a member's service terminates, there shall be due him u a R^und any excess of contribution he may have made above what is necessary to adjust bit account up to, but not Including, the last day of service; but no refund dull be doe in the month in which a member dies.
69. Any refund of contribution due a member or applicant for membership shall be payable upon application therefor by such person, if made within twelve months after termination of membeiship, and shall be made by warrant or other- wise, in conformity with the financial methods ot the Company.
DISABILITY
70. Wherever used in these Regulations the word "disability" shall be hdd to mean physical inability to work, by reason of sickness or injury, and the wocd "disabled" shall apply to memben thus physically unable to work; the decision as to when members are disabled, the cause and extent thereof and when they ire able to work, shall rest with the Medical Examiner, subject to review by the Super- intendent and the Committee.
71. Whether disability at any time shall be classed as due to accideat arising out of and in the course of the member's employment by ibis Company ot to other causes, shall be passed upon by the Medical Examiner, ivho shall traasmit the same with his recommendations to the Committee which shall make fiul determination. Pending such determination the Superintendent shall order benefits (or compensation) to be paid from such fund as upon the facts before him may seem liable and, if upon final determination, any sum or sums shall prove thus to have been paid from the Relief Fund which should have been paid from the Workmen's Compensation Fund the former shall be reimbursed out of the latier.
73. tn considering the question of disability, subjective symptoms er alleged feelings will be given due weight, but these themselves, unsupported bf objective and discoverable symptoms, shall not entitle a member to be conadered disabled.
73- When a member becomes disabled, he shall notify his tiraekeepel « foreman immediately, or cause him to be so notified. In reporting disability the member shall also give his house address. If he fails to give notice until he recovers, DO benefit shall be payable unless he proves his disability to the satisfaction of the Superintendent, and gives satisfactory reason for failure to pve notice. If he gives notice during his disability, but delays in so doint he shall not be considered disabled before the day on which notice is given, unless he proves his disabiliiy before that day to the satisfaction of the Superintendent, and gives satisfactoty reason for delay in giving notice.
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74. When a member becomes disabled it shall also be his duty, unless in- capacitated thereTrom by his disability, to report immediately in penon to the Medical Examiner at his office during office hours. It shall alio be the duty of a disabled member not confined to the bouse by disability, to report at the Medical Examiner's office from time to time as requested, and to keep any other appoint- ments made by the Examiner. Members who avmd the Medical Examiner, or Defect to report or keep appointments as herdn provided, shall not be entitled to benefits.
7j. If a member who has been reported by the Medical Examiner as able to work, is not able to work on the day set, he shall immediately notify his employing officer to that effect and shall immediately communicate with the Medical Exami- ner, reporting 10 him in person if posMble; otherwise be shall not be considered disabled on or after the day set for his return to work.
76. When a member becomes disabled during suspension, furlou^ or Other leave of absence, and while away from his usual place of residence when on duty, he shaJl not be entitled to benefits, unless, in addition to reporting hb disability immediately as required by the regulations, he proves his disability while absent to the satisfaction of the Superintendent.
77. When a disabled member wishes to absent himself for any length of tine from his usual place of residence when on duty, he shall first see the Superin- tcodent and the Medical Examiner and obtain written approval of absence for a Specified time; he shall furnish to the Medical Examiner satisfactory certificates of disability during absence, keep him informed erf his address and report to him immediately upon his return. If such disabled member goes away and remains away without previously consulting the Medical Examiner and obtaining written approval of absence for a specified time, he shall not be entitled to benefits or com- pensation for any time (rf absence unless he proves his disability while absent to the satisfaction of the Superintendent, and gives satisfactory reason for failure to con- sult the Medical Examiner before leaving.
BENEFITS AND COMPENSATION
78. A member shall be entitled to receive from the Relief Fund benefits cuitinuously after the first week during any. total disability due to causes other than accident arising out of and in the course of employment by the Company, but not beyond the day when such disabled employee shall be awarded a service pension by the Company under the Regulations of its F>ension Department; and any em- ployee from the Workmen's Compensation Fund like benefits as compensation from the first day during the entire duration of his total disability due to such acci- dent. Benefits or compensation to disabled members in receipt of the same on Januaiy 1st, 1914, shall be payable from said day as provided in this paragraph.
79. After a member has sufficiently recovered from a disability for which beiMfits or compensation have been paid, to resume work, he shall be restored to full membership, if he is re-employed by the Company.
80. A member who has drawn benefits or compensation for total disability
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fhal) not be required to make contribution uotit restored to fnU membenUp; except as the same is deducted from his benefit.
8). A nteinber shall not be entitled to benefits or cocnpeiiHtiiMi for totil disability alleged to be due to any cause, while still so disabled from a piecediai
83. While wages or salary is received from any source whatsoever durias disability, a member shall not be considered totally disabled within the meaniag of that tenn as employed in these Regulations, and no benefits or compensation for total disability shall be paid; provided that, after such total disability shall have been established, the earnings of not more than one-sixth the amount shall DM be deemed to terminate such total disability.
83. Should a disabled member decline to accept benefits or compensatiM he shall not thereafter make contribution or retain title to benefits or eompenntioii. Should such member afterward accept the benefits or compensation to which be is entitled, a proper adjustment of contribution shall be made.
84. In any case of grave injury or chronic weakncu where the member dt* sires to accept a tump sum in lieu of the benefits or compensation which nd^ become due to him or on his account, and in full of all obligations of the Departmait w the Company arising from his membership, the Superintendent shall have authority to recommend full and final settlement with such member for such amoont and on such terms as may be agreed upon in writing. All such pn^nsed settle- ments shall be based upon computation of commuted value of the benefits by tbe actuary; and shall not be effective until approved by the Committee after ten days' written notice setring forth in detail what the benefit or compensation is, tbe pro- posed commutation and the reason therefor.
85. In computing benefits or compensation, the time of disability dnll be considered as beginning upon the first day upon which no wages or less than one- half day's wages are paid because of disability, and this day shall be called "Fust day wages not paid,"
86. Benefits and compensation shall be paid in confonnity with the financial methods of the Company, and on warrants drawn by the Superintendent (or in his absence by other penons authorized by the General Manager) upon his receiving satisfactory certificates respecting the claims and such releases as may be required by him.
87. Benefits or compensation on account o( continued disability will be paid monthly; on account of short periods of disability as soon as the amount doe can be ascertained.
88. Benefits or compensation payable on account of total disability shall be payable only to the member or employee or in accordance with bis written order when approved by the Superintendent, or to his legal representative; but payment for medical or surgical treatment may be made to the attending physician or sar- geon.
89. When in the opinion of the Superintendent, a disabled member or em- ployee is mentally incompetent, disability benefits or compensation due him may.ii the discretion of the Superintendent, be paid to his wife or to some member of hit
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family, or to some other person in law charged with or in faci astuming his care and custody for the use and benefit of the member, and such payment shall be a bar to any subsequent claim on part of Ibe member or his legal represeotative for the amount so paid.
90. Disability bcnefiis shall not be payable out of the Relief Fund for dis- ability directly, indirectly or partly due to intoxication or to the use of alcoholic liquor as a beverage, or to immoderate use of stimulants or narcotics, or to unlawful acts or immoralities or venereal disease however contracted, or to the results thereof, or to urethritis, orchitis, epididymitis, stricture or to glandular swelling, or abscess in the groin, however caused, or to fighting, unless in self-defense against unpro- voked assault, or to injury received in any brawl or ia any liquor saloon, gambling bouse or other disreputable resort. Compensation shall not be payable out of the Workmen's Compensation Fund for death or disability due to accident solely caused by the member's intoiication, or by his willful or reckless act. During such disability members who keep the Superintendent informed of their addresses and furnish him satisfactory evidence of continued disability, retain title to death benefit; otherwise their membership shall be held to have terminated.
91. Benefits or compensation shall not be payable on account of disability be^nning or death occurring while a member is in arrears. (See also Regulations Nos. J5 and 6j.)
93. Members or employees shall not be entitled to beoelits or compensation if they decline to permit the Medical Examiner to make, or to have made by any other physician, such examination or examinations as he may deem necessary to ascertain their condition.
9). Disabled members or employees must take proper care of themsdves artd have suitable treatment: benefits or compensation will be discontinued If they refuse or penistently neglect to comply with the recommendation erf the Medical Examiner of the Relief Department as to proper care and treatment.
94. Oaim for disability benefits or compensation must be made within sixty days from the lime a/hen such benefits or compensation bepn to accrue, and claim for death benefits or compensation must be made within one year from death.
9$. A person claiming benefits or compensation for time after termination of service shall not be entitled to such for a disability arising from any cause occurring after such termination nor in any case unless directly due to a cause which arose out of the disability existing at the time of such termination.
96. Members vi\l be entitled to benefits or compensation as follows:
Bnufit
H^agti or Salary Cotitribttiitm Total Dimbilily Dtalb
Clan ptrmontb ptr numlh H^ttUy Ont Sum
I Under f)j t -io {j.oo f 150.00
II fe5.oo to fss-oo .75 7.S0 150.00
III Sjt.oo tof7;.oo 1.00 10.00 ijo.oo
IV J7J.00 to (9J.00 . . t.3j ia.50 IJO.OO V (95.00 or over .... 1.50 15.00 150.00
97. No member shall be entitled to disability benefits for sickness, nor shall 3>' 481
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death benefits be payable for death resulting from sickness, unless said sickness begins at least )o days after date of formal acceptance as a member.
98. Payment of benefit shall be made for each week attd fracti<Hi of a ved of total disability not due to accident arising out of and in the course of the employ- ment of the member by the Company (except for the firat week of such total dis- ability) during the period of such disability, but not beyond the day when the disabled employee shall be awarded a service pension by the Pension Oepirtmrot under its Regulations. Payment of compensation for total disability due to such accident shall be made for each week and fraction ot a week of total disability.
9!). To establish a claim for benefit for disability due to sickness there mutt be positive evidence of acute or constitutional disease sufhcient to cause disabffity.
100. In case of relapse in event of disability which lasted one week or dwr, the first seven days shall not a second lime be deducted in computing time of dis- ■bility benefits; and where such immediately preceding disability lasted sil days or less, the number of days to be deducted shall be seven, less the number of days of such preceding disability.
loi. Death benefit shall not be payable in case of death due directly or indirectly to unlawful acts or at the hands of justice.
loa. Death benefit, or compensation, together with any unpaid disibUity benefits or compensation, shall be payable to the beiMficiary of a deceased membet upon proof of claim and eseculion and delivery of the necessary releases.
iDj. A part of the death benefit or compensation, not to exceed tiao.00. may, at the discretion of the Superintendent, be paid before final settlement, to meet funeral or other urgent expenses incident to the death of a member.
104. No benefit shall be payable for partial disability due to cause otiwf than accident arising out of and in the course of empbyment by the Company: compensation for partial disability due solely to such accident shall be cUim^fie from the Workmen's Compensation Fund in an amount based upon the compensf tion which would be claimable by the member for total disability, proportionate to the extent of the disability as determined by the impairment of the earning powa. If such impairment is temporary or, when permanent, is at least 40 per cent ol the earning power, such partial disability compensation shall be paid in the uinc manner and at the same times as are prescribed by these Regulations for the pay- ment of compensation for total disability. If such impairment is permanent sad less than 40% of the earning power, compensation may, at the discretion of the Superintendent, be paid in a lump sum. equal to four years' payments of compea- sation at the rate corresponding to such degree of impairment.
■OS. Should the Company re-«mploy the partially disabled member, am- pensation for partial disability shall be fixed at a proportion of the compeosatiM which would have been claimable, had the disability been total, corresponding U the reduction (if any) in wages or salary. Such re-empk>yroent shall be upon the basis that the Company reserves the right to suspend or discharge such empkiyee at its pleasure but in event of such suspension or discharge he shall be entitled toi review by the Committee of the determination and award of compensalioa for partial disability.
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106. Sboutd a partial disabitiiy through any cause improve or should it increase through the cause which was oripnally responsible for ii, the amount of the compensation shall be subject to review on motion of either party by the Com- mittee in ordeflo fix the proper amount to be paid thereafter: and, on motion of the claimant, upon a showing of mistake of fact or of newly discovered evidence.
107. All compensation for disat»lity or death due to accident arising out of and in the coune of the employment shall be paid from the Workmen's Compensa- tion Fund contributed by the Company and no pait thereof from the Relief Fund; and if by error or oversight any such payment at compensatbn shall be made out of the Relief Fund, it shall be reimbursed out of the Workmen's Compensation Food-
ro8. In any controversy, daim, demand, suit at law or other proceeding between any member, his beneficiaiy or legal representative and the Company or the Relief Department, the Certificate of the Superintendent as to any facts appearing in the records of the Relief Department or of the Company, or that any writing is a copy taken from said records of any instrument on lile in said De- partment, or with the Company, or that any action has or has not been taken by the Committee or Board of Directors of the Company, shall be prima facie evidence of the facts therein stated.
109. All questions 01 controversies of whatsoever character arising in any manner, or between any parties or persons, in connection with the Relief Depart- ment or the operation thereof, whether as to any claim for benefits or compensation preferred by any member or employee or his legal representative or his beneficiary or any other person, or as to the construction of language or meaning of tbe Reg- ulations, or as to any writing, decision, instructions or acts in connection with the operation of the Department, shall be submitted to the determinaijon of the Super- intendent, whose decJMon shall be final and conclusive thereof, unless an appeal shall be taken lo the Committee within tbirly days after notice of such decision to the parties interested.
1 10. When an appeal is taken to the Committee it shall be heard by said Committee without further notice at the next stated meeting, or at such future meeting or time as they may designate and shall be determined by a vole of a majority of a quorum or of any otber number not less than a quorum of the mem- bers present at such meeting, and the decision arrived at thereon by the Committee shall be final and conclusive upon all parties without exception or appeal; except that it shall be reviewable by a court of competent jurisdiction by an actbn brought within JO days after notice of the decision of the Committee, as to the right of any party to recover a benefit or compensation.
1 1 1. The action of the Board of Directors in establishing (he Relief Depart- ment, in adopting these Regulations and in making contributions shall not be held to create a contract between the Company and any em^doyee or other persons or vest in him or any of them any interest, prior to or other than an actual award of benefit or compensation or to confer upon any such employee a right to be retained in the service of the Company or to oblige the company to continue the Relief Depaitment, the Relief Fund or the Workmen's Compensation Fund or to make
483
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further contributions for the benefit of persons other than those to whom bcnttt or compensation shall have been awarded; provided that no such diKontinuioct shall affect the Company's liability as trustee or guarantor of the Relief Fund or Workmen's Compensation Fund as regards benefits or compensation awarded, ex- cept that the Company may at any time be released from further liability there- under by:
I. Nominating, by and with the approval of a Judgeof aCourtof Allqibmy County, Stale of Pennsylvania, of competent jurisdiction, a trustee for the Rdief Fund, the Workmen's Compensation Fund or both as the case may be, to hold ud administer the same as herein provided for the benefit of all persons to whoa benefits or compensation shall have been awarded and transferring to such tnuite funds and securities at least equal in value to all benefits or compensation awarded and then in force, as determined by the Actuary of tbe State Insurance Department <rf Pennsylvania; «
1. Purchasing annuities for all persons to whom such benefits or cMnpema- tion shall have been awarded and shall then be in force for amounts equal to tucb benefits or compensation and payable for the same terms. fn»n a life insurance company licetised to do business in the State of Pennsylvania.
In either of such cases, the remainder of the Workmen's Compensation Faod, and in any case when valuation shall disclose a surplus of that Fund, ovtr all requirements, the surplus may be withdrawn by the Company and under like circumstances, the remainder or surplus of the Relief Fund may be distributed equitably among its then members.
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APPENDIX XVIll
PENSION SYSTEM,' WESTINGHOUSE AIR BRAKE COMPANY
Pumunt to action taken by the Board of Directon of the Westingboute Air Brake Company at their meeting held September 17, 1908, and at subsequent meetings and la action taken by the shareholders It their meeting held October 1, 1911, for the purpose of providing Service Pensions for faithful employees who, after rendering long and efficient service, may be relircd by reason of age and for the purpose also of providing for the dependents or next of kin of employees of the Company who die as the result of accident arising out of and in the course of their employment by the Company and of such of the employees of the Company as come within these Regulations who die in consequence of any other cause, the Com- pany bas created a Pension System and hereby creates a Pension Department for the administration of the same and adopts the following Regulations to carry such Pension System into effect and to provide for such administration.
Wherever in these Regulations the following words occur without quali- fication, they will have the meaning defined as follows: "Company" will mean the Westingbousc Air Brake Company; "Board of Directon," "Pension Department" and "Relief Department" will mean the Board of Directors, Pension Department and Relief Department of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company; "Pension Fund" and "Actuary" will mean the Pension Fund and actuary of such Pen- sion Department; and "Relief Fund" and "Workmen's Compensation Fund" will mean the Relief Fund and Workmen's Compensation Fund of such Relief Department. "Wages or salary" means the ordinary average earnings of the employee by service to the Company, without deduction for occasional loss of time or extra pay for overtime, as determined by the Pension Board.
I. PENSION FUND
A. Tbesumof ti 10,000, with all additions thereto and accumulations there- of, which has already been set aside in the custody of the Treasurer of the Company, it hereby declared to be held in trust for all persons who are or may become pension- ers of this Department, to provide for the payment of all penuons awarded to them.
B. In addition to the above-named fund, the Company will in each year cmtribute to such fund from the income of trusts created or to be created for the purpose, and from its other funds such further sum or sums as may be required to
* Established September 17, 1908; amended regulations effective January 1. 1914.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
provide all Peimoiu, awarded because of superannuation or of deaths during sodi yearor to restore and make good any impiinnent of sucti fund below an amount at least sufficient to provide all pensions.
C The Company absolutely guarantees the solvency at all tlmei of the Pensbn Fund and the payment promptly and in full of all pensions awarded there- under, subject to these Regulations.
D. No right or title shall vest in any peison to any pension or against the Pension Fund in any Tespect unless and until a pension shall actually have been awarded to, and accepted by, him or by his legal representative or committee, in accordance with these Regulations.
E. All contributions by the Company are so far voluntary that at any tioK the Board of Directon may repeal these R^ulations in respect to all persons wko mi^t thereafter have become entitled under them to make claim to awards of pensions, and thereafter the Company shall be bound only as respects pensions already awarded.
F. No contribution to the Pensbn Fund shall be required or be received fnun an employee of (he Company.
II. ADMINISTRATION
A. The Pension Department shall be managed by a board, to be known ■* the Pension Board, consisting of live persons, appointed by the Board of Directon and acting during the pleasure of the Board of Directon.
B. Tbe Pension Board shall elect a Chairman and appoint a Secretaiy, and, subject to approval, as submitted or with modilicaiions, by the Board of Directors, may adopt by-laws, not Inconsistent with these Regulations.
C. A majority of the members of the Pension Board shall constitute a quorum for all purposes.
D. The Pension Board shall, subject to this or further action by tbe Board (rf Directors, have full control over and management of (he Pension Fund and the power and duty:
(i) To award pensions in conformity irith these Regulations.
(]) To authorize the payment of all sums becoming due under pentiou so
(j) To determine all questions that may arise, in or in respect to, the Pension Department,
E. The affirmative vote of at least three members of the Pension Board shall be requisite in all cases.
F. Thecompensation, if any, of membenof the Pension Board and of oflicen and employees of the Pension Department shall be fixed by the Board of Directon and paid, together with all other operative expenses of the Pension Department, by the Company as a part of its general expenses.
G. The Pension Board shall be under the immediate direction of the Board of Directors to which it shall render reports of its transactions and condition an- nually as (rf December jist of each year. It shall also render such other and further reports to the Board of Directors as such Board may require.
486
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H. The Pensioii Board ihall employ an actuary who shall malM valuation as of December jisl of each year and perform such orher services as the Pension Board may direct.
1. All act$ of the Peiuion Board shall be valid as to all proceedings there- under until disapproved by the Board of Direcion; when so approved, they shall becmne conclusively binding upon the Company.
III. SERVICE PENSIONS
A. All employees of the Company (except general officers) shall be retired upon attaining the age of 70 years and shall not thereafter be re-employed, except by order of the Board of Direcion,
B. All such empbyees who shall at the time of such retirement be members of the Relief Department in the class to which their respective wages or salaries allocate them, as determined by the Superintendent of the Relief Department under the Regulations thereof, shall be granted a Service Pension.
C. Any employee 10 qualified may be retired on a Service Pension at any time after attaining the age of 6; years, by order of the Pension Board, if deemed for the best int«ests of the service.
D. Kx months' notice shall be given to eveiy employee prior to his retire- ment, naming the date of the same and the amount of the Service Penuon awarded
E. The amount of the Service Pension shall be determined by:
(1) The average monthly salary or wages during the last 10 yean of con- tinuous service.
(a) The number of yean continuously in the service.
(j) The character and quality (rf the service.
The Service Pension shall be one per cent (1%) of the average salary or wages during the last 10 years of continuous service, for every year of continuous service.
The minimum Service Pension shall be taaoo per month and the maximum, f 100.00 per month.
The Pension Board may, with the approval of the Board of Directors, increase by not to exceed one-fourth the Service Penuon, so computed, in an exceptional case of specially meritorious service; provided that in no case shall the pennon when so increased, exceed f loaoo per month.
F. Should the employee, upon reaching the retirement age, be in receipt of compensation from the Workmen's Compensation Fund or from the Company under any obligation created by law or by contract or from insurance paid for by the Company, for permanent partial disability due to accident arising out of and in thecounc<^employment by the Company, the computation shall be based upon his salary or wages prior to said accident at the rate of 1% thereof for each year of continuous service and the pension awarded shall not be for a larger amount than will, together with the compensation for permanent partial disability, be equal to the sum, so computed; the intention being that the pension awarded shall iwt bring the total income of the employee from compensation and pension above the
487
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
pcntion that wmild be awarded od the baiUof ulafy or wages receivable before the accident.
G. Employcei who ihill, upon reaching the retirEinent age, be in receipt of benefit for total dUabiJity from the Relief Fund, shall be eligible for Service PennM the Hmc a* if *til1 in the cmploymeiii of the Company; and upon the award of Hich Service Pension the payment of further benefiti from the Relief Fund ihaD cease, in accordance with the Regulations of the Relief Department.
H. Time during which an employee is in receipt of benefit for total disabilit)' from the Relief Fund shall be counted the same as service, in computing the amoonl of Service Pension, which shall in such case be based upon his wages or salaiy just prior to such total disablement at the rate of r% thereof for each year of continuoos
1. The Pension Board may deny or withhold a Service Pension in any case of criminal or grossly immoral conduct.
J. A retired employee to whom a Service Pension has been awarded may, without forfeiting such Pension, engage in other employment or business unkss advised by the Pension Board that the same is deemed prejudicial to the intensts of the Company; but he will not be re-empkiyed by the Company.
K. No Service Pension shall be allowed or paid to any person who shall have enforced or sought to enforce against the Company any claim for personal injoiy, other than undn the Regulations of the Relief Department against the Wotk- men's Compensation Fund because of any personal injury received within five yean prior to date of retirement.
L. Service shall be deemed to be continuous from the dale of last employ- ment. Leave of absence, suspension for cause, lay-off (not exceeding one year) on account of dull business or dismissal followed by reinstatement within one year ^alt not be deemed a break in continuity of service, but such time out of service shall be deducted in computing the period of continuous service.
M. The period of continuous service shall be reckoned from the dale c( last employment to the dale of retirement, eliminating in the result any fraction of a month over.
N. Retirement shall be from the first day of the month neat following the month in which the retirement age is reached, provided the six months' prior notice has been given, as required; otherwise from the first day of the calendar month neat succeeding the expiration of the six months' notice.
0. Service Pensions will be awarded only to employees who have been em- ployed for their entire lime and services by the Company and not to employees of subsidiary companies. Time in the service of a subsidiary company shall not be reckoned in computing the period of continuous service.
P. Employees who were continuously in the service of the Company prior ta July I, 1908, for two years or longer, shall be deemed to have an unbroken period of service from their first employment by the Company to said dale; provided, ia each such case, the aggregate absence from the service from such first empbyment to said date does not exceed two and one-half years. In every case, however, all absences shall be deducted in computing the period of ct
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IV. PENSIONS TO DEPENDENTS
A. Upon the death
(a) From my cause, of any person in receipt of a Service Pennon from the Pension Fund of the Company; or
(b) If caused by accident arising out of and in the course of hii employment by the Company, of any employee whose dependent or dependents or any Other person m persons, if any, who might be legally entitled to claim, shall release the Company from all other liability, if any; or
<c) If not caused by such accident, of any member of the Rdief Department who comes within Regulation NIB, who has been such fw at least two years and who is, at the time of his death in the empkiyment of the Company or in recdpt of total disability benefit from the Relief Fund or of any person in receipt of total disability compensation from the Workmen's Compensation Fund;
Pensions to Dependents shall be awarded as follows:
(i) Thesumof {ijo.oo payableimmediatdyuponreceiptof proof of death.
(i) To the wife or dependent husband of the deceased empbyee (if married to the deceased before totally disabled or at least five years before awarded a Service Pension) until death or remarriage (irith two years' pension upon remarriage) 30% of the average wages or salary of the deceased employee prior to his total disability, or 8a% of his Service Pension, as the case may be, pins 10% thereof additional for the support of each of his children under the age of t6 years until such child shall have attained such age.
()] If no such wife or dependent husbaitd survive, then i;% of such wages or salary or so% of the Service Pension of the deceased for the support of each of bis children under the age of 16 years until such child shall have attained such age.
(4) To each of the (a) grandchildren, (b) parents and (c) grandparents of the deceased employee, in each case only if actually and principally dependent upon him for support, 10% of his such wages or salary or jo% of his Service Pension during continuance of such dependency.
Should pensions for the support of children together with penuon (if any) to wift or dependent husband, exceed 60% of his wages or salary or 100% ol his Service Pension, the pension for the support of each child shall be reduced pro rati so that the total pensions payable shall not exceed such 60% or tDO%, as the case may be. If pensions to other dependents, together with penuon (if any) to wife or dependent husband and pensionsfor the support of children, exceed 60% of his such wages or salaiy or toc^o '^ hi* Service Pension, the pension to each other such dependent shall be reduced pro rata so that the total pensions payable shall not exceed such 60% or 100%, as the case may be. If the pensions for the support of children and the pensions (if any) to wife or dependent husband aggregate 60% of his such wages or salary or 100% of his Service Pension, no pension shall be payable to any other dependent.
B. Excess of wages or salary over fioo.oo per month shall not be taken into account in computing Pensions for Dependents.
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C. Should any person to whom otherwise a Pennoa for a Dependent wwU be awarded, be a rendent of any UMintiy other than the United States or Cinidi. the award nuy. at the diicretioD of tlie PeoMon Board, be for four yean' peBMa (but not exceeding the maiimuin aggr^ate, were the peniion paid monthly) of Ibe amount computed a* directed in Sub-section A of this section, payable in oae nm.
GENERAL RULES AND REGULATIONS
A. Every person to whom a pension has been or shall be awarded, mtal notify the Secretary of the Pension Department of any and all changes of residtnce or of pott-office address; and must furnish, as a conditi«i precedent to the paynKU of each sum due on account of pension, proof that be survives and is otbcrwite entitled.
B. Eveiy person claiming a pension as a Dependent must furnish proof of fact and date of marriage or of relationship, of dependency and of all other facts that may be required to establish his right to claim.
C. Every person, claiming a Pension as a Dependent, must, as a oKtditioo precedent to receiving any payment under any award, execute and offer and be ready to deliver and actually deliver upon notice of such award a full and complete release, in such form as the Company may require, of all liability (if any) of dte Company because of the death of the empbyee or pensioner, other than for the pay- ment of the pension so awarded.
D. All pensions awarded heretofore or hereafter against the Pension Fund are hereby declared to be Spendthrift or Alimentary Trusts, created and maintained for the support of the ccstuu que irusteot and secured by the Pension Fund held in Trust by the Company. No assignment, mortgage, pledge or antidpition of any such pension or of any payments to become due ihereuitder will be recogoiied by the Pension Department or the Company, or in any way bind or be valid against the Pension Fund.
E. Every employee who leaves the service of the Company, whether volua- tarily or in consequence of dismissal or discharge forfeits entirely his eligibility for Service Pension and the eligibility of his wife, dependent husband, children, and other dependents for Pensions to Dependents.
F. The action of the Board of Directon in establishing the Pension Depart- ment, in adopting these Regulations, and in making contributions to provide for the payment of pensions shall not be held or construed to create a contract with any employee or other person, prior to the actual award of a pension to him, or as con- ferring upon any officer, agent or employee of the Company a right to be retained in its service or a right to enforce any claim to a pension except for a pension duly awarded under these Regulations or as creating an obligation upon the Company to continue the Penuon Department or Pension Fund or to make contributions there- to, for the benefit of persons other than those to whom pensions shall have been awarded. The Company reserves its right and privilege to discharge at any time any officer, agent or employee as the interests of the Company may in its judgment so require, without incurring any liability because of any pension, not actually awarded; and also reserves its right to amend, alter or repeal at any time these
490
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R^ulatioiu or any of them as regards all persons who might otherwise become entitled to claim thereafter an award of pension thereunder, but not so as to affect the ri^t of any person to whom a pension shall have been awarded to receive all payments of the same promptly and in full or the obligation of the Company as trustee of the Pension Fund and guarantor of the sufficiency thereof and of the prompt and full payment of every pensioD awarded thereagainst.
H. These Regulations may be amended, altered or repealed at any special meeting of the Board of Oirectors, called for the purpose; but do such amendment, alteration or repeal shall affect pensions theretofore awarded or the liability of the Pension Fund or of tbe Company in respect thereto, except that the Company may at any time be released from further liability thereunder by:
I. Nominating, by and with theapptovalof a judgeof acourt of All^beny County, State of Pennsylvania of competent jurisdiction, a trustee for the Pension Fund, to hold and administer the same as herein provided for the benefit of all persons to whom pensions shall have been awarded and transfer- ring to such trustee funds and securities at least equal in value to all pensions awarded and then in force, as determined by the actuary of the State iniutance department of Pennsylvania; or
3. Purchasing annuities for all persons to whom such pensions shall have
been awarded and shall then be in force for amounts equal to such pensions
and payable for the same terms from a life insurance company licensed to do
business in the State of Pennsylvania.
In cither of such cases, the remainder and in any case when valuation shall
disclose a surplus of tbe Pension Fund over al) requirements, the surplus, may be
withdrawn by the Company.
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APPENDIX XIX
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE WORKING GIRLS
Charles C. Cooper Resident Director, Kingsley House, Pittsburgh
During the settlement season, 1910-1 1, a card index of the member- ship of Kingsley House was inaugurated. This was in addition to the regular book registration always kept at the settlement. During the succeeding year this card index disclosed the fact that while the number of giris remained the same a decided shift in the personnel took place.
To find the cause, a study of the girls who did not come back was made and the results published in the Kingdey House Record (Apn), 1913).
Various causes for the shift were found, notably a change in resi- dence: but one cause was not anticipated. Card after card was returned by the investigator with the information that the girl was working and "too tired to come to the settlement." Some 13 per cent of the girls attributed their non-attendance at the settlement house to the fact that they were working. A further study of these working girls was therefore made the following season, by Mabel Vogleson of the Kingsley staff.
The group does not represent any one class of girl workers nor the workers in any one department store, factory, or trade. They were neighborhood giri workers in various occupations. Some 12$ cases were studied and the results tabulated.
In no sense has this investigation been made with any purpose of painting the shadows dark or of obtaining special data for legislative fights; it represents a study by the settlement house made with reference to its own routine work, the startling results of which were not anticipated.
White it is not safe to generalize for the whole city from this one study, nevertheless it seems fairly well established that in one of the poorersectionsof Pittsburgh, the Hill District, many working girls are not receiving a living wage and are working longer hours than is safe for tbote who are to become the mothers of the future citizens. 492
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The tables which follow show hours and wages in connection with the ages and occupations of the la; girls.
|
NunAtT of |
Hours |
WORKED P |
..„„ |
Waoes per week |
|||
|
gitlt |
LoHgtit |
SborUil |
'''"''• |
Highta |
Loieta |
A^agt |
|
|
14 ■ |
7 |
i« |
I |
8H |
14-00 |
»3.oo |
JjJ4 |
|
3.00 |
|||||||
|
8» |
7.50 S.50 |
||||||
|
9K, |
7K |
i« |
3.J0 |
S.j6 |
|||
|
Over 17 , |
45 |
9-iab |
7K |
4-00 |
S.69 |
||
|
Total . |
"35 |
io}4 |
7 |
m |
fiaoo |
Jaoo |
fV09 |
■ One giri works 13K hours on Saturday. bOnegirlworksfromninctoiahounpcrday; t
|
Hours w |
>RKBO |
Wages per |
|||
|
NutKberof girh |
PERD |
AY |
|||
|
Longta |
SborUa |
Hifbtit |
Laatil |
||
|
Wrapper . |
,, |
8 |
»5.oo |
U-iO |
|
|
34 |
J.00 |
||||
|
to |
9-13 « |
||||
|
Slock prl . . |
6 |
9 |
8 |
3JXI |
|
|
Office worker |
|||||
|
Stope worker |
lOj^ |
8.00 |
|||
|
38 |
7 |
||||
|
All ffrls . . . |
135 |
.3 |
7 |
liaoo |
f3.00 |
■ One girl works i3>^ hours on Saturday.
■>0nly one received }io, the two next highest received ^.00; tti pay then dropped to f6.oo, and lower.
■= One worked from 9 to 11 hours per day, next highest gK hours, d Only one received }io.
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APPENDIX XX
BUREAU OF SAFETY. SANITATION. AND WELFARE, UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION
(From statements supplied by C. L Close, Manager) The Bureau of Safety, Sanitation, and Welfare of the United States Steel Corporation has been in operation since 191 1. This Bureau acts as a central station in obtaining infonnation and disseminating it among the subsidiary companies. It carries on the administrative work of both the Committee of Safety and the Committee on Sanitation. It distributes to the subsidiary companies comparative statements on accident pre- vention, compiled from reports sent in by them periodically, so that they may benefit by each other's experience. The Bureau is constantly in communication with municipal, state, and national authorities, with other employers of labor, and with various persons engaged or interested in this work. From many sources it obtains information of value on these subjects, and keeps the subsidiary companies informed of the latest and best methods in accident prevention and welfare work. In this way the Bureau aids materially in coordinating the efforts made by the sub- sidiary companies to improve the conditions of their employes.
It was realized from the start that cooperation between those carrying on this work is one of the most essential features. With this in mind, there has been established in the Bureau, located at 71 Broadway, New York City, a museum of safety appliances, together with photo graphs showing the improved conditions under which employes of the subsidiary companies work and live.
Although this Bureau was installed primarily for the benefit of the subsidiary companies of the United States Steel Corporation, many other employers of labor have written for information or have visited the Bureau.
Safetv Work Outline of Safety Organization op THi United States Steel CaRPOKATioii /. UniUd Slalts SUil Corporation Committee of Safety.
Cuualty managers of all subsidiary companies called together May, 1906, to discUH accident prevention.
Subsidiary companies actively took up safety work by detailing special nteo for the work.
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Committee of Safety organized in March, 1908.
An officer of the Steel Corporation acts u chairman ar»d seven other members represent the larger subsidiary companies.
Meets quarterly, either in New York or at one of the planti or mines.
Coitducti inspections by having an inspector from one company inspect another company's operations.
Also makes inspections personally.
Studies alt serious accidents and makes recommendations against further occurrences, not alone to the company in whose woiks the accident happened, but 10 all companies.
Passes upon safety devices and makes recommendations as to their use-
SUBSIDIARV COMPANV, SAFETY COMMITTEES
II. Cmtral Safely Committtti.
Organiied shortly after the Steel Corporation Committee.
Made up of important officials from each of the plants, mines or railroad divisions.
Meet monthly.
Duties similar to the Sted Corporation Safety Committee, but each with reference to its particular company only.
Cooducts inler-mill inspections. ///. Plant Safay CommitUti.
Organiied shortly after Steel Corporation Committee.
Made up of important officials of the plant.
Meet monthly and in some cases daily.
Make regular inspections of the plant.
Duties similar to those of the Central Safety Committee, but each ivith ref- erence to its particular plant only. ly. Dtpartnuni and Special CoMmiUtes.
Organiied shortly after Steel Corporation Safety Committee.
Made up of foremen, master mechanics and skilled workmen.
Meet weekly or monthly as the case may be.
Make periodical inspections of the plant.
Make special investigations of particular problems.
Safety committees have been organized for practically every oper- ation throughout the subsidiary companies of the United States Steel Corporation; 4,678 employes were members of these committees during 1913. The personnel of these committees, especially those made up of workmen, is changed periodically in order to extend the individual interest in safety.
In an endeavor to eliminate accidents due to the carelessness of the
workmen, a very active campaign of education was starteil by all of the
subsidiary companies some time ago. Entertainments are given at the
different plants or mines. All employes and their families are invited.
495
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nil
1 :«
• 5 -i*
s s 3
496
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SAFETY, SANITATION, AND WELFARE
NATIONAL TUBE COMPANY
CHART SHOWING INCREASEa AHO DECREAflEB IN SERIOUa AND FATAL ACCIDENTS 1BO0 TO t&M INCLUSIVE, USING YEAR tSOV M A BASE.
(S WOKTHB OMLY>
NATIONAL TUBE COMPANY
CHART SHOWINa INCREASC8 AND OECREABEt IN TOTAL TIMC LOST ACCIDENTS 180B TO IB 14 INCLUSIVE. USINO YEAR 1B08 AS A BABE.
1 SIS^^BMi^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ni
t S I S^^^^^^^H^^
1B14^^^^»» Co UOKTHS ONLY>
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Typical unsafe practices in contrast with the proper and safe method of doing the work are shown. Motion pictures and lantern slides are cnh ployed and are relieved by music and other things of an entertaining char- acter. Twenty-one such entertainments were given by <»ie company thii year.
Many other plans have been inaugurated, the most recent at which is the giving of monthly prizes to eacb man in the departments having the best records for safety; one company has established a bonu plan which applies to all foremen. Cash bonuses, based upon the per cent of reduction in accidents in each particular department, are paid at the end of the year to each foreman. In some ctmipanies, suggestioa boxes arc located at convenient places throughout the plant for the benefit of at) employes who are not members of committees but desire to make suggestions. Prizes are awarded periodically to those making the best suggestions.
The cost of safety work in 191 j was |66o,;9J.oo.
Serious accidents per i ,000 employes are now j8yi per cent less than in 1906, when this work was first taken up by the Corporation. This means that 3,37) men, who might have been injured under earlier cmdi- lions, were saved from serious injury during the year.
Sanitary Work
The work in sanitation has been organized in a manner ahnosl identical with the safety organization, except that the Sanitation Com- mittee is chosen from among the presidents of the subsidiary companies, with an officer of the United States Steel Corporation as oneof its members. This committee administers the work through a sub-committee compcncd largely of technical representatives from eacb of the subsidiary companies designated by the presidents of their respective companies. In thiswork trained sanitary engineers and experts from outside the United States Steel Corporation organization are employed as occasion arises, and in some cases have been attached permanently to the organization of cer- tain of the subsidiary companies.
The committee selected for first attention the purification at drinking water and the disposal of fecal matter. Each subsidiary compaay had an analysis made of all water used for drinking purposes, about i.joo analyses having been made. In cases where the water was found impure, the source was abandoned and a new supply obtained. These analyses are now made twice each year and oftener where there is any questkm as to the purity of the supply. In the mining towns where springsandwdb
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SAFETY, SANITATION, AND WELFARE
are used, extra precautions are taken to avoid pollution by surface water or otherwise.
The common drinking cup is rapidly being replaced with sanitary drinking fountains; 483 such fountains were installed during 1912.
The investigation of water supplies and the installation of drink- ing water systems alone cost $t3o,ooo.oo during 1913.
Where there are no sewerage systems, especially in mining camps, special types of out-door closets have been installed, arranged and designed with the idea of preventing soil pollution and flies from coming in contact with the excrement. Interchangeable and removable cans are used, and are collected periodically and hauled in a specially constructed wagon to a point where the feces is disposed of by incineration or in septic tank. 91D new closets were built during the year 1911, and 1,763 old ones were remodeled and made sanitary.
Water Closets, Wash and Lockek Rooms
During 191), there were installed in the operations of the subsi<^ iary companies, 1,19) wash basins, aio showers, i$,47r lockers. There were also installed 333 separate urinals in addition to a large number of water closet installatrans.
The cost of providing washing facilities for 1913 was {141,000.00.
The total cost for sanitary work in the United States Steel Cor- poration's companies last year was y564.977.00. While these figures cover the entire Steel Corporation, a large proportion of it was in the Pittsburgh District. This is the extension of work started in earlier years, and while all plants and operations are not equipped up to our present standards in these respects, all of them are equipped in some man- ner to meet the entire needs of the employes.
Restaurants for the employes have been installed at a few of the Pittsburgh plants. This work is still in the experimental stage.
General specifications have been prepared by* the committee, covering the general sanitary requirements for water closets, urinals, and drinking fountains. These are to be followed by all subsidiary companies when putting in new installations or making repairs to old installations.
The committee is now making a special study of the following subjects:
I— Fly prevention.
2 — Malaria prevention.
) — Proper ventilation and light in plants and houses.
4 — Provisions for proper heating systems in plants.
i — Provisions for regulation of milk supply at company houses or camps.
fr— Provisions for dust removal at plants, including roadways and pavements.
7 — Provisions for sterile ice. storage and distiibuiion. 499
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Pension Fund On Jan. i, 1914, there were 1.092 active pension cases under the United States Steel and Carnegie Pension Fund.
The 435 employes retired in igi) arc classified as follows:
Compuboiy Retirement $4 (<i-7%)
Retirement at Request of Employe . 3$9 (61.0%) Retirement at Request of Employing Officer '7 j ^7^^
Permanent Incapacity 7S ('7-o%)
Total 4>» ("»%)
For these 43j cases the
Avenge age was ^IP yea"
Average service was aS.Sa years
Average pension was }30.8j
It may be of interest toknow that 49 (11.} percent) of those retired in 191) had served more than forty years, and nine of them for periods ranging fram forty- five to fifty-tivo years.
The amendment to Rule No. 7, effective January 1, 191), reducing the ser- vice requirement from twenty years to fifteen years, for cases of permanent total incapacity, permitted the Fund to place twenty-six of these distressful cases 00 the pension roll. Wirbout that generous provision it is llkdy that about half of this number could never have participated in the benefits of the Pension Fund, because of insufficient service. In a few other cases of permanent total incapacity, due, in most instances, to tubercular infection, rest and specialized treatment were sug- gested, with the result that in two cases, at least, the employes recovered suffidently to be able to return to the service. In two or three others the progren of the dis- ease seems to have been arrested and it is hoped that a result, similar to that in the other cases, will be achieved.
Employes' Stock Subscription Plan On December 31, 1913, more than 3$,036 employes were slock- hdders under this Man. Their aggregate holdings amounted to more than 146463 shares of stock.
Voluntary Accident Relief Plan There has been practically no change in the Voluntary Accident Relief Plan since its adoption in May, 1910. A year later, or in May, 1911, the maximum relief per day for married men was changed from I3.00 per day to {i.jo per day. The amount paid to and for injured wwk- men in 1913 was }3,;64,839. The accompanying charts show compara- tively accidents and relief for the entire Steel Corporation, years 1906 to [913 inclusive; and for one of the large plants of the Pittsburgh District.
■d^yCoogle
APPENDIX XXI
THE PITTSBURGH MORALS EFFICIENCY COMMISSION
Rudolph I. Coffee
In 1912 came a further* and more radical turning point in pub- lic policy toward prostitution in Pittsburgh, — the fifth distinct stage in twenty years. The results of each have stood out so clearly that Pittsburgh's experience should be of practical value in the present country-wide study of the problem.
I. Twenty years ago Pittsburgh was known as a "wide open" town ; and it was so in every sense of the term.
II. Then through a decade or more prostitution flourished less brazenly under the cover of police regulation, which had in view only the suppression of disorder and the removal of disorderly houses from resi- dence districts. And because it was kept out of the public eye, vice grew steadily and was able to intrench itself strongly in a business way. The power for evil of the underworld under police supervision and protection was the same in Pittsburgh as in every other city where similar methods are in force. It had the same corrupting influence not only on the com- munity but on the police and in politics.
ill. In 1906 came the administration of Mayor George W. Guth- rie, who realized that the solution of the entire question was too big for any one administration, but whose clear-cut policies of regulation are set forth by Mr. Forbes. At the end of his term the superintendent of police estimated that 334 houses had been closed. There was thus established a new standard which Pittsburgh did not forget when the reaction came. Mayor Guthrie permitted the police to enforce their regulations by raids. From time to time a small army of police would surround a district and carry hundreds of men and women to the station houses. This method had the effect of driving many prostitutes to the residence districts, where they lived in apartments and carried on their trade quietly. No effort was made by the police to fdlow them there. Subsequent experience *Sce Forbes, James, op. cit. P. )0$ ol this vdume. 501
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
has shown that raids were unnecessary. Because almost every aa in the life of a prostitute is a violation of law, a simple pcdice order, with honesty of purpose and public opinion back of it, is enough without raids to enforce any regulation. If this fails, the criminal courts can be resorted to for drastic remedy.
IV. Following Mr. Guthrie's administration from 1909 to 1911, under another mayor, Pittsburgh again was a "wide open" town. With it came all of the attendant evils, debauching the community, corrupting the police, and tainting politics. Conditions became so intolenble that the citizens at large revolted. The Voters' League, the same organtutkn that put an end to graft in Councils by locking up more than a hundred members of that body, led the fight. It appeared before the state legis- tature and made the question of public morals one of the chief demands for the new charter which gave Pittsburgh a new Council. The league early in 1912 forced the trial before this new Council of the directorof the department of public safety, charging him with malfeasance in office and mismanagement of his oflTicial duties. He was convicted of mismanage- ment. The league had the substantial backing of the leading churches. On one Sunday its charges were read and discussed from more than two hundred pulpits. The value of the churches' co-operation in this move- ment can not be over estimated. In fact, it would have failed utterly without such support.
V. More important, these exposures and this trial so stirred the people of Pittsburgh that they, in 1912, were ready to lake up actively constructive work in dealing with prostitution.
At the instance of a few citizens, a bill was introduced in Coundb asking for the appointment of twelve members to serve without pay on a Morals Efficiency Commission. The time was most opportune. Certain councilmen bdieved it politically expedient to remove the police from politics before the campaign for mayor in 1913. Others voted for the bill as a forward step in municipal affairs. Mayor Magee signed the bill, appointed twelve citizens of standing, and supported the commission loyally throughout its work. The commission organized on May 1, 1913, by electing Dr. Frederick A. Rhodes, president, and George Sdbd, secre- tary. Three of the members were women. All three great religions were recognized, and the personnel included two physicians, three lawyers, ooe professor, one minister, one social worker, two women club workers, and one business man.
"nie commission had no definite powers. It merely made sugges- tions to the police department, but these were carried out by the superin- tendent of police. A careful survey of the city, including both All^Jieny
503
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MORALS EFFICIENCY COMMISSION
and Pittsburgh, disclwed 247 houses of prostitution, on 34 streets, with 347 madams, and approximately t ,000 girls. At the end of eighteen months of activity by the commission, this number has been reduced to 71 bouses, on six streets, with 71 madams, and 3^3 girls.
The commission set to work with an c^n mind. Without passing on the question of segregation, it adopted the practical method of pro- ceeding step by step, choosing as a motto "gradual restriction leading to ultimate elimination." It first recommended to the police department that all houses of prostitution in residential sections of the city should be eliminated as soon as possible, particularly in the streets where the poorer people live; that commercial prostitution in tenement houses, alcMig a street car line, near any schod, hospital, or charitable institution, must be stamped out. AH assignation houses were to be closed; and all bouses with colored inmates receiving white visitors. No new houses were to be opened, and no new madam nor girl was to be henceforth permitted to enter a house. This rule was later extended to prohibit the return to Pittsburgh of persons who had gone elsewhere and wished to come back. No landlady nor girl was allowed to keep a pimp.
Liquor and soft drinks were banished absdutely, and every form of dancing, show, or music was strictly forbidden. Minors were denied admission; peddlers were to be kept out. Every insanitary place was to be closed, and houses paying exorbitant rents wen recommended for closing.
These were preliminary moves. Each was recommended as soon as it was felt that it could be properly enforced. As a result, the backbone of commercialized vice was broken. If a house disregarded any rule, — admitted minors, for example, or kept liquor under cover, — it was penalized for the first offense and closed for the second. This pro- gram stripped the houses of every form of allurement and attraction other than sexual pleasure.
To see that the police carried out orders, five of the nine men on the commission made frequent trips to the segregated district, and never less than once a week, two members visited it with detectives.
The attempt to handle the medical end of prostitution ended in failure. The commission recommended that every girl submit to a weekly examination, but the certificate merely furnished a false sense of security to men, as the girl might become infected an hour later. The medical examination, at best, was none too careful. Therefore, the commission withdrew its original order, and merely advised the girls, for their own good, to be examined weekly.
The commission looked forward to the reporting of venereal dis-
503
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
eases as a hopeful measure, but that lay outside of the powers of the niiuiid- palhy. Other practical measures for keeping track of the situation irtiick it brought forward were recommendations that all transfer companies report the names of persons moving furniture, giving cAd and new ad- dresses; that lodging bouses be licensed; emptoyment agencies roistered; and policemen required to report daily the names of persons moving from and into their beats.
it must noc be supposed that the commission came to regard ntber l^islation or enforcement a cure for the social evil but, throughout its work, laid stress on education. It endeavored to anmse the people about the dangers of venereal disease, but paid even more attention, on the pre- ventive side, to instniction in sex hygiene. Many prominent churches of Pittsburgh were open to members of the commission; they delivered addresses before all the leading women's clubs; started a movcmeDt for instruction in the high schools; and constantly sought to awaken a deep interest in the subject throughout the city. Physicians were urged to revise their ethics with respect to patients having venereal disease, and one member of the cc»nmission wrote a play, "The Leper." It deals with the educational value of sex education, and the folly of phy- sicians remaining silent when a word may prevent an innocent rnxnan from marrying a moral leper.
Before the first year was up the commission was ready for another drastic step, and voted in favor of closing all houses on the North Side. The 91 houses in operation there had been decreased by the various recom- mendations to 2;, and on May i, 1913, all of these were closed. Evety house had been visited in February by members of the commission, and the girls had been spoken to individually. They were urged to save money and think of their future. Every girl in the Pittsburgh houses was similarly spoken to and told that the same recommendation might at any time be made for Pittsburgh. The results in closing Allegheny and cleansing other infested districts were so satisfactory to the com- mission that, had it remained in power, it would in the near future have voted to close the entire city.
As a result of ail these activities, we found the frequenting of houses of prostitution radically decreased the second year. With 70 per cent of the houses closed it might be imagined that the 30 per cent remaining in- creased their business. The reverse was true, going to show that not the desire of man but the leal of com mere iaiizers is at the bottom of the trafik. One salutary effect was that many boys have never visited these houses owing to the strict watch for minors.
The commission was convinced by its experience that the handling
504
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MORALS EFFICIENCY COMMISSION
of the social evil can best be done by a special body, created for that pur- pose and co-operating with the police. While it had no real legal rights, it was backed by an authority higher even than the law itself— an aroused public opinion. To give such a body permanence, to give it power when public interest should in the future be engrossed in other community prob- lems, and to equip tt to take up problems of education as well as enforce- ment, the commtssicm secured the passage, in the legislature of 1913, of a bill * providing for a Morals Bureau to consist of seven members, three of wh<Hn may be women, to serve without pay. A superintendent of morals was provided for, under the orders of the Morals Bureau, with salary of $3,000 and a staff under him to handle the work.
Thus, new municipal machinery has been created to relieve the police of the responsibility for dealing with a problem which the wisest men of all ages have as yet failed to solve, and Pittsburgh is entering upon a sixth stage of public policy in dealing with the baffling evil.
The law went into effect January I, 1914, and what use is to be made of the new machinery, what policy employed, is in the hands of a new administration, — and ultimately, of the people of the city.
ACT CREATING A BUREAU OF MORALS AN ACT providing for the creation of the Bureau of Public Morals in
the Department of Public Safety in cities of the second class,
defining its purposes, and providing for the payment of expenses
incurred thereby.
Section 1. Be it enacted, &c.. That there shall be, and is hereby created, a Bureau of Public Morals in the Department of Public Safety in cities of the second class, for the purpose of investigating and acting upon all questions and conditions arising from sex relationship which affect public morals.
Section 2. That the bureau, hereby created, shall be governed by a board of seven (7) directors, three (3) of whom may be women, appointed by the mayor of the city, and confirmed by the council. The directors shall elect from without their own body a superintendent, who shall give his entire time to the work of the bureau, and shall receive therefor a salary of not exceeding three thousand (fs.ooo) dollars per year. The directors shall be appointed for the term of four years, and shall be subject to removal at the pleasure of the mayor. Vacancies
* A second bill was introduced making a bealtb certificate a prerequisite in granting marriage licenses but was passed only in a compromise form. A tntnl bill, to report venerMi diseues as any other communicable disease is reported, was defeated and will be presented again at the next session.
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
in their offices shall be filled in the same manner as the appointments are made.
Section 3. The board of directors shall have full power to direct the work and operation of the bureau; they shall have power to investigate all conditions growing out of sex relationship affecting public morals; and they shall have full power to enforce all laws, and prosecute all viola- tions of law, in matters of sex relationship; and for that purpose they shall exercise such pc^ice power as may be necessary. The business and pdicies of the board shall be determined by a majority vote of the whole board.
Section 4. For the purpose of carrying out the operation of the bureau, there shall be detailed such policemen and detectives as the board may require and sdect for its purpose from the regular police and detective forces, subject to the approval of the director of said Department of Public Safety, and during the time that they are so detailed they shall be subject to the orders of the board of directors, exercised through its superintendent, and shall be responsible to said board, and shall receive the regular pay as provided by law. The board of directors may, frixn time to time, appoint and employ such additional investigators as they may deem necessary.
Section j. The board of directors shall elect from its own number a chairman, and employ whatever clerical help may be necessary to enable it to carry out the purposes of this act.
Section 6. All acts or parts of acts inconsistent with the pro- visions of this act are hereby repealed.
Approved — The 37th day of June, A. D. 191J.
JOHN K. TENER.
506
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APPENDIX XXII
STATISTICAL EXCERPTS FROM THE REPORT OF THE
PITTSBURGH MORALS EFFICIENCY COMMISSION.
1913
Investigations conducted by the Commission showed that about 600 prostitutes in Pittsburgh had come in equal proportion from almost everywhere, the greatest number being from the nearest points. Pitts- burgh gave birth to 154 out of fin; surrounding cities to 29; Philadelphia to 10; the remainder of Pennsylvania to i$i ; a total of ^44. From Ar- kansas came i; California, a; Colorado, 3; Connecticut, i; Georgia, i; Illinois, 4; Indiana, 2; Iowa, 1; Kansas, i; Kentucky, 5; Louisiana, 2; Maryland, 7; Massachusetts, 2; Michigan. 2; Missouri, 2; Nebraska, t; New Jersey, 4; New York, 54; North Carolina, 1 ; Ohio, 49; Tennessee. 4; Texas, 7; Virginia, 7; Vermont, i ; West Virginia, 23; a total of 1 s?. There were no foreigners — from Austria, ji;Canada,2; Denmark, i:England, 3: Germany, 16; Holland, i; Ireland, ); Italy, 9; Russia. 18; Scotland, 3; Sweden, 3; Switzeriand, 1. Many of them are virtually female vagrants with criminal tendencies.
Our inquiry as to the previous occupation and income of ;o6 pros- titutes revealed that 169 had been in domestic service at wages from |i. JO to 17 a week; jj had worked in factories at from$3 tofioa week; 51 had been clerks at from $) to fS; ;o had been waitresses at from $3 to $7; 14 had been seamstresses at from fj to f 10; [4 had worked in laundries at frCMnl3to|6; 10 had been nurse girls at from$i.jotof4;5 had been tele- phone operators at $3.50; 4 had been flower girls at ^ to ls; 4 had done office work at from $2 to (15; 3 had been milliners at 16; 3 had been cashiersat f6 tof 13-so; 2 were chorus girls at |io to $12; one had been a manicure at $y one an actress at (40, one a governess at f;, one a can- vasser at ^, one a fur maker at $4, and one a music teacher, income not ^ven. But 1 18 had come directly from homes, having never engaged in any gainful employment. Low wages are an indirect factor as they pro- duce an unattractive home life, parental ne^ect, a taste for cheap amuse- ments and strong stimulants, and similar elements in the psychology of poverty. From this point of view the low wages of men are as much to blame as the low wages of women.
507
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
Ten women gave their average weekly income as from f$ to K: 36 from $g to $10; 8t from fi 1 to f 15; 139 from |i6 to {20; 93 from |io to $35; 30 from $2^ to|3o; 36 from f^^totAO; 2$from(4; to^jo; 17 from $SS to f75; 8 from $80 to |ioo. The prostitute will rarely acknowledge her full income, but fairly dependable reports from 458 in Pittsburgh at the beginning of 1913 show their share of the traffic amounted to about f 10,000 weekly. As the share of the keeper of the house is the same, that would mean I1.040.000 annually as a tribute to the social evil, or about fi. $00,000 (excluding the equally huge drink bill), when there were over 300 houses and about t .000 inmates, a tax of fs on every man, woman, and child in the city. Out of 558 Pittsburgh women 406 had never had any children: out of the 153 who had. there were 66 who had one child living. [9 who had two living, and five who had three or four living.
Of 360 women both parents were dead, of only 87 both were living. The mothers of 103 and the fathers of 73 were living. Two came from wealthy families. 10 were well-to-do. i$3 in moderate circumstances, and 3 $4 poor.
Out of 474 Pittsburgh women 1 entered a house at fourteen, 1 at fifteen, 3 at sixteen, 8 at seventeen. 44 at nineteen, 75 at twenty, 113 at twenty-one. 163 at twenty-two, 64 at twenty-five to twenty-eight, and IJ at twenty-nine to thirty-five. It will be seen that 257 entered at the age of eighteen to twenty-one, and only 317 at all other ages. It is a corollary of this that most of the women entering this life are single; there were 359 such in the above enumeration, 1 19 who had been married but were separated or divorced from their husbands, and 84 who were widows.
While earlier marriage would, undoubtedly, check the tendency to prostitution in a large measure, its bonds are by no means a guarantee of virtue. Out of 34; fallen women in Pittsburgh, 95 were seduced by married men. and 250 by single men.
Nor do the churches appear as any restraining influence. There were found 373 Protestants. 18S Catholics, 67 Jewesses, 1 Dunkard, 1 Spiritualist, 1 Freethinker and 1 Agnostic. They came from all walks of life. There were 13; daughters of laborers. 70 of fanners, 39 of miners, 21 of clerks, 18 of carpenters, 17 of contractors. 13 of mechanics. 11 of engineers, 10 of merchants, 8 of tailors, 8 of painters, 8 of blacksmiths, 7 of firemen. 6 of mill workers. 6 of stone masons, 6 of machinists, four each of shoe makers, pumpers, plumbers, and brakemen, three each of saloon keepers and officers, two each of bookkeepers, schod teachers, florists, cooks, milkmen, bakers, attorneys, hotel keepers and mill superintendents; one each of a postmaster, a real estate agent, a driver, a physician, a conductor, a waiter, a broker, a rabbi, a plasterer, a pattern maker, a bar-
■d^yCoogle
EXCERFTS MORALS EFFICIENCY REPORT
tender, a cigar maker, an oil driller, an attorney, an editor, an actor, a manager, a glazier, and a glass worker. Eighty-five did not even know their fathers' occupations, indicating how largely lax family ties are re- sponsible for female delinquency.
Out of ; i8 Pittsburgh prostitutes, aged from twenty-one to forty- eight, there was i aged twenty-one, 41 were twenty-two, 73 were twenty- three, 89 were twenty-four, $7 were twenty-five, 40 were twenty-six, 43 were twenty-seven, 39 were twenty-eight, 38 were twenty-nine, 33 were thirty, 21 were thirty-one to thirty-two. 34 were thirty-three to thirty- four, 12 were thirty-five to thirty-six, and 6 were thirty-nine to forty- eight. Over half, or 261, were under twenty-five years of age, and they looked <dder.
Only 1 13 were found who had been in the business over five years; only 18 who had been in it over nine years; only one who had been in it for twenty years. Out of a total of 491, 15 had been prostitutes from six to eight months; 133 from one to two years; 76 from two to three years; 68 from three to four years; 76 from four to five years; S3 from five to seven years; 47 from seven to ten years; s from ten to thirteen years; 8 from fourteen to eighteen years.
■d^yCoogle
APPENDIX XXIII
RECORDS OF REPEATERS
POLICE COURT, JAIL, AND WORKHOUSE RECORDS OF A
GROUP OF PETTY OFFENDERS IN PITTSBURGH,
SHOWING THE ENDLESS ROUND OF SHORT
TERM SENTENCES
Compiled by Frederick A. King
RED McHUGH* CouHTr Jail Record June, 1910-June, 1907 Committed 39 ti
Days
Nov. Nov. Nov.
March ) . Feb'y 4 .
ntbs, ij djiyt 1900
}»«. 2 .
igcS
Dec. 38 .
Nov. la .
Nov. 6 .
Aug. } .
May J? : Jan. s .
Aug. 16 . June 36 . June IS .
Central Police Court Record
June, 1910-Juiic 1909 Arraigned and discharged ) lime*
drunkenness discharged drunkenne» discharged
Nov. 3 arrested
4 drunkenness discharged
July I s arrested
16 drunkenness discharged
drunkcnnCM discharged
* Names fictiltous. 510
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RECORDS OF REPEATERS
Red McHuch «
Workhouse Record
1910-1870
93 Terms of ImpriMHimenl
Served a total of 13 years, 8 monthi
|
1910 |
Ci<ir(« |
Dayi |
,8g8 |
Ci«-(< |
D-y* |
|
M.y 1. |
vagrancy . |
■ 30 |
April ao |
disorderiy conduct |
■ JO |
|
igog |
Jan. 1 |
■ 90 |
|||
|
ManhTi |
vagrancy |
. 30 |
>897 |
||
|
i,oS |
Nov. a6 |
. 30 |
|||
|
Nov. 38 |
■ 30 |
Sept. ai |
■ 30 |
||
|
Oct. 7 |
disordetiy conduc |
- 30 |
July 7 |
disorderly conduct |
■ 30 |
|
Stpi. J |
■ 30 |
April 9 |
■ 30 |
||
|
Apnl 3 |
drunk . . |
- 30 |
Feb'y 3 |
. 30 |
|
|
Jan. 15 |
vagrancy |
. JO |
.896 |
||
|
/po? |
May ty |
vagrancy |
■ 30 |
||
|
July 10 |
. 30 |
March as |
disorderiy conduct |
■ 30 |
|
|
,,06 |
Jan. 8 |
. 30 |
|||
|
Sept. J, |
vagrancy |
. 30 |
K, '*« |
||
|
J«i» 7 |
. 30 |
Nov. 14 |
. 30 |
||
|
April II |
. 30 |
July 7 |
vagrancy . . |
■ 30 |
|
|
/po5 |
]une 1 |
disorderiy conduct |
■ 30 |
||
|
Aug. as |
disorderly conduc |
■ 30 |
K, '**^ |
||
|
June 9 |
vagrancy |
■ 30 |
Nov. 39 |
vagrancy . . |
■ 90 |
|
April s |
. 60 |
June 3 |
- 90 |
||
|
1904 |
Jan. 33 |
■ 90 |
|||
|
Nov. Vi |
• 90 |
/»P3 |
|||
|
Joly JO |
disorderly conduc |
. & |
Dec. aa |
. 30 |
|
|
April 17 'POJ |
" |
AfofX |
Nov. II Oct. 5 |
drunkenness '. vagrancy . . |
■ 30 ■ 30 |
|
May 15 |
vagrancy |
. 6 |
Match 3) |
. 30 |
|
|
Dayi |
disorderly conduct |
. 30 |
|||
|
April 1 |
■ 30 |
suspicious person |
■ JO |
||
|
ipoa |
Jan. ao |
vagrancy |
. 60 |
||
|
Aug. tj |
disorderly conduc |
■ 90 |
iSpa |
||
|
Jom <o |
vagrancy |
■ JO |
Cte. a Oct. ai |
■ JO |
|
|
IflOl |
vagrancy |
■ JO |
|||
|
Sept. 37 |
disorderly conduc |
. 60 |
S.pt. at |
.; i** |
|
|
Aug. ai |
vagrancy |
■ 30 |
Motifhi |
||
|
May 1; |
■ 30 |
Jan. 35 |
6 |
||
|
Mareliaa |
■ 30 |
iS,i |
Day, |
||
|
Feb'y i6 |
■ 30 |
Oct. 30 |
90 |
||
|
/poo |
Aug. 30 |
■ JO |
|||
|
Dec. JO |
, 30 ■ 90 |
"".sS |
■ 30 |
||
|
■ JO |
Jan. 7 |
- 90 |
|||
|
fJ99 |
MoiUbi |
tSdj |
|||
|
Nov. 78 |
. 6 |
D«:. 5 |
■ JO |
||
|
Days |
Sept. ai |
■ JO |
|||
|
Aug. 18 |
■ 90 |
Jan. 36 |
. 30 |
||
|
disorderiy conduc |
. 30 |
.SSi |
|||
|
■ 90 |
Ang ao |
90 |
|||
|
.S98 |
te z |
interfering with officer. 30 |
|||
|
Dee. 1 |
vagrancy |
30 |
suspicious person |
■ JO |
|
|
Aug. 9 |
exposing person |
. JO |
iSS} |
||
|
July 6 |
suspicious person |
■ 30 |
July 16 |
■ 30 |
.d,Google
WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
|
,a8i |
Ctoj* |
M4mtbi |
,878 Chart* |
|
Nov. 36 vagrancy Oct. 1 disorderly conduct |
|||
|
Oct. 4 |
April 26 |
||
|
J-,^; |
aiMult aod battery |
30 |
i^\ ■■ ■■ |
|
Sept. 39 |
vagrancy |
90 |
,S,6 |
|
■ JO |
|||
|
Feb'y 9 |
disord«riy conduct |
JO |
,S,i |
|
Aug. 4 |
- y> |
■«70 |
|
|
'879 |
|||
|
Aug. 9 |
|||
|
Day, |
J.«. 16 |
||
|
April . |
■ 90 |
||
|
Pemitentiarv Record |
|||
|
1866-69 |
|||
|
Served ) yean, 6 months |
Jan. I) Felonious auauTt and battery.
1910 May 19 Ma;^ 6
FebV 37 Jan. 1$
1909 Dec 30 Nov. 1 1 Oct. ao Sept. 37 Sept. 13 Sept. 5 Aug. 37 Aug. 3t July 19 June J May t7 April 34 April I) March 19 March 17
TOM MURPHY
County Jail Record
June. I9io-Jone. 1907
Cammitled 4$ times
Served a total of 4 months, 3 days
Oct. 30 . Oct.
Sept. aj .
Sept. 7 ■
Aug. 3S .
Aug. 18 .
July 39 .
June 4 .
1907
Dec. 17 .
Oct. 30 .
Oct. 4 .
Sept. 3j .
Sept. 1 .
Aug. 18 .
Aug. 8 .
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RECORDS OF REPEATERS
|
GERTRUDE SNOW |
||||
|
Workhouse Record |
||||
|
June, |
1910-June, 1900 |
|||
|
Police Court Record |
||||
|
June. |
1910-June. 1909 |
|||
|
Arraigned 1 1 times |
||||
|
1910 fe ;| April 16 Match 17 March 6 |
Discharged |
|||
|
diwrderiy conduct |
ID or )o days to work house |
|||
|
drunk |
10 or 10 days in ail |
Committed |
||
|
diiord«riy conduct |
10 or JO days in ail |
Committed |
||
|
drunk |
iDonodayiin ail |
Committed |
||
|
Jan. 8 |
dnink |
^joo or 5 days in jail |
Committed |
|
|
Dec. 13 |
dnink |
$(.00 or s days in jail |
Committed |
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Nov. ig |
drunk |
Discharged |
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CPct. i5 |
drunk |
yio or 10 days in jail |
Committed |
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Sr; ^; |
drunk |
>.o or 10 days in jail |
Committed |
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drunk |
iyoa or j days in jail |
Committed |
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THOMAS SCOTT |
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County Jail Record |
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1910-June, 1907 |
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Committed 36 times |
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Dayi |
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10 |
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ApHI 38 . |
3 |
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Jan. .3 . . . |
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1907 |
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Nov. 36 . |
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May 6 . April 39. |
June ?: : ; |
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■ 5 |
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ip/0
May 19 3o
May i8 lo
May 7 lo
April » s
April 19 ]
March 16 30
March 9 j
Feb'y 33 10
Nov.
WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
WALTER JOHNSON CouNTV Jail Record June, 1910-June, 1907
Committed $8 times
Dayi
Oct. Oct.
JO ■
July 11 ... .
July 6 . . . .
June 34 -
May 18 ... .
April 3j 30
April II .
Feb'y 10 ... .
Oct. Sept. Sept. Aug. Aug.
Suly 31 .
Illy 10 .
uly I .
une II .
aS U:
April 18 . April 8 . March 38 . March 18 . March 1
Oct. Oct.
<W7
I .
Sept. 19 .
Sept. 6 .
Aug. IS .
Aug. I .
uly 10
37 ,
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CORNELIUS CARR |
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Workhouse Record |
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Apn/^ie Di'°'i8 April >6 Nov. J Oct. ) July 8 April 39 |
vagrancy ... 60 ... 90 . JO disorderly conduct . 30 |
1907 Dec. 33 vagrancy Nov. 3J •' ft" .? :: March 34 " . . 1906 1905 Aug. 36 vagrancy May 39 " |
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vagrancy ... 30 ... JO ... JO drunkenness ... 30 |
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RECORDS OF REPEATERS
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l!>04 Sept. 36 IffO) Sept. ai |
vagrancy . . |
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«1? '7 Feb'y aj |
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7(103 ipOi Dec. ID |
: ; ; |
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Sept. II igoo |
Dec. i vagrancy
Sept. 4 ■■
June 33 disorderly conduct
'894 May aj
June ti
Oct. 16 vagrancy
Aug. 30 "
April 17 " . .
/891 May 30 disoideriy conduct
1800
March 33
iSg6 March n
Dec. 34 drunkenncM . June i disorderly conduct March 33
r8S4 March 37 vagrancy
y> J»n-„
May i disorderly conduct
County Jail Record
June, igio-Ju'w- '9o6
Committed 33 times
Served a total of 3 months, 19 days
April 19 S July
April 13 ... . ^*
March 34 10
Dec. Dec
Nov. Nov. Nov.
Sept. Sept. Aug. Aug.
March 18 .
Feb'y a I .
,908
Dec. ao .
Sept. 36 .
Sept. II .
April 18 .
Nov*^i
Nov! 10 '. Ctt. .7
Sept. t . May i .
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APPENDIX XXIV
EXCERPTS FROM REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
Pkepaked FOR THE City Council OF Pittsbukch by the New Yok Bureau OF Municipal Research, JUNE-JuLr, 1913
BUREAU OF POLICE Bureau's Efficiency Not Shown bv Records
The present system of records and reports of the bureau of police nukts intelligent direction and accountability impossible. Neither the superintendcoi of police nor the director of public safety can determine the eflicieiicy or ineflideiicy of the bureau by reference to these records, and therefore all chance of intdligCDI direction of the activities of the force is destroyed. Lack of Discipline Due to Lack of Information
The director's lack of information concerning the bureau accounts in large measure for the apparent lack of discipline throughout the force.
To the present irregular and inefficient methods of supplying the director with information concerning the workings of the bureau of police may be attributed the presence of the present patrol system which was established more than 35 yean ago and which has neither been altered nor improved since its adoption.
The director is unable to maintain adequate control over the bureau because he does not know, and no records are available to tell him: I. Whether crime is on the increase or decrease. a. Whether the number of arrests exceeds that of preceding years. ). Whether the number of convictions exceeds that of previous years. 4. Whether complaints received are being properiy investigated. }. Whether the number of complaints received exceeds that of previous yean.
6. Whether the members of the detective division are intelligently inves- tigating cases which come within their jurisdiction.
7. Whether the station bouses are in good sanitary condition.
8. Whether there arc few or many disorderly houses or houses of prostitu- tion in the city.
9. Whether juvenile delinquency is on the increase or decrease.
10. Whether supplies are being properly distributed and honestly accounted for.
11. Whether the surgeons are performingtheir duties intelligently and with greatest benefit to the force.
II. Whether there is much or little sickness among the membersoftheforce.
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REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
This lack of infonnatioD a the fundamtntal defect in the administration of Pittsburgh's bureau of police. Until this defect is eradicated, present police
inefficiency wilt continue
Plan op Reorganization
It is recommended that the director provide a plan of reorganization em- bodying the suggestions in this report, and that he secure immediate control over the activities of the entire force by;
I. Establishing a complaint, record and filing division by means of which all the correspondence, complaints and iecord$ may be under the supervision of the director himself.
a. Providing formi which will biing to his desk each morning in concise, accurate and consolidated form adequate information of the workings of the entire force so as to make intelligent control and accountability possible.
}. Appointing a civilian aide who will have no duties involving adminis- trative detail but will be at the disposal of the director to make intelligent research into modem methods of policing and to conduct confidential investigations.
4. T>roviding charts and maps for his own office, which would enable him to KC at a glance the cKme conditions of the city. This map should show the boun- daries of all precincts and at the end of each day the crimes committed within the various precincts should be indicated on the map by different colored tacks. An increase of tacks of a certain colot in any one section would immediately serve notice of the increase of crime therein and would indicate the need for immediate investigation.
ORGAN tlATION AND PEKSOKNEL
To have an efficient patrol force, the patrolmen must be governed by a definitcset of rules; they must be properly trained; they must have decent working hours; the stations in which they are housed must not only be saniiaty but must be comfortable and as nearly home-like as it is possible to make them; the men must be treated with respect by their superior officers and the superior officers must demand of them the respect to which the higher office is entitled
The present system of patrol we condemn as unfair to the policemen and unfair to citizens. Patrolmen Should Faithfully Report Conditions on Their Posts
The patrolman is required to patrol his beat continuously for not less than Dine hours. It is the experience of police experts that much of the trouble into which policemen get in large cities is due to leisure time while on patrol. The patrol force should be made to understand that it is not sufficient that they walk back and forth on Iheir posts and make arrests for violations of the law but they must do more — they must co-operate with all the city departments by observing conditions on their posts and calling the attention of the respective departments having jurisdiction to matters which they discover requiring attention.
Indeed, in some cities in this country and in almost all the cities of Europe, policemen are required to make inspections for the various departments, such as health, fire, and buildings. The administrative head of the department should
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hold each patrolman stricily to account for alt conditions on his pMt, Patrolmen should be furnished uniform standard memorandum books of the loose leaf type. They should be required to report in writing in this memorandum book such mat- ters as come to their attention while on patrol, and their efficiency in this direction should not go unrewarded but should be carefully considered in rating their monthly efTiciency cards. Much of the inspection work now being performed at a large expense by the other city departments could be reduced if the policemen, who have plenty of leisure time while on patrol, were efHcient in observing conditions and reporting upon them
WoKK OF Macistrates Not Supervised
.... Magistrates should be responsible to the judges of the courts of record and their work supervised by one of their number to be selected as chief magistrate. To accomplish this it will be necessary to amend the statutes by an act of the legislature, and it is recommended that an effort be made to secure the necessary legislation to remedy the defects in the present magistrate system. Macistrates' Courts Not Properly a Part of Bureau of Pouce
The function of Che magistrates is judicial and in no sense a police function. The practice of having police magistrates' courts a part of the police system has been proved in other large cities, particularly in New York, to be unsatisfactory and not in the best interests of justice. Ma^strates' courts should be separated from the bureau of police and made a part of the judiciary, as are the inferior courts. No Sessions of Court after Eleven a. m.
The taw should create a board of ma^strates providing for the holding of hearings in regular district court houses especially built for this purpose. . . .
At present a person arrested after 1 1 a. m., and in some sections of
the city even earlier, is required to remain in a cell over night or procure bail.
If magistrates' courts were kept open during the entire day. the present system of providing meals for prisoners in station houses could be abolished. This would result in a saving of money, and the station houses at present used as jaib could be used as places of temporary detention
Arrests for Drunkenness Point to Need for STi;Dy
More than 4 1 per cent of the total number of arrests during the years 190^ 1910, and 1913, were made on charges of drunkenness. These figures indicate either that the policemen are making a great number of unnecessary arrests or that the city of Pittsburgh has an inebriety problem to solve. In either case a careful analy- sis of the figures should be made
Bureau Lacks Data to Form a Basis of Study
Under the present system of records no data can be secured which would be of value in astudy of the causes of inebriety. It is impossible to determine from the records the number of habitual drunkards arrested or, in fact, the number of
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REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
second, third or fouTth ollenden. No card record system of persons arrested U
maintained
Many Needless Arrests Are Made
A study of station house procedure showed also that many persons were arrested and charged with drunkenness against whom there was no complaint of disorderly conduct and who might well have been sent home. . . . LiEUTEHANTS Have No Power TO DISCHARGE Persons Arrested for Intoxica-
Except where an intoxicated person is very disorderly or so drunk as to be unable to reach home safely, no arrests should be made. The ordinance should provide that desk sergeants or lieutenants upon taking the necessary pedigree upon the cards referred (o above should have the power to discharge from custody when sober and in condition to go home, persons arrested for intoxication where no charge of disorderly conduct is made. The ordinance should further provide that in cases where the records show the prisoner to be a second or third offender or a habitual drunkard he should be detained and the facts called to the attention of the magbt rate. . . .
Each precinct should maintain a duplicate set of card records for drunken* ness. Patrolmen should be instructed to use more intelligence in the matter of handling intoxicated persons. While it is impossible to estimate in what degree needless arrests for intoxication are made it is, however, quite apparent that at least very many of the persons arrested on this charge need not be taken to the Station house. No Civic Agency Is at Present Studvihg Inebriety in the City
Council should appoint a commission to make a study of the whole inebriety question with a view to providing treatment for persons addicted to the use of liquor other than criminal prosccutbn and incarceration in prisons. Such persons should be treated from an entirely different viewpoint than they are at present. This commission should observe the workings and results obtained by the Inebriety Board of the State of New York. More than 4; Per Cent of Arrests Result in Discharge
An examination of the records of arrests and dispositions in the police mag- istrates' courts discloses the fact that more than 4; per cent of the total number of arrests made result in discharge.
The following table, showing the total number of arrests during the years 1909, 1910 and 191 1 and the total number of discharges in magistrates' courts, by comparison with the total numt«r of arrests and discharges in the city of New York in the year 1913, indicates that many needless arrests are made: Total
|
Ytar |
Arrtits |
DiubaritJ |
PtTCenlagi |
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f^ttsburgh . |
■ 1909 |
} 5,611 |
18.781 |
53.7a |
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Pittsburgh . |
1910 |
}9.'i" |
17.769 |
%s |
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Pittsburgh . |
. 1911 |
)6,9ia |
'7.9'? |
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New York . |
. 1911 |
I70.)75 |
3<l.ao4 |
aj.oi |
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wage-earning pittsburgh Records E>o Not Show Number of Dischances or Acquittals in Hicmer
The figures relating to the city of Pittsburgh under the beading "Nnoiber Discharged" do not indicate the total number of cases discharged becaose they show only the cases disposed of in the police magistrates' courts. No Investigations Made of Discharges
The director of public safety should cause to be made forthvith an investip- tion in order to dettrmine the reasons for the unusually large number oi cases dis- charged in [he police magistrates' courts with a view to instructing the memberi of the force not only to avoid making unnecessary arrests but also to use more intelli- gence in the presentation of their cases in court
juvenile delinquents Arraicnment op Children in Police Courts Unwarranted
The present method of handling juvenile prisoners Is cruel and without justificatbn. A child arrested for juvenile delinquency is taken to the police Station in a patrol wagon wheie he is placed under the care of a matron. Although police officers are supposed to notify the parents of the child's arrest, it is admitted that there is no rule requiring this and, according to desk sergeants, it is not the usual practice. Children are arraigned before police magistrates notwithstanding the existence of a juvenile court. . . . All Children Should Be Taken to Juvenile Court
Measures should be taken at once to provide for the tnns-
portation of children in some manner other than by patrol wagon. In referring to the manner of arraigning children before magistrates one of the judges stated that frequently little children have to be raised up by the policenien and placed upon the desks while their cases are being heard. Nothing In this report is of more imporunce than the suggestion to reform the present method of procedure in the handling of juvenile delinquents. No Child Should be Detained at Station House
Under no circumstances should a child be detained in a station bouse. The city should either maintain a building for this purpose or contribute to some sodeiy for the prevention of cruelty to children so that juveniles when arrested would not be held at the station house. Parents op Arrested Children Should be Notified
The department should have a rule requiring lieutenants or desk sergeants to notify forthwith the parents of children arrested, and all children, except in very serious cases, should be paroled without a forfeit in the custody of their paitnis. Failure on the part of commanding officers to observe this rule should result in instant suspension and subsequent dismissal. . . .
conditions in station houses CitL Houses Unsanitary— Padded Cells
With the exception of the cells in one station bouse, the cells throughout the $20
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REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
city are equipped with unsanitary plumbing. They are all of the oldest type and none b equipped with drinking water. They are of steel and iron construction, poorly vcntitaled, and only a few are natuially lighted.
In station No. i, which serves the busiest precinct and has the largest cell bouse, the toilets in the cells are of the oldest type and it is impossible to keep them in a sanitary condition. They should be removed at once and replaced with the newest standard plumbing. Most of the cells in this house, and especially on the lower tier, are absolutely dark. There is still in use at this station a cell of the type of the ancient torture dungeon, and it is frequently referred to in the news- papers throughout the country as "the menagerie." The walls are padded with a heavy canvas which is blood-smeared and filthy. The cell is not lighted and no place is provided for the prisoner to sleep except on the wooden floor. In this cell sanitation is impossible, the only means of ventilation bdng through a small open- ing in the door. It Is declared that this cell is only used for demented and delirious prisoners. Two other stations are provided with similar padded cells except that they are somewhat cleaner. Padded cells have long since been condemned. A piisoner who is demented or deliiious is entitled to immediate medical attention, and should not be detained at a station house but sent directly to a hospital. It would be cruel to put a well person in such a cell — and much more cruel in the case of one suffering from delirium or dementia. As a means of preventing demented prisoners from doing themselves bodily harm these cells have proved useless. In fact, this particular cell was stripped of its padding and its walls laid bare by de- mented prisoners. At the best, padded cells are torture chambers and there b always the temptation for the jailer to use them as "coolers" for punishing unruly and troublesome prisoners. This cell should be removed immediately. . . .
Policemen Receive No Training
Policemen receive no training whatever for their work. The moment a patrolman has been appointed he is assigned to duty and little or no instruction is given him. He is required to learn the duties of his office as best he can or, as the authorities in charge of the bureau put it, "by experience."
He is not even placed under the charge of an older patrolman or required to perform duty with him for a definite number of days so as to become familiar with the merest routine. Lack of Discipline Due to Lack of Training
It is unreasonable to expect a policeman to enforce the laws
and ordinances unless he has at least some idea of what those laws and ordinances are. The policeman who has received no training in court procedure and no in- struction as to how to conduct himself in court can scarcely be expected to present evidence properly to a court of law. Policemen are given revolvers to use with- out a sini^e lesson in target practice. Urgent Need for Training School for Police Service
It is recommended that a training school for police service be established at
521
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wage-earning pittsburgh
promotions Political Influgnce Affects Promotions
An eumination of ihe records shows that political influence affects promo- tions in the bureau of police. Letters on file in the bureau prove conclusively tlut all promotions are not made upon merit. . . . The politician who succeeds in securing preferment for policemen insists upon preferment at the hands of the police- men so favored, and when the opportunity arises for the policeman to help the politician who helped him secure his promotion, efficiency and fair play, and some- times even justice, must suffer.
The entire system of promotion should be changed and the civil regubtioos should provide that alt promotions be made in the same manner as are appwnt- ments — one name to be selected from every three certified. . . .
Trials of Delinquent PoLiCEHiN Sessions of Trial Board Secret
By excluding the public and the press from the hearings of the trial board its sessions are shrouded with an air of mystery which serves no good purpose and invariably creates suspJcbn. Therefore, it is recommended that all trials be pub- lic and that the press be admitted to all sessions of the trial board — including
For some reason which could not be explained by the head of the bureau, there appear upon the record card of each member of the force, which accompanies the copy of the charges of trial, the names of the accused policeman's vouchers or, as one man put it, his "backers." The placing of these names before the trial board can serve no good purpose, but they may serve to influence the members of the board in the matter of punishment. The practice should be discontinued forth- with, as delinquent policemen should be tried upon the merils of the case without regard totheir'backcrs" or vouchers. , . . No Uniformity of Punishment
A study of the individual record cards disclosed the fact that there is no uniformity in the matter of punishment for Ihe same offense. Typical cases of the disregard for uniformity may be observed from the following illustrations taken from the record cards of members of the force:
.... Can I. — Drunkenness, fined Sio; drunkenness on duty, second offense, discharged — subsequently reinstated; drunk on duty, third offense (fine not recorded); drunk and neglect of duly, fourth offense (tine not recorded): visiting "speak easies" in uniform, fifth olTense. no case; drunk on duly, sixth offense, reprimanded: seventh offense, fined %y, eighth offense, fined %y, ninth offense (line not recorded); drunkenness, tenth offense, case dismissed; eleventh offense, cau- tioned by superintendent and relieved from suspension.
Can J, — Intoxication and conduct unbecoming an officer, reprimanded; drunkenness, second offense, discharge recommended by board, but disapproved by D. P. S.; drunkenness, third offense; discharged and reinstated. Note: On this man's record card in one year there appeared the record of complaints and IS follows: Neglect of duty (a), intoxication and conduct unbecoming 522
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REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
an officer, neglect of duty ()). absent without leave, conduct unbecoming an officer (three limes). This patrolman is still a member of the force. . . .
pensions Pension Benefits
.... The present system of pensions, is faulty in that it docs not provide adequate protection to a member of the force who may be injured or killed in the performance of his duty or to the widow and children of a policeman who dies at his post while protecting the ciliiens of the city.
To illustrate, if a policeman, while in pursuit of a burglar, were shot and killed, his widow, provided the deceased had made a will and complied with all tbe regubtiontof the association, wouhj receive f 1,000; and in the event that a police- man die intestate without complying with the regulations as to naming a bene- ficiary, the widow would be forced to litigate her claim, and the f 1,000 mi^t be reduced by divisions among possible heirs to a very small sum for the widow. . .
If Ihe bullet from the gun of the burglar did not succeed in killing the police- man, but perchance destroyed his eyesight or made him a cripple during the rest of his life, the only pension he could receive, under the by-laws of the association, would be one-half the sum of his salary for a period of fifty-two weeks and Si,ooo at the end of this time. Council Should Create a Municipal PENStON Ststem
.... Adequate pensions for the policemen should be provided as
I. Service pension; This is to allow all members of the police department who have served aj years or more and who, at the expiration of such lime of ser- vice, shall be j$ years of age. to retire upon a sum equal toone-half of their salary at the lime of retirement.
3. Disability pension: This form of pension should be for members of the department who become totally incapacitated from performing police duty, their injury having been received In the actual performance of police duty. They should be paid at the rate of one-half their annual salary at the time such injury was
detective division
Our investigation of the detective division revealed a condition of demorali- zation due principally to a lack of supervision, a defective method of securing detectives, a lack of control of their activities, failure to specialize in the investiga* tion of the mote serious crimes, lack of detectives capable of understanding and speaking foreign languages and the complete lack of records which would be of value in directing activities. . . . Detectives Receive No Special Training for Theih Work
.... According to the figures furnished by the coroners' ofRce (none being available in the division of detectives) of 77 defendants tried for murder since 1905, a8, or 36^ per cent, were acquitted. In 191 1, the total force of detectives made 761 arrests, of which 343. Of 3 1.8 per cent, were discharged in the magistrates' courts; it is impossible to ascertain from the records of the detective division how 523
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
many of the 1)3 cases which were held tor court were alsodischarged or acquitted. The entire detective organization for the year 191 1 only made on an average ol 1 httle over two arrests a day. School for the Thaininc of Detectives Should Be Estabushed
... A training school for detectives should be established at once as a part of the regular training school for policemen suggested elsewhere in this re-
Detectives' Duties Not Comfined to the Imvestication of Chime
Members of the detective division are used in the enforcement of the Uvi against gambling, prostitution and the illegal sale of liquor. Detectives should be relieved of any duty in the enforcement of these laws except where felonies have been committed in connection with their violation. Detectives should be free to investigate ciime and apprehend criminals. Contact with saloons or disorderly houses is not, however, conducive to efficiency and the enforcement of the law in relation to these places should be left either to the precinct plain clothes men or to special squads created for this purpose. . . . No Members in Detective Division Who Speak Foreign Languages
A large percentage of the population of the city is composed of foreigners. Polish and Italian colonies have already been established in various sections and the records of the bureau show the need tor specializing in the investigation of crimes characteristic of the criminal element in the foreign sections. In order to study the habits and characteristics of the foreign criminal, it is necessary to empkqr detectives capable of speaking and understanding foreign languages. The person- nel of the detective division does not now include detectives who could be asNgned to this work. All investigatbns of Italian cases are made by an Italian clerk fn>m the office of the chief clerk of the bureau. While this clerk is carried on the payroll of the chief clerk's office, he devotes all of his time to detective work, thus depnving the chtefclerk'sofhce of his clerical services. In the reorganiiation of the detective bureau provision should be made for the appointment of detectives capable ol speaking and understanding foreign languages. . . . Detectives do Not Specialize on the More Important Work
Although the detectives are specializing in pawn-shop, junk and second-haitd store cases, and in fraudulent stock speculation, none is specialiiing in the investi- gation of the more serious crimes.
There is no homicide squad or squads specializing in the investigation of foreign blackmail cases in which bombs are used, and no detectives are making a special study of the methods employed in the investigation of such cases. When the attention of the superintendent was called to the absence of a homicide squad, he replied that the entire force is required to investigate murder cases. This does not meet the need for specializing in the investigation of homicide cases. The fact thai the entire detective force is assigned in each murder case does not make tbero any tiettcr fitted for the work or provide any method of specially preparing them for this kind of investigation.
Detectives should be assigned to specialize in the investigation of the more 524
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REPORT ON BUREAU OF POLICE
scriotu Crimea. Italian and Ptdiih deteciives should be trained in delecting crimes peculiar to their race and instructed to mingle among tbe people of the foreign
No Record of Homicides
Thus, of the loB murders committed in the city since 190; the records of the detective divliion contained information concerning but ten easel, and this was of no value either statistically or for future action in connection with the cases. . . . Records Seem to Indicate Greater Efficiencv in Recovering Propertt
THAN IN Apprehending Criminals
.... A great many cases in which recoveries of property and no sub- sequent arrests were made, were cues where the property was found in junk or pawn shops. From the records in this booh it would seem that detective activity usually ceases with the recovery of the property. . . . "Stool Pigeons" and Special Detectives
The bureau of pdice formerly was allowed four thousand dollars a year as a contingent fund out of which to pay for the services of special detectives, or stool pigeons and to secure evidence. Last year council appropriated but one thousand dollars for this purpose.
Efficiency in detective work requires that the detectives be able to secure speedily and accurately information of the "doings" of the underworld. There is no better method of securing this infonnarion than through the aid of stool pigeons. Great care should be talien that the function of the Stool pigeon shall always remain the furnishing of information and not inciting criminals to commit crime for the sake of apprehending them.
Stool pigeons are invariably of a criminal class and successful deteciives are never without their aid. They must be paid for their services. When the city does not provide sufficient funds to enable the detective to pay the stool pigeon it is the experience of other cities that the detective invariably resorts to the dis- reputable practice of protecting his stool pigeon on his commission of minor crimes as a reward for the information furnished him of the activities of other criminals. Pkesent Svstem op Describing Pawned Articles Efficient
The improved Boston system of filing and describing pawned articles is in use, and according to the records of the diviuon, considerable property has already been recovered since the adoption of this system. . . . Division of Criminal Identification
Bertillon measurements, photographs and finger prints are kept of persons arrested on serious charges. Measurements are carefully made and the records of the divi«on are neatly and carefully filed and indexed. The equipment is ade- quate for the work. . . .
Suspected Disorderly Houses, etc.. Not Reported Br Captains
.... While the superintendent alleges that he has information relative to all disorderly houses in the city he was unable to produce any written lists or reports concerning the suspected disorderly house or houses of prostitution except 525
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WAGE-EARNING PITTSBURGH
I card record of the houses of prostitution and thdr inmates, located in the scfre- gated districts. He admitted that there were no such lists and alio alleged thai there were no othN disorderiy houies operating in the city other than those confiBed 10 the segregated district. . . . Police ActOnlv on Complaints
.... The official records of the bureau of police now show ibe existence of but 67 regular houses of prostitution which are all located within the segrc^ttd district. While we were unable, because of the limited time at our disposal, to make any extended investigation of the vice conditions of the city, we had no dHK- culty in locating a number of houses of prostitution and disorderly a part meets located outside of the segregated districts. Investigations also showed that dis- orderly apartments wherein one or two women operate are on the increase. . . . New Bureau of Public Morals to be Created
This new board should have the hearty co-operation of the bureau of police. To be of real value it must be furnished truthful and adequate information con- cerning the vice conditions of the city. Patrolmen Should Report all Susncious Places
For this purpose It is recommended that the rules be strictly enforced, re- quiring patrolmen to report all places on their post which they suspect of being used for immoral purposes. From the reports of the patrolmen, as well as frocn their own observation, captains should be required to furnish a regubr monthly list of suspected disorderly houses and houses of prostitution. Immediately upoa the receipt of information they should be required to report the opening of any im- moral place. . . .
station house records and reports Lodger Card
During the year 191 1, 31$ women and 13.491 "i^"- > '<>'^' <>' ia,Si6 persons, were furnished lodginp at the 13 police stations in the city. These lodgings were furnished principally during the winter months. This enormous number of appli- cants for lodgings points to the need for an analysis of the conditions surrounding the practice of using the station houses as lodging places. Of themselves, these figures seem to indicate the need for the establishment of a municipal lodging bouse. The police station is not adapted for use as a lodging house.
From the present record kept of lodgers, it is impossible to ascertain how often during the winter any one person is given lodging, or, indeed, any other sta- tistics concerning them. It is therefore recommended that a special card history of lodgers be established and a study made of the facts and figures assembled upon the cards. . . .
. ... All the tables of arrests and police activity in the present annual report show only the conditions for the year reported upon. Thus, a comparison of the work performed by the bureau of police in former years cannot be made. The report does not show whether crime is on the increase or decrease, whether juvenile delinquency is on the increase or decrease. . . .
526
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INDEX
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INDEX
AcceMibili^ to maikets, 113
Accid«nta. See Work-^eeUtnls
Act—
Cnsting a Dqiutment of Labor and Industry, 1913, 446-450: occu- pational diseues, 4$!, 451. See abo
Adanu, Samtial Hopkins, t4i is
AdminlatiatlTC areu, 8-11; iteces- ^ty for expanding, S, 9; restricted, playing iata hands of underworld, S; sanitary, expanded, S
Afro-American Steam and Gu En- {ineera and Skilled Labonn, 4:8
Afn>-Ameiican Steam and Gaa Fit- ting Dnion, 153
^reementa —
"Gentlemen's," in steel industry, 376. See also Emptoyers' asntments
Acricultnn —
Land unsuited to, 113; state de- partment of, 19. See also Uorkel farden; VegtUMeJarm
AlcoholiBn —
Attack on, through recruiting of employes, aio. See also DnmkeH- nas; Saftfuardint employts
Aldeimanic conrt. See Court, older-
Aldennen ud Tbalr Courts, The, i
S3. 377 Alfradsbof. See&im
335; harboring outside Yeggs, 337; rrheF --•■-'■' "White, _ _, Yeggs, 334, 335
"Whitey O's," a rendezvous :
Allegheny County VoiUionae, 3S8 Allied Printing Tradea Council, iSi
Social responsibility of police com- pared with, 3901 special classes ex- cluded from, 390
Ambulance —
No systematixed hosfMtal, 1
America, 18-30, 157, 158
American Federation of Labor, 118, i8t, iSa; Retail Qerks' Interna- tional Protective Association, 131
American Order of Eagles, 314, 315
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Americcn Steel Cempaay, >66
Anti-Mclal. See Social, anti
Anti-nnloB. See Union, anU
Apollo lion and Steel Compenj, i6i
AppUcatioa bUnki uid fonni, Wei- tinchonse Electric and Huiafac- tmug Companj, 461-467
Apprentice*—
I^ysical eiaminmtiwi of, 911, an; probatioiiaiy period of, ai3
Appronticethip—
Bieweiy workers, 1371 bridge uid ■tructunl iron workers, 149; build- ing tndet, 1451 carpentera, 154; electiicat workera, 155, 156; eievfttor constructors, 157, 158; glass houses, 300, 301; hoisting mgineers, 145, 15^. lS4i houBeamiths, 152; ma- cnuiists, 141; painters, decorators, and paperhangen, 160; (dasteren, 161; plumbers, 145, i6a; printera, 134; sheet metal workers, 165; slate and tile roofers, 145, 165; ateanjfit- ten, 145, 163, 164; system employed in recruiting employes, 310, »i, ait; ^stnn in Annstiong Cork Company, aiil system in H. K. Porter Com- pany, aij; system in Mesta Machine CcHupany, Jii; system in Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, 131, aai; system in Pittsburgh Railways Com- pany, ill; system, weak feature in, iia; tile layers and helpers, 145, 166; Westinghouse Electric and Manu- facturing Company, couises in, an
Ambe, 355
AnDttrons AiaocUtlon, 43a
Aireat*—
In New Yoric and Pittsburgh com- rared,387i in Toledo, 367. See also
mended by report o
to withhold prosecutions for vioUtiaa of child lalxn law, 306; chief factory inqiector's dedsion conceming edu- cation test of children seding on- ployment ovemiled, aoS
Anstria-Hnnguy, 63
Aostriuu, i3S,35i
Aver; College Trade School- Appropriation of legislature for, discontinued in 1913, 434; in I9r4, 434
Bakeriea-
Investigation of, by new factety inspection department, 444
Bakera, 134-136; effect of panic of 1907-08 on, 134. 13s; emploren' agreements with, 135; hours of, 119, 13J, 136; improvement in conditica <a, during fourteen years, (Table) 13s; racial make~up, 135; sborlige in supply of, doubled wages and ihort- ened hours, 129; strike in 1910, 136;
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unknkm among, 119, 134, 135, 136, 187; unioD labd, 1191 wages of, tag, '3S> i3<ii iSj, 1S5, in 1914, 136
135 Balcb, BmUj Greene, 69 Baldwia LocomotiTe Worice, 337 "Beldj Calkhan," 330
Baltimore and Obio Railroad— Machinists' and blackamitlis* strike 00.14*
"Baad-Boi" on Grant Street, 316,
Amounts dnosi ted by 1 2 Slavs b a Pittsburgh, (Table) 54; deposits of immigruit wage-earners, 53, 54; for- eign achtmge department of, 53
BftOUng. See WoikintfocUUki
Begeara, 336-339; blind, from Over- brook, 337, 338; representative typeSi 337- 338; victims of work- accidents as, 337; Y^, "woiking" Pittsburgh during winter of 1908, 333.334
Begrinf—
ftletbod pursued in, from factoiy employes, 31S, 319. See also Under- KvrU; Ytut
Belcittm—
Death rate from mine workers' accidents in, 175; farm colonies in, 371
Bell Telephone Company, 156
Set EmpU/yts'
Bennett and Company, J. G., 454
Bethel Home, 343, 344
Betterment—
Of immigrant wage-earner re- quires aggressive woric, 60
Beyer, David S., 145. 371
"Big Sam" Stiaanlder, 313
"Billy Kid," 331
HiTmingham England —
Factory m^Kction in, 13
Black Diamond Hill, 106
Blackmailing and graft- In Iron City Central Trades Coun- dl, iSi
Blackamitln, 144; employers' agree- ments, T44; hours of, 1441 strike on Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 141; among, 144, iSi; wages of.
Association for the, in New Eng- land, 338; b^gars from Overbrook, 337i 33S; Pittsburgh Association for the, 338
Boarding honaes. See Lodp»t
Boggs and Bnhl, 130, 131, 4:4 Bohemians, 35, 63, 64 Bohner, E. H., 414, 417
Boiler makera —
Character of work of, 143; houis of, 143, 144; unionism amoo^, 143, 144; wages affected by unionism during panic of 1907-08, 144; wages of, 143. '44
Bonus sjBtem—
Bi-vreekly premium to children in glass-houses, 398; deigned to in- crease output, 36S, 369; development of em[Joyes through, 368, 169, 374; effect of, on techniod edtKation of young men, 169; late of ttie "one
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Amutrong Asn^'
American Steel Camp«a7, 166
Aatiionf, Principal J. W.—
Educaticau] work of, among Jews, S> Antl-wKial. See Social, anU Anti-nnlsn. See Union, atiti Apollo Iron aad Steel Company, 16
Application blanks and forma, oachonae Electric and Hani tuitag Company, 461-467
Apprentice!— JT- .
Physical examination of, g Li ' probationaiy period of, jr \ ,
ApprenticealUp— ,. ^
Brewery workers, i' ^ i
structural iron woi^ Y, '
ing tiBdes, 14s; i -^
electrical woilien, ,-- '■'-
chinists, and papcrL 161; plum' 134; sneet^
01; hois' 1^9
™rhf I V [n< {
,/; strikes not
unless sanctioned
, 145; union working
-ce of employen' agree-
.uforced among, 14S, 149;
n among, 146, 147, 14S, 149;
I4S. "
r.uS
.jj, i«4: ap- .., 14S) hours in, 146, ., nours of day labor in, 184; ..maoal unemployment among, 145; unionism among, 39, 146, 147, 1S61 uniocusni among, affected by panic of 1907-08, 146; unionism among day laborers in, \2o, i3t; wages afiected lism, 146; wages affected by L during panic of 1907-08, 147; wagesin, ISO, 144, "4S. '46,147, 166, 182, i8j, 1&4; wages of day labor in, 130, 1S3. See also SriciJoyeri Md nxuoni,' Bridie and stmetural iron workers; Hoisting engineers; Carpem- lers; Eieclrital markers; Eietator am- structors; Painters, decoralors, and paperhangtrs; Plasterers; Plumbers; Sleamfillers; Sheet melal markers; SlaU and tile roofers; Tiie layers and hdperi
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job" man under the, during bsrd times, i6g; for punctuality and regu- larity, 3511 loss of individual in skill and volition under, 168, 369; to de- velop speed, iio; United States Steel Corporation stockbolder'B re- port on, 399, 400
BoBtcm—
Death rate, 14; premium on home building in, 31; ward school system
Borcntt—
Unionism among breweiy worken strengthened by the, 129, 136
Brmc« BrotberB' Laundry, 315, 231
Bnddock, 136, 161; housing condi-
Brtkemen. See Railway emfhyes
Br«w«ry workers, 136-138; appren- tices, 137; employers' agreemoits with, 136, 137, 13S, sanitary standards in 1914, 138, J58, 454; Iwura °fi i37. 138, 184; unionism among, 29, 129, '3^7 i37i >38> 1S3, t86; unionism among, struigthened by tbe union labeland theboycott, 129, 136) wages of, 1^7, (Table) 138, 183, 183, 184; working conditions of, 137
BrickUyerB and masons, 147-149; carfares of, 14S; decrease in building operations affecting employment, 149; hours of, 146, 147, 148; number of, 147; piece work, 149; seasonal un- employment of, I4S, 147; strikes not allowed by union uiJess sanctioned by committee, 149; union working code in place of employers' agree- ments enforced among, 148, 149; unionism among, 146, 147, 148, 149; wages, J4S. 147, 148
Bricklayers' and Hasons* Inter- natiooal Union of America, 147, 148, 149
{doyen' agreements with, 150, i$ti emdoyeis' aasodation "principks and working rules," ijo, 151; botis of, 150, 151, 153, IS3; seasonal un- emjiloyment of, 15a; strike in 1906 against National Erectore' Associa- tion, 150, 153; strikes in 1901, 150; unionism among, 149, 150, 151, r52; unicHiism among, affected by panic of 1907-08, 150; wages of, 146, 150, 151, 153. See also Stntctural vorktn
Bridge and Strnctotal Iron Woiken' Diiion, 146, r49, 150, 153
Brinton, Jasper T., 315 Bronchitis—
In river wards and East End, 24
Brodiels. SeePnufiiwiMni
Brown and Company, 333 Builders' Eschange League, 154, 1S3
Building trades, 144-166; agreements with employers, 166, 1S3, 1S4; ap- prenticc^p in, 145; hours in, 146, 166, 184; hours of day labw in, 1S41 seasonal unemployment among, 145; unionism among, 29, 146, 147, 186; unionism among, affected by panic of 1907-08, 146; unionism among day laborers in, 130, 121; wages affected by unionism, 146; wages affected by unionism during panic of 1907-08, 147; wagesin,i20,i44,i4S,i46,i47, 166,183,183,184; wages of day labor in, lao, 183. See ahio Brietiaywj aitrf masons; Bridge and limclurai inm workers; BoiiHng emgitieers; Car fat- ters; Eieclrkal vorktrs; Elivaltr am- stnictors; Painters, decorators, ani faperhangers; Plasterers; PlmmUrs; Sleamfillers; Sheet meliif VMrkirs; Slate and Hie roofers; Tile layers and Mpers
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Bttildlng Trades CotmcU, iSi, 183, 184
Bnreau of Huaicipal Reaearch, New York, 16, 516-526; reconunendations of, ba^ on amditions found in igij, 19; report oo amsts and incarcera- tkaa, 387; report on Pitlsbuigh po- lice, 311; report to dty coundl in •9i3i »i. "^1 '7i 19; survey of county by, 17
Bnrean of PabUc Honlt. See Mor- all
BoTMO of Statiatiu ud Infoima-
Duties and powers of, 448; field covered tv, at*
"Bnrly It," 333. 336 Bums, Allon T., 9, 13
Butlar, Elizabeth Boardslej, 33, i7> 18, 19, 49> i3i> '94i 19s. >^> i'°> Jij, 3S4. 360, !75'-3'Mi 3S4
Cab drivers. See Ttamtkn Cadets. See Prostiiutim
Capital—
Immobility of, cocnpued witb mo- bility of labor, iiG, 117
Brit^yen aod masons, 1481 ele- vator constructors, 158
Carnegie Lil>rai7, 136, 185
Carnegie Pension Fnnd, 49S Carnegie Relief Fnnd, a6, 365 Carnegie Steel Company, 71, 96, 106, 107, S30, 336, 137, 333, 337, 3^6, 147, 161, 365, 37s; suigiad or^ouatioD, 4SS-460
Carpenters, 154. 1551 apprenticeship, 154; empli^en' agreements with, 154; hours of, 154, iss; untonism among, 146, 1541 wages of, 146, i54.
Canon, Hr., 306
Casea cited —
Constructive soda] work in New York in case of Greek boy who had lost arm, and Dane picked up in Union Square, wo; death of boy hastened by conoitions of work, 39S; of fatal work-accidents to children, t(>gi of improved atmospheric oMtdi- tions in certain woA places,
356. 3S5; of refusal o relief physician to attend smallpoi case in Sharpsburg, 181; of under- world alliances, 314, 31c, 316; physi- cally or mentalTy handicapped boys placed in glass-houses, 399; showing causes of immigration, cl^racter of, attitude of, and eSect of American conditions on Slavs, Gi, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70; showing how work- accidents have handicapped Slavs, 73,74, 75' 76; showing lack of munic- ipal provision for lodging poor, 347, 3481 showing readiness of Slav to help countrymen in distress, 76, 771 showing reasons for contempt for American law held by Slavs, 71, 73, 73; showing restlessness and in- stability of child labor, 300; showing slight chance for apprenticeship in glass-houses, 300, 301; showing viola- tion of child labor law, 201, 303, 310, 311,313,181,197; showing violation of labor law governing hours of work
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for women and childim, 103, 104; tnuiicy in Sharpsburg ichools, 386, 187, aSg, igo, 391, tgj, 199; Yeggt utd b^an, 317, 318. 3*8. 3»9. 33'. 333, 334. 337, 338
Centrfti Labor UnioOi 445
"Cluppia Hoimn," 311 Charittfls AsaocUtlon, Public, 1 1 Check-waicbouui. See Mine mcrktri Cbemicov, 61
CUCKgO—
Court system of, 13, 381; munici- pal lodging houses, 347; vice com- mission, 371, 3S8, leconmiendations of, concerning agencies to deal with prostitution, 3S3; ward school sys-
"CUSteUr," 318,319
Child Uboi—
Affected by inadequate tniancy Staff, III; aaected by provision in schod law penmtting abridgement of school year, m; afiected by school census, 110, 313^ ages of children leaving school for work in Plymouth and Hazelton, in 1007, (Table) 308; an extravagant tool, 301, 302; cita- tion of, cases in Shupsburg, aSi, 397, 398, 399, 300, 301; d^ection of mental and social development caused by, 301; effect of, in stogy factory on physical condition, 101, 303; in caseof false affidavits burden of proof rests with factory inflection depart- ment, »07i lack of records of children woilung, 1S4; method of checking, in New York, 309; nunimum legal
Tfor, 388; Negro, 99; night work in glass factories, 19s, 30^, 313; official transcripts of birth certificates
or idigious records from abroad as a means of checking, 309; on dajr awl oigfat shifts, 3Q3, 393, 394, 395, 39S, i99i 3°°. 3^1 physical effect <^ joi; Shaipsbuig childim, 387-19^ Shaipsburg children in tlte gbua- housea, 395-301, in the metal trades, 391-39$, wbcdiy m partially suppott- ing family, 389, wondng double turn, 399, wtnkiDg without certificate*, 396, 397; unconcern of sdwol autlwri- ties reguding, an
ChUd labor CI . _
Combination of lax law and lax enforcement brought out by, 111; ol 1911, generally unsuccessful, 313
CliiM Lcbor Conunlttoe, 453
ChUd Ubor Ij
Urictina lefeated.
ni^t :
113; case died showing effect of failure to enforce, 3oi ; certificates of minors in Sharpsburg, 396; Ddaney amendment to, affecting tobacco in- dustry, 303 \ duty of factory inspec- tion department to enforce, tar, education test under, 207, 208, 309, 379, 393„30i; cnfordng, in Sharp*- bure, lia; e:qierience of schod prin- cipal in dealing with violation of, 310; "farm Ubor" not covered by, 213; fomtecn-year-old limit uochanged, 379; glass industry working against, 379. 395; in Massachtisetts, 307; in Pennsylvania, 207; in New York, 207; in New York, compared with Philadelphia, 304; in Wisconsin, r^ulating employpient in tobacco trades, 202; inteUigent co-opentioa of children in breaking, 311; issuing work certificates under, IT3; Ujc, and lax enforcement btought out by child labor campaign, in; new, in- ability of children to qualify under. 211, involving educational test, placed in hands of schocd offidab, 311, re- quireaproof of age, 211; non-enforce- ment of, in stogy factoiy, 101, 202; of 1905, issuance of certi&^tes under, held unconstitutional, 107; proof of
age, 3
r, 309, 3
379;
tions concerning hours.
313.
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pHiUtnted occupations for, 199, 113, proof of age, 309, 113; rebtitig to irauis, 108: vkdation of, by mBnsgeT of picUe iBctoty, »ii, III, by sted mids, 301, 303, goveniiiig boun of work, 103, 303, 104. See also Labor
Child Welftre Burean, 16
CUIdr«a—
Consenration of, unKcognlzed |irob- lem of Shaiptburg, 304; djamissed from industnes by lactoiy inqiectian depvtmeiit, 305; factory inspection department report of, at woi^, 1903- 1913, (Table) 196; factory inspection depaltment reports lati statistics conterninz employment of, in glass factories, laun^es, and metal trades, 193, 194, 19s, 196; intelli^Dt co- operation of, in breaking child labor iLoA compulsny education laws, in; lack of detention rooms for truant, 3ii; leaving school for work, loS; s^r^ation of, in jails and alms- boiue, 390. See also Sharpsburg: A TypiaaWaitt rf ChUdhood
Children's initltntioiif —
Education in, 131 hygiene in, 13; lack of co-operation among, 13; plac- ing-out work of, 13
Children's work- accidents- Fatal, r99; reports of factory in- qiection department lack adequate statistics conceniiit^, 1991 re^cHrta of, important as baais for prohibiting dan^tnis occupations, 199
China, 3
Cincinnati Mine CompanT, 176
Cltiieoa —
Desirability of Old Believers as, 03, 94; Russians' lack of desire to become, 94, 9j; Slavs as permanent, 61, 6», 6s, 66, 67, 70
Citizens* Committee —
Attack by, on administration of William A. Magee, 363, 363
CltUenship—
Converting Old Believers to, 94, 95 ; efFect of overwork on, iS, 39
CiQr—
Hours, day labor, lai, 184; wages, day latxM', i3i
City cooacil—
Ant^onistic to reform adminis- tration, 313; graft of, ^63; graft of, during reform administration ex- posed, 313
City pbTsician—
Sharpsbuig, 3S3, 3 S3, 384
ClTlc Club of Allegheny County, 333 CItIc Forces, The Coalition of Pltts- bnrgli's, 9
CItIc meetlass— National, 7
CItIc problem of 1914, 30
Clvle responsibilities, 7; of democ-
ClTict-
Young Men's Christian Associa- tion da^es in, 416, 417 CItU aerrlce —
Effect of extension of, on police, 375; factory iiiq>ectots placed under,
fornon-e
factory ii
municipal, I
effective because of character of com-
missioo, 310; phyucal examination of
day labor under, i3i Clark mills, 96, to6, 107 Clesnliness. See WaskUi facUUks "Clem" Hackeaberger, 344
CleTeland, 4; death rate, 14; low- fare street railway service, »; re- ducing number of arrests in, 387; ty- phoid death rate, 17; ward school system, 9
"CleTeland Jim," 330
Close, C. L., 345, 494-49S
Closed shop. Sec Unionism
Closing hours. See Hours
Coal- Yearly production of, in District No. ^ of United Mine Workers of America, ii;
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Coflee, Sadolf I., 501-506
Coke region—
Affected by outcome of unioniEm in Westmoreland, 168
Cokeborgh, S3, 84, S5, 86
ColonUation—
Of immignmt wBge-euueTa, 44, 45.56
Colorado- Mine wofkers, 167
Colnmblui Settlement, 51
Colnmbna Daj, 60
Appointed by 25 states to invcsti- R&te work-ocddents, en^loyets' lia- bility laws, etc., 300
I 13-188, ,440
Cosmi^Mlitan make-up of, 366, 367; eSect of inflow of itonugruits on moral and religions life of, 34; effi- ciency tests of social machinery of, 16; expansion obstructed by street rail- way system, ii; relation ol wage- eamers to, j; respomnbility of, 18, to industriea, 14; soda) aod indus- trial development of, as affecting crime, 366-369, See also Uuniei- paUty
Community and Workshop, j-30 Community betteanent—
Pioneer work, 41 tools for, 11-16, 18, 19
mpanyai
Competltloa—
Effect of imrestricted, 176; of United States with foreign natkos.
Comatock, George S., 445 Condition of the Working CUh in England In 18441 The— By Frederick F.ngds, 18 a
Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in flie United States, ao8
Congress. See Ftdtrai fOMrwMeal
Coniidine, John, 314 Conaolldated River Coal Com|any,
Constabnlary. See Piiict ConatmctiTe public policy—
Development of, an dement is solution of housing problem, 11
Conanmers' Leagne—
Child labor committee and, active in factory legislation and oifacement, 453; enactment of women's labor law in 1913 accomplished by, 114; enforcement of common standards for women workers by, »6o
Consumers' League "white lift," 131, 304, 138, 453, 454: cooditiaDt inaking retail houses eligible to, 453, 4S4
Contract labor law- Circumventing the, 37, 38, 39; no violation of, by em[doyen in iHlls- burgh, 39; suits for violation tA, 39; verdict in suit for violation of, 39
Contractors- Wages day labor, iiq, 120
Contrasts of Pittsburgh, 119
536
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Cooper, diaries C, 493. 493
Co-operation-^ '
Develt^ment of employes through encouragiiig, 167, 368; eveiy move- ment for, a sain, 5; in garment tradea b New York, 1731 374i lack of, 4
Co-oper«tiTe cemmitteas—
Development and stability of em- ployes through, 271-174
Lack of, between di^iensacies, 19, between boqiitals, 10, 11, 11, between nurses' aasodationa, 11, in IQ14, i3
Cut accotmtinE—
Practiced by Andrew J. Canegie, 376 Coat of living. See Living Cottntj poor relief phyaiclan, }Si
Cotirt—
System of Chicago, 13; records of repeaters, 310-313
Court, aldeimanic, 11, 13, 377; blind man's parade, 37S', fees, 378; in- fluence of underworld in, 316, 379; injustice acMirded immiffrant wage- earners in, 3a, S3, 71. 7». 73i 379, 380, attitude of Westinghouse striken in 1914 toward deputy sheriffs and po- lice a reaction against, 380; present jurisdiction of, 33, 378
Court, coDimon pleai —
Consolidated under presdent judge, 380
Court, county- Influence of underworld in, 316; of concurrent jurisdiction, 13, $3, 53, 378, non-sun>ort cases in, 381
Court, juvenile- Association, colored auxiliary to, 433; lack of detention rooms for chil- dren, III, 330. See also Jiftenile de- linquaili; ProbalioH
Court, maglatratea'-
Alliance between, and underworld, 377; aniointmenta to, 377; domi- nated by police, 377; dnmks and petty ccenders tried before, 378; malpractice in, 377; not property part of Bureau <» Police, stS; now part of centralized police ^stem, 377; sessions of, 377
Court of Oyer end Tenniner, 380
Court of Quarter Seuloos, 380; adult probation officer ifipcdntcd in, 38"
tion work needed for adults in higher, 383; pcdice and the, 375-380; prejudice and contempt for immigrant wage- earnersin,44.S'. S3. 7». 7». 73.368; probation needed for oSenders brought before minor, 383; reformation and prevention si^terseding punishment in the minor, 376, 377; rehabilitation of minor, needed, 381; relation of probation officer, to, 376, 377. See also Crime CoTode House, 359
Deaths due to cq)eration of, 13, 15 Creaaon, 11
Among AmericaD-bom and aliens, 367, 368, immigrant wage-earners, 50-33. Negroes, 433: bureau of, pre- vention, 386; camplollowasof, 315- 317; case work in dealing with, 389- 391; effect OB, of home conditions of immigrant wage-earners, ji, 53; etimination of organized, 384, 385; 6rst (lenders and rounders, 387, 388; methods suggested for prevention of, 386; not confined to lowest sodal order, 367, 368; opportunity of police tor prevention of, 383, 384; police accessories to, 309; police poLcy in dealing with organized, and individual offenders, 385; scientific treatment of, 388, 389; BOdal program needed to prevent and eliminate, 383, 384; sources of, 366. See also Cotirls; Pelict
■d^yCoogle
AttnctioD of bduatrul center for, 366; generating, in an indiutriu center, 366, 367; per cent of inuni- grant, unmarried, 53; tendency to punish alien, 368
Crlppl« factory of Tegga, 334
Cripples, fake, 334, 33s
Ctoaln, Prank S., 445 Crowell, F. BUtabetb, 10 Cmclbte Steel Compaa;, at, 261,
410-413 Cultural poaalbiUtiea—
Of immigrant wige-eanMts, 34, 6a Cpabrlani, 95
Dairiea. See Milk
Darr Mine, 176
Day labor, 119-111
Day labor, boon of, 184; in building trades, 184; in dty enqitt^'ment, iii, 1S4; in state emidc^inent, lit
Day labor, wagea tor—
Affected by knoidedge of En^ish, 131, politics, I30, 111, unionism, 110, III; immifpaat, in steel aHnpanies, 119; in bimding, no, i8t; m dty employmeot, iii, 181; in state em- ployment, lit; In U. S. Steel Cor- poration, 41, 119; on railway, 119, 110; paid by contractors, 119, no; under Americanized padrone, tio
Daylaborara — Physical em dvil service, i3t; unionism among, 184, in building trades, iio, 111
Deatb rate—
Comparison of, in Pittsburgh and four other dties, 14. See also Mor- talily slatistici
"Denver Shine,*
331
Dapartmant of tbe Interior^
Bureau of mines established under, '3. '4. i77t safe^ wotk of, 177 Depreasion—
Influence of unionism during pe- riods of, iSs
DetectiTe bureau. See PeUct Develmment—
Sodal and industrial, as affectiag crime, 366-369
DeTlne, Bdward T., 7
Diamond Ccdie and Coal Cempany,
430 Dlarriiaa—
Death rate, 14 Dinwiddle, Emil; W., 10
Dlaeaae —
Infectious, danger to modem dtics.
14; preventable, a drain on
ity, 17, deaths from, 14, ij. Sec Saftptarding trnphyet
DiBpenaariea—
Lack of co-ordination between, 11,
538
Dlatrict attomaj'a atafl^
Coundlmanic graft during reforai administration exposed by later, 313
District Council No. i, BroUi- erhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperbai^ara of Allegheny County, 159
Districts defined. See Prottititiitm
"Doc" —
Industrial worker, bartender, piiie Ggbtei, and sanitary policeman, 318
Drinking—
Among immigrant wage-earners, 49i 50, 531 among Negro sted work-
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en, 104; unofflg OM Bdieven, 84, 85, S8, 89, 90, 91, 94; among river- 1001,113; u cause M wo A-«ccidcnts, 119; employes' benefits not payable
. if disability is due to, 264
Dnif»—
Sale of, 38s
Qnmku'dB —
Scientific treAtment of, in Massa- chusetts and New York, 388
Anests for, point to n«cd for study,
518, 519; neeJless airests for, 519 DntokaniiaH and disorderly con-
dnct— Elimination of, ^5; pei
police cases of, umiigrr-*
Southeastcni Europe, 50, 5: Dnqiteane, 11, 136, 161 Dntcb, 351 Dyiutmitfl coaiplntcT, 15a
mmiigrants from
■■J&>,
Ttiwfiigiant
gm sted workers.
See also ITiifei East End—
Comparison of mortality statistics
in river wards and, »3 BastmsD, CtrabU, 15, 43t 73. i97. 19S.
199, 200, 145. »64, 166, 443 Bconomic Iwttennent. See Bctier-
Ecooomic cost—
Of typhoid fever, 17; of work-acd- doita, 34, 15, 16, 17; of work-acd- dents, distribution of, a6, 17 Economic jtosition—
It wage-earners, 33-43
ce of prostitution, 353 Economic snrver—
By Piof . Holdswortb, 19 Education, compiilBOrT. See Ckild
labor Educational need—
Of Sharpsbuig children, 303, 304
Educational woA—
Among immigrants, jt, 51
Edwards, Dr. James t., 16, 345, 406
Bfflcioacj, Patifae and. See Fi^pu
Eisner and Philips, 131
Electrical machinery, apparatus, and snppUes— Output of, 115
Electrical wortcers, 155-1571 appren- ticeship of, 155, 1561 employeis' agreements with, I5S) hours of inside '''iremen, 155, 156, of linemen, 157; linemen favor municipal ownerahip,
ng, "4S; , not permitted by union linemen, i^ strike in 1905, 155; strike in 1907 among linemen, 156; strike in 190S among linemen, 1561 unionism »mong, 155, 156, inside wiremen, iss, linemen, 156) wages of inside wire- men, 145, i55i >56> of linemen, 145, iSfi. "57 Blsvator constnictors, 157-159; ap- prenticeship, 157, 158; cariares of, 158; classified as mechanics and helpers, 157; employers' agreements with, 157, 158, 159; hours, 158, 159; jurisdictional dilutes of, 158; piece work prohibited, 158; scarci^ of workmen among, 145, 157; unionism among, 146, 147, i57, 'jB, 1J9; wages affected by unionism during panic of 1907-08, 147) wages of, 147, 158, 159
BUis, Morton, 317, 338, 319 Emergencj rooms—
In industrial plants, 231, 332. See
also Plants, pkyiical equipment of;
Surfieal orgamtaHon 0} the Camept
Steti Company
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EmenoD Compuiy, 17 Employer—
SelaCionsbip between, and employe in large oiganizationa, 17a
Bmployen—
Cmitests between, and unions for supremacy, 173; enforcemtjit o( tabor laws in lUiiioii crippled by, 190; in- suiance, 264; interstate conventioDS of, and mine worken, 170; labor legi^tion defeated by, bl Massachu- setts, 190; metbods lesorted to by, to ddeat labor legislation and cripple enforcement, 190; power of, to re- move factory inqvectors, 190, 191
Employerf' ■graemmti. See Trade
Employ en' asaocUtion—
Bndge and stnictuial iron workers, 150, i;i; hobting engineers, 153; machinists, 140; metal trades, 139; moldeis, 1411 slate and tile roofers, i6f; tile layers and helpers, i6£; unionism aSected by, 139, 140, 150, 153. See also Eittator hlatatfactur- tr^ and Builders' Association; tn- lemaUotud AssociatUm of Bridge and StnictUTol Iron Workers; Uanvfac- ttirtrs' Association of Pittsburgh; Hosier Brick Contractors' Associa- tion; Master Builders' Association; Master House Painters' and Decora- tors' Association; Master House- smiths' Associalum; Master PUm^trs' Aisocialion; National Erectors' As- sociation; National Pounders' As- sociation; National Metal Trades Association; State Roofers' Associa- tion; Tite Dealers' Association
Employer*' liability- Commissions appointed to investi- gate, 3oa; law, 35, 176; legislative action concerning, joo, urged by De- laney, 100. See also Workinfmen's compensalioH
EmployeB—
Effect of monotonous repetitive tasks on, 36S, 169; loaned to, for vegetable farm, 361; relationship between employers and, in targe organizations, 370; resent- ment of American, by welfare work, =S8
IS drudgeiy of fiS, 169; land
Bmployu' benefit aseociatioiM— Elnect of, on morals, 264, 365; in H. J. Heuu Company, 364; in Pittsburgh Coal Company, 164; to Pittsburgh Railway Company, 1641 in Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, 364; in United States Steel CorporatioD, 364; in Westing- bouse Air Brake Conqiany, 1G4, 46S- 401; in Westin^wuse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 164; in- suiaoce by emfdoyers in em(4oyeis' liability conqiany genersUy super- seded by, 364; suffMWted by cmn- pany, i&t, supported by cnmpaay aad employes jomtly, 264; npfionBd by employes, 364
Employes' benefite—
Baaed on service and resionaibility. 164; not dqiendeut on liability of company, 1&4; irat payable if dis- ability or injury b due to intoiin- tion, z64i not payable if anpiojt sues for damages, 364; petd by Car- negie Relief Fund, (Table) 165
Employe!, deTalopment and atabil- Itj of, 155-374; effect of anti-unioa policies on, 168; efiect of gettenl method of labor management cm, 168; eSect of immigratioo on, i6ft; im- portance of, to employer outside of employing center, 363; in ctial town of Mariarma (Pittsburgh-BuSalo Cod Conutany), 161, 363; in mill town of Braddock (Carnegie Sted Company), 36 1 i in mill town of Midland (Cru- cible Steel Company), i6r; in mill town of Duquesne (Carnegie Sted Company), 161; m mill town of Homestrad (Cajne^e Sted Com- pany), 3G1; in mill town of Vaodv- grift {Apollo Iron and Sted Com- pany), 161; in miU town of Wilkins- Durg (Westinghouse Electric aad Manufacturing Con^iany), 160; in mill town of Wilmeiding (Westing- house Air Brake Company), 160; in mill town of Woodlawn (Jones and Laughlin Steel Company), 261; m mill towns. 359-363; through acci- dent and sickness relief. i63'i66. 3751 through bonus system, 36S, 369,
.d,Google
encouiagEng initiative and co-open- doD, 167, 368; throu^ penwms, 165, a66; through [Kofit-ahajiiig, 166, 167, ID H. K. Porter Company, 367, in Reymer's Omdy Factory, 167, in United States Sleel Corporatioii, 166, 167, initiative and con^ieraCion, 166- 374; through relief and pensions, 163-166; through sug^tion syv tern, 170-171, in Amencan Bridge Company, 271, in H. J. Heini Com- pany, 171, in National Tube Com- pany, 27i> 373; through wdfare woR, 157-159; thiougli wdfaie work, a paying investment, 158, in America, 157, 158, in Aimstiong Cork Company, 159, in H. J. Heine Com- pany, 258, 259, in Germany, 157, In Jenkmson's stogy factory, 259, in McCreeiy's depMtment store, 259, in Rauh clothing factory, 159; tliTough worits committees, 170, 271, 272; wages affecting, 263
^nployea, recmitiiig ' apprenticesliip courses liouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in, 221; apprenticesliip metbod of H. K. Porter Company in, 222, Mesta Machine Company in, 222, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Rail- road in, 221, 322; apprenticeship S]rs- tem employed in, 110, lit, 113; attempt to attack alcoholism in, by littsbulgh Railways Company, 220; attributes to be considered in, 218; constant, necessitated by restlessness of labor, 221, 222, 22j; in early days, 1751 indiscnminate method in, ziS, 219; indiscriminate method in, re- sults in inefficient working force, 219; method employed by H. J. Heinz Company, 1 19, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in, 119, no; physical examination in con- nection with, 119, 110, by Camc^e Steel Company, 210, by Central Dis- trict Telephone Company, 120, by H. J. Heinz Company, J19, by West- inghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, 2 30; physical examination of apprentices in connection with, by H. K. Porter Company, 121, by Mesta Machine Company, 222, by Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, iji; probationary period and train- ing of pn>q>ective motonnen by
Pittsbui^ RaHways Onnpany in, 322; probationary period of Arm- strong Corii Company in, 122, of H. K. Porter Company in, 222. of Mesta Machine Company in, 111, of Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad in, in; sdection, iiS-iio, 274; se- lection through foremen, 3iq. 110; training, 320-223; training immi- Erontsforone taskin, 110, 111; weak leatuie in apprenticeship system of.
Anployes* aerrice p
Paid by AmericaD Steel and Wre Company, 166, Aimstroi^ Cork Company, 166, Carnegie Relief Fund, (Table) 165, Pittsburgh Coal Com- pany, 166, Reymer's Candy Com- pany, 266; Westinghouse Air Brake Company, 485-491; taken over by United States Steel Relief Pension Fund, 166
Bnceli, Fndftrick, 282 Engiiieen. See RaUway Employer Botineera' Soci«tj of Peiuu;lTuila, 445
BngUsd, I J, 2
1,181
Eoglisli labor laws- Recommendation that, be made basis of a code, 213
Englishmen, 34, 54, 3^
American sodal industrial problem not to be solved along, lines, 7; com- munity conditions, 3; convalescent homes, 6; co-operative stores, 6;
ig, 5, 6; industri inWidity funds, 6; new industrial center, 5; pensions and woik-acd- dent funds, 6; rents, 6; sanitary facilities, 5, 6. See also Gtmony;
Essen No. I, 79
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Ivaiiwu W«jr, Th», ,-, S
■.Vll4luH ithUOlS. ^t >t.ilU<M
tuiiets ordered by new, 1 15, 445 '• ^*^ ol co-opa*tioii between, and xbad Bulhoritie*, iSj; ladu powet of con- intay aaiety experts in gettiiiE ictkB on recommeiMktions, 19Q; BMil effect 00 children of bulim on pui d to prosecute law bre^tcn. iii. ni: tieed of higbeat efficiescy in. itr. new, divutoo of indusunl bypoB. Jij, iit>, Md covcfed by. :i;. :ia: no o|>|M6itiaa by, to pcwvisuB iH^ tan lUKbl work of mnofs in ^iHi
result of LKfc of dvii juwne pane'
^ety laws by. ^05;
•vnrlr iiiiiiMn
'»nuiuiy 01. a
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cbOdioi important ai buh for pio- hibitiug dangerous occupations, 199; amtssions in, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197; questions which should be cov- ered in, 193; to the public, 191-198
Factoij inapsctloD headqnarters— Estabiisbedat Pittsburgh, 115,4451 establishmen t of , at Pittsbui^, recom- mended in report on factory in^>ec- tion, 111; inadequate impropriation for, in 1914, 13; madequate clerical force at new, 445; no, m Pittsburgh, 189
Factor; inspection In Pittsburgh, 1S9-11G
Factory inapection atafi —
Physicians and engineers added to, 115, 316; recommemiation of report on ractory inspection that physiaaos and engineers DC added to, 113
Factor; inspector, cblel—
Advised by attorney general to withhold prosecutions for violation of child labor law, 106; change in, rec- ommended in report on factory in- qjection, 213; character of won of, iQo; characteristic statement of, con- cerning accidents 197, 198; decision by, concerning education tert of chil- dren seeking employment, loS, over- ruled by attorney general, 108; J. C. Ddan^ reappointed, in 1909, by Governor Stuart, 3151 J. C. Ddaney
J. C. belaney, loo; new, L. R. Pal- mer, 445; number of orders of, to guard machinery compared with number of orders of safety inqiector of private company, 19S
Factor; Inapectort —
Inaccessibility of, ^89; insufQdent number of, 189; power of employers to remove, 100, 191; unprotected by civil service law, 191
under civil service rules, 115; pladng, under civil service laws recommended in r^Mrt on factory itk^Kction, iii; political appointees, 191; power of incompetent, 191
Factor; lam —
Qutnges in, from 1908 to 1913, 313, 114; local agencies, and laz enforce- meat, 307-114. See also Labor Lam
Farm colonies, 373 "Fum labor," in
Fati|iio and Bfficimic;—
By Josephine Goldmark, 153, 154. See also Safeptarding employtt
Federal bnraan of mines, ij, 14, 177
Federal goTsrament—
Steps by, for prevention of mining accidents, 13, 14, 177
Federal Immigration Conunisslon,
3S3. "5»n, 36 Federal Supply Company, 174 Feehan, Francis, 171^, i77i 445 FUtration plant. See Water supply
Firemen. See Railway empioya
Fitch, John A,, 17, 117, 119, 178, 153
*73 Flagmen. See Railviay tmphyet Flint, Joslah, 317 Flood prevention, 9
Food anpply —
In£ssen,5,6; study of quality and cost of, by Professor HoldkworUi, iS
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Foreign white atock in PittabniKh in igiD— By mother tongue, (Table) 3 a Fort Pitt Bridge Ctmt*aj, 1 50 Poster HoOier, Plttibargh u a, la Foundries and machine iliops — Labor condltkos in, 17; investi- gation of, by new factory inspection department, 445
Prance- Death rate from mine workers' accidents in, 17s
Fraternal order* —
S6
French, 35 '1 3*4, 3^S PridE, H. C, t68 Friedrichshof . See Bssfit
Garbage remoral contract, 14 Garment trades—
Co-operation In, inNew Vork, 173, 174
Garrison Fonndr; Company, 133 Gaynor, Mayor, 387 Geographical situation, 113 German Lutheran school, 184
Germans, 3. 5. 6, 18, 33, 37, 40, 46, 34, 84, I3S> 187. as8| aSo, a84, apo, 310, 3>8, 337. 3SI. 366. See also Teutons
Germany, 3, 257, 371; workingmen's insurance in, 3. See also Esten; Krupp; Rktnisk-Wesiphaiia
Girls- Legislation affecting hours of woA for, imder eighteen, aoa, 113, 314; one hundred and twenly-Gve work- ing, 4ga, 493, hours of work of, (Table) 493. See also CliUd labor;
Glass House Row, 38a
GtaM-honses, 297, 39S, 399, jcxi, 3ot; legislatim in 1913 safeguarding em- ployes in, aoi; night work of duldien m, 195, ao3, ai3, ijg; reports of fac- ttwy Inspection dniartment ccmcon- ing einployinent ol women and ddl- drenin,lacking, 194, 195; Sharpsbuig ctuldren in, 195-301
3qS Glenshaw, »g6
Goldmark, Josephine, 353, 154 Goler, Dr. George W., 18
GoTetoment —
Effective methods of, probleni of iver in^xovonenls by.
Grady of tk« underworld, $1$
Greater Birmingham, 8 Greater Pittabnrch, 8, 9 Greek Orthodox Rnstians, 57 Greeks, 46, a8o, 345, 335
Greenabnrg-
Mine wor Grodno, 6 a Gnizot*s History of Prance, 78
Guthrie administration, 14, 18, 311, 3i». 313. 3S0, 358, 371. 386, 406, 501, Soa
"H— henchman," 316 Hang-onts. See Ytu^
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Hardy uid Bmjm ComponT, 454
Hurison, Shelby H., 9 Hkyes, Gertrnda, 3^1, 35S
Htueltoo—
Ages of childKD in, leaving school
HMlth—
LahM conditions itiimiml to, ij; puMic, I^ttabuigh's foregnie uset.
Health, bnreBtt o( —
Deaths from wc«k-acddenta not shown by T^>orts of, 15; develop- ment of Military service and, pro- tecdMi of ctly, 141 gubage removal contract engrossed two-thiids of ajHiiopiiation of_, 14^ in hoods of pcditician, ij; in hands of skilled sanitarian in 190S, 14, 15) lodging hoiue licenses issued by, 341; lodging houses closed by, 345; new adequate departntental organization and trained sanitarian, 15; no annual rqiort of, for five years, 14; no physi- cian at head of, until Guthne ad- ministration, 14; only one-half of appropriation free for general health purposes, 14; power of, to vacate, 10; reorganization of food inspection ser- vice of, recommended by New York Bureau of Municipal Research, iq; report oa work ol, by New Yott Bureau <^ Municipal Researdi, 15, 16; Shaipsburg, inadequate care of poor, 283, 183, inconudete records, 181. lax disinfection by, 383, 183, laxness b r^KHting contagious cases, 1S3, 384; subordinate bureau up to '909. '4
Health certiflute —
Legislation making, prerequisite in granting marriage licenses passed m compromise form, 505
Heinz Bottle Works in SharpabnrB— Improvement of atmospberic con- ditioia by, 101
Hoinz GUh Company, 319, 334, 319, 330, 131, 136, 330, 353, is8, 359. ^f 37a, 39s, »9<i
Herr, President, 141 Heyl-Pattenon Compaay, 150
HolBting engineers, r53, 154; appren- ticeship of, 14S. IS3, rS4; employers' assodation, 1531 hours of, 154; li- cenaingof, 153, 154; unionism among, 133; wages of, 1S4
Home condittons—
Effect of, of immigrant 1 ers on crime, S3, S3
Homestead, 106, 336, 361; bou^ng conditions in, 33, 13; mills, 33S; overcrowding in, 131 privy vaults not prohiUled in, 33; riota, 276; strike of 1893, 113; water supfdy in houses, 33
|
Home aad CompsiiT i3». 4S4 |
Joseph, .30. |
|
Hospital— tizedini9i4,i3; ex-poHceman super- intendent of, for insane, ii; munici- pal tuberculosis, 11, do general mu- nicipal, in 1914, 13 |
.d,GoogIe
Hotpltalr—
At EsMD, 6; lack o( co-ordin&tioD between, lo, ii, in 1914, la; recent additions to spedalized, 11; subsi- dized, difficulty in getting patients accepted in, 11
HoteU—
Investigation of, by new factory inspection department, 445
Hotm —
Adult male wage-eainecs, 303; a^tatioD by workers to shorten, met with reprisal, 39; bakers, 129, 1351 blacksmiths, 144; boiler makers, 143, 144; brewery workers, 137, 138, 184; bricklasrers, 146, 147, 148; bridge and structural iron workers, ijo, 151, 151, 153; building trades, 146, 166, 1S41 building trades day labor, 184; carpenters, 154, 15^; duld labor law relating to, 308: aty day labor, iii, 184; clostng, [or women and ^rU, 114, in Indiana, Massachusetts, Ne- braska and New Yoric, >i4; day labor, 184; effect of long, on citizen- ship, family life, and morals, 17, 38, 19J effect of long, on restlessnos of l^ior, 117; electrical workers. Inside ^nnwax, 155, 156; electrical woric- ers, linemen, 157; elevator construc- tors, 158, 159; for women and girls, 313, 114; ^ris under eighteen, Icns- lation affecting, 1^1; ^rls wotked in tgij, 104; Imiating engineers, 154; houKsmiths, 153; in 1914, 18; in laundries, 104) in United States Steel Corporation, 395-399; law regulating, in Ohio, 301; machinists, 140, 141, i4»; masons, 146, 147, 148; metal trades, 139, 1S41 mine wcorkers, 167, 168, 170, 17a, 173; mine work- ers compared with steel workers, 178, r^o; molders, 143; of 135 settlement giris, (Table) 403; of Shaipsburg chUdren in ^ass-houses, 198, in metal trades. Iron mill, 193, in meUl trades, shovel factory, 193, in metal trades, tube mills, 394; pamtera, decorators, and paperhangers, tjg, 160; pattern D!'^''^! '43> plasterers, 161; plumb- ers, 146, i63i printers, 133, tS4i rail- wav and runs, 115, 136, 117, 138, 184; railway, restricted by federal legisla-
116, :
retail deits, iig, ly), 131, 133, 184; retail clerks, leg)dat»n affecting, 133, 314, 360, shortened through tflorts of Knights of Labor, 119, women, 1841 rivermen, 133; sheet-metal wodten. Its ; shortened to safeguard enqiloyei, 354; slate and tile roofos, 165; state daylabor.iir; steamfitters, 14C, 164; street railvnty, and runs, 133, 134, 1S4; summary showing effect of 184, i8s;
Honae building —
Promoted by Industrial owpoia-
Honsebold demonstrators— Resident, 359
Hooseliold needs, 17-30 Honsekeeplufc—
Co-operative, among imnugnnt
wage-earners, 47
i> »3, 45. 54. nsus of, 3a
See also OsovrwRiJiKf
Housesmidis, 153,153) affiliated with structural iron workers, 153; appm- ticeahip^ of, 153; employers' agree- ment with, 153, 153) hazards of, ijji he^ieis allowed to fitters or journey- men, 153; houisof, 153; ^mpathebc strikes, 153; I '" ■ wages of, 1S3
Housing —
Immigrants In nnderworid ds- tricts, 307; in Essen, 5, 6; nine workers, 174, 175; mine workers and steel workers compared, 179; Negro steel woikers, tot^ non-enforcen»ii of, laws and ordmanccs, 406; the immigrant wage-earner, 45, 46, 47, 4*. 49. 55. 59. 60
Houaint conditions—
At Mariaima, 263; inqirovtd. shown by photogr^te in Museum of Safety ^)pliances, 494; in tai towns, 33; m Sharpsburg, 33, iSa, 181,183; ' ' -— -
S46
.d,Google
Hmuing of Pittsborcb's workeri, 20
UaiuiBf problem —
Ci><ipcntive building sdwme, >i, r, devdopmcDt of constructive pub-
Hnbbard'f iborel factory, 191, 193
Httman coniorratioD —
Kesults of failure to apply principle of, to tndustiy, 18
HnmMJanti 34, t», S4t 86, 161, 351 HimkiM, aSo, 319, 334
Ice men. See Teamslen
nilDois—
Enforcement of labor law« crippled by employer!, 190
"niinoia Jlmm7,"33i
Immlcrant children. See Sharpsburg
Imiiiciant labor — '
^ect of, on improvement of min- ing iwocesMS, 169
TtwntfrMnti^
. underworld districts, 307; Pittsburgh as a destination of,
56; Sodety for tlie Protection of talian, 51; the Jewish, of two Pitts- burgh blocks, 419-413; training, for one task, sio, 111; Young Men's Christian Association work for, in the Pittsburgh District, 6a, 414-41S. See Lodging iotues; Wait-tamtr3,im-
bmnigration —
Causes for, of Slavs, 61, 63; effect of, on conditions of mine workers, 167, 168, 169, 170, on development of employes, 368; eacouraged by steel industry, 276; higher wages a reason for, 36, 37, 40; per cent of Slavs in present, 61
Immoralltj —
Among immigrant wage-earners, 48,49 Indiana —
Oosing bour for women and giris
in. 214; segregation of confirmed
felons in, 37a
Indtiatrlal accident* in Pennayl-
Tani«, 443. See also Work-accidentz
Industrial advance —
Made by inunigiant wage-eamen, 40, 41, 42, 43
Indnatrial board —
Duties and powers of, 216, 448, 449; membenbip of, 445; outcome of, to be seen, 216. See also Indus- tries; Labor
Indni trial center—
Attractions of, for professional criminal, 366; generating social ren- %ades in an, 366, 367; new, in Es- sen, 5 ; workin^ien resource of, 14, 28
Indnatrial centera—
Social progress in, during last five years, 19, 30
Indnttrlal cooditiona—
Recapitulation of, iSo-t88
Industrial corporationa—
Promotingliouse building, at
Indnatrial deTelopmant—
Of community, as aSecting crime, 366-369
IndnitrUl dlatrict— Areaof, iij, 116
Induatria] efBciency—
Of immigrant wage-eaners, 38, 40, 4*. 43
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InduBtrial Koremment'
Contest between ej
imioni for supremacy
. . . 0. *74-
278; devebpment and stability of employea, 255-1741 divisioD of, in factory inspection dqtartineat, 116; improvement in, depttident on man- agerial and finandal heads, 175, 177; of the Pittsbui^h Distcict, 27, 217- 1781 physical equipment of plant as it affects the comfort and convenience of employes, 213-140, 174; piindples fonning basis for analysis of, 117; recent improvements in, 259, 260, »7S; recruitiny of employes, 21&- 313; safeguarding employee against accident and disease, 140-255, 274. See also Working condilioiu
Indnatrlal maiugameDt —
Desire of wage-earners to have voice in, tSS; evolution of, compared wi til that of political government, 273. See abo Labor maHagement
Industrial problem of 1914, 30
Indiutrial unions. See Unions
Indnstriai workers —
Drifting into underworld, 317, 3181
preyed upon by underworld, 307, 317,
318. 319. 3™ Industrial Workers of the World,
Industries- Community responsibility dependent on immigrant
ers, 59; effect of panic of 1907-0S mt, itSi expansion of, other than steel, 277; independent of rank and file, 117; relation of wage-eamen to, 7
Industries, pig Iron- Quick response of, to depicsiioa «r prosperity, 118
548
InltUttire—
Development of employes tbim^ encouraging, 167, 36S
£x-policemaj hospital for, 12; provisions for o
Insorsnce. See WarkingmtH'i imfw
Insursnce societies —
Founded by priests, 58; of immi- grant wage-gamers, 56
International Association of Steam- fltters and Steanifitters' Helpers of America, 162
International Brotheriiood of Team- sters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen end Stablemen's Helpers, 111
International Loi^thoremen, Ha- rine and Transport Worfcen' Association, 121
Intemationat Holders' Union, 141
International prostltotion, 352, 353
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Intozication. See Drunkaititss
Iiiibi 33. 34. 37, 54> 'So, 184, 310, 35i Iron- Output of, 115 Iron Age, iis Iron aad Steel Roll HuuIb' Union,
106 Iron City Central Trades Cotincil,
Iron mills —
ShaipsbuiR children in. tgt, 192; Sharpsburg diildren'f opportunity for advancement in, iQi
Italians, 33, 34. 37, 39. 40, 43. 48. 53. S4. S5. 56, S7, 79. '19, "o, i". "35. ]6l, 2Sa, 381, 183, 2S4, 287, 397, 199. 302, 330, 3SO, 3SI, 3SS. 368. See abo Wage-earners, immtrant
Jackaon, John Price, 445 Jenkinson Stogy Factory, 330, ijt,
259 Jerome, District Attomsy, 315 Jewish Bakors' Union, 1 19
Jewiah Immigrants of Two Pitta- fanrgh Blocka, Tbe,4i9-423
J«ws, 3S, 129, 135, 136. 187. 280. 350. 3S", 3SS, 360. 3WI; educational work 4rf J. W. Anthony among, 51
"Jocker." See Yeggs Jones, John H., 263 JonesandLaaghlin,45. "9, '73, '78, 2l5t >33. *4S, 161, 445
JuTenile dBlinonests—
Rectwunentutions made by New YoA Bureau of Municipal Researdi affecting, 510
Kellogg, Paul U., 3-30, 43, 53, ji
Kelts, 33, 34, 40, 43
Kennard, Benbtb, 10, 52, 60
Kerr, Allen H., 12, 377, 378
King, Frederick A., 3S8, 5io-S>5
King of Second Avenue, 315
KIngaley House, 51, 133, 363, 453, 491
Knights of Labor, 1 : Salespeople's AasemI
Kohler, Chief, 387
Eoukol, Alois B., 36, 61-77
Krupp, 3, 5. 6
Krapps—
Mobilization of workmen by, s; remarkable labor force of, 6) sick- ness or disability of skilled workiaen on economic loss to, 5; welfare work of, from standpoint of American em- ployer, 6, from standpoint of Ameri- ' ' See also Essen
Knrtz, Langb«in and Swartz, 454
Labor- Causes and effect of restlessness of, 117; effect of Balkan war on, ti8; tack of effort to attract higher class of, 268; mobility of, compared with immobility of capital, 116, 117, evi- denced by panic of 1907-08, ti8; mobilization of, by Krupps, j; rest- lessness of, 116, ir7, 169, 390, 191, ji)6, 300; scarcity o( electrical work- ers, 145; scarcity of elevator con-
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■tiuctots, 145, iST; scardtyof iknied, 974; situatioilin igi4, 118. Seeabo Day labor; Wafe-eamen
Labor ftnd IndnstrioB Department- Act creating, 446-4 jo, appoiiit- ments under, 445; factory adminis- trative service o( state reotganiied as, 315; inadequate appropriation under, for supcrviiing factory in- spector's ofbtx at Pittsburgh, 13; indudes bureau of statistics, factMy inspection, and ait»tration, 115; iiAa Price Jackson, commis^Dner, 445 i legislation making report of wOTli-aixidents to, obliptoiy, 443; outctMne of work of, to be seen, 116. See also Factory irupectian; Ittdut- Irial board
Labor condltiona—
RepOTt on, by Stockholders' Com- mittee United States Steel OMpora-
tion, April ij, " "" "--
also Workitii u
Labor conToations —
Worit-acddents to miners, subject of complaintat, 175. See also I/moiu Labor Urn—
AfFecting wmneo and children, amended hi 1913, 113, ai4, includes all women subject to partial exemp- tions, 1131 California, and enforce- ment, 115; mforcemetit of, duty of factory inspection department, aoi, elements in, 307, In Ulincis crippled by etapl<^ezs, 190, ineffident, 190; enforcing authority of, unchanged up
■ 1913. : -. improvement of woriting through, 2j8; limiting working week foe women not ^lorceable, loj; Massachusetts, and enforcement, 115; New Yotk, and enforcement, aij) no, regulating ventilation in indus- trial plants, 226; non-enforcement of , by factory inflection dqiartment, 191, 104, 105, 106, III, 112, 249, in stogy factory, loi, 201; Ohio, and enforcement, 103, us; opposed by steel industry, 276; Pennsylvania, in igijexcelledby only four stales, 214) recommendation that English, be madebasisof acode, 213; regulating hours of women retail clerks, 1S4, ti4i violation of, governing hours of
work, 303, 304; Wiscoosin, and en- forcement, 115. See also CkM iabar lav; Ltp^latioK, mimini law
Labor logislatioii—
E>ef eated by emplojreis in Blaaa- chusetti, 190
Labor manaKemont —
Beginnings of scieotific, 255; cflect of, on development of emphqivn, 26S1 problem of, 256, 157; tii-tinii-.l men unprepared for duties of, i>s, »6
Lamont, Philip, 323 Lanf , Director, 310, 33$ Langfltt, Dr., 149 Utlna,366
LatrobamtnewDTfcers, 167 Lattfanore, Florence L., 13, 417
r day ii
Lanndriei—
Friday a fiftecn-bo( labcx conditions in, . . factory impecttim dq>utment c cemiog en^<»rment of wmnen 1 children in, lacJting, 194
Law breaking—
Capitalixing, and selling protec- tion, 359
Lawrence Park, 136
"Leadriile Jimmj," 331
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\
L«KlsUtioa—
AfFecdng houn of Rtail daks, 133, at4, ate, of women, 1&4, 113, 314, of pxb under eighteen, 133, 313, 114; affectkiK miniog (^tendons, i;6, 177; aSecdng noo-nqiport, 381; affecting MOtNLtion, 380, 381 ; ftffe<^iiig woric- ing oooditloiu m women tnjd siris, 314; aiming to [vevent mine woricen' accBdcDtA, 176, 177^ unendmetits to compiilsMy education, give local ButhiMitiet juriidictioii over enqdoy- ment of childRn under fourteen and illitente under «iTtiiii, 309; tuU pro- viding for rqxxt of venereal disoues defeated, S05; "Blower," loi, 250; cMd laboc, in Uaasachuietts, 107, in New YoA, 107, in Pennsyivania, 107, idatin^ to boun, loB; compulsory "•■—'■—I, »07, J79, 39a, 301; ctm-
inc the iMuing of worit certificates to (Mdren, 313; Consumers' League ac- comfdislied enactment of labc«, in 1913, 314; creating Bureau of Public Morals, 363, SOS, S061 creating Ete- partmcDt of LatxM and Industries, 446, 4so; effort t^ employen to de- feat labor, and ennircement, 190; en- abling local scIkmI autbmtiea to open dasBcs for adult immigrants, 51; es- ^■i^iw^i'w counW court <d ct^cur- rent jurisdiction, 53, 531 establishing
insurance, enacted in 13 states, 300; failure to enact, providing for vcdun- tary workingmen s compensation syt- tem, 44; federal, restricting hours of railway moi, 116, 13S; makmg health certificate {HCTequisite in granting marriage licenses passed in comfoo- mise form, 505; making cMigatory report of wo^-acddents to Labw and Industries Department, 443; proof of age, 379; j»t>vidiDg for state commission to mvestigate work- acddents, 44; requiring construction of fire wall^ 145; requiring file drills, 344; restricting night messenger ser- vice defeated, 3131 tariff, 114; to prevent occupational 'li"****", 301, >49. *S«i 4Si> 4S'i wwkmen's com- pensation, 313- See also Labor laws; Ckild labor lam L«giaUtlr« action—
Concerning en^Ioyei's liability and woikingmen's compensation bill, 100
Leia«rMii, WUlkm H., 113-188, 173
Lib*rt]r ATenn* Hiulim, 343
Library- Branches and substations, 11; foe Sharpsbuig children lacking, 303
Tlie Pnblie: A SocUl Foru
innti
Light- In industrial plants, 333, 334. See also Planti, pkyikal equipMtnl of
Lillian Horn*, See KimgiUy Botat
Llppincott, If Ih, 55
Liquor- Effect of prohibiting sale of, in houses of prostitution, 311, 338, 359. 361, 361; law strictly ^forcxd unOH reform administration, 513; profits from sale of, in houses of ^Hostitu- tion, 3s8, 3591 sale of, ^85, m Mari* anna, 363. See also Drtnkmg
LithnuiUlU, 33, 34, 3S, 37, 38. 39, 4<»i 43, 43. 44, 45. 47. 44. Sh 53. 55. 56. 57,58.65
LlTellhood. See Earninti
liTiaco
Among immigrant wage-eamert, 43-*o UTinc, cost of, 18, 19, 30; advance in, 55, ii9> 440, 441; effect of, on rest- lessoess of labor, 117; for unmarried immigranta, 46, 47; maiket garden poanMlities in reducing, 19
Lockers—
In industrial plants, 133, 3741 in United States Steel Cmporation, 497. See also Plaitit, pkyikal eqmp-
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/
Ordinance providing (or operation of mUDidpa], vetoed by Mayor Magee, 346
Lodfing house*, 3J9-348; assault and battery in immigiuit, 47; Bethel Home, 34J, m; Chicago munidpal, 347; class seeking shdter in, 339, jj4o; "Clem"Hacke(ibergeTconduct- ug, for rivermen and market men, 344; dosedby bureau of health, 345; comparatively small number of, 33Q; five- to tirenty-five cent, 341, 341, co-operation between poUcc ^id health bureau needed for regulation of, 3S3) immigrant, 87, 86, congested, 46, 47, 48, 3Q, moral conditioiis in, 48, 49, sanitary conditions in, 46. 47, 59; ineffective oversight of private, 348; investigation of, by local com- mittee, 345; keptby"&-,"34i,34», ilS; kept by "Rev." R—, 343, 344; iberty Avenue Mission, 343, 345; Liberty Misuon enjoined, 345; U- censea for, issued by board of health.
Si; lodging-house resort, 345; Iging-house types, 346, 347, the moral bankrupt, 34b, 347, the old railroad yardmaster, 346; men al- lowed to sleep on diain at Rescue Mission, 345, 346; munidpal pro- vision, 340, 347, 348; New York
Tavern, 344; Providence Mission, 345; rivermen's houses, 344; Salva- tion Amjy conducting, 343; Salva- tion Anny, enjoined, 345; Salvation Army Industrial Home, 345; Salva- tion Army Shdter, 3431 the "Mis- *«>n," 340. 34»t 34*. 343; triple- deckere and sanctimony, 343, ~ ~ Volimteers of America condu 341.345
LodKinga--
Municipal provisions at police stations for, 347, 383; no, provided by dty exc^t police station or work- house, 3401 police station, eleven- C-cdd boy seeking, 347. 348, oum- of, 347, underiying evil oiF, 34S
I^endi Clnb, 433
"Loi Slim," 331
Liuch taclUtl*!—
In industrial plants, 114, aiS-i^ 174. See also PJont, pkystcal tqmf-
Hachiniata—
Arorentices of, 141; charactei o( work of, 140; employers' agiLuuuit with, 140; employers' associatiaD, 140; hours, 140, 141, 141, number d, 139; strike in 1907, 141; strike io 1910, 141; strike on Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 143 ; strike on Pean- s>1vania Railroad, 141; iinLmkni among 140, 141, 141, 187, afiected bypanic of 1907-0S, i4i,afiectedby ^xcialiiation in Westiugbouse shops, 140; wages of, 140, 141, 183
HaglBtratea' canrti. See
ma^ittalts' Magyar, 33, 3s, 37, 70 Hallej Compaoy, The, 454
Hanheimer, W. j Mana act, 353 HBiiiifactar«r>*
Harlaima, 176; borough g at, 303; devdopment and stability of employes at, iti, 363. See uso Pillsburgk-Buffale Coal Company
Uarket ^rden —
Possibilities of, in reducing cost of living, 19
HarshalsM, 11, 370
Uasons. See Bricilaytrs and matmu
Haaaachiisetts—
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in, 114; farm coloay for dninkaids in, 3SS; laboT laws and enforcemcDt, ii4i labor legislatkm defeated by enqiloyeTS, 1901 safeguarding em- ployes against tuberculosis is, 150
Haater and aerrant law, 164
Haater Builder*' Aasoctation, 154
Maater Houaemltha' Aaaociation,
Matter Plumbers' AuocUtton, 163
Matthews, William H., 363
Mattresa factoriea—
Investigadon of, by new factory inflection department, 445
••Masey tlie Flier," 315
"Maxey tli« Mixer," 350
McCandleas, George W., 445
Conatruction
McConnaugbey, H. A., 414. 4'8 McCord, Annie E., 453 McCteery's, tja, J15, 331, 259, 454
McEeesport^
A "percentage-buig" for the un- derworld, 321, 311; bousing condi- tions in, 3i; Tccreatioii grounds, 136; worked by underworld at Old Home Week, 319 HcXeea Rocka atrike. See Slrttts McQuaide, Thomas, 311, 335
Wages of, 183 Medical inspection—
In schools a forward step, 16; in Sharpsburg schools, 183, 3S4
Meaaenger aerrice —
Bill to restrict night, to boys d^ teen or older, defeated, 113
Metal trades, 139-144; employefs' association, 139; hours in, 139, 184; tadal make-up, 139; reports of fac- tory in^iectioa department concem- ing employment of women and chil- dren in, lacking, 194) Sfaarpiburg children in, 991-1951 Sharpsburg chil- dren's opportunity for advancement in, 291; unionism in, 139; union- ism in, affected by speculixation, 139; wages in, 139, 183. See also Blacksmiths; Btriier Makers; Maddn' ists; Holders; Pattern Makers
Metal Trades Section, 181
Mexicans, 331
Mexico, 3
Meyer Jonaason and Company, 132,
4S4 "Mickey G—," 331 Midland, 31, 261, 410-413
Midland Improvement Company, 410-413
Milk- Clean, as a bountiful ccnunodity, 191 dairy inspection since 1907, 18; deaths caused by impure, 18; In- saftitary condition of dairies, 18, 19; municipal, dispensaries, iS; wider area covered by, inspectors since 1907, 8
Milk and Ice Aasoclation, tS
Mill towns, 260-163
Mine explosions —
Station for investigation of, estab- lished under United States Geolo^
cal Survey, i J7
, 179.
180
Mine workers, 167-177; agreement of, not to sue for wages, 170; and steel workers compared, 178-tSo; at Colorado, 167; at OmnellsvUle, 167, 168,173; at Greensbuig, 167; at Ir- win, 167; at Latrobe, 167; atWest-
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moreUnd County, 167, 16S; U. West Virgmii minea, 1671 bieniual inter- sUte coavcDtioDS of, and en^ikiyen, 170; check-weigluQg system of, 170, i73>i74; coke region ifiected by out- come of unionism ammig, in West- moreland, 168; company houses for, 174. '75; company stores for, 174, 17s; district ctnifeiences of , 1 701 ef' feet of immigration on oxiditioni of, 167, 16S, i6g, 170; employers' agree- ments with, 170, 171, 174 i7g, 180; H. C. Frick, 168; hours of, 167, 168, 170, 171. 173; hours of, compared with steel workers, 17S, 179; housing. 1741 housing of , comp«Ted with steel workers, 179; hfe-saving demonstra- tion by bureau of minea, 177; num- ber of, 167; overtime woric of, 173; payment to, for "dead work," 170, 173; percentage of immigrant, 169; racial make-up of, and steiEl woiken similar, 178; rents paid by, 174; Slavic, 167, 168, 160, 170; strike of, in iS^7, i7g; strikes of, 167, 16S1 unionism among, ag, 167, 168, i6g, •70, 173. 174. I7S. "77, "79, 180. "82, 186; unionism among, compared with steel woikeis, 179, iSo; Uniontown, 16S; VestaNo. 4, 173; wageaof,i67.
Mine woiters' acddeati. See Work-
HinB workers' w«ge>—
Check-woghman's wages and oEBce expenses deducted from, 174) union dues deducted from, 174
Hlnea, F«d«nil Btueao of—
Established under Dqiartment of the Interior, 13, 14, 177; safety work of, 177
Mining districts- Town pUnniDg in, 161; Yotmg Men's Christian Association work in, 418
Mining indnstrr—
Movement of miions for work- acddent prevention in, 177
Mining lew, bitmnintms—
Amendments to, urged by minrn, ■76; commission appointed to revise, 176. "77; commission appmnted 10 revise, rqmrt and recommendatioas, 177; revisi(Hi of, rect»nmaided by 177.
L^sUtion affecting, 176, 177
Mining processes—
Effect of immigrant labor on im- provement of, 169
Molders, 14a, 143; employtn' asn- dation, 141; hours of, 143; Dumbec of, nfj piece'Tate s^tem opposed by, umon, 143; unionism amoog, 141, 143, b Westingbouae Madnne Company, 141; wages affected by panic of 1907-0S, 14a, by trade de- pression, 141; wages at, 143, 143, 183
Monroe, James, 313
Moore, Miss Sarah, $1
Moorhead, 391, 291
Morscorlcki Dr., 48
HonlitT—
ElSect of employes' benefit axt tions on, 164, 163; eSect of a work on, 18, 19
police needed by, 536; theaxthst of public policy in dealing irith pi titution, S05 Morals Efficiency CommisBioB, 363, 37t. 37a, 501-506; apposntmoit d, 503; educational famp«;pn agaiut prostitution by, 504; bequcnting oi
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houses of pnstitutioii der Bctivibes of, 504; houseaofpros- dtutkui on North Side dosed by, 504; medical ezanunation of prosti- tutes recommended by, 503; minors protected from prostitution by activi- ties of, 504; number of houses of prostitution disclosed by survey of, 503; organized, 501; perwmDet of, 501; rules for pc£ce Id dealing with prostituticn laid down by, 503, 304; statistical excerpts frran report C^, S07-S09
HonTis, 63, 65
Horln, J. H., 315
Mortalltj aUtistlct—
Compaiison of, in river words utd East End, 13, 14. See also Dtalh
Hortarittlnra—
Vnioiusin amcmg, no; wages for day labor, no
Hotfaer-tonsoa atatiatics. See Pof-
MU Alto, II
Hnalcipcl eiril sBTvlce law, 310
Mmiidpal lioapltal—
Fot tuboculosis, 11; no general, m 1914, " Himlcipal lodfiiic honsra, 340, 347, 348: ordinance providing for, vetoed by Maym Migee, 346
Mnolcipal RhmucIi, Butmu ot See Bmeau of Uuiucipal Reteank, New York HtmkipaHty—
Improvement of working condi- tions through, 158-, (^Kratiiig effid-
Mnaenm of taf ehr cpoUaacei — And photof^afdu of un[»oved hous- ing and working conditions, 494
Hnshiks. See Rmiian
Naomi Uln«, 176
Nktlonal aapect^
Of underworid, 314,316; <A Y^gs, 3^330. 331. 33» Natloiul Biacnlt Company, 135, 187 National Child Labor Canmlttee,
National Croatlaa ScclatT—
Report of, showin); number of fatal and disabling work-accidenta and deaths from tuberculous among members, 73, 74
National Brectora' Aaaociatioii, 146, ISO, iS'i tS». 'S3t 187; "print' ' aikd working rules" of, 150, 151
National Foundartf AaiociatloB, 14s
National Lead and Oil Company, 140
National Uetal Tradea Aaaociation.
140, 141. See also Mam^aeturtri Aisoeiatioii ^Pittsburgh
National minea, 17S
National Mining Company, 171
National Slovak Society, 56
National Tube Company, 44, aoi,
M%, 317, 133> >38> 14S< 1461 340> >7ti
»7». ^95 Nebratka—
Dosing hour for women and girls
in, 114
H^ro—
Ability of, loS; as an industrial factor, loS, 109; percentage of.
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By age excess of n ... „, .
portion of ^fd persons in, 103; small pn^Mition of children in, 103,
108
Negro prostitute!, jss, 356
negro steel workers- Ages of, (Table) 97; and Amal- gamated Anodation of Iron and Steel Worliers, 105; and Associated Brotherhood of Iron and Steel Heaters, io5; and Iron and Steel Roll Hands' Unioo, 106; and Sons of Vulcan, 105, io6i and the union problem, 107; and the unions, 104, io|, to6, 107, to8; attitude of white union men toward union, 106, 107; attitude toward President Roose- velt's action at Brownsville, 107; attitude toward socialism, 107, to8; attitude toward unionism, 104, 106, 107, loS; birth[daces of, oS; charac- ter and quality of work of, 105; childrenof, 101,101, 103, loS; church life of, 104; clothing of, 101; com- munity life of, 103-105; conjugal condition of, 101; connection with unions unsatisfactory, loj. 106, 107; drinking among, 104; earnings, 100, 101; earnings, average daily, (Table) 101; education of, gS; food of, lor; farmers' employment of, 98; housing of, lor; in Black Diamond Mill,
106, ^l8, 439; in Clark Milb of the CoiiKgie Steel Company, 96, 106,
107, 41S, 429; in Homestead, 106, 4tS, 429; in non-union mills <Ndy, 106; insurance carried by, 103; last attempt to unionize. 107; no labor union among, 104; output oE mill not limited because of, loS; per csnt of, 96; Pittsburgh's debt to the South for, log; politics of, 107; portions held by^ 96; proq)eTity of, loS; rents paid Dy, loi; savings of, 103; secret societies of, 103; strikebreak- ers, 42S, 429; union white men re- fused to worit with union, at Beaver Falls, 106; working under Negroes, loS; working up from unskilled labor, 99; working with white men, 104, 105, 1081 yean in diy employ, 419,
IfeKToes, to, >8, 54, 96-109, 121, itio. 280, 283, 331, 341, 3SO, 3S1, 3SS. 3S6. 360, 368; as property owners, 431, 432; business enterprises of, 429. 430, 431; crime among. 435; in Mooiikead Mill, 428, 429; in thechurch, 432,4^; industrial school needs of, 434; soaal and dvic needs of, 435, 436; social clubs and homes for, 433 ; muonism anuKi^, 428; Young Men's Christian Association for. opened, 436. Sec also Avtry CoOtge Trade Sdutol
Negroes of Pittabufg^, The, 414-43'
Nemst Lamp Company, 243, 244
Newsric, 4
Typhoid death rate in, 17
New Jersej^—
Argument for, system of working- men's compensation, mo "New Orleuis Ray," 331 New York—
Arrests in, 387; attempt to reform
Klice force, 309, 310; child labor jisIatioD in, 207; child labtM' statute compared with Pmn^vania law, 204; dosing hour for women and gills in, 214; co-c^ieration in garment trades in, 273, 274; &re protection in, 244; labor laws and enforcemest, 115; munidpal lodging bouses, 347; official transcript of birth certificates or religious re«wds, metfaods em- ployed by, in checking chikl labor, 209; p^-ch(^thic pavilions in, 38S; system of reporting wmk-acddBits in, 197; "turning pmnt" foe "wire- lees wire tapping," 314, 31$ Hew York Bureau of Municipal Research. See Bureau ef Mttmd- pal Research
S56
.d,Google
Newsboy's lodsiiig botuM, 548
North, LiU V«r PUnck, g, 53, j8, 313
I Siarpabaig children m metal trades, iron mills, 191, ia met^ trades, shovel factory, 343, in metal trades, tube mill, 194. igj; oppoi- timity of factory inspector to reduce, 198, igq. See also Worlniccidtiitt
Occup«tloa>—
Injurious, i;»S; injurious effects (tom overwork in certain, i^S
OfflcUls—
Strength of underwc«Id thiouf^ venal alliances of, 314, 31s, 316
OUo-
LaboT laws and enforcement, iij; law regulating hours of work for girts, SOI
OUobuikef^
" by underworld, 314
Olcott, Francis J., 11, 53
"OldAgestFor^"—
Report of stockholders' committee, United States Sted Coiporation. on statement contained in article en- titled, 355-405
" Old Baldy." 331
OldBcUeTers. SeeRuisianx
OUnr, Mrs. Henry W., 335
Ollwr StMl WatkM, 43, 335, 433 Opoa shop. See Uitumism Oporstlnc offlciency—
1 greater
factor than mechanical equipment b obtaining, 317, 326, 339, 367
OtEsniied labor. Sec Unionism
Oseroff, Abnhun, 406-413
Ootpot—
Bonus system designed to increase, 36a, 369; efforts for increased, 374; not limited because of Negro steel workers, 108; of allied foundry and machine shoJM, 115; of industries, 115,443. See also ronitdie
Ovorbrook —
Blind beggars from, 3, 3J7, 338
OmcnwdiDK—
Cases cited of, 30; in Homestead, 13. See also Eotuts
T8,
Effect of, on citizenship, family life, and morals, 17, 38, 39, on rest- lesaoess of labor, 117; in United States Sted Conxuation, 395-399; injurious effects 01, 19S, hours wortwl by 135 girts showing, (Table) 493
Psdrono—
Standard Oil Company's contnct with Americanized, 1301 wage* under Americanized, i3o
Painters, decorators, and paper- hangers, 159, t6o; apprenticeship of, 160; employera' agreement with, 159,1601 hounof. 159, i6oi seasonal
among, 159, 160; wages of, i4St iS9i
, 37, 38, 39, 40, 68, 74, 133, 136, 130, 131, IJ4, 137, 141, 144. 148, 149. 15I1 151. 153. 154. 158, 159, i(k>, 161, 164, 166, 173, 1S4, iSs, 301, 303, 304, 391, 393. See also Sunday vork
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Painter'a Kow— Donolisbed, II
Pabun, L. R., 74S, 445
Puic of 1907-^1 "8, iig, 133, 13s,
"41. i4», 144. 146, 147, ISO, 166 Puiih sdiooli. Stt Sckooh, parish P«rol« law. See ProboHm
Pattern makers, 143; hours of, 143;
number of, 143; uniouiam among,
1431 wages of, 143 Pattern Uakera* League, 143 PatiUon BroOiers, 454
Pemisylmiia —
Child Labor Assodation, 215; Child Labor Committee, 316; child labor legialatioD in, 3071 Uanu^- turen' Assodation, 445
At Essen, 6; United States Steel Cwporation lervice nquiiementa for, redutxd in 1913, 49S, stockholders report on, 40a, 403; Westingliouae tux Brake Company, 485-491
Peniioiu and relief- Employes' devek^ment through,
Perkina, George W., 267, 268
Fbrsical •xaminatios—
Effect on police of, of ^>plicaiita, 375. See also Emfloya, rtcnUting 0}
R«ce worii—
Bricklayers and masons, 148; elevator constructors, 158; iniini- grants, 411 molders, 143; printen.
Si; sheet metal workers, 165; tile pers and layers, 166; stockholders' rqiort United States Sted Onpota- tionon, 399, 400
Pi«k«rski, Attorney Frank A., 57
Pierce, LTmaii L., 414
Pig Iran. See /rim
Pimpa. SiteProstUidioii
Description of Yegt^ by, 316 PItcaira—
PlttBbnrgfa-Bnlfalo Coal Cmnpany,
170, 174, 176, 164, 366. See alM Maruuma
Pittrturgh Coal Company, 176
Pittabor^ Coostnictioa Company,
h calendar of the, 15
nttaburgh TubercnlosU League, 1
PUnt, fanproTaments in —
Not generally directed toward betterment of conditions for employe.
558
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Plant, physicsl eqiiipiiteDt of—
Act pBued in igij aSectiDg, 451, 45j; afEected by breweiy workers' 1914 trade agreemenC, 454; as it aSects the ccmifort and convenience of empb^a, 313-340, 374; deajili- ne*s, 333-336, 374; diinlcing water 316--31S, 374, analysis of, 33S, and CCHmnOD cup as centers of danger,
335, bucket brigade system, 317, distributing system in American Steel and Wire Company, 317, dis- tributing ^tem in Carnegie mills, ia6, 317, distributing system in Homestead mills, 318, distributing system in National Tube Company. 317, distributing system in Unitea Engineering and Foundry Company,
336, 137, filtered and distributed throu^ sanitary fountains, 327, from ^rlngB and driven wdls, 137, 33S; fadlitks for fhanging and dry- ing clothing, 331, 331; facilities foi oontndling temptnture, 324, 315, in Brace Brothers' Laundry, 335, in Central District Telephone Company, 335, in laurulries, 315, in McCreery's de[MUtment store, 335, in National Tube Company, 215, in office building of H. K. Porter Company, 135, in Reymet Candy Factory, 31^, in Stan- danl Sanitary Manufacturmg Com- panyii'S, in Westinghouse Foundry at Trafford City, 335; heating fa- cilities, 314, 3351 heating facilities in foundries, 1 34 ; insanitaiy privy vaults, »3S. '39, of the United States Glass Conqjaiiy, 339; Hght, 333, 334, attifi- dal, 313, at H. J. Heine Company's facbny, 334, clean windows, iij,cfiect of unequal, on health. 314^ m food factories, 334, in new buikhngs, 333, in old buildings, 333, "white black- smith shop" of Pittsburgh and Lake Erie RailrDad, 334, white- washed walls, 113; lockers, 331, 331, 374; lockers for men in machine slx^, 331, metal, in Armstrong Cork Works, 331; lunch facilities, 33S-ri3Q, 374, as a rival to nearby saloDos, 139, 330, in Bdnunistrative buildings but not in wraks, 339, in H. J. Hrins Company, 339, In Mesta Machine Company, 129, in United States Glass Company, 339, in Westing- bouse Electric and Manufacturing Conqkony, 33S, 339; recent improve-
ments in, l^ United States Sted Cor-
strong Cork Company, 331, 232, of Brace Brothers' laundry, 23a, of Westinghouse Electric and Manu- facturing Company, 331; rest, 230, 331^ rest and emergency rooms, 231 , 332, in Central District Telephone Coinpany, 231, 259, in H. J. Heinz Company, 3ji, in McCteCTy*s de- partment store, 331; test, backless stools aSording no, 330, iji; rest for women at work in American Sheet and Tin Plate Company, 330, in Aimstiong Cork Works, 330, in H. J. Heinz factory, 130, 331, in Jenkinson dgar factory, 230, 23r, in McCreery's department store, 331, in Rauh Brothers' clothing factory, 230, in United States Glass Company, 130, 232; rest, no seats provided for, 330; rest stools lor motormen in Pitts- burgh Railway Conmany, 330; stud- ied by bureau of safety, rdj^, sani- tation and welfare in United States Steel Corporation, 232,494-498; ven- tilation, 325, 336, no legi^tion regulating, 226, system of Pittsburgh and Lalce Erie Railroad, 226; wash- ing facilities, 233-236, 274, at Mari- amia, 362, bath houses near Olivet worits, 335, condition of, in Armstrmg Cork Worits, 3J4, essentials of ade- quate, 334, hot water, 334 274, in Westinghouse Electric and Manu- facturiiw Company 233, 335, in Westinffbouse Electric and Manu- facturing Company conqiared with those of Eastern competitor, 335, inadequate, 333, 133, installation of, ordered by factc>ry inspection d^mrt- ment untkr law cd ipir, 335, not pro- vided by A. Garrison Foundry Ccnn- puiyi iJ3> itot provided by AJIegbeny Counh' Light Company, 233, not provided by Brown and Company, 33, not provided by Carnegie steel m^, 233, not provided by Jones and
pools, 23s, 336, pools, transmitting disease through7 -^- pools, frequency of chaugtog water in. 336, poob m Carnegie library at Biaddock, Duquesne, and Homestead, 336, poob In H. J. Heins Company,
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3i6, pools in Lawrence Park, 1^6, potit in McKeesfMTt recreatioD ETOtuidi, 136, poolt ID Turkish Bath Natatorium, 136, poob in Westing- liouse Air Brake Company, 136, poob in West Park, 136, pocds, number of bathers in, 136, shower baths, 335, shower baths not used by men, 135, towels and soap, 133, 334, 13S1 i74i towtls, roller, 234, wash bowls, 133, 334, washing in the bashes, 131; water-closets, 236-340, 174, apparent method pursued by employers in regard to, 136, economy of providing an attendant to caie for, 137, in American Sheet and Tin Plate Ctnnpajiy, 338, in American Steel and Wire Company, 138, in Carnegie Mills, 237, in H. K. Porter Locomo- tive Shops, 337, in Mesta Machine Company, 138, in National Tube Company, 23S, in PittsbucKh and Lake £rie Railroad shops, 337, in Pittsburgh Valve and Constniaion Company, 238, in Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, 339, 340, in United Engineering and Foundry Company, 33S, in Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Com- pany, 23S, loafing in, 337, segregation of men and boys, 33S, See also AltHoiffienc conditions; Working cendiltont
Plant*—
"WoA-out" prqtaiatory to aban- donment, 375, 377
Plwtecen, 160, 161; apprenticeship of, 161; employers' agreement with, iti; Negro, non-union, 160; rada] make-up, 160^ seasonal unemploy- ment of, 145, 161; unionism among, 146,160,161) wagesof, 145, 146, 1611 working without specifit^tions pro- hibited by union, 161
PUrgcound—
And camp work of Young Men's Christian Assodation, 417, 418
Playgrounds—
For Shaipsburg children lacking, 303; in mill neighborhoods, ijg; school, lacking, 283, 2S4
Plumbers, 161-163; appcenticeshq> of, 145, 163; employers' agreemeot with, 161, 162; boujs of, 146, 161, 162; racial mi^e-up of, 161; strike in 1903, 163; unionism among, 146, 147, 161, i6a; wages aSected by unionism during panic of 1907-08, 147; w^esof, 147, 1^1
PlymouQi —
Aps of children ii in 1907, 108
leaving sdMNi
In river wards and East End, 24 Polscks, 319
355
Police- Accessories to crime, jog; appomt- ments, 521 ; bodies on call to assist, in preserving law and order, 311,311; rhjinging administrations requiring of , divergent policies of sodal coatial, 3081 confidence of, in oew adminis- tration, 311; co-opeiatioD of , needed by Morals Bureau, s^; courts aid the, 373-3801 diramal vocabulary cf, 374, 373; criminals working vpaa busmeas basis vrith local, 30c
of, 3
1,309;
of, by double statKlard of law and eijorcement, 370, 371; desiability of courses on elemental sodal ethics and sodal needs for,375; detective burean brought under control of superinten- dent of, 311; detective diief dis- charged, 311; detective divison of, 523, 534, 535; development of, neg- lected, 384; (Lvision of criminal idm- tification, 325; effect of citensioa of dvil service on, 310, 311, 37s; effect of phyacal ezaminatiim of applionti f>n,375i effect of political TCMcm on, 370; effect of reform administratkn on rank and file of, 31a, 37a; tStd of underwiMid alliances oo, 370; effidency and sdf-ieqiect of, under new leadership, 310; eKmination of organized crime by, 384, 385; ta- fiKcement by, of outward decency, 310, of Sunday obsovance laws od saloonsandhotels,3io; faceoutwiid taboo and secret t<detation of cm-
560
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mercMliied iwMtitutiiHi, 371; gnft in piDtectiiig prostitution, 361, handl- ios of habitual cnminaJa by, under refonn rtgime, 311; inadequacy of, lecordi and reports, 526; mSuence o[, 30S; lack of infotmation funda- mental defect (rf, administration, 517; lessening the number of amsta, 387; New YMk's attempt to reform, 300. 310; no buying protection that protKted during refonn adminis- tration, 31a, 31s; number on roster of, 310, 311; (^jpoTtunity for social, woit. 338, 384, 385; opportunity of, for prevention of crime, 383, " organisation of, 311; port of and governmental machinery,
S'3;
. "percentage jobs of
E, 3091 KtlsbuTgh and the Pitts- burgh Force, 310-311; Pittsburgh under old, control a mine for the cun- ning criminal, 310; Pittsburgh under reform administration do iriace for "winlesswire tapmng," 315; pc^cy of, in dealing with oiganized crime and individual offenders, 385; pcdi-
senting "deadwall" against reforms
31Z; problem of social control in haDdsof,3o8; promotions, 523; pub- licpolicyand the, 370-373; pi^lidty and the, 373-375; recommendatiOD that, be required to rep(Ht lu^dous pistcts, 536; regeneration of, from the tc^, 300; reorganization plan recom- mendea by New York Bureau of Municipal Research, 517; report by New Yorfc Bureau of Research on, 3tt, 516-536; repressiiHi under re- form, 311, 313; salaries of, 311; self- protection of, from scheming poli- ticians and bureaucrats posing aa reformers, 3og; social, 366-369, re- ^lonsibility of, 386, compared with almshouse, 390; sooal inake-up of. 3741 sodalization of, 375; suppres- sion of vice by, 535, S36; systematic grafting by, stopped under reform administration, 313; tenure of office of, 31a; testof ^ciency of, 309, 366, 369; Thomas McQuaide, 311; tol- ,eiate raids by outside gun mobs, 312; I training school for, recommended by j New York Bureau of Municipal Re- 36*
search, 531; trials of delinquent, 539, 539. See also Courls, mipttraU^: Cnme; Repealers
Police station—
Lodgers, study of, recommended, 536; lodging at, 340, 347, 536; ]Md- ded cdl, 388, 510, 511. Sec tidfinft
PoUcei The, An Orgutlmi, 308-313
Pollah National AlUuce, 56
Political- Factory inspectors, aj^xiintees, 191; power of underworld, 3 14, 315, 316, 3". i*^, 3'*< 3>S> 370; refmm and the police, 369, 370
PoUticiana—
Graft in protecting prostitution, 361; self-protection of police from, 309 Politics- Immigrant wage-earners in, 50, 56, 57; of tiegzo Steel workers, 107; wages of day labor affected by, t30.
Poor Man's TsTam, 344
Population, 13, 115. 116; of Austrian, Hungarian, Italian, and Rus^an nativity, 1900 and 1910, (Table) 35;
forrign bom, 35,34,3s; percentageof Negro, 33; racial make-up of, (Table) 35; Sharpsburg, 381. See also iV^fro pept^athn
Porter Company, H.E., 233, 325, 337,
Postal Savings Deposits and Do-
g>Bltora by Race and Country of Irth of Depositors, (Table) 54
561
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PresbjterUn Book Store, 454
Presied Steol Car Companj, 42, 59, 168, Ii9,334>4i8
Prevontton of crimo. See Crime Prioits. See Wate-eamert, immigranl
Printen, 131-134; advuiUges of, employed on newspapers, 139, 130, 133; agreement of 1914, 133, 134; apprenticeship of, 134; effect of panic « ii)07-<>8 on, 133; employers' agree- ment with, 131, 134; houiB of, 133, 1S4; [Mece won, 133; strike in 1907, unionism among, 131, 133, « of, 133, 134, 183, 1S4
Ptivy vaulU. Sec Vaults
Probatioit—
Adult parole law of 1911,380, 381; be^nnings of, 380-383; constructive, work needed, 381; recottstructiiig tlie potential dtizen throu^, 3S9 Piobatton offleei^
Constructive work of, 389; io Court of Quarter SesMons, 381 ; non- support cases handled by, 381; op- ponunity of, for sodal work, 384; plea of, for assistance to carry proba- tion into community, 383; prisoners from jail and workhouse paroled to,
I3». ' iS6;i
381 Probationen — Payments for made in instalments by, 381
Professiona —
Immigrants in the, 53 Profit on inTeBtment —
Early owners satisfied with fair, 375
Proof of ace. See Ckild lobar law
Property depreciation—
In neighboiboods occupied by Slavs, 46 Property owner*—
Immigrant wage-eamen as, 53, 59
Proaperit]'—
Of immigrant wag&^amers, 53, S4, 55. 59
Prostitotes—
Ages of, at entruce, 50S, at time of iovestiration, soy; average weekly income M, 5081 butliplaces of, 507; " body snatcboL" 357, amoog Negro, 3S5; businesBofbthaa of, 508,509; cadets, piofessioaal recruiten of gint to, 364; ccJored giils from the South, 3SSi 356; families of, 508; fifty-ceot nouses of, 351; Gertrude Hayes moi- ^ — ■■■ HongKong,3si, "
nof.
i.SOJ.
^04; number of yean, 49r, 1 m business, 509; pceviousoccupatkm and wages of, 507; religious belief cf, 50S; scientific treatment oi, 388; suiddes among, 357; tubcTCukns and the Negro, 355, 356; typical Negro, m HiU District, 353, 356
^oatitntion,: forgiiisas ai
562
. 364. i in houses of, in Snangnai, 353; ap- p(Hntments aikd entertainments at houses of, 353; benefidal results of dehned districts for, 350; business proposition, 359, 360; business rami- fications bade of, shown by case <d "Mazey the Mixer," 359; cadrts and the brass check astern, 360; cadets arrested for vagrancy unds reform administration, 361; cadets driven from dty imder rebinn ad- ministration, 311; cadets or pin^ 360; capitalizing law-breaking lad selling protecticMi, 359; Chiogo Mce Commis^on's recommendations coo- ceming agends to deal with, 3S3; dean centers of recreation as an ltd in eradicating commerci^ized, :£]. 364; commercialized, an educatiattl center io unnatural vices, 364, 31s. catering to esthetic sense, 363, Pitt- burgh center for, 348, recreatiMi, 363 364; distribution in community of
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glej
proceeds fiom, 3S8; duty of unioiusm m Matniping out, 34gi economic pres- suie a source of, 355, 507; education as a cure for, 373, 504; ^ect of pro- hibiting sale of UquiK in houses of, 3", JS8, 3S9i 3611 36*; efforts of AmerKam dties to cape with, 9on- dic,^7il Federal Immigraticai Com- missioa exposed international as- pects of, 353; five-dollar houses of, 3Si; houses of, frequenting of, de- creased under activities of Morals Efficiency Commission, 504, on North Sde dosed May, 1913,504; removal from car lines under reform Bdmiuis- tration, 313; inadequacy of fine in dealing with, 387; increasing extent of, 365; indusuial position of patrons of houses of, 3S'i legislative and ex- ecutive powers involved in elimina- •ion of. 37'. 373i minora protected from, by Morals Efficiency Com- mission's activities, 304; moral jeopardy of shops le^ing to, 353, 354; Negremes working as maids, coi^, or laundresses ia bouses of, coe source of Negro prostitution, 355; not single active dominant power in underworid, 361; number of houses of, J50, disclosed by survey of Morals Efficiency Commission, 503; owners of prc^jeny used for purposes of, 359; penal laws affecting, and munid[ul enforcement, 339; police and poli- ticians' graft in protecting, 361; po- lice face problem of outward taboo and secret toleration of, 371; power to blackmail keepers of houses of, curtailed under reform administra- tion, 36r; profits, 358, 359; profits from sale of liquor in houses <rf, 358, 359; profits of commercialized, de- pend on victimizing boyhood as well as girlhood, 363; prosecutions under Mum act, 353; public policy in deal- ing with, 501, five distinct stages of, in IHttsburgh, 501, 502, sixth stage of, morals bureau, 503; pidilidty needed toeliminate,373; radal make- up of active promoters in buaness of, 3^9, 360, of inmates of houses of, 351, <dpatr(Mis of houses of, 331, 355; re- form administration tolerated, in de- fined districts, 36r; r^ulations gov- erning houses of, under reform ad- ministration, 361, 371; repression of, not an adequate poUcy, 363; re-
striction, 361, 363; rules laid down by Morals Effidency Commission look- ing to ultimate elimination of, 37r, 37'. 503.50*; Saturday night in, dis- trict under reform admuustrstion, 363; situaticMi of, districts, 349, 350; sooal aqiect of, 365; social situation leading to, 34S, 349; source of re- cruits to, 353, 369; sources of, inter- national, 352, 353; ten- and fifteen- dollaihousesof,35i; the street walk- *fi 3S7r 358; twenty-fivc-ceat houses of, 351; two- and one-dollar bouses of, 351; two extremes in the social scale of, 35S, 365; types of houses, 351-353-, under Mayor Guthrie's administrati<m, 501, 503, Mayor Magee's administration, 361, 502; venenal diseases spread by, 365 ; vice and disease, 364, 365; Voters' League leaders in fi^t against, 502; wages for men adequate to ■^■■*^'"'' hraae as an aid in eradicating commercial- ized, 364; woman in the alley, the, 35^.3571 w<Hnen of the underworid.
563
Benefits from, 1 14. See TariJ Protestant misBion woA —
Among Slavs and Italians, 57 PrOTldence Miaalon, 345 PsTchopathic pavilions —
In New York, 388 Public poller—
And the police, 37»-373
Pnllnuui car shops is Chicago, 337
Race studies, 33-109
Racial antlpathlsB—
Effect on unionism of, among im- migrant wage-earners, 40,59; sunk in strike of Westinghouse employes, 30
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Racial mak»-ap—
Bakers, 1351 inmatea, houses of prostitution, 351; met&t trades, 139; mine workers, 178; mother-tongue statistics. 35; patrons of houses of prostitution, 351, 355; pUsterEn, 160; plumbers, 161; population, 31, 35 ; promolere in business of prostitu- tion, 359, 360; railway en^>loyes, 135; Sharpsburg inhabitants, 280; Sharps- burg schools, 1S3, 284; steel workers, 178; teamsters, iii. See also Pop- idatio», perctnlate ofJorHpi bom
Railroad. See Raitway
Deaths due to operation of, z j
RaUway—
Character of, employes, 1151 duties of, employes, 114, 115; em- ployes, 134-118; hours restricted by federal l^islation, 116, 117, tiS; number of, employes, 124, tiy, racial make-up of, employes, 1 15; unionism among, ig, 115, 118; wages, day labor on, itg, no; wages on, 115. 136, 137, iiS. See also Sireet raU-
Rebates. See Railroad r^aUs
RecldiTlsts. See Crime
Recreation- Clean centers of, as meai eradicating prostitution, 363, 364;
community should provide dean, for immigiant nogC'eaniers, S0| ^i Sharpsbi^s facilities for, 303
RecruitiiiE anployea, itS-tti
"RedHcHu«h,"388
Reed, Anna, 419-433
Reform adminlstratioD —
A period of abeyance throug^iout the underworld, 362; antagonisai of underworid to, 313; bunco games in hotels checked under, 311; cadets of prostitutes arrested for vagrancy
attorney's office aDtagooistic to, 313; ' effect of, OD police alliaaces, 370; effect of, on rank and file of pdice, 312, on underworld, 307, 313, 311, 332> 313. 3=5. 3'6; efficiency and self-respect of pohce under, 310; gambling houses and pool rooos
closed under, 312; hanHling ot
habitual criminals by pcdicc undn 312; houses of prostitution removed from car lines under, 312; inter- munidpal alliances of underworld held in abeyance during, 325,316; lim- ited activities of underworld under, 3] I ; liquor law strictly enforced under, 312; no buying protection fnm police during, 312, 315; Pittsburg no place for "wireless wire ta(^>ing" under, 315; power to bladu&aS keepers of houses of prostitution curtailed under, 361; pressure as pohce under, to relax, 312; regula- tions governing bouses of proititutioB under, 361; r^ression under, 312, 313; Saturday night in prostitutioo district under, 363; systematic graft- ing by police stopped under, 312; " take-a-chance" men under, 312. 313; tolerated prostitution in de&ied districts, 361
564
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ReUef—
RqxiTt of stockholdeiy' committeee United States Steel CoiporatioQ on, plan, 401; voluntaiy a/xident, 4i>Si Westiiigboiue Air Brake Gimpany, department, 468-484
ReUef and penalons—
Employes' devel<^inent through,
2-a66. See also Bureau of Safety, ief, Sanilatitm and Wdfare
Rellgloua elemeat —
Id immigrant wage-esmera, 57, S8.S9 Rent*—
At Meiiaiuu, 161; diacrimination against immigration in price of, 45, 46,55; in Essen, 6; in Midland, 411; paid Iw mine woikers, 174; paid by Kq ■ ■
Repression of the men- Report of stockholders' committee
United States Steel Corporation on,
400 Rescue Hbsion, 345, 346
Rest and emerpentf rooms—
In industrial plants, 131, i^i. See also Plants, physical tquipment of
Rest facilities—
In induitrial plants, 330-133. See also Plant, physical equipment of
ReitleasnesB of labor. See Labor
Retail clerks, 130-13*; employers' agreement with, 130, 131; hours of, 119, 130, 131, 131, iS4i Knights of Labor able to shonen hours of, iig; It^hlation aSecdog hours of, 131, 114, 360; legislation interference to pre- vent excessive hours of female, 184; stores employing, on Consumers' L^gue "white list," 132; strike of, in 190S, 131; unionism among, 139, 130, 131. ij*; wagesof,i30,i3i,t3i, 183,185
Retail Clerks' International Pro- tective Association. See AtnericaH Pederalion of Labor
Retail stores—
I^bor day not a holiday in, in 1908, 13'
"Rer." R— ,343,344
ReverseSide, The, 305-391; beggars, 33^339; lodging houses, 339-348; I>olice, an organism, 308-313; pros-
. "S.
Rheaish-Westphslls, 3
Rhodes, Dr. Frederick A,, 503
Rice, W. C, 31, 410-413
Ridgwsy, 310
Riotsof 1877. 113
Riter-Conlej Haaufactuiiog Com- pany, I JO
RiT«r distrtct. See Water shed
River Improvement*—
Aid to transportation, 114; by government, 114; by private o^iital, 114
River wards- Comparison of mortality statistics in, and East End, 13, 14
drunkenness 33; strike in
1907,
113, i»3;
■33;
33, iiS; wages of, i: Rivermen's lodglnc houses, 344 "Riverside Slim," 33r Roberts, Peter, 3S, 33-60, 63, 71,
73, a6i, 378, 414 Roderick, James, 177 Romsn Catholic parish schools. See
Schodt, parish Reman Catholic wsge-eamers, 57
S6s
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RooBSTelt, Preildent —
Attitude of Negroes toward, a at Brownsville, 107
RusseUtown, 86, 87, 88, 89, go
RnssU, gj
RnssU In tho Pittsburjcli Dlitrict—
MedJKVBl, 78-gs; moiKTn, 96 RusiiUL "mnzhika," 79, 91
I, 4, 34> 4o> 4*. 44. 47> 48. 55. S7. 6a, 63. 66, 77, 78-95, 355, 357. See also Slaw RuasimiiB, Old Belierers—
Ameriau's snapshot knowledge of, 79; appearancx oE, 81, 81; bath- ing lubits of, 88; boarders and keep- ers, 87, 88; converting, to American citizenship, 94, 95; desirability of, as dtizens, 93, 94; drinking among, 84,85,88,89,90,91,94; "efficiency" of)9ii93i fight for cars, gi; beater- boss, 91, 91; hospitality of, 80, 86, 87, fta, 90; in Cokeburgh, S3, 84, Sc, 86; in E^en, No. 1, 79; in RusseU- town, 86, 87, 88, Sg, 90; in Russia, 91; in Siberia, gi; in the steel mills, 91, 93; industry of, 91; knowledge of En^ish, 81; lack of desire to be- come American dtizens among, 94, SS; living pictures of, 78, 79; lodging ousts, 87, 88; Don-imionism among, 93; photc^raphing the, go; priests, 93; self-dq>endency of, 93; sketch <rt, and their religion. So, Si, S3, 83; strikebreakers, 93; success among, gi, gi; traits of, as seen by Texan cowboy, 89, 90; women, 85
I 44, 45. 46.
SadowBkl, Dr. Lmn, 48
Safeguarding employes against — Acrident and disease, 240-255, 274; alcoholism, 2so-»s3, 275, by im- proving working and sodal concUlions, ^5^, 153, by paying a bonus for punctuality and r^:ularity, 251; fatigue, 153. 254, by shortened time schedule, 154, by the "preventive clinic," 354, 155, in telephoi' ■"
S66
1541 fire, 140-145, at the ArmstroDg Cork Company, 141, at the Nenot- Lanq] Company, 242, 244, by ex- tinguishers, 142, by fiie-escapes, 141, 242, 244, by the fire brigade, 242, 143, by the fiie drill, 24r, 141, 143, 144. by the fire wall, 244, 245, in the steel mills, i<), 240, the alarm, 242, 243; occupatwiial diseases, 14S-153, 274, 275, by American Sted and Wire Company 14S, by maldng use of wash and lundi rooms obligatory, 249, by Nations! Lead and Oil Onnpany, 149, by National Tube Conqnny,
249, by Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad Company, 148, by Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company, 34g, 250, by United States Sted Cor- poration, 152, caused by dust, ttu, 149, 250, 275, caused by pouoos, dangerous fumes, etc., 248, 249, 251; tuberculosis, 150, in Honz factoty,
250, in Ma^achusetta, 250 rding emploi
Moral rtspoD^td for, 148; throu^ the shop cUmc, 2S4, 25s. in Armstrong Cork Com- pany, 155, in Central District Tele- phcme Company, 255, in Heini Coo- pany, 155. See also W«rk-«ai-
147, 455^480; at J<Hies and Lau^ifin Mills, 148; at MesU Machine Com- pany, 24S; at United States Sted Corporation, iji, 146, 147; by e:q»cn study of mill mjuriea, 247; by im- mediate antiseptic treatment, 146; by local emergency haqtitals and dty hospital care, 246, 247; by medkal supervision after re^cmirfoymail. 147; by preventing premature re- employment, 247; by su^cal n- ganization of Carnegie Sted Com- pany, 12, 455-460; r»ults from casu- alties less serious by, 247; trivial arrangements for, in many shops and factories, 147, 148 Sa(e^ appliance! —
I^bA hos|Mtal care, 145-248; *t Carnegie Sted Conqiany, 455; at Marianna, 262; museum of, 494, See also Safepiardint emptoyes; Work-accidtnt pretenlitm
.d,Google
Safety
Of National Tube ConqMny, 143, 246; of United Sutes Sted Corpora-
SBf«t7 edncatioiLtl aHaftiga, 495, 496
Safety expert—
CM Jones and ijHietiliti Conqwny, Z48; ^National Tube Company, 245
Safety orfaaisatiott—
Of the United States Steel Cotpon-
lion,4M,495 Safety pro^oiona in the United
State* Steel Corporatioii, 19, 145.
See abo Safety Commiuee
. Maiy'a Parochial School, 184,
St. Petersburg, 65
Salespeople. See Retail cltrkt
Sanitary in^ectian force — Jurisdiction of, S, g
Sanitary standardt—
In btewety worken' 1914 trade 138, »S8
Sanitation. See Burton of Safety
Sanitation and welfare- Report of stockholders' coounittee United States Sted Corporation on.
iavinn—
CK im
54. 55. 59
immigrant wage-eanen, 53,
Canq), for immigrant wage-earners, ji, sa; children leaving, for work, 3c^i evening, courses at Camesie Technical Schools, 51; industrial, for Negroes, 43f, 4351 legislation enaU- ing, autltorities to open classes for adult immigrants, 53^ medical in- spection in, a fonnrd step, iti; ward, system in Baltimore, 9, system in Bostni, 9. system in Chicago, 9, sys- tem in Cleveland, 9
School anthoritiea —
Unconcern of, whether children are at school or work, iii
School board syatem, anb-district— Effect of, OD housing and equip-
Scfaool censni, i8j, 186; hodge-podge scheme of taking, 110; legislation oonceming. 113
School Uw—
Provision in. permitting abridg- ment of school attendance, an
School officials- Educational test of new child labor law in hands of, 3ti
567
School Syatem, The Hew, 10, $2
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Schools—
No compulsoty enrollment in Sh&ipabuig, 185, 3&6; Pittsburgh, 9; truancy in Sbaipsbuig, 185, 186, a87> 389, 390, 391, 197, 399
Schools,.
Attendance in Sharpsburg, 384; childiea vacdnated in Sttup&burg, 384; erected and maintained by inimigiant wage-eanien, 58; gym- naiiums in Sbupsburg, lacking, 1S4; housing Shaipsbuis, 384) in Siiaips- burg, 184. 38s; l>ck of records of childien working, 1S4; Ubraries in Sharpsburg, 185; medical inspec- tion in Shaipsburg, 384; no reports o! contagious cases to, from Sharps- burg board of h^Ui, 3S4; not m- nected by board of health or dty physician, 1S4; playgrounds, 384; rooal make-up of^ Sharpsburg, 384; tuition fees in Shaipsbuig, 384
Schools, ptibllc—
Gymnasiums in Sbaipsburg, lack- ing, 3Sj ; high school class in Sharps- burg, 383; houses in Shaipsbuig, 3831 housing Sharpsburg's, 383; in Shaipsburg, 183, 384; lack of co- operation between factory inqiector and, in Sharpsburg, 383, 384; lack of co-Cf>eration between mediod BUthoriues and, in Sharpsburg, 183; medical inspection in Sharpeburg, lacking, 383; Negroes in, 433, 434; number of pupils in Sharpsburg, 383; playgrounds, 3S3; radal make-up of, 183; Sharpsburg, board, 3S3
Scotch, 31S
"Scrsatoajtauny," 33^,333
Seasonal unemployment—
Bricklayeif, 14S. '471 bridge and structural iron workers, 150; building
S68
399, 300; slate and tile roofers, 166
Sedgwick, Professor Wm. T., 334
Selbel, George, 503
S«U-ctdtnre sodotios—
Of immigrant wage-earners, 56
Sem^e, Mrs. Samuel, 445
SefTla,s3
Sorrlaas, 33, 43, 44. 4S, 4*'. 49. ss. S7 83
SesquicentewiiKl celebration, 60
Sessions of Trial Board secret, 370
Seven-dsr week and long torft— Report of stockholders^ ommittee United States Steel Ccnporatioa oe, 395-398. See also Ottneart; Smtitj
Shaneborg —
Child labor, an extravagant tool, 301,303; conservation of childtai un- reco^iized problem of, 304^ Glasa House Row, 383; homes <rf, 181-3S3; houses, number of, 381, shortage in, 381; housing conditions in, 33, 380, 3811 industrial aspect ot, 179, iSo; lost children, 385-387 i obligatiM) of, to children unfulfilled, 303, 304; officials satisfied with induSiiil
Erosperity, 304; outside hydrants He family water supply, i8i, in 1914, 383; outside privy vaults, 1S3, in 1914, 3831 physical aspect of, 379; peculation, 381, character of, igo, laciaJ make-up of, 380) reoeatirt and amusement facilities of, 303; re- fusal of county poor relief jdiysdan to asast, 383; work [rfaces, 390, 391
Sharpsbtirg board of health- Inadequate medical care of poor by, 383, 3S3; incomplete rcoHds of.
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iSi; lack of effort to wfcguaid health of people by, >8>, 183; Uz disinfectioD by, iSa, 383; kxM3s of, in reporting to school authorities con- tagious cases among school children, =83,284
Sharpabnrg duldren—
Class in English for Italian, con- ducted by Protestant church, 302; dub life for, lacking, 303; educational need, 303,304; free night schools for, Urlfing, 303; inunigrant* not ad- mitted to Young Men's Christian Association, 301; leisure hours of, 301-304; mental and emotional poverty of, 303 ; placed in industries as altemative of school for physically and mentally handicsp(>ed, 199;
CrgTDunds for, lacking, 303; prob- of meeting needs of, made more difficult by day and night shifts, 304; public library for, lacking, 303; •odol need, 304; sodal work by Catholic churches for, 301, 303; vocational training need, 303, ^04; Young Men's Christian Anodation, asasodal center for, 303, educational ■ s only.
„ I unreported
l>y, 183 ; failure of, to report to board of health, 3S3; one in name only, 1S3; vaccination by, of children in parish schools, 1S4
SharMborg acliools—
Ages of 806 children in, (Table) 1S6; census of assessor of little value, 185, 186: German Lutheran, 384; tack of uniformity of records in, 185; ni^t, 303; no compulsory enrollment in, 385, 1&6; pansh, 284, 385, 286, age of duldren leaving, 184, 285, atten- dance, 1S4, children in, vaccinated by dty physician, 2S4, course of study in, 184, 283, gymnasiiun in, lacking, 3S4, bousing, 1S4, lack of recoids as to duldren working, 184, libraries in, 1S5, medical inspection in, lacking, 284, DO report of contagious cases to, from board at health, 284, not in- spected by board of health or dty [Aysician, 184, fdaygrounds, 1S4,
racial make-up of, 1S4, tuitim fees, 1S4; public, 1S3, 284, gymnasiums ladung in, 283, high school classes, 383, hours, 1S3, housing, 1S3, lack of cooperation between school and medical authorities, 1S3, lack of co- operation between school authorities and factMy inqiectors, 293, medical inspection m, lacking, 2S3, no reports received by school authorities of chil- dren at work, 283, 384, number of pupils, 3S3, {daygrounds, 283, racial m^e-up of, 283, reporting contagious cases in, lu, 383, scboal board, 283; tniancy cases dted, 286, 287, 289, 290, 391, 297, 299; truancy in, 285, 386, 187; truant officer failed to : re^tration list with schocd
compare re^trat cnroUment, 3S6
S69
Sharpsbtirg mtkinf childnn, 387-
r; ages at time of b^inning wiuk 177, under seventeen, found at
work in 1908, (Table) zS8; agesof4i, under fourteen, found at work in 1908, (Table) 288; tMys at work in dty, 3gi; cose dted of restlessness of girls, 290, 291; educational and industrial equipment of 177, found at woric in 1908, 301, 303; in the glaas-houses, 393-301, ages of, 296, OS altemative for boys unable to attend school, 299, at Glenshaw, number employed, 396, bi-weekly premium for faithful, steady service, 298, certificates of minors,
396, day and night shifts, 2^, death of boy hastened by conditions of work, 29S, H. J. Heinz Glass Com- f^^y- 295, 296, hours of, 198, insta- bility of, 396, lure of the industry,
397, moral ^ect of alternate day and night shifts and «^"«""''l occupa- tion, 199, 300, nature of the work, 397, 398, permitted by legislation to work on night shift, 295, physical con<Ution of, 298, 199, physit^ effect of alternate day and night shifts, 399, 30a, restlessiess of. 296, 30a, slight chance for apprentice^p, too, 301, Tibby Brothers, 29s, Tibby Brothers, number employed by, 295, Tibby Brothers, seasonal occupation at, 293, wages, 298, without certifi- cates while enrolled at school, 296, 197, working double time, 290; in the metal trades, 391-195; m the metal trades iron mill, ages of, 291, 292,
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chain boya, 191, houn of, 191, Moor- head plant, 391, 3gi, no opportunity for advancemeot, igi, occupadonaJ risk of, 2g2, on altETnate day and night siiifts, 19}, puU-up boys, igi, shear btn^, 391, wages of, 1911 in the metal trades shovel factiKV, ages of, 393, 393, hours of, 393, Hubbard's, 391, 39^, nature of work, igt, 3()3, occupatioDal risk, 393, opportunity for advancement, 393, overtime, 393, wages of, 193; in the metal trades stove foundiy, 393, ages of, 393, op- portunity for advancement, 393; m the metal trades tube mill, ages of, 394, houiB of, 394, nature of work,
394, occupational risk, 194, 395, on day and night shifts, 393, 294, Spang, Cholfont and Con^iany, 393, 394,
395, wages of, 394, work-acddents, 394, 395; interchange of, between Pittsbu^ and Shaipsburg, ago; ipJTiimiim legal age for, 388; on day and night shifts, 391, 393, 194, 395, 398, 199, 300, 304; sentiment in en- forcing law with reelect to, 389; siz- teen-year-dd illiterate giri working at homewitta nine iwardets, 381; status of fathers of 177, found at work in 190S, (Table) 369; tendency of giiia to restlessness and irregiJarity of work, 390; wages of fathers of, 3S9; wholly or partially supportiiig family, J89; work {dace of 117, found at work in 190S, (TaUe) 390
Shaw, Ira D., 418
Sheet metal woriiers, 164, 165; appreoticeship of, 165; definition of, 164) employers' agreement with, 164, i65i hours of, 1651 piece work of, prohibited, 165; sub-contracting prohibited, i6s; unionism among, 164, 165; wages of, 165
Shennaa, William Olfelll, 146, 455- Shop Clinic, Tlie, 354, 355
Shovel factor;^
Shaipsburg children in, 393, 3931 SbariMburg diildren'sopportunityfor advancement in, 393
Slckneia relief. See EMpfoya" kaeft
Sktuk Hollow, 437
Slate and tile roofera, 165, 166; ap- prenticeship of, 145, 165) cmptoyta' agreements with, 166; empbym' association, i6s; hours ^, 165; seasonal unemployment of, 166; strike in 1903, 165; unionism among, 165, 1661 wages aifected by ■mi'Tiiw during panic of 1907-08, 166; *fag(s of, 14s, 16s, 166
Slate Roofers' AssocUtioii, 165
Slai^ler bouiet — Output of, 115
sub- case of slow, showing that qualities of ranstaocy, honesty, and sobriety are unappreciated, 68, 69; qiirit ol,
Slaw, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39. 40, 4". 4». 43, 4S. 46. 49. JO. SI, S3, S4. SS. S*. S7. S8. 59. 60, 61-77, 78, 79. 81. 8*. 93, 93. 94. "9. I30, 131, 13s, 169, »7o, 178, 3*9, 3SI, 3SS. 3W, 36*; attitude of, toward America, 61, 61, 65. ^7. 70, toward native land, 67, 70, 71; cases dted showing causes M immigration, character of, attitude of, and eSect of American conditioos on, 63-70, showing how work-acd- dents have handicaiqjed, 73-76, sho*- ing reasons for contempt for American law held by, 7 1-73 ; cause of immign- tion, economic, 6a, 63, knowledge of Httsburgh industries, 6^, pc^tica! op- pression, 63, solicitation of tisns- portation companies, 63, 631 char- acteristics of, 61; effect of liviDg conditions on, 63; effect of working conditions on, 63; greatest suffenn
■d^yCoogle
from woA-Bcddenti, 73, 74; injustice acinrded, in aldenn&nlc court, 71, 71,73; misunderstood by Americans, fii; per cent of, in present immigTB' tion,6i; i^dinessof, tohelpcountry- men in distress, 76, 77; reasons for settling in Kttsburgh, 64, 65; re- port of National Ctoation Society showing efiects of work-acddents and tuberculosis among, 73, 74; Slovaks most ambitious of, 69, 70. See also Ruisians
SloTikB, 3S. 37, 40, 42, 44. 45. S3. SS. S6, 57. 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 79
Social—
A^iect of prostitution, 365; book- keeping of municipality, 16; build- ing erected by Heinz Ccnnpany, 159; center, at Maiianna, 361, Young Men's Christian Association as a, for Sbatpsbuig children, 303 ; centers of Carnegie Steel Company, 1611 cm- trol, proUems of, in hands of pdice, 308; coat o{ typhoid fever, 17; cost erf wmfc-BCcidents, 14-17; institu- tions, h^^tazaid develtqnnent of, 7; machinery, efficiency tests of, 16; need of Stiaipsburg children, 304; otganizations of immigrant wage- earners, 56) ormnizations of Negroes, loj, 104; ptwce, 366-369; police work, opportunity for, 338, 384, 385, 386; problem of 1914, 30; progress and l^ck-9et currents in, 366-369; progress in industrial centers during last five yeais, 30; re^xmaibility of, police compared with almshouse, 3^; sigaificance of underworld pnmng upon work pec^le unrecognized by court, J2t; situation leading to pros- titution, 34S, 349; tests, 16-18; the challenge to industry, 14-18; work of Catholic churches in Shaipsburg, 301, 303
Socisl, anti- Recruiting the, forces of a com- munity, 316, 317
Social-economic achemes — In Great Britain, 3
Socialism—
ESect of defeat of unions on, tSS; Negroes' attitude toward, 107, 108
Socialist Tote—
Increase in, following defeat in economic strug^, 188
Needless delay in cleaning up, ao
Sobo Hillside, A, 406-410
Stdcofofl) Alsxli, 18, 79-95
Sons of Vnlcaa, 105, 106
Sfiaiic, CttaUant and Coinpanj, 193, w>4. »9S
Specializatioo—
Effect of, on restlessness of labor, 117; not allowed among tmion line- men, 156; unionism affected by, 139,
SpecUlcatioua—
Plasterers working without, pro- hibited, 161 Speeding of the woAmen —
Report of stockholders' committee, United States Steel Coipoiation, 399, 400 Speeding-np —
Effect of, aa operatives, 17, on restlessness of labor, 117; through the bonus system, 1 30, 399
Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Companr, 315, 139, 140, 249, 150, 361, 164
"StarEid,"3z8,339
State .
Or workiugmc legidation enacted in 33 states.
■d^yCoogle
Steamfltters, 163, 164; a[^>raiUce- ship of, 145, 16], 164; employers' agreement with, 163, 164', houn of,
146, 164; unionism among, 146, 147, 161,163; use of non-union machinery, tools or material by, not prohibited, 163; wages afiected by unionism during panic of 1907-08, 147; wages ol, 147, 164
Ste«l—
if pioccu 0 of, lis
99, 100; output
St««l IndtistiT—
Effect of, on other industries, ajj: en of combinations in, 176; fastened opposition to labor laws, 3761 "good timei" in, following period of com- binations, 3771 unmigration en- couraged by, 176; labor conditions in, 376; outhne history of, 175, 176, i77> P^' cent o( fatal woric-acciilents in, 197; per cent of unskilled immi- grants in, 117; promoted "(^tie- men's agrecmeut," 376; railroad rebates fostered by, }76i removal of, out o[ town, 377i supported high taiiS movement, 176; town plui- ning in, 361; unionism fought by spy system, 176; unionism in, 176{ violation in, of lam reducing hours of women and children, 302, 103; work-accidents in, 15
Steel woikers—
Employers' agreement with, 180; hours of mine workers compared with, 178, 179; housing of, compared with mine workers, 179; percent of Negro, 961 racial make-up of mine workers and, similar, 178; unionism among, iSo; unioni&m among mine workers conqiared with, 179, 180; wages of, 1S3; wages of immigrant day labor, 119, of mine workers compared with, 1 78, 1 79. See also Jf «jro sitel worktrt
SteTcnioa and Companr, George K.,
^irporat
StockbolderB* c<nmDitt»»—
Report on labor conditions. United States Steel Coipnation, Aftfil 15, i9",3W-40S
Stogj factory- Lack of factoiy inflection in, 101, 101; physical effect of wiorking in, on young giris, 301, 103; Wisciwain statute r^ulating employment of children in, zoi. See also rofrooe iradt
Stool plgeona, 374
Stove fonndr;—
Sharpsburg children in, 191, 193; Sharpsourg children, oppntuni^ for advancement in, 191
Strategic position of Pittabor^ 113
Street deTelopment, 9
Street railway^
Low fare, in Qevdand, 11. See also TroctiM
Street raUmr employes, 113, 1341 employers' agreemeDt with, 133, 134; hours and runs of, 113, 114, i&4) strike in 1909, 114; unionism amcog enqiloyes, 133, 124, 138; wages ol. 133, 134. izS, 183, in process of aibi- tration LI<ilyt >9I4)> 'M
Streetwalker. SeeiVMl>M»M«
Strikebreaken—
Rusman, 93 Strikea—
Bakers, 136; blacksmiths, 141; bricklayers and masons, not allowed by unimi unless sanctioned by com- mittee, 148, 149; bridge and struc- tural iron woriters, 15a, 153; electrical workers, 155, i5<^; garbage cdlectors
155, 156; garbage cdlec 113; Homestead, 113, :
141.
141' marine engineers in 1914, 113; McKees Rocks, t88, 119, 311; mine workers, r67 i63, 179; plumben, 1611 Pressed Steel Car Woits, 42, S9, 319; printers, 132, r33; ret«l clerks, r3i; rivermen, 122, 123; slate and tile roofers, 165; street lail-
■d^yCoogle
my, 134 i teamstera, 111; tile layers and helpers, i66; Westinghouse, at Turtle Creek in 1914, 3°, 14*. '68, 188, 269, 311, 380. See also Riots; Unitmism Structural Iron workers—
Aod housesmiths affiliated, 151. See also Bridge and structural iron
Stuart, Goveraor, 114
Snggeation syitam—
Development of employes through, 170-»7J
Snicid«a—
Among prostitutes, 357; attempted,
edentific treatment of, in New York,
388 SulliTUU of HewTork, 314.324 Sunday Uw. See Police
Sunday work, 17, 28, 39, 40. 6S, 74. 122, 123, ia6, 130, 1311 134, 137. 141. 143, 144, 149. 'SI, iS>> '53. '54. 'SS. 158, 160, i6t, 164, 166. 178, 184, 39a, 395-398. See also Overtime
SnppI; trades, 129-138; unionism among, 139. See also Bakeri; Brew- ery viorkers; Printers; Retail clerks
Surgical organliatitm of the Car- n^e Steel Compan;, 455-460
Inquiry into work-accidents by, 34; Pittsburgh the year of the, 7; study of fatal work-accidents by, 43
"Swedish Clara," 331
Switchmen. See Raihoay employes
Switchmen's Union of North Amer- ica, 135, "8
Swltierland, 373
Sylvester, Mayor, 375
Syrians, 35s
Tariff- High, supported by steel Industry,
276; legislatioD, benefits from, ii4> See also Protection
"Tea" West, 331
Team play. See Unity
Teamsters, 131, 131; duties of, 111; employers' agreementi with, 133; hours, III. 122; per cent of Negro. Ill', racial make-up, 111; strike in 1905, 123; unionism among, 133, 138; wages of, [22, 183
Telephone serrlce —
Fatigue in, 354; legislation aSect- ing women operators in, 214; recent welfare work among women in, 259
Temperature—
In industrial plants, 334, 335. See also Plant, physical equipment of
Tenement bouse census, 30
Tener, Governor, 215. 445
Teutons, 33, 34, 40, 43. 9S- See also Gemumi
"Texas Rod," 33'
Tibbj Brothers, 295
Tile Dealers' Association, 166
Tile layers' helpers, 166; apprentice- ship of, I4S. I&6; employers' agree- ments with, 1661 employ era' associa- tion, 166; hours of, 166; piece work prohibited by union, 166; strike in 1907, 166; unionism among, 166; wages of, T(S6
Tile Layers' and Helpers' Union, 166
■d^yCoogle
Tobscco InduBtry—
Delaney amendment to child labor Uw ftfiecting, enacted, loz; iovesd- KBtion of, by new factory inspection dqAttment, 115; labor additions in, 17. See also Slogy factory T«t«do—
Reducing number of arrests in, 387 Tom L««, 331, 33J
Tonnage, iij, 376; pace in mill, set by Andrew J. Cainegie, 3j6. See alsoOwf^
Town pUnnlnc —
An element in solution of housing problem, 11, 12-, in the coal industry, 1621 in the steel industry, 361
Toylud. S«e Midland
Traction deTslopment, g; an dement insolutionof bousing prcjikm, 31, ix; lack of, obstnicting community de- vcIopmenC, 31
Trtd« agreements- Advantage of, to en^>loyers, 186; blacksmiths, 144, between employers and bakers, 135, bridge and struc- tural iron workers, 151, 153, biEwery woriters, 136, 137, 138, 454. building trades. iM, 183, 184, caipenteis, 154, electrical TOiters, isSt elevator constructors, 157, 158, i6p, bouse- amiths, 153, 153, machinists, 140, minetrorken, 170, 171, 174,179. 180, painters, dec^a^ors, uid pape^ang- ers, 1S9, 160, [Jasterers, 161, plumb- ers, 161, 163, printeia, 133, 134, retail clerks, 130, ijt, sheet metal workers, 164, 165, slate and tile roofers, 166, steamfitters, 163, 1O4, steel workers, 180, street railway employes, 113, 114, tile layers and helpers, 166; competi- tive conditions for employers equal- ized by, 186; hygienic proviuons in 1914, brewers, 454; union working code in place of, enforced among bricklayers and masons, 14S, 149
Trade onions. See Unimis
TrtnBDortation— Underworld, The, 313-336) affilit-
ESect of unproved, mi freight rates, tions oi, counting for immunity. 314;
114; national facilities for, 113, 114; alliance between courts and, 377, 378,
railroad fadlities supplementing
TruupoitatiaB tradea—
Unionism among, iiS. See XaH- wiy empioves; Rmrmai; Skttt raiheay employa; Teamiteri
Tiuancr. See SekeUs
Trusto—
ESect of, on unionism, 186, 1S7, 18S; struggle between, and unions, 187, 1S8
TuberctUosls—
A menace, 11, 12; and Negro prostitutes, 355, 356; death rate, 14; munidpa], b^pital, ii; PittsbwEh, League, 11; (ooviskiiis for, pAtiau report of NstiaQi] ■ ■ -^of
J. 74-
Tucker, Helen A., q?, 106, 4i4-43<i Tnrkiah bath nntntoriom, 336
Twelve-hour day^-
Report of stockbidders' c United States Steel Corporaiiaa on, 398, 399. See also Ouneork
Typhoid fe»er—
Among immigrant wage-earoets, 481 death rate, 14, i^, in Qevdand, 17, in Columbus, 17. in New Havto, 17, in Washington, 17; decrease in, after opetung ol filtration [dant, 17. 30; endemic, 17; in river wards id1 East End, 34; social and ecotiomk
TTphoid Fever CaaimiBsion, 33 Typhoid, Thirty-flre Tenn of, 17
■d^yCoogle
3791 American Order o Eagles holds omdavE in Pittsburg 315, national OTgaiiuationof,3i4,335; anUgtnism of, to icftxni admuiistnitimi, 313; "band-boi" on Grant Street 316, 315; "Big Sam" Sticenider, 313; bunco games in hotels checked under reform admioistrstion, 3Tii busioess ■gent of the, 315; cases dted showing strength of. through venal alliances with offidals, 314, 31S, 316; "Chap- pie Moran," 31a; conviction of expert Pittsbu^ swindler secured by Pennsylvania Railroad detective, 311; oonvictioiis secured by District Attoraey Jerome, 315; "Doc," in- dustrial worker, bartender, prize fighter, and sanitary policeman, 318; effect of, alliances on police, 370; tfect of refcKm administration on,
.7 3»6; "filed' bill ignored by grand juty, 314; friendliness and welcome of, to the down and out, 317; gambling houses and pool rooms closul under reform admmislration,3ii; gambling houses reopened under administration of Mayor Magec, 361; Giady of the, 31J; immigrants housed in, districts, 3071 inadequacy of imprisonment in dealmg with, 387, 3SS; industrial classes preyed upon by, 307, 317. 318, 319, 3»o; industrial in^eis drifting mto, 317, 31S; influence of, in alder- 'c court, 316, in county court,
3'6;
: of
leddents of, held in abeyance during reform administration, 335, 376; J. M. Morin, president local aerie of American Order of Eagles, ^a j; James Monroe, 323; John Considine, 314; leader in, operating small factory, 314, posing asreal estate man, 3i4i limited activities of, under reform adminis- tration, 321; McKcesport a "per- centage burg," 3*1, 31); McKees- port at Old Home Week worked by, 319; natituial aspects, 314-316; New York "turning joint" for "wireless wire tapping." 314. 3'S; outside invaders, 322, 323; Philip Lamont, 323; political power of, 314, 315, 316,312,^23,324, 325,370; potential
pei^ile. 3is-3ati raids by outade gun mobs tcHeratcd by pohce, 311; recruits tA crime, patnms of liquor and vice resorts, 317; reform ad- ministiatitm a penod of abeyance throughout the, 362; restricted ad- ministrative area playing into ^an^l* of, 8; rise oE "H-heodunan" typical of lesser lights of, 316; social sig- nificance of, preying upon working- men, imreco^iized by court, 32r; strilung out from the dty, 321, 311; SuUivaos of New York, 314, 3^i "sure thing men," 314; "takisa- chance" tridents of, under reform aHmini»tr«tinn, jjj, 3^3; "trimming" of an Ohio banker by tlw, 3 14; "trim- ming "of wealthy oil operator by the, 3r4> 315; victims' fear of publicity makes convicting swindlers difficult, 321; womenof the, 3SJ,353: "orit- ingmen tricked by tin box. handker- chief, or podetbook game, b^" wheel of fortune," by "strong jomt" and by "thimble ringer," 319, 3*0. See also Crimt; Ytfgs
Union- Dues, deducted from mine workers' wages, r74; ^namiting conspiracy of natknud officers of, 150'. labd, bakers', i2g, unionism among btewety workers strengthened by, iig, 136; strikes of bricklayers and masons not allowed by, unless sanctioned 1^ committee, :48, 149; working code in place o( employers' agreements en- foKed among bricklayers and masons, 148,149
Union, onti—
Effect of, pdldes on development of employes, 26S
Union Iron Worits of Son Fnwcisco,
Affected by employers' association, t3g, 140, ISO, iS3i pa^c of 1907-08, 118, 141, 146, 130, ^wcialization, 139, 140; among bakers, 119, 134, 135, 187, blacksmiths, 144. 181, boOer makers, 143, 144. brewery workers, 119, 136, i37> 138, 182, 1S6, brick-
■d^yCoogle
Tobacco'
law aff oqMT
Tom Twi
■"-..'U; ■"'"-:^ ''^*'°-
'rtJia mine wii^r^
■-»«;','■■ ■" ~22?°"« / "«"«' Sun.
.^ "m^ n^ . influence / "" " ' "
-"^ " I.C ,?; "" 'I. ^-- 'S:!^ '1' ~ -- =•
.d,GoogIe
i steel Relief Penalon
» if Plttabnrgh, 19
oi buieftu of health t<
pay
1 tdepbcMK company,
, _ ■ . . upply CompMy, 174
^ _ , {rift, 261
^^ * priTy, 10; ID industrial plants,
^139) in Sharpsburg, 183, 183;
. Ao, 40S, 4091 not prohibited in
Sestead, 31, 13. See also Plants,
il,-ical tquipmtnt of
.? "^S,
*et«tl diseaua—
fini providing for leport of, de- — -" "s- See also ProiWu/ion "■* ^^tiUtion—
^ In industrial plants, 3 15, a 16. ■ See also Flanlt, fhyikal equipmtnl of
,//lGe, See Eaerse Side, TMt
lak Vice and diseue, 364, 365
* ' Vocattooal traiiiin«~ im k Needed by Shoipsbuig children,
mm: 303. 504
Vogelson, Uabel, 492
• i»* Volnntery accident relief plan, Stx Relief pian
Volnnteen of America, 343, 34s
Voters' Leagoe—
■■ Agitatirai against vice led by, 363, S02; district attorney's oflto in con- junction with, exposed councilnumic fit, 313; instigated survey of county by New Yorit Bureau of Municipal Research, 17
d by immigrant wage-earners.
Wage-earners —
Desire of, to have voice in manage- ment of industry, 1S8; hours of adult male, not limited by statute, 1031 number of, in Greater Pitts- burgh, 1 16; relation of, to community and industries, 7. See also Industrial workers; Labor; Mine workert; Nt- fro sled workers; Wage-earners, innni-
ptability of, 36, 40, ^ paid by luunarried, for room and food, 46, 47; as property owners, 53, 59; asaiinilation of, difficult, 56; buik and postal savings dep<»its of, 53, 54; betterment of, requires aggres- sive wMt, 60; boarding bosses, 46, 47, cOD4Jetence accumulated by, 55; camp school for, 51, 52; celebration of Columbus Day by Italian, 60; change in type of, 33, 34, 35; classes in English for, 360, 261; colonization of, 44, 45, sf>', community should provide ckan recreation for, 50, 60; compensation for work-accidents to, 44, sg; oMnpcnsation for work fatalities to alien families of, 44; conditions of work among, 43i "»- operative housekeeping among, 47; crime among, 50, 51, 51, 53; domin- anceof Magyar,Slav,andLitliiianian •ntaw. 33. 34. 35; drinking among, 4g, 50, 53; earnings, expenditures, and savings of single, 55; economic positi<ni of, 33-43) educational work among, 51, 52; effect of home con- ditions of, on crime, 52} effect of inflow of, on moral aiid religious life of community, 34; effect of panic of 1907-0S on union and non-union, 1 18; eSect on unionism of radal antip- athies among, 40, 59) evening schools for, lacking, 51; expenditures of married, 55; fomer, in business and the profes^ons, 53; fraternal ordeis of Slavic. Lithuanian, and
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Iftyeis, 146, 147, 148, 149, bridge and structunJ iron iniAers, 149, 150, 151, iji, building trades, 146, 147, 186, building trade day tabor, iio, 111, carpenters, 146, ij4, day labor- en, 184, electrical worun, 155, i;6, electrical vforkers, inside wiremen, 155, electrical workers, linemen, 156, elevator constructors, 146, 147, 157, • S8, isg, hod carriers, i jo, 438, hrast- ing Ni^neers, 153, housesmiths, 153, machinists, 14a, 141, 141, 187, ma- sons, 146, 147. 148. 149. metal trades, 139, mine workers, 167, 16S, i6g, 170, 173. >74. I7S. »77, "75, 180, 181, 186, mine workers compared with steel mwkers, 179, iSo, molden, 141, 143, mortar miieis, no, Negroes, 418, painters, decorators, and paperhang- ers, 159, 160, pattern makers, 143, plasterers, 146, 160, 161, plumbers, 146, 147, 161, 161, printers, 13J, 133, 186. railway emfjoyes, 115, tiS, re- tail clerks, iig, 130, 131, 131, river- men, 113, 113, iiS, sheet toetal woo- ers, 164, 165, slate and tile roofers, 165. 166, steamfitters, 146, 147, i6a, 163. steel workers, tSo, street railway employes, 1 13, 1 14, T ]8, siqijdy trades, iiq, teamsters, ita, isS, tile layers and helpers, 166, tramportatton trades, iiS; at Marianna, 163; atti- tude of mine operators toward, 179,
180, United Sutes Steel CotpoTadim toward, 179, tSo, 400; coke regitHi affected by outcome of, in Westmore- land, 168; duty of, in stamping out prostitution. 349; effect of competi- tion oa, r86, national corporation or trust on, 186, 187, 188, on progressive improvetnent in industrial conditicKis, 185, 187; effect of racial antipathies among immigrant wage-earners on, 40, 59; hygiene (or brewny woilets, 4S4; in steel industry, 976; influence 01, in hard times, iSj, on non-union err^itoym, 1S5; summary showing effect of, cm hours, 184, 183, on wages,
181, 1S3, 1S5; trade autonomy vbt- sus industrid group in, 136; wages affected by, 146, during panic of 1907-08. 144, 147, 166; wages of day labor affected by, iio, ni
UaltuiiflD, non —
Among Old Bdievers, 93; effect of, on restlessness of labor, 117
Dnlona —
And Uie Negro sted worfcs- ^ "5' '*=*. •°7. toS; tombi^,^ bership d, 18,; conditi^ St have built up stronfr VSi ^? contests between, «™ie^«dSv^*S|i supremacy, 273; defeatTl^* increase in socialistk vou, Js^fcJa of organiiatKn of, 181 ia "V ^^ inent ol, for Trork-accident'nSSr tion in mining industry n-,. C251 •ievdoped to secure %iii JJ*gi
Emphyers' assecinlioK ' T^
Unlontown, i68 L^
United AuocUtion of
Gutnd Vnlted Brotherhood
ud JoioenVf iSeHe,"^!' 3P> Doited Coucpo.,^,^"-"*
Uolled EodoeeHo, .^ > k.
Doited UborU.^_,j_
D^ P,o.h„«^ 3^ ^ United States
*™o mute mtk^^ United State, tion, 138
United State, unmigntiaii in
„=»*'-'««*»,, u-^
Doited Stotos €l-„i .
D1t«i St. to. GU_ T^" Doited st.t„ -.^,
S76
tMMSimSlidBtSrfP
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tdvances made by, 40-431 iodustrUl cffideDcyaf,38,4o, 41,431 industries dependent OD, sq; uifloir ind outflow of, 36; insuisnce societies of, 56; liv- ing conditions of, 43-60; lodging bouses, Bssftult and battery in, 47, congested, 46, 47, 48, 59, moral con- ditions in, 4S, 49, sanitaiy conditions ill> 4^1 47> S9i majraity of, Roman Catholics, 57) means of lecniitiug, ifii 37r 3$i ""**'"£ rdigious needs of Slavic, (orwanl problem of church, 59; money sent to home countries by, S3; money sent to Servia by, 53; parish schools erected and maintained Dy, 58; participation of, in sesqui- ccntennial celebration in 1908, 60; per cent of oiminal, uumanied, 53, of police court casa among, from Southoutera Europe, 50, », of mukil]ed,ln steel mull. It;; [diysical and cultural poaubilities of, 34, 6a; physique of, 37, 38, 40; Playground Association May festivals for sodal devdopment of, 60; political clubs of Croatian, 57, of LiUiuanian, 57, of Polish, 57; political leaders unong, 56, sj; political leaden among Italian, 56, among Polish, 56, 57; political power of, 57; prejudice and contempt for, in courts, 44, S». 55. 7'. 7», 73, 368; priests of, character, activities, and mfluence of, 5S, foun- ders of building and loan associations, 58, founders of insurance societies against sidutess and acddent, 5S;
property depredatia noods occupied by S
y Slavic, 46; pros- perity of, 53, S4, 55, S9i Protes- tant mission work among Slavic and Italian, 57; races of, performing baldest and most dangerous work, 45; racial consciousness of, 56; reasons for immigration of, usually ectxKnnic, 36, 37, 40; religious ete- ■nent in, 57, 58, 59; rent sometimes r^ulated by number of boarders, 46; rents paid show discrimiruiti<m against, 31, 45, 46, 55; Russian, Greek Orthodox, 57; Russian (Greek Ortbodoi), Slavic, and Italian, pre- ferred by employers, 39, 40; schools for adult, 51, 53; self-culture 9od»- ties of PoUdi, s6; Slavic and Lith- uanian, in aJdennanic courts, s>; Slavic, sddom apply for aid, 5^, subject to Patriaith of Constanti-
aUcf-
judges, 51; study of, in 19071 34; tenckocy of Italian, to construction work, railrDad wxk, and mines, 33; Teutonic and Keltic, displaced by races from Southeaston Europe, 33, 34, 35, 43; typhoid fever among, 48; votes polled by Italian, 56, S7, by Polish, 56, 57; wage standard affected by inflow of, 33.34. 40,41. 4», 43, S9; wages, piece and day work, 43; wiUmgneaa 01 skilled, to do menial worit, 41; women exposed to danger, 49; woik-aod- diiits to, 43. See abo Iwmdpvatt; Otertimt; KMStiant; SlitK; Simi*r wfi; r ■ ■■ ■ Wagaat
Affected by inflow of immigrants, 33.34.40,4r,4>,43.59
Adequate, as an aid in eradicating prostitution, 353, 364; affected by unionism, r46, during panic of r^oT- 08, 144, 147,166; affecting employes' development and staUlity, 163; bak- [36, i83_, 18s; Wa<±-
smiths, r44; boiler muers, t43, 144; brewery woikers, 137, (TabteJ 138, ~ 18^, t84; bricUayas, 145, r.
578
148; bndge and structural Lr ers, r46, rjo, isr, 153; oauamg trades, iw, r44, 14S. >46, t47. >48, 166, rSi, 183, ra4; building tiada day labc«, ito; carpenters, 146, 1S4, IJS; city day labor, 131; coo- tractois' day labor, ri9, rio; day labor, affected by knowledge oc Eng- lish, rii, affected by politics, rio, III, affected by unionisn, 110, iii, in 1913 and 1914, 119, in United . States Steel Corporation, 41, 119; effect of low, on restlessness of labor, 117; hitler, usually teaaon foe inmu- gration, ^6, 37, 40; dectikal worfcets, inside wiremoi, 145, 147, 155, 156, linemen, 145, 156, 157; fUeruot con- structors, 147, 158, 159; fatben at Sharpdnirg's woAin^ chUdroi, 3S9; hod-caniers, im; botsdng engmeen, 147, 154; housesmiths, 153; immi- grant day labor, in steel companka, 110; Jones and Lanolin, 119; ma- chuiials, 140, i4t> 183; masons, 145,
■d^yCoogle
i47> 148; medisnits, 1S3; metal trades, 139, 183; miiw mxkm, 167, 168, 170, (Table) 171, 171, 173; niine woAxn compared with ated wcxicen, 17S, 179; midden, 143, 143. 1S3; mratar-miieis, 130; painten, deco- raton, and paper hai^eis, 145, 147, 159, i6a; pattern makers, 1431 pat- tern makers at WestingnouM Ma- chine Ccnnpany, 143^ piece and day wotk, of immigrants, 41; plasteiers, r45, 146, 147, iGt; plumoeis, 147, i6a; printers, 133, 134, 183, 184; rail- way day labor, iig, 110; railway em- ployes, us, J36, J17, ia8; retail deifcs, 130, 131, 133, 181, i8s: river- men, r», 181; ^axpsburg ciuldicn, in ^^as-housea, 398, m metal trades, inn mill, 391, in metal trades, shovd bx^ry' >93< >° metal trades, tube mills, 394; sheet metal woffcen, 165; slate and tile roofers, 145, 165, 166; state day labw, t3i, steamotten, 147, t64; sled wnfcers, 183; street railway enqik^'ea, uj, t34, laS, tSi, in process of artntration, 134; sum- mary showing dfect of unionism on, 183, 183, 185, under Americanised padrone, no, United States Sted Corporation, iig, 178; teamsters, III, 183; tile layers and helpers, 147, 166. See also Barnintf
Washing facUltiva—
In Cam^ie libraries, 336; In industrial plants, 333-131^1 >74; in Lawrence Park, 336; in McKeesport recreaticA groimds, 136; in Turkish Bath Natatorium, 136; in Umted States Sted Corporatitm, 497; b West Parit, 336. See also Plantt, fkytkal eqttipmfnt n^
Water-«l<weta—
In industrial plants, 336-140, 374; in United States Sted Corporation, 497. See also Planit, fhyiical equip-
WctM, drlnkinc—
In industrial [dants, 116-iiS, 174, Midland, 413, United States Sted Coijioration. 496, 497; legislation providing lor pure, for working
Water ahsd—
Co-operation throughout, needed to solve water and sewage probkm, 9
Water aapplT—
Fami^', in Shaipeburg, 381, 18}, no ordinance in Homestud requiring adequate, 13; filtration plant, de- crease in typhoid fever after opera- tion of, 17, 30; pure, a water-shed {HX)blem,8,9
Wattlea and Sou, W. W., 454
Wealth- Pittsburgh gigantic in creation of, 113; principles ap^ed to distribu- tion of, 117; titanic in contests toe division of, 113
Welfare work—
Devdopment of enqiloyei through, 157-359; land loaned to employes for vc^table farm, 16 1; of Amoridge Works of American Bridge Com- pany, 3611 of Central District Tde- phone Conqiany, 359; of department stores, 359, 160; of Krupps, 6; of Mesta Machine Conqiany, 161; of Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company through Young Men's Christian Association, 361; United States Sted Coiporation, 403; re- sentment of American employes aroused by, 15S; term, being dromied in Westinighouse Air Brake Works as in^prc^riate, 35S. See also SweoK ^ Safety, Rditf, SamtatioH and Wd-
Welsh, 33. 317, 366 West Park, 336 West Virginia- Mine workers, 167 Weatem Pennsylvania Association
of the national League for Women
Worken. See Women viorkert WeBtlnghonse Air Brake Works,
136, 158, 364, 166, 414, 417, 468-491 Weslingboiue Electric and Manti-
fftctnrinK Company, 30, 143, 143,
■d^yCoogle
i68, i8S, 119, 110, zii, 118, 139, 33i> »33, »3S. ajS, J43. H4. »6o. afiQ. 3". 380, 461-467
Wat mines. See Rutidltaam White BUTerr. See ProOUution "Whitey O," 334, 33S Whitlock, H«ror, 387 WUkbubnrc, 16a WUmeidiiiK, 160, 414, 417 Wilwm, Robert, 363 Wac, Frank E., 17, ao, 48
Labor laws and enforc«meDt, 11 statute legulating cmf^ymoit children in tobarm trade, 102
Wall 1 fa tirfa-Rinrirti titti£^ti ^ jj^
Wcoun'i Leapie, CcdioUc, 453
agendea tecuring emplc^mcnt (or,
Council of Jewish, 453; bcttxy in- spection depaitmoit Rpofts lack of ' ent o(.
metal trades, 193. 194, 195, 196; boucs <rf, retaQ clerks regulated by
darker, 49; labor law kc, amended in 1913, 114, as amended inchidea those suhject to partial aenmciCDs, Bmits hours of work, provides for
' ■ ■ " i, Witt ■' ■•
J. .^ ■ - '««»i»»' ***' duty (M factory i^*!!***"*! >
' MtnUe, SOS, nq ts" for, viobted,
organisations among, 258, in 1914, 4S3> 454! Voung Women's Chrisiisn Assoaatiao work aamag, 453. See aboGtrfi; Sal/adliiia
Women and the Trade*—
By Elizabeth B. Butler, 27, 49,
132, 194, 104, 279. 3S4, 453 Women of the underworld, 352, 353 Women's Trade Dnion LeafKe, 4S] Women woAen utd aoctal agen-
cie«i 433. 454
irlranla Aanociation of the Ha- tKmal LMgne for, 453 Wood, Major John P., 445 Woodlawn, 261 Woods, Robert A., 8 Woods Knn, 51 Work-nccident funds—
At Easen. 6 Work-accident prereotioa, 16, 198- 206; activities of Naijmal Tibe Canq»ny, 395, PittAar^ Sled Conqiany, 44, United States Sttd CoqMTMion, 16, »9. 43. 44. >99. aoo. ^75; ■PC™' to anpkijivn, ogi- s, foremen, and »offcm^ >»{■<>- - " ■ *6»; by
WelEarc, United Stales Sted Cespeaa- tiao,494; canpanj safety cspot far, 198,199; duty of factory ■
^t 27, '99. 200; , _
and, 198, 199, »os; taooryB .
"" ' lacks power of an^May
580
14.I7S.»7*.I77; I
for, ■ iJKi^ i»* .. lorcemcfU by factory MifiFiiiis statotf paDvvhng far, 1984 I9K n
.d,Google
ber of orders given for guuding mach- inery for, 198; pubUdty as an aid in, 35, 16; recommendation in report on factory iuspectioD concerning, 311; removal of nearby saloon as, jiQ. See also Safeguardinf em- ptoya; Saftly committee
Work-accident sUtistiea—
No local or state compilation of, 44
Work-accidents—
And old liability law, 35; as- sumption of risk theory, 15. 16; cases cited showing how, have handi- capped Slavs, 73, 74, 75, 76; chief factory in^iectors characteristic re- mark concerning, 197, iqS; com- missions appointed to investigate, loo; compensation for fatal, to alien families of immigrant wage-eamers, 16, 44; compensation for, to immi- grant wage-earners, 44, 59; deaths due to operation of cranes, 13, 35; deatlis fnun, not shown by re[)orts of bureau of health, 35; discrepancy between state factory inqiector's re- port and coroner's records in report- mg fatal, 197; distribution of eco- nomic cost caused by, »t, 37; dtie to non-enforcement of statute providing for guarding of machineiy, 198, ipg; duties of factory inspection dmart- ment concerning, 196, 197, 1981 fatal, r4, 3j; fatal, in mines and mills, 1908-1913, as shown by coroner's records, (Table) 35; fatal, of children, 199; in Pennsylvania, 443! "" ""'er wards and East End, 34; in steel in- y into, by Survey, 3 prevention, 198- \ making obligatory report of, to Dq>artment of Labor and Industry, 443 ; legislation provid- ing for state conunission to investi- gate, 44; number of, rq>orted by chief factory inspcxtor, 197; per cent of fatal, in steel industry, 197; re- duction of, by safety work in United States Steel Corporation, 496; report of National Croatian Society showing number of fatal and disabling, among members, 73, 74; rq>orts of factory inspectitm depanment lack adequate statistics concerning, 104, 196, 197, iqo; Stuupsburg chiltuvn in tube mills, 194, 395; Slavs greatest suf-
sSr
ferers from, 73, 74; soctal and eco- nomic cost of, 24, 35, 16, 37; state commis^on appointed to investigate, 34, 35, 177, law drafted by, defeated, 177; study of fatal, by Survey, 43; system of reporting, in America compared with European countries, 197. in Minnesota, 197, in New York, 197; to inmiigTant wage- earners, 43; United States Steel Corporation action for relief of, loo; victims of, as beggars, 337. See also Oceupatiimal danger
Work-Accid«ntt ud tli« Law—
By Crystal Eastman, 35, 43. 73i I7S, 197. "9*. '99. »">. »4S. 264,443
Work-«ccidenta, miners' —
Death rate from, in Belgium, 175, in France, 176. in Great Britain, 175, in United States, 175; deaths fnnn, in Allegheny County, 175, 176; fatal, as shown by coroner's recmds, 35; measures for preventHW of , token by operators, 176; no adequate measure for prevention <rf, 173; preventable, 175, 176, r77j pre- ventive legislation, 176, 177; station for investigation of mine eiplod<ms established under United States Geological Survey, 177; steps taken hy federal government for preven- tion of, 14, 177; subject of com- plaint at labor conventions, 175
Working conditions, 174; among immigrant wage-earners, 43; better- ment of, 37, 39; brewery wOTken, '37. 138, »S8, 4S4; effea of, on Slavs, 62; effect of unionism on [Htigressive improvement of, 185, 1S7; improved, shown by photographs in museum of safety appliances, 494; improvement of, through borough and dty govon- ments, 358, through factory legisla- tion and enforcement, 358, through outside agencies, 158, ihroi^ welfare work, 357-359, through Young Men's Christian Asiodatian, 358; in Amer- ica, 38; in Pittsburgh in 1914, 39, 30; in steel industry, 39, 176; 'nit" ■'Til to health, 37. See also Atmosfheric eoM- diiiom; ImluslHal kygtent; Phut, pkyacal ej ' ' ' *
■d^yCoogle
Varidngmon—
Resource ol induitruJ center, 14, iS, ag
Woifclncmen'i compniMtion, 16, 17; bin kSled in 1913, 316; Dtiaxity Mgues for New Jersey Bystem of, mo; effective factory in^tcction nec- casaiy because of Uck oi provinoa for, 199; employeis, lack incentive to prevent kcdoentt because of absence of, bw, 19Q, 100^ fulure to enact le^slatkm providing ioi voluntary, (ystcra,4^; legislation or state insur- ance l^iiiation enacted in 11 states, >oo; Pennsylvania last to enact, legis- lation, 36, 1001 Btate commission t^
Cted to investigate. 14, 35, 177, drafted by, defeated, 177, legis- lature of 1915 to amsider report baaed on invcsdgatimi of, 177. See also BMphyers' liatiiUy; Relief and feit-
Work! cominitt«e>—
Employes' development through, 370, 371, »7i
WoAshop and Communitr, 3-30
Wriglit, Jr., R. R., 96-iog, 419, 430
Yardmen. See Raihcay employes
Yeggs, 336-335; Allegheny City hang- outs dosed after annexation, 335; Allegheny City harboring, who "worked" ebewhere, 337; Allegheny City termed by, "The Fence," 337, 334- 335; author's introduction to, in Pittsburgh, 339; "Baldy CaUa- han" or " Cleveland Jim, " 3^0; Baldwin Locomotive Works, Umon Iron Works ol San Francisco, Pullman Car Shops in Chicago, Weatinghouse planta in East Pittsburgh, as fields of operation for, 337; "best works in which to make a pitch" according 3»7; "BiUy Kid,^' 33i[ "Burly
., - . , ..■■ • J'^' ^''
cnpple factory," 334; CroaB-coim-
try Jumps," 330-333; "Denver Shine," 331; description of open- tiou of two, 339: Mming. of, on pay day at Pressed Steel Car WoAs, 334; fake cripples closdy akin to, 334< 335> f^e cripi^es' hMdquarten rend^vous for, 335; few, found in Pittsburgh in 1908. 333, 334; field of
r rations of, 316, 337; hang-outs , ?I7. 334. 335: "Hariigan," 331; "lUinois Jimmy," 331; "jocker," and crippled boys, 338, 339; "K. C Red, " 331 J " Louise Jimmy," 33:; "LosSlim,"33i; "MickeyG.," 331; national characters, 336; na- tional ramifications of, 331; "New Orleans Ray," 3^1; "Old Bildy," 331; on the "Mam Stem" 319, 330; Pinkerton's descriptian of, 316; Pittsburgh a "Hostile Town," 333- Te^de^vous for^ at "Whitney
"Riverside Slim,"
Allegheny City, 334, ^35; ide Slim, 331; saloon opened by "Scranton jimmy" fre- quently raided and finaUy dosed by liini. 333, 333; slayers trf "Swedisii Clara,'^ ._ , " ""
Ellis as to Pittsburgh conditions and operations of, 337, 358, 330; "Tea West," 331; "Texas Red," 331;
rorking" the factories, 397-
3'9
Yellow Row- Razed during Mayor Gutlirie's administration, 31, 350
Young Hen's Christian AisocUtlon, 5t, 358, 3tio, 361. 301; all nations' singiiig c»ntest held by, 417; at Wil- merdin^, 360, 414; at Preston, 418; classes in dvics, 416, 417, in En^ish, 415, 416; for Negroes opened, 436; in Harbison and Walker Refractories Con^iany, 41S; in miung districts, 41S; out-of-door lectures, 416; wcnk for immigrants in the Pittsburg Dis- trict, 6a, from 190Q to 1914, 414-41S
Young Women's Christlin AssocU-
S82
At Wilmerding, 361
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RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION PUBUCATIONS
THE PITTSBURGH SUKVEY. Rodbiss in six Tolomes. edtted by Paul U. Ketlogg. Sto. Fi^j iHtutrated with photos by f^e and drawing by Joseph Stella. Maps, charts, and twles. Price per set. postpaid, $10.
THE mrSBtntGH DISISICIi one frontage. S7« p>bw. PDBpilil.
VAGE-EAKNING FITTSBURGH. MO ■>■(«. TammmlO. SI.73.
WOHKH ARD THE TRADES. Br EUubMh BuidaW Bmlu. Id ailttkMi.
««> paRO. Poripiad, St .73. WORK-JLCCIDENTS ARD THE LAW. Br Cryaul "■-'"ft- 350 ■»■■■. Fsat-
P«tJ.il.72. THE STEEL WORKERS. By John A. FHdi, R«v T«k Dapt, of Labor. SSO
paiH. PoMiHld, $1.73. HOHESTEAOi THE HOUSEHOLDS OF A KILL TOWR. Br ECuaurt F. Brtai-
ton. ItOftt—- PiwipiliLSI.70.
WEST SIDE STUDIES. Embodyios the results of an investi- Sation into social and economic conditions on the Middle West Side of New York, carried on tmder the direction of Pauline Goldmark. la two volumes. I2mo. Ufus. Price per Tolume. $2.00 postpaid.
THE KIDIXJE WEST SII«i A HISTORICAL SKETCH. BrOlboG.Cutwtltbt.
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■iOTHERS WHO HDST EARR. Br Kuthuliic Anthsor. Ulia. 324 etfm.
PabUatma la eu tobaaa. hM«ald, t2M>.
BOTHOOD AHP LAWLESSHBSS. Dla. 204 hmh. THE NBGLBCTBD GIRL. Br Rntb S. Tn». 14S pain. PabUsbd ta on* nhimc. hMfHld. t2M>.
THREE PRACTICAL BOOKS ON HOUSING.
A lltHtBL HOUSmC LAW. Bj Ltwmem VmaUr, Sn. SO Dbfnsu. 352 mna.
PMIp-M. S2.0CL HOUSING RHFORES. A Hudbook (or Uaa In Amuleu OiIh. Br Lawnau
tlJ6.
WORKINGMEN'S INSURANCE IN EUROPE. By Lee K. Frankel and Miles M. Dawson, with the co-operation tA Louis LDubllo. Svo. 450piu:eB. I45tables. 2ded. Postpaid, $2.70.
FATIGUE AND EFFICIENCY. By Josephine Goldmark. In- troduction by Frederic S. Lee, PhJ>. Appendix shows com- parathre schedules of hours and extracts from laws on women's labor. 8to. 358 pages. 4th ed. Postpaid, $2.00.
THE DELINQUENT CHILD AND THE HOMEi A Study of Children in the Chicaso Juvenile Court. By Sophonlsba P. Breeklnridse and Edith Abbott. 8to. 360 pages. Postpald,$2.00.
SOCIAL WORK IN HOSPITALS. By Ida M. Cannon. R. N. 12mo. 272 pages. Postpaid, $1.50.
WORKING GIRLS IN EVENING SCHOOLS. By Mary Van Kleeck. Illus. I2mo. 258 pages. Postpaid, $1.50.
WOMEN IN THE BOOKBINDING TRADE. By Mary Van Kleeck. Illus. I2mo. 290 pages. Postpaid, $1.50.
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RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION PUBUCATIONS
ARTIFZCIAL FLOWER MAKERS. By Mary Van Elecck. HIus.
I2mo. 280 pages. Postpaid, $1.50. SALESWOMEN IN MERCANTILE STORES. Baltimore, 1909.
By Elizabeth Beardsley Butler. Ulus. I2mo. 234 pages.
2d ed. Qoth, postpaid, $1.08. Paper, postpaid, $0.75. THE STANDARD OF LIVING AMONG WORKINGMEN'S
Families m Net Yore Cttt. By Robert Coit Ch^>in,
PtuD. &T0. 388 pages. 131 tables. Postpaid, $2.00.
_, mm,WLrd^PhJ>. lOu. 13m.
jBUdMW- adwttUea. PistiMid, St J5. UGGARCS in ODK SCHOCXS. A Stnfr id RatudiUaa tnd Bhnla»tiBm. Bj
UgaudP.Art*a.PhJ>. In. TSXpafm. 4t)i wttHoa. INmpsU, S).SO. HEDICAL inSPECnOFI OF SCHOOLS. B* LottiB H>1«t CdIA, HJX. iwl
L«BHd P. ArMib PhJX moL Bn. 344 tmfm. 4lh aAtoB. CDHplKtatr
mlHd. PoMpald, SI.50
CORRECTION AND PREVENTION. Four Tolumes prepared for the El^th International Prison Congress. Edited by Charles Rkhmond Henderson, PhJD. 870. Price per set, express prepaid, SlOt per volume, $2.50 net.
PKISOR XEFOKIL BrCbu. K. KaaOmwiio, P. B. SMbnctt. P. H. Wlaa ud Odwn. And CRUiraAL LAT m THE UIOIBD STATES. Br B— ■■■ Smltb. Illfii 3U imM INmhhM. S1.47.
PBNAL AND KBP0MIATOR7 inSTTnrnORS. Br m,M. »M>M— • POMpilii. SUO.
FRBVEnnVB AGBRCIBS ARD HEmoDS. B* OuUs
PREVBfniVB TKBATHBnr OF NEGLECTED OOLIMtER. Hut, LLJX VIA w»fl **P« br ladlaf aaAiKWH. POstMtd, S3.70,
CARRYING OUT THE CTTY PLAN. By Flavel ShorUefif. Iq collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted. J2mo. 362 pages. Postpaid, $2.00.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED by Surrey Associates. Inc.
OOK SLAVIC FELLOW ClI'lZBRS. Br EidIIt Gnu* Bskb. Put L Shflc
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SOCIAL PORCBS.
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□slnrBttr. 1300.
SURVEY ASSOCIATES, INC
PUBLISHERS FOR THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
105 EAST 22d STREET, NEW YORK
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STANFORD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES
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