WORK, WAGES AND HOURS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume X, Issue 20, 7 January 1920, Page 5

WORK, WAGES AND HOURS

IS THE DAY TOO LONG ? “WORKERS POISONED BY FATIGUE.” [Sir Robert Hadfield, the writer of the following article in a recent exchange, is the head of the great steel firm, Hadfields’, of Sheffield. He has been knoAii for many years as one of our foremost industrial scientists, and his invention of manganese steel was epoch-making in metallurgy. He has won equal fame as an enlightened and progressive employer, and no cause is nearer to his heart than the improvement of the conditions of the workers- Indeed, it is his constant desire that the workers shall themselves seek and strive for better homes and hours and lives.]

Sometimes at great spurts meetings I have seen men running in Marathon races. They made superhuman efforts ; they kept on long after they were stupefied by over-exertion. Their movements became mechanical and at the end of the race they were almost unconscious.

Trainers poured warm water over them and masaged their bodies vigorously to increase circulation. The runners were so stupid they could hardly tell their own names. The oxygen in the cells of their bodies had been used up. They had been poisoned by their efforts. . .

Somewhat the same results obtain in the case of men who, during long hours, do hard physical work. Modern labour is both tiresome and irksome. A constant repetition, doing the same kind of work from one year’s end to another, produces a sort of coma- The workers are poisoned by the fatigue of monotony. The only alternative is to shorten the hours of labour and improve the hoiirs of leisure. Then a clear-brained, invigorated man will come fresh to his work every morning. The hours spent away from the bench determine in a great manner the quality of the work done at the bench- There is nothing truer than this in all economics.

There is no more interesting topic than work, wages, and hours of labour. It is vital, pressing, human.. Since first in Eden mankind was condemned to toil and the ominous words pronounced, “By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread,” this problem of how long mankind shall sweat, and for how much bread, has been all-absorbing, all-engrossing. Two classes have arisen sincethen, the men and th© masters, and it has taken nearly 19 centuries oF Christianity to teach that there is no great gulf fixed between these two —that their interests are indeed one. Democracies have been made and unmade according to the strength and wisdom of the class which had the most power. Revolutions have arisen over the dispute. In the Hadfield factory we used to start at six in the morning. Before they had slept sufficiently, men had to rise from bed and hurry to work. There was much bad time-keeping. The men often turned up late or did not come in until after breakfast. We tried'starting half an hour later, but that did not improve matters. Then we made a radical change ana altered the hour to 7-25 and did away with the break at 9 o’clock. Would you believe that the scheme nearly “fell down” owing to the attitude of the workers themselves? They thought that we were out to make more money out of them ; then their wives were “up against’ ’the innovation. Both the brains of the men and their wives were so stupefied by endless fatigue, never being really fresh and rested from one year’s end to the next, that they could not think any further than that it was a change from the routine, and thev did not want to tax their minds with a change. The wives grumbled at having to rise and make breakfast at that hourHowever, feeling we were on the right lines, we went on our way undaunted. And now neither the men nor the women would go back to the old 6 o’clock start. We initated ths system because it seemed to us unnatural, inhuman, to rouse workers from sleep at 5.30 in the morning, and has been a tremendous success. — , Recently I brought a large party ot younger workers to London in a private train to see the Scientific Products Exhibition- I was delighted with the intelligent way in which the young men remarked upon everything they saw. their keen minds grasping every detail and remembering all distinctly. They went home determined to learn more about the things they had seen. For a good manv of them this was the first visit to London. They have now learned the romance of the steel industry, and it will not be drudgery to them, because their minds are not drugged with fatigue; they can now take an interest in their work. They go home from work tired, yes, hut not so tired that they cannot go to the library and learn more of the facts of their trade or read a hook at home and glean knowledge from it. In the old days this would have been impossible. The minds of the men were not keen. They had gone dav after day to work with a surplus of fatigue from the day before, and the monotony and fatigue had piled up in their systems until their minds were no longer able to assimilate ouickly. To-day and to-morrow, with shorter hours and improved methods of education, the wide-awake young men will rot nlwavs be labourers; they will grin their own technical knowledge and rise to the ton.