say you are running 10 of them on Government work-one-fourth of your force then you would have to stop at the end of eight hours; but the efficiency of your engine and the overhead charges, the general wear and tear on the plant goes on, and you are not getting the full benefit of that power or of the money expended in the plant; you are not getting the full benefit if you work eight hours, and we can not afford to consider that unless it becomes general. If you accept Government contracts on an eight-hour basis, under an eight-hour proviso in the contract, you have to lay off part of your force at eight hours or stop certain machines. Suppose you have a contract for an automatic screw machine, which is an expensive tool, costing from $2,000 to $4,000; you have a Government contract; it may take from four to five hours to set up that tool. At the end of the eight hours that man must be stopped on that machine, and you must then put him on some other work. Could you work your men on the other work for the balance of the ten hours?

Mr. EMERY. Oh, yes; he can work on other work; he is confined to eight hours on Government work.

Mr. MARKLAND. Then you have a $3,000 or $4,000 tool standing idle for that two hours or more. If you ran three shifts of men, running twenty-four hours, it would be feasible, but unless your plant runs the twenty-four hours you could not afford to do it, because you are standing idle sixteen hours, and the plant does not earn while it is standing idle. There are automatic machines, the automatic screw machine, and you can have one man running four or five machines, and he might go and loaf four or five hours during the day. The question would be, are you working that man under the contract? You might, and you might not. I do not know how you would construe it; I do not know how you would get at it. That is to say, if the man was working these automatic machines and the employer said, "Now, Jim, you go and skidoo for about an hour or so this morning; the Government does not allow you to work more than eight hours. We will allow your machines to run along; they are fed; the hopper is full of material. You come back after dinner and run four hours more and loaf in between starting and quitting time." The question would be, would that be against the law?

Mr. EMERY. That would be settled by the inspector; you would have to gamble on that proposition with him.

Mr. MARKLAND. We would not gamble.

Mr. DAVENPORT. Who would keep track of it? Part of the force would be on Government work, and then go off on private work, and then go back to work on Government work. It would take an inspector for every man, would it not?

Mr. MARKLAND. Most assuredly; you would have to have several inspectors on the job. They do that sort of thing in France, I believe, two or three million inspectors and two or three million workmen, something like that.

Mr. EMERY. Do you employ both union and nonunion men?

Mr. MARKLAND. Oh, yes; we make no discrimination at all. The men have a right to organize. We say, "We want the product piled on the floor; we will pay you; bring it out and bring it out right and we will pay you the money."

Mr. EMERY. Do you find any

difference of desire to secure overtime for overtime pay between the union men and the nonunion men?

Mr. MARKLAND. We work on a premium plan largely. We will take a job and we will take the superintendent of the shop, myself, probably, and one other, and we go over this work, take the blueprints and specifications and look it over, and we conclude a man can do that work in about five hours if he hustles. Of course, we have records which have been kept for sixteen years, and we can get every class and what time a man can do a job in. We say, " Jim, there is a nine-hour limit on that work; look it over and see. He will say, "I don't believe I can do it." We say, " Make a run at it." He will try to do it in four and a half or five hours. Sometimes he will run it up to six hours. Then a man gets 12 cents an hour for every hour he has off. The result is that several weeks ago, when we started to shut down on Saturdays, the men kicked about it. Those who were working said they did not want to stop Saturdays; they wanted that five hours' pay; they could make in that five hours probably eight or nine hours.

Mr. EMERY. You mean eight hours' pay?

Mr. MARKLAND. Yes, by the use of the premium system. That applies to union men as well as nonunion men.

Mr. EMERY. Just as much?

Mr. MARKLAND. Just as much. They want that dollar. We do not restrict them as to tools. We tell them we will provide any tools they want, any peculiar kind of steel manufactured. We have imported steel from foreign countries-in most cases found it worthless and anything at all to get the fellow to use his brains and push ahead. To illustrate: Take this gear up here [indicating], 18 inches in diameter, a man will turn that off in two hours. We will give him a four hours' limit on it. He might, if he is an exceptionally fast man, do it in one and three-quarters hours. The man makes almost double his pay.

The CHAIRMAN. Right there take an illustration of that; what are the probable wages of that man called "Jim" in the record, who took the piece of work on which you put a nine-hour limit? What is his probable pay per hour?

Mr. MARKLAND. Thirty cents.

The CHAIRMAN. He does the work, if I understand you, in six hours, probably?

Mr. MARKLAND. Yes; supposing he had an accident.

The CHAIRMAN. In six hours, for which he gets 30 cents an hour. Now, for the three hours that he has saved the machine you pay him 12 cents an hour?

Mr. MARKLAND. If we conclude that the accident was not all his fault, we will give him the benefit of it and raise that limit to twelve hours, making him 42 cents an hour.

The CHAIRMAN. Then, in your reckoning, it will take him only six hours in case he had an accident; how many hours if he had no accident?

Mr. MARKLAND. Four hours or four hours and a half.

Mr. EMERY. He has allowed for the accident on that, Mr. Chair

man.

The CHAIRMAN. I see the theory. There is a nine-hour limit and the work was done in six hours: leaving out the matter of accident, the wages are $1.80, but the man also gets a premium of 36 cents for the three hours he has saved to the machinery. That is the theory?

Mr. MARKLAND. Yes. The desire on the part of union men to take advantage of our plant has been fostered through the fact that we do not cut a ticket.

The CHAIRMAN. What do you mean by that?

Mr. MARKLAND. The old plan was when a man made over $3 a day the employer said "He is making too much money; that fellow will get too smart for us; we will cut that price so that man can not make more than $3 a day." We have men in our shop making $8 a day. We never cut a ticket. If we have a contract with the Government for so many years at so much money that settles it. We will say to the men "There is so much limit on this job turning these blanks." We will let out the cutting of the teeth-we do not like to let them out on a premium because a man is likely to run it through and get a shattered tooth.

Mr. EMERY. That is in the gear?

Mr. MARKLAND. That is in the gear, yes; this tooth around here. The time for turning that job is so many hours. "Now, rush it; do the best you can with it." Our men are trained so that they sail into it to beat the band; they put on the best power they have, make the belt pull every ounce it will pull, ground their tools to the proper angle, and get the best out of that machine possible. He does that job, say, in three hours, but he has twelve hours. Of course, it might be a long job, three or four hundred hours. This happens frequently; this is not an occasional thing; it happens in our shop right along. Our contract with the Government is not cut. By that means a man has earned for himself $1.08, the premium and his three hours' pay, which is 90 cents; he has more than doubled his time. So that if a man is getting 30 cents an hour, in ten hours he would get $3, the 30 cents an hour and the additional for the three hours' work, or 37 or 38 cents an hour besides. But we never cut a ticket. The union man, knowing this, applies to our shop frequently, so that he can get into that plant and go to work. We have spoken of this to many concerns and they are adopting the same plan, never cutting a ticket, so that the union man hunts for that chance to make his overtime, the same as the other man does, and if we want him to work overtime he works overtime.

Mr. EMERY. Then during your experience as an employer, Mr. Markland, have you known of any organized or generally expressed individual opposition to overtime as a system?

Mr. MARKLAND. The union, of course, opposes

Mr. EMERY. I am not speaking of overtime for overtime pay; I am asking if in your experience as an employer you have noted among organized workmen and unorganized workmen a general tendency of opposition to overtime work as such?

Mr. MARKLAND. Except for Saturday afternoon and Sundays, our men would work all night, and have done it, and not kick, but when you come to Saturday afternoons, you have got to go and show him that it is a necessity to get that work out, for him to work; he does not want to work Saturday afternoon and Sunday, nor do we ask it if we can avoid, but we only have to indicate that the opportunity is there to work at night any time through the week and he will gladly work.

Mr. EMERY. Do you know of any instance, of your own knowledge, where the men have chosen to work for one factory or one employer

where there were opportunities to make overtime pay as against any other employer where such opportunities did not exist?

Mr. MARKLAND. I have a case of a concern in Philadelphia which is called the Langfeld Company. They manufacture leather goods specialties. Their men, some time ago, came to Mr. Langfeld and said they were anxious for an eight-hour day; they were working then on the day run; a man was paid so much a day. If he worked a day, of course he got paid by the day. Langfeld took the question up and told them that hereafter he would work them eight hours a day, but "you will be paid by the hour, and your rate will not be increased to the fifty-six hours." He was then running fifty-six hours, and the fifty-six hour rate, while running eight hours a day. Then he devised a scheme; he got teams of men in various parts of the shop, taking the intelligent men, he could not use the others for this sort of work, and he would take in a case like the Westinghouse people, who give away their fancy leather goods every year, very many of them, and I cite this case particularly; they would take those goods and say to the foreman of this particular team, "There is $40 a gross for this work," and they look it over and conclude that is all right. They are working on an eight-hour day; they use very little power. He would go back there sometimes at 7 or 8 o'clock at night, and he would find them digging to beat the band on that stuff to get it done. They would take all the hours of all the men who work on the stuff, and at the end of the job, when it was finished, compute that time, and if it ran to thirty or thirty-two or thirty-four dollars, the difference between that $40 was then divided among the men who worked on the goods. But he said invariably those men on those teams on a contract where they have so much leeway will stay to 7 or 8 o'clock at night and work right along through the day, and the other fellows, when the eight hours was up, off they go, but that is not the intelligent class of men, those who quit when the whistle blows. If you look at the pay roll, which is a very good indicator, you will find so many men whose pay is so high, and to those men we give the best work and get the best results. You will find their hours running so high every week.

Mr. EMERY. How much do your own men make on an average? Mr. MARKLAND. Some of our men have averaged $50 or $60 a week. With 40 men we have had pay rolls running nearly $700. That includes, outside of myself and Mr. Grant, $118, the office wages, and the balance goes into the plant. That, I think, is also true of Crescent, Sellers, Langfeld, Berstein Manufacturing Company, Eynon-Evans Company, and numberless other companies in Philadelphia. There are many of them who have adopted a sort of premium plan of their own scheming and they find that many of their most intelligent men take advantage of it and do not hesitate to work overtime. George B. Crescent & Co. have had the pneumatic molder in the foundry. They had a strike. Through our labor bureau in Philadelphia, the Metal Manufacturers' Association, we supplied them with molders, and they picked out the most intelligent men to operate those pneumatic machines, because they could not afford to put the man of less intelligence on those expensive tools; the other men stayed on the dock; they did not quit.

Mr. HASKINS. I want to get this matter into my mind. These men who are working on a premium. For instance, they have a nine

hour day in your shop. I become one of your employees; you pay 30 cents an hour; I work nine hours and get $2.70?

Mr. MARKLAND. Yes.

Mr. HASKINS. You set me to work on a piece of work, and I can be nine hours about it, but you tell me to hustle and I get it out in four hours at 30 cents an hour, which is $1.20. How do I make up my $1.50?

Mr. MARKLAND. You are working on other work as soon as you are done that job. You have turned this up, this blank, you have turned it, bored it, faced the ends, written the ticket, turned it into the time clerk, and the foreman checks it and O. K.'s it, seven, or six, or four hours. Then he says: "Smith, here is this other job now, with six hours' time limit." You do that in three hours. You had three hours to do the first job, and then six hours, provided you split the ticket. That is, we presume that a man will split the ticket; we prefer to arrange the ticket so that he can split it to encourage a man to use his brain and not only his hands and feet. We are willing to pay for it, and we have the choice of men in Philadelphia, because of the opportunity to make more money. You then have done the two jobs and consumed six hours. By the way, we run ten hours, except Saturdays. You.then have the six hours' balance, and we give you another that might consume two hours. That is eight hours. "You can not do any more work, Smith, on this work, and this is not ready. Suppose you go up and fix that machine for Jones." You do that, and you charge an hour up for shop time for repairing such and such a machine. For that you get your 30 cents for the other eight hours. You have made a premium of, say, eight hours, 96 cents, in addition to that $2.40 which you have gotten for the eight hours' work.

Mr. RAINEY. That is really piecework?

Mr. MARKLAND. Hardly; you could not call it piecework, because you give them a certain price for certain work. As a matter of fact, I think it does amount to piece work.

Mr. RAINEY. You give six hours' wages for this work?

Mr. MARKLAND. You give six hours' time in which to do the work, but assume that the man gets 20 cents an hour.

Mr. RAINEY. Then you give him $1.80 to do the work, so that is really piecework.

Mr. MARKLAND. Not exactly. You could not look at it that way. There are lots of elements there. We have men who will turn out stock work, which is simply stuff we carry. We will take a young fellow and we will say, "Here is some work with a half hour limit apiece." "I can not do that." Certainly you can not, but get at it and find out how the other fellow does it, but that is the limit on the job."

Mr. RAINEY. Six hours?

66

Mr. MARKLAND. Half an hour apiece; say it is twelve; six hours is the limit of these twelve. Of course we know he can not do it, but it is an incentive; he probably does the work in five and a half hours, while he had six hours to do it. We pay him 20 cents an hour, a boy, a young fellow. young fellow. We say to a man, "The limit is six hours." We pay him 35 cents; it is done in one and one-half hours. Piecework would not enter into that. Not only have you taken a more efficient man to do that work, but you are going to save; if he