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Updated: May 26, 2025
Some communities operated on the basis of time-work, or the gang system; others on piece-work or the task system.
At sixteen years of age Brigaut did not yet know how to draw or to model a cornice; he was ignorant of much, but he had earned, by piece-work done in the leisure of his apprenticeship, some four or five francs a day.
In the harvest, however, he has an advantage. The corn is reaped by piece-work, and the labourers therefore strain every nerve to do as much as they can. But then he must be on the lookout to see that they do not "scamp" it. The traditional bacon and greens dinner is passing away, though still the usual fare in the small farmhouses.
I wish the Government would take it on themselves to settle the rate of wages, otherwise two-thirds of the estates will be thrown up before next year; of course I can stand this as well as any. The people have behaved well: they did every thing I told them; they are working on piece-work, which is the best plan."
As an illustration, the steel tires used on car wheels and locomotives were originally turned in the Midvale Steel Works on piece work, a single piece-work rate being paid for all of the work which could be done on a tire at a single setting. A fixed price was paid for this work, whether there was much or little metal to be removed, and on the average this price was fair to the men.
She had sewed on piece-work from eight in the morning to six at night with an hour for lunch and no night work or overtime. She had earned from $20 to $25 a week in the busy weeks when the better pieces of work were more plentiful; and in the slack weeks $6 and $7. Ermengard had no complaint whatever to make about her own trade fortunes.
Since they work on a piece-work scale, the "perfect sanitary conditions" exist at their expense. In a department store I know, employees are required to sign a printed expression of gratitude for overtime pay or an extra holiday. This kind of welfare work simply alienates employees from their employers. It always fails.
"Don't you know what came of the strike a few years ago, when this piece-work and sweating first came in? The masters made fine promises, and never kept 'em; and the men who stood out had their places filled up with poor devils who were glad enough to take the work at any price just as ours will be. There's no use kicking against the pricks. All the rest have come to it, and so must we.
A quart of threepenny ale for breakfast, with a hunch of bread and cheese, then out to work again in the weather, let it be what it may. The cowyards have to be cleaned out if not done before breakfast the manure thrown up into heaps, and the heaps wheeled outside. Or, perhaps, the master has given him a job of piece-work to fill up the middle of the day with a hedge to cut and ditch.
'You see by going out piece-work I visits every farm in the parish. The other men they works for one farmer for two or three or maybe twenty years; but I goes very nigh all round the place a fortnight here and a week there, and then a month somewhere else. So I knows every hare in the parish, and all his runs and all the double mounds and copses, and the little covers in the corners of the fields.
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