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Updated: June 28, 2025
Bringing the first-class bricklayer and the science of bricklaying together, through the constant help and watchfulness of the management, and through paying each man a large daily bonus for working fast and doing what he is told to do. Fourth. An almost equal division of the work and responsibility between the workman and the management.
For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, and receives an equivalent in wages at the end of each day or week; and, secondly, the manager of some great industrial enterprise, who spends each day so many hours in his office, issuing minute directions with regard to the conduct of his subordinates, and sending his receipts to the bank as they come in from his customers.
After this lapse of years I won't be sure about the bricklaying, but at any rate, work was slack in his regular line, and so he went to the proprietor of this vast retail establishment and procured a responsible position on the strength of his easy and graceful personal address and his employment of some of the most stylish adjectives in the dictionary.
His upper part might have belonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks of recent bricklaying. Without its being remarkable, he had what one calls a good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined forehead and nose. His cheeks were shaved, and his whitening beard and moustache were worn somewhat after the fashion of Charles Dickens.
At this time I had been seventeen years a resident, and was, in fact, the oldest inhabitant, and had some little influence in a quiet way. About eleven years before I had been put in the party, and had a chance to learn bricklaying, and having become an expert in the art was given charge of the bricklaying.
But he was his mother's son, learning to the last. He told me one day that literature was not a trade; that it was no craft; that the professed author was merely an amateur with a door-plate. "Very well," said I, "the first time you get a proof, I will demonstrate that it is as much a trade as bricklaying, and that you do not know it." By the very next post a proof came.
Suppose now that the bricklayers increase their inefficiency either by a trade rule or by a combination to shorten the hours of labour. The cost of each house is increased L50 to him: nothing in the new bricklaying rules or rates affects the purchasers; the builder estimates that his profits will fall to 5 to 8 per cent on his capital.
The Pittsburgh managers knew just how the results had been attained at Bethlehem, but they were unwilling to go to the small trouble and expense required to plan ahead and assign a separate car to each shoveler, and then keep an individual record of each man's work, and pay him just what he had earned. Bricklaying is one of the oldest of our trades.
But I was obliged to say something, and I shouted first one order and then another. "That's your sort, lads," cried a cheery voice. "Down with 'em, and I'll stow. It's like bricklaying with big bricks." "Who's that?" I said sharply, for the man's back was towards me, and it was getting quite dark where we were. "Me it is, sir Bob Saunders, sir. Beg pardon, sir." "Yes; what is it?"
"I don't know," I said, taking off my coat and rolling up my sleeves, to find that though the highest price had been paid for that bricklaying, the cheat of a fellow who had the job had used hardly a bit of sand and bad lime, so that, after I had loosened one brick and levered it out, all the others came away one at a time quite clear of the mortar. "Never mind," says Sir John.
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