On those first night-shifts I wondered if my feelings on the arrangement of hours were not solely those of a sensitive novice. I'd "get used to it," perhaps. But I found that first-helpers, melters, foremen, "old timers," and "Company men" were for the most part against the long day. They were all looking forward, with varying degrees of hope, to the time when the daily toll of hours would be reduced.
The twelve-hour day gives a special character to the industry itself as well as to the men. I remember noticing the difference in pace, in tempo, from that of a machine shop or a cotton mill. Men learn to cultivate deliberate movement, with a view to the fourteen-hour stretch they have before them. When I began work with a pickaxe on some hot slag, on my first night, I was reproached at once: "Tak' it eas', lotza time before seven o'clock." And the foremen fell in with the men. They winked at sleeping, for they did it themselves.
Another kind of inefficiency that flowed quite naturally from excessive hours was "absenteeism," and a high "turnover" of labor. Men kept at the job as long as they could stick it, and then relaxed into a two or three weeks' drunk. Or they quit the Company and moved to another mill, for the sake of change and a break in the drudgery. I remember an Austrian with whom I worked in the "pit," who said he was going to get drunk in Pittsburgh, go to the movies, and move to Johnstown the following Monday. He had been on the job three weeks. New faces appeared on the gangs constantly, and dropped out as quickly. I achieved my promotion from common labor in the pit to the floor of the furnace by supplying on a twenty-four-hour shift, when absentees are apt to be numerous, and it is hard fully to man the furnaces. The company kept a large number of extra men on its pay roll because of the number of absentees, and the turnover percentage ran high.
It is impossible to live under this loose régime--with high turnover, and the work-pace necessarily keyed low because of the excessive burden of hours spent under the roof of the mill--and not wonder if there isn't an engineering problem in it. The impression was of a vast wastage of man-hours. The question suggested itself: "Is it in the long run, good business--an efficient thing?" An exhaustive investigation by engineers and economists could surely be made to answer this question.
