High Wages and Short Jobs
I
FOUR graduates sat on the porch of the fraternity house in the post-Commencement tranquillity, exchanging addresses and plans. One, just created a civil engineer, was bound for Cuba and the sugar plantations. The second had been accepted by a New York bank as a ‘runner.’ The third, in the fall, was to teach high-school algebra in Massachusetts. And I, because I had learned a trade between high school and college and so had acquired a union card, intended to supplement my college degree by working as a journeyman carpenter.
Unanimously my three friends proclaimed me lucky. ‘Twelve dollars a day,’one of them remarked enviously
to the ivied walls, ‘and beginning a week after graduation! What a roll you’ll have in a year!’ It seemed that I might, in comparison with what they might expect to save from their salaries, ranging between twelve and eighteen hundred dollars.
Just three years later, the same four friends had dinner together and informally audited their experience. The civil engineer had been shifted to the home office as a cost expert at $3500; the bank runner was in ‘the cage’ handling securities at $2500; the third, still teaching, but profiting by two advances of salary, had just been married on $2400. All had bank accounts, good prospects, and delightful associations. I had forty dollars in the world, a fair chance for a job in another week, and three bandaged fingers. I think it cheered them somewhat to learn that my hands had not been able to keep pace with their heads, commercially. Still, to them it was all very strange.
They had read of fabulous amounts paid to workers in the building trades: bonuses, double time for overtime, three times the salaries of college professors. I too had read the same deceptive reports. But direct experience had put an altogether new aspect on the life and rewards of the construction worker.
II
Two days after Commencement, with a union card and a tool box, I arrived at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Carpenters had been called for a rush job, mainly characterized by graft and careless workmanship. It was forbidden to use level, square, or line, so that little satisfaction could be found in the work. But at least it meant ample money. I served as a ‘pusher,’ with forty carpenters under me. We were building a toy lagoon; the work lasted three weeks and gave me wages of $310. Then came the depression.
Philadelphia was full of itinerant building tradesmen. Ironworkers from the Florida building boom, carpenters who had been knocking together sets at Hollywood, masons from the New York skyscrapers, laborers from the depressed textile towns of New England, all had swarmed into the city hoping to profit by the Exposition. We were too highly concentrated; some of us would have to recognize that we were supernumeraries, and look elsewhere.
I chose to stay and take my chances, and a month later, through luck, secured work with a local company which was building a sugar refinery. It was necessary to replace sixty old boilers with five modern ones which would do the same work. We carpenters used two tools: a machinist’s hammer and a Stillson wrench. The unions began to mutter. Were n’t we taking work away from boilermakers, or ironworkers or millwrights or steam fitters? Not that it mattered which category we were depriving of the opportunity to labor, but why should we ourselves have the work? How did carpenters come to be dealing with wind boxes, burners, gaskets, and steam lines? We got ready to leave. Exasperated, the builders replied that all the other trades had been given a trial and had proved incompetent. In desperation carpenters had been brought in and were somehow doing the job well. So we won our point and the hatred of the other trades. It is remarkable how deadly a millwright can be with a halfinch nut when a carpenter is his target ! It was intolerably dirty work, and the boilers were agonizingly hot to work in half an hour after the fire was pulled; but it was a steady job which lasted two months.
Philadelphia was overcrowded. A friend wrote me of a large power-house development starting ‘down somewhere near Boston,’ and I set out for the North. Two weeks later I was punching the clock as #2620, at the hourly wage rate of $1.25. I was engaged as a timberman, a post which came under the jurisdiction of carpentry. We were a heterogeneous crew, made up largely of Canadian French, Prince Edward Islanders, and Cape Cod fishermen who had lost their dories rum-running. The greater part of the men were members of the Legion, unmarried and about thirty-five years old, hard-bitten, hard drinkers, fighters, and workers.
The plant we were helping to build was situated on tidewater. We worked for six months in hip boots, mud, and cold. Our only tools were cross-cut saws, electric and air drills, twelvepound sledges, adzes, and cant dogs. We drove piles, fitted and placed ‘cribbing,’usually of Georgia pine timbers, sixteen inches square; we built towers and trestles for the locomotive cranes. Pneumonia had its way with three of us, and we all counted on losing about four days a month by minor accidents such as infected cuts, falls, rope burns, and the like. We all went overboard at different times, an experience which in hip boots is not, as someone said, ‘like bathing at Nantasket.’
We worked steadily, except when it rained, and it rained copiously that fall, usually about two days a week. For a time we worked under all conditions, until an epidemic of flu, bringing stiff muscles and reducing the amount we could accomplish, convinced the boss that we were ‘only working for the doctor.’ I suppose our average wages were about forty dollars a week in a twenty-five-dollar town. Yet Micky, my helper, remarked one rainy day as we played seven-card stud in the tool shanty and watched the nor’easter whip across Dorchester Bay, ‘When ye git that wind with snow on it, boys, ye’ll wish ye’d saved yer summer’s wages.'
We finished foundations and began the superstructure just as the first snow found us. From that time the job became madness, and the previous months seemed like a remote island of peace and ease. There was rush and shouting everywhere in the frenzied effort to get the roof on before the big storms came. The ironworkers drove the steel up in three weeks. The scaffolds of the masons climbed higher and higher, and the hot hoists whined constantly to give them brick and mortar. The pipers and electricians ran miles of pipe and cable. The lathes in the machine shops and the planers in the sawmill buzzed interminably through long three-shift days, knocking out fittings for the men aloft. The maintenance gang ran lines of temporary steam, water, air, and electricity everywhere they might be needed. The tool sheds bulged with extra equipment. Endless streams of trucks thumped through with cement, sand, stone, for the hungry mixers that never stopped spitting out concrete to the forms.
Above the din of it all, everybody yelled at once for ‘wood butchers. For once we became important. Our pusher was worn down to nerves and futile blasphemy. The master mechanic needed bolt boxes, and needed them to-day! ‘Give me six men to build a hundred-’n’-fifty-foot concrete tower,’demanded the superintendent. The engineers needed more office room. The ‘ wire jerkers’ needed scaffolds, the ironworkers an A-frame. Everywhere went up the shout: ‘Where in hell are those carpenters?’ We used every tool in our kits and some that had to be imported, from pinch bars to micrometers, to keep them all happy. We made money during that stretch — and earned it.
Meanwhile, of course, the accident list mounted. A rigger fell from somewhere aloft, a jack hammer ran wild and killed a carpenter, an electrician lost an arm. Safety signs appeared, and everyone seemed to be swabbed with mercurochrome or swathed in adhesive. I lost a week by stepping on an eightpenny nail, point up through a plank. Then I had to buy thirty dollars’ worth of winter working clothes and replace some ‘borrowed’ tools. I lost thirty dollars in a crap game and gave ten for sick collections. Then the union delegate threatened to tie up the job because we were not working a five-day week. The local union refused to let us vote at its meetings because we had not spent a year in its jurisdiction. Just what did the term ‘journeyman’ mean?
Finally the roof took its place in the completed structure. Abruptly the madhouse came to an end as suddenly as it had started. Half of us were at once laid off, suspended until material for turbine foundations should be received.
The turbine foundation was a sixtyfoot concrete hill in the middle of the building, on which would be mounted the steam turbines, spinning at thirty thousand revolutions a minute. That meant extra-heavy concrete, well reenforced to resist vibration. A great deal of form work by the carpenters would be necessary. Fifty more men were hired to make up for lost time; in the end we had enough men to eat the work, and we finished altogether too quickly to please us.
I was the victim of a splinter in the thumb. We handled so much lumber that I never could tell how or when I received it. But sepsis and blood poisoning followed. I spent two months out of work trying to save my arm, and I found that twenty dollars a week workmen’s compensation was hardly adequate to my predicament.
On my first day back at work we set to building ten tremendous manholes which would enable new transformers to go into service. The main power plant of Greater Boston was in imminent danger of breakdown. It was imperative that these transformers go into action at once, or Boston might be without lights. We started Thursday morning to rush the work to a finish and worked until Saturday noon, when the circuits clicked through. On that fifty-two-hour stretch we ate every six hours, but we never slept. We started sixty men and ended twelve, eyes reddened, lips chapped, dirty, nervous, exhausted, and one or two singing hysterically. Those of us who stuck made a total week’s pay of $160, but we were n’t allowed to come back to work for a week (they said we needed rest), and none of us felt right for a month.
Then the job petered out altogether, except for the pipe fitters, who were putting the boiler house in shape. I began a new branch of experience by going to sea as a ‘chips.’ Two voyages in the banana navy as a ship’s carpenter at eighty dollars a month, with ports of call such as Havana and Panama, did not prove lucrative. But ship routine of sounding the tanks, running the anchor winches, and building banana gratings or a radio table for the captain was restful after the madhouse of big-time construction. We met one hurricane, but, as we were snugged down in preparation, it was much less exciting than an eight-hour pour with the concrete gang on chutes and runways.
III
Returning from the sea, I found vagrant jobs here and there of a few weeks’ duration. Duct lines in Springfield, a concrete reservoir in Greenwich, a spell of house building, kept me at least partly occupied. I never knew when the pink discharge slip would be handed to me. I wanted another madhouse, greater permanence.
I took my way to a dam that my former employers were building on the Susquehanna River. Five thousand men were housed in a big construction camp: ironworkers; Cherokee Indians; French Canadian rivermen, three hundred strong, from the drives of the Allagash; carpenters; concrete men; Italians; common labor; blacks; general mechanics. The undertaking promised to be colorful, and it was, but some of the zest departed when we learned that we were working ten hours a day at considerably less than union wages elsewhere. And hard work, never out of overalls. The camp was miles from a city, desolate and grim.
It enjoyed a fringe called Death Valley. Here was every variety of ‘gin mill,’‘hop joint,’brothel, and gambling den that such an army of men would demand. Croupiers with green visors watched spinning roulette wheels from high stools. Craps captains, with one hand constantly in a back pocket, uttered their stock patter in smoke-filled shanties where greasy riveters elbowed immaculate timekeepers for a chance at the dice. ‘Roll down, boys. Pay the line. Pay the race horse and take the field. Seven to four odds in the house game, boys.’ Occasional gun play took place. Ten deputized ex-marines were assigned to keep order. Otherwise it was nothing but eat, sleep, work, and damn the job.
This madhouse, too, came to an end and I started for the skyscraper country where the money is supposed to live.
I helped build apartment houses on Long Island. My function was to run a circular saw and cut floor joists. Then opportunity came to move into the city itself, where the ‘big ones,’the manystory office buildings and hotels, exemplify modern construction at its most towering aspect. I started building footings for a forty-floor hotel and working with the dynamite gang. Very quickly I learned that there is nowhere less work for a carpenter than on a skyscraper. The use of wood has been reduced to a minimum. Such work as exists is intricately specialized and subdivided. There are shorers, wall builders, arch men, protection men, door hangers, floor layers, lathers, stair builders, scaffold men, fireproofers, trimmers, shop men, and a variety of others. And each performs a highly specialized task. The New York City trade laborer is not the all-around mechanic that is found in the provinces.
The carpenter installs practically nothing which is permanent except the fast-disappearing wooden window-frames. His part is the temporary work; he supplies forms, outside waste chutes, protections, and stagings. As an example of the degree of specialization which prevails, four distinct kinds of carpenters are used in building the arch forms for a concrete floor of a skyscraper. One hangs the joists, another the beam bottoms, another the beam sides, and the last man nails on the ‘decking’ for the concrete slab. All these workers must and do work at top speed.
It is an exceptional skyscraper job which provides the mechanic work for more than six weeks. Two weeks is probably nearer the average. Then comes an indeterminate (longer rather than shorter) interval in which he has to find another job. He simply knocks about from job to job unless he is one of the very few exceptional men who have some sort of direct contact with their employer. Labor is simply a commodity, like brick and stone, with the difference that, on account of its high hourly wage, it is hired as late as possible and dispensed with as soon as feasible.
The skyscraper, from the workman’s point of view, is the mostprosaic and least interesting type of structure to build. From its third sub-basement, chiseled from the granite of Manhattan, to the roof of the pent house fifty-odd floors above, it is all ‘ typical’: that is to say, every floor is like every other floor. The worker hardly learns the name of his partner (mechanics work in pairs). I suppose I have had forty partners in the last three years, so rapidly does the mechanic shift from job to job. A skyscraper, as the workman knows it, is altogether like a factory job in its sameness and monotony. It lacks the variety of a bridge or dam job.
In other kinds of employment, there is always news at the noon hour. Kelly is running a job in Beaumont,
Texas. T—and L—have just
landed a three-year contract in the Azores. McGuire’s wife is making good beer these days. Gus is getting a new Nash. But the sole noon-hour topic in the shacks that nestle on the second floor of the skyscrapers is ‘When do we get it?’ And by ‘it’ is meant the lay-off, the ‘crash,’ the ‘ walk.’
IV
Old age, accident, and unemployment are, of course, the chief terrors of itinerant labor. It has been said that the first of these never affects the ironworkers, because an ironworker is always killed before he grows old. Colonel W. A. Starrett, in his Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them, has this comment: —
The game itself is a killer. One passing a large metropolitan building during construction is apt to notice the young, virile men, with nonchalant manner, who so confidently go about their tasks. Few people stop to consider these same men after twenty-five or thirty years of this rigorous, exposed life. They are hearty eaters and gulp their food, frequently carried to the job cold; or, if bought at the ubiquitous hot-dog stand, it is generally of the fried variety with little thought of the science of dietetics. Their inordinate use of tobacco and small attention to dental hygiene, nowadays recognized as of such importance to middle-aged good health, leave them susceptible to the occupational ailments which their work sometimes engenders. . . . The admiring spectator sees young men, but little realizes the shadow that an uncertain future is casting. The experienced builder, however, sees the prematurely aged building mechanic, sometimes a pathetic figure, standing on the sidewalk week after week, in the furtive hope that a job commensurate with his now narrowed abilities is available for him.
The unions have done and have been able to do but little toward the solution of this problem. Their benefits are inadequate, but that is not their fault.
Naturally the occupation of any workman about a building in process of construction is hazardous. Some occupations are more hazardous than others. It is significant that in New York the insurance rate for steel erectors was, in 1928, $24.93 per hundred dollars of pay roll. Carpenters were rated at $17.11. The greatest amount of compensation is $25 per week.
But the average workman worries little about old age and accident; in fact, he is too complacent about them. Intermittency is the chief spectre. Lost time due to weather, tardy delivery of material, and completion of the job are factors beyond the control of either the worker or the employer. The problem of finding a new job, which is based on whom and not what the worker knows, is more acute in the building trades than in most industries, on account of the entire dissociation of employer and workman.
The reason for intermittent employment is the fault of no one group in the organization of the building trade, perhaps not the fault of all the groups. The fault is inherent in the nature of the work itself. Its very driving power is uncertainty. This zest of gambling with men, materials, and the elements can make for nothing but instability.
That is why I am not perhaps as well off as my three friends who entered safer levels of employment. Through training and education I am more fortunate than most of my fellow construction workers; other fields are open to me, now that I have demonstrated to myself that skilled labor to-day simply does not pay. They, however, are in a situation which is greatly misunderstood.
It is difficult to equate these ‘high wages’ to a yearly stipend. The proper scale of remuneration, as mentioned above, is in terms of hours. In an occupation which pays eighty dollars one week, twenty the next, and nothing for the next two, it is hard to save money systematically.
This instability fosters a sort of false economy. I have known mechanics who have made first payments on a new car after two or three weeks heavy with overtime, apparently with no thought for the lean weeks which inevitably must follow a period of rush.
Not a few of them confess that they never saved a penny until they were married, although it is difficult to see just how this estate bettered their situation, for a man with ties is in no position to follow the big jobs from place to place. It is true, however, that no one is more prodigal with his money, when he has it, than a young man engaged in physical and dangerous work.
Nearly every carpenter, at one time or another, has been in the contracting business for himself, but insufficient business or backing usually forces him back to using tools very quickly.
Unionism has, of course, greatly improved the position of labor. The individual trade-unionist, however, sees his local primarily as an agency that furnishes him with an opportunity to pay dues. Rightly or not, the union is generally regarded as an organization dominated by small cliques. Its members distrust its efficiency as an employment bureau.
The function of the local is largely social. It gives the worker something to talk about on and off the job. Then, too, it has a tremendous welding power. Its members are, if its severest critics, also its most loyal supporters, and they back its policies resolutely, if not enthusiastically.
V
My experience has been pretty typical. There has been little of the collegiate in it, little thinking about economic theory, for it has been my living. I no longer speak of making twelve dollars a day, but rather a dollar and a half an hour — when you can get it. When my three friends asked me, ‘Good experience, was n’t it?’ I said, ‘Splendid. I would n’t swap with any of you.’ ‘High wages?’ But at this I grew just a little exasperated, and told them: ‘A million dollars a year is good wages, but if you’re laid off at the end of the first minute it does n’t mean much.’
I offer no suggestion toward the solution of the problem, beyond, perhaps, a restriction of the apprentice quota temporarily and a greater insistence on unionism, which after all does produce competent craftsmen, and ameliorates, to some extent, the madhouse life of high wages and short jobs.