The Jungle
villages. But now there was a member of the family who was permitted to
travel and widen her horizon; and so each week there would be new
personalities to talk about,—how so-and-so was dressed, and where she
worked, and what she got, and whom she was in love with; and how this
man had jilted his girl, and how she had quarreled with the other girl,
and what had passed between them; and how another man beat his wife,
and spent all her earnings upon drink, and pawned her very clothes.
Some people would have scorned this talk as gossip; but then one has to
talk about what one knows.
It was one Saturday night, as they were coming home from a wedding,
that Tamoszius found courage, and set down his violin case in the
street and spoke his heart; and then Marija clasped him in her arms.
She told them all about it the next day, and fairly cried with
happiness, for she said that Tamoszius was a lovely man. After that he
no longer made love to her with his fiddle, but they would sit for
hours in the kitchen, blissfully happy in each other’s arms; it was the
tacit convention of the family to know nothing of what was going on in
that corner.
They were planning to be married in the spring, and have the garret of
the house fixed up, and live there. Tamoszius made good wages; and
little by little the family were paying back their debt to Marija, so
she ought soon to have enough to start life upon—only, with her
preposterous softheartedness, she would insist upon spending a good
part of her money every week for things which she saw they needed.
Marija was really the capitalist of the party, for she had become an
expert can painter by this time—she was getting fourteen cents for
every hundred and ten cans, and she could paint more than two cans
every minute. Marija felt, so to speak, that she had her hand on the
throttle, and the neighborhood was vocal with her rejoicings.
Yet her friends would shake their heads and tell her to go slow; one
could not count upon such good fortune forever—there were accidents
that always happened. But Marija was not to be prevailed upon, and went
on planning and dreaming of all the treasures she was going to have for
her home; and so, when the crash did come, her grief was painful to
see.
For her canning factory shut down! Marija would about as soon have
expected to see the sun shut down—the huge establishment had been to
her a thing akin to the planets and the seasons. But now it was shut!
And they had not given her any explanation, they had not even given her
a day’s warning; they had simply posted a notice one Saturday that all
hands would be paid off that afternoon, and would not resume work for
at least a month! And that was all that there was to it—her job was
gone!
It was the holiday rush that was over, the girls said in answer to
Marija’s inquiries; after that there was always a slack. Sometimes the
factory would start up on half time after a while, but there was no
telling—it had been known to stay closed until way into the summer. The
prospects were bad at present, for truckmen who worked in the
storerooms said that these were piled up to the ceilings, so that the
firm could not have found room for another week’s output of cans. And
they had turned off three-quarters of these men, which was a still
worse sign, since it meant that there were no orders to be filled. It
was all a swindle, can-painting, said the girls—you were crazy with
delight because you were making twelve or fourteen dollars a week, and
saving half of it; but you had to spend it all keeping alive while you
were out, and so your pay was really only half what you thought.
Marija came home, and because she was a person who could not rest
without danger of explosion, they first had a great house cleaning, and
then she set out to search Packingtown for a job to fill up the gap. As
nearly all the canning establishments were shut down, and all the girls
hunting work, it will be readily understood that Marija did not find
any. Then she took to trying the stores and saloons, and when this
failed she even traveled over into the far-distant regions near the
lake front, where lived the rich people in great palaces, and begged
there for some sort of work that could be done by a person who did not
know English.
The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They
had always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for
work at seven o’clock, although there was almost never any work to be
done till the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some
cattle had come over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven
o’clock, which was bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack
season, they would perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till
late in the afternoon. And so they would have to loaf around, in a
place where the thermometer might be twenty degrees below zero! At
first one would see them running about, or skylarking with each other,
trying to keep warm; but before the day was over they would become
quite chilled through and exhausted, and, when the cattle finally came,
so near frozen that to move was an agony. And then suddenly the place
would spring into activity, and the merciless “speeding-up” would
begin!
There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours’ work to his credit—which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general
average was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a
week; and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the
killing bed till one o’clock, or perhaps even three or four o’clock, in
the afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the
very end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they
went home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even
twelve or one o’clock, and without a single instant for a bite of
supper. The men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers
would be holding off for better prices—if they could scare the shippers
into thinking that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get
their own terms. For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the
yards was much above the market price—and you were not allowed to bring
your own fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in
the day, now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers
would buy their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would
come into play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the
same day they were bought. There was no use kicking about this—there
had been one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only
to be told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest
chance of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked
till nearly one o’clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on
the killing bed at seven o’clock.
All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work
the balance of the hour—he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And
on the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for
that—though often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen
minutes before the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to
the end of the day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour—for
“broken time.” A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no
work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of
every day was a sort of lottery—a struggle, all but breaking into open
war between the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job
through and the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the
bosses for this, though the truth to be told it was not always their
fault; for the packers kept them frightened for their lives—and when
one was in danger of falling behind the standard, what was easier than
to catch up by making the gang work awhile “for the church”? This was a
savage witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to
him. Old man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so
whenever they were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men
would wink at each other and say, “Now we’re working for the church!”
One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers’ union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this of
the men—that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America,
he got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase “a free country.”
The delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to
get every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis
signified that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was
by, all the working members of his family had union cards, and wore
their union buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they
were quite blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant
an end to all their troubles.
But only ten days after she had joined, Marija’s canning factory closed
down, and that blow quite staggered them. They could not understand why
the union had not prevented it, and the very first time she attended a
meeting Marija got up and made a speech about it. It was a business
meeting, and was transacted in English, but that made no difference to
Marija; she said what was in her, and all the pounding of the
chairman’s gavel and all the uproar and confusion in the room could not
prevail. Quite apart from her own troubles she was boiling over with a
general sense of the injustice of it, and she told what she thought of
the packers, and what she thought of a world where such things were
allowed to happen; and then, while the echoes of the hall rang with the
shock of her terrible voice, she sat down again and fanned herself, and
the meeting gathered itself together and proceeded to discuss the
election of a recording secretary.
Jurgis too had an adventure the first time he attended a union meeting,
but it was not of his own seeking. Jurgis had gone with the desire to
get into an inconspicuous corner and see what was done; but this
attitude of silent and open-eyed attention had marked him out for a
victim. Tommy Finnegan was a little Irishman, with big staring eyes and
a wild aspect, a “hoister” by trade, and badly cracked. Somewhere back
in the far-distant past Tommy Finnegan had had a strange experience,
and the burden of it rested upon him. All the balance of his life he
had done nothing but try to make it understood. When he talked he
caught his victim by the buttonhole, and his face kept coming closer