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Updated: May 26, 2025
The writer used every expedient to make them do a fair day's work, such as discharging or lowering the wages of the more stubborn men who refused to make any improvement, and such as lowering the piece-work price, hiring green men, and personally teaching them bow to do the work, with the promise from them that when they had learned how, they would then do a fair day's work.
He held that the national expenditure was so enormous,* arising from the corrupt administration of the country, that it was impossible the "bloated mass" could hold together any longer; and as he could not expect that "a hundred Pulteneys," such as his employer, could be found to restore it to health, the conclusion he arrived at was that ruin was "inevitable."* Notwithstanding the theoretical ruin of England which pressed so heavy on his mind at this time, we find Telford strongly recommending his correspondent to send any good wrights he could find in his neighbourhood to Bath, where they would be enabled to earn twenty shillings or a guinea a week at piece-work the wages paid at Langholm for similar work being only about half those amounts.
"I denounce John Briars." "Why?" said another. "He offers to take nothing but piece-work; the man who does piece-work is guilty of less defensible conduct than a drunkard. The worst passions of our nature are enlisted in support of piece-work. Avarice, meanness, cunning, hypocrisy, all excite and feed upon the miserable votary who works by the task and not by the hour.
Wages are high; canteens and rest-rooms are being everywhere provided; and the housing question is being tackled. The rapidity of the women's piece-work is astonishing, and the mingling of classes girls of education and refinement working quite happily with those of a much humbler type runs without friction under the influence of a common spirit.
I goes to work every day the same as the rest, only I always take piece-work, which I can come to when I fancy, and stay as late in the evening as suits me with a good excuse. As I knows navigating, I do a main bit of draining and water-furrowing, and I gets good wages all the year round, and never wants for a job. You see, I knows more than the fellows as have never been at nothing but plough.
He was astonished at their malingering on piece-work, generalized about the inherent laziness of the unskilled labourer, and proceeded next day to hammer out three dollars' worth of boxes. And that night, coming out of the cannery, he was interviewed by his fellow workmen, who were very angry and incoherently slangy. He failed to comprehend the motive behind their action.
Again and again there swam into her ken the face of that woman of fifty, in decent widow's weeds, who had stood there in the Night Court, charged with drunkenness on the streets. And the man with the frost-bitten fingers in Madison Square. And the dog in the sweater. And the feverish concentration of the piece-work sewers in the window of the loft building.
This was true, too, of Sadie, a little underfed, grayish Austrian girl of seventeen, who had come to New York as the advance guard of her family. In the last year since her arrival, two and one-half years before, she had first been employed for seven months in a neckwear factory, where she earned from $2.50 a week to $6 and $7 on piece-work. In two very busy weeks she had earned $9 a week.
The room was disappointingly like any other old country-house living room; scrupulously clean and shining, a wide fireplace aglow with a wood fire that cast bright splotches of color over the low walls, the faded rag rugs, the piece-work cushions on the old wooden settle.
At night when the amount of work done was calculated, they laughed at Ed. Then they heard that the piece-work plan was to be installed in the factory, and were afraid they would be paid by a scale calculated on the amount of work done during the two weeks of furious effort. The workman who stumbled along the tracks cursed Ed Hall and the men for whom he worked.
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