People ask: "Is there any mechanical or metallurgical reason for the twelve-hour day?" The answer is: No. There are several plants of independent steel companies that run on a three-shift, eight-hour basis; and the steel mills in England, France, Germany, and Italy operate with three eight-hour shifts. The long day is not a metallurgical _necessity_, therefore. The metallurgical _explanation_ of the twelve-hour day, however, is this. The process of making iron or steel is necessarily a continuous one, because the heat of the furnaces must be conserved by keeping up the fires twenty-four hours a day. So the division into either two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of eight becomes imperative. Other industries might reduce their hours gradually from twelve to ten, and then to nine. With steel the full jump from twelve to eight must be made. Without doubt, this metallurgical factor accounts in some measure for the conservatism of the steel companies in making the change.
It is none of my business, in summing up a personal experience, to review the story of steel mills which have undertaken a three-shift plan of operation, of eight hours each, in place of the two shifts of twelve. But the study has been made by engineers and economists, who have collected figures as to the cost of operation on an eight-hour basis as contrasted with a twelve. The increased cost in product which such a change would entail is between three and five per cent.[3]
The community of workers takes on a special character, where men live whose day is twelve hours long. "We haven't any Sundays," the men said; and "There isn't time enough at home." This is the most far-reaching effect of "hours" in steel, I think, and easily transcends the others.
"What do you do when you leave the mill?" people ask. "On my night-week," I answer, "I wash up, go home, eat, and go to bed." Anything that happens in your home or city that week is blotted out, as if it occurred upon a distant continent; for every hour of the twenty-four is accountable, in sleep, work, or food, for seven days; unless a man prefers, as he often does, to cheat his sleep-time and have his shoes tapped, or take a drink with a friend.
The day-week is decidedly better. You work only ten hours, from seven to five. Those evenings men spend with their families, or at the movies, or going to bed early to rest up for the "long turn." It is not, however, as if it were a "ten-hour industry." Some of the wear and tear of the seven fourteen-hour shifts of the night-week protracts itself into the day-week, and you hear men saying: "This ten-hour day seems to tire me more than the fourteen; funny thing." However the week may be divided up, it is impossible to keep the human body from recording the fact that it averages seven twelve-hour days, or eighty-four hours of work, in the week.