sylvania Steel Company, my experience has been practically the same. As the shop manager, I treat directly with the men, and we have the same practice now; while you might call it an open shop, a man does not have to sign an agreement with us that he will not become a member of an order. We do not discriminate there as to what the man is or might be. We simply hold that he must strictly conform to the rules of our company and we reserve the right to do with him as we think the merits of the case require. Mr. PAYSON. And control your own business? Mr. MORRISON. We certainly have to, or give up the business. Mr. HASKINS. You do not require that a man must be a Democrat or a Republican, a Methodist or a Baptist? Mr. MORRISON. No, sir; we leave that to the discretion of the man, what he is or may be, but we do demand that he must give us a fair return for a fair day's wages. Mr. NICHOLLS. Has there never been any question raised as to whether the company has influenced the men in regard to political matters? Mr. MORRISON. I can not say whether there has or not; I have never known it to be so. Mr. EMERY. You mean you never knew that charge to be raised? Mr. MORRISON. I never heard the question raised in our shops as to whether a man should be a Democrat or a Republican. Mr. HASKINS. When you hire a man you do not ask him as to his politics, or his religion, or whether he is a Mason or an Odd Fellow? Mr. MORRISON. No, sir. Mr. NICHOLLS. Has the company never collected from the men for campaign purposes or otherwise? Mr. MORRISON. I never heard such a charge being made against either company I have been in; I have never heard such a question ever raised. Mr. NICHOLLS. I will ask you again; you mentioned that in your dealings with the men you have gotten along very nicely for those years? Mr. MORRISON. It has not been a bed of roses; I will say nicely, though. Mr. NICHOLLS. In those matters do you make definite contracts with the men in a body? Mr. MORRISON. Oh, no; we treat each man as an individual. Every man sits on his own bottom, and he must simply produce the goods or we get rid of him as soon as possible and put a man in his place. Mr. NICHOLLS. Do I understand you right, that the company makes out a schedule of prices and wages, and when anyone comes for employment that he is supposed to accept this fixed rate of the company? Mr. MORRISON. We simply have a classification governing the rates for the different characters of the work, and if a man comes to me for a job I try to size him up the best I can, whether he is a dollar-a-day man or a two-dollar-a-day man, and I put him where he belongs. Mr. NICHOLLS. Then you have no hard and fast list of prices for a day's work? Mr. MORRISON. Well, we do have; yes, sir. We find that a man on a certain machine can do a certain amount of work in a certain amount of time. It has been figured out from several years' work, and we exact of that man at least that much work before he earns a premium over his day's wages. If he can not earn the premium, we try to find a man who can, and we never have any trouble in finding a man. Mr. NICHOLLS. They must earn a premium? Mr. MORRISON. Not "must;" there are certain characters of work that a man can not earn a premium on and we do not expect it, but a rule they do. I might just say, in addition to what I have said, that we find our premium men average from 15 to 20 per cent above their regular day's wages in the year; each man earns about that much in addition to the way we rate him. Mr. EMERY. While you are on that subject, what do you pay your men in the erecting department per day, on an average? Mr. MORRISON. Our erectors we pay 50 cents an hour-$4 a day for eight-hours' work. That is the most hazardous work we have to do. The erector has all kinds of risks to run, and that is the highest labor we have, and the erector's pay is about 50 cents an hour, what we pay for a regular bridge erector; but there are men working with erection gangs who are not erectors; they are simply helpers-men we take to assist the erectors and do work that is not really erecting work. Mr. EMERY. Carrying tools, bolts, and so forth? Mr. MORRISON. Yes; we run from $3 to $5 a day. Mr. PAYSON. One thing further. Have you ever known, in all your experience, with either the Pennsylvania Steel Company or the company preceding it with which you were connected, of any substantial objection on the part of your employees to the principle of overtime pay? Mr. MORRISON. No, sir. Mr. PAYSON. On the contrary, what has been your universal experience? Mr. MORRISON. On the contrary, our universal experience has been that we have always tried to keep men from working overtime; that is, they are so anxious to make an extra day that it is up to us, as a rule, to say, "Hold on; do not work so long. We think ten hours a day is all you can do and do well." They would work fourteen hours a day and be glad to, in order to get the increased wages. Mr. PAYSON. You notice in these bills there is an absolute prohibition as to overtime? Mr. MORRISON. Yes, sir. Mr. PAYSON. Now, in your judgment, would that provision as to overtime work be opposed by any substantial portions of your employees? Mr. MORRISON. I would say as a unit they would be opposed to it. Mr. NICHOLLS. Would you be willing to agree with them if they favored it? Mr. MORRISON. Favored what? Mr. NICHOLLS. If your men said as a body that they favored an eight-hour day? Mr. MORRISON. Do you mean to say would we be willing to stop our machines at eight hours a day? Mr. NICHOLLS. If your men, on the contrary, would state that they were favorable to it? Mr. MORRISON. I do not see how we could work on an eight-hour basis and compete with people working ten or twelve hours. Mr. NICHOLLS. Then, as far as your action is concerned, it would not make any difference whether the men were in favor of it or not, and I simply raised this question because you said your men would be a unit. Mr. MORRISON. That is only my judgment. That is very broad; I ought to modify that, and say a great majority would be. Mr. NICHOLLS. At the same time you were taking the position of representing their sentiments here. Mr. MORRISON. I merely talk from my experience in thirty years handling men in the shops. Mr. NICHOLLS. That is your department? Mr. MORRISON. Yes, sir. Mr. NICHOLLS. Just another question. How many shifts are there in your place? Mr. MORRISON. Two. We have ten hours for a day's work and twelve hours for a night's work. Mr. NICHOLLS. That would be twenty-two. Mr. MORRISON. Twenty-two hours; but I want to add that out of a thousand men whom we employ, about eight hundred and fifty to nine hundred are the ten-hour men. We simply have one hundred on the night force. They are simply on the machines that have to work double time in order to keep the shop working along economically. Mr. NICHOLLS. Where does the two hours' time come in? Mr. MORRISON. That is lunch hour between shifts. The night men quit work at 6, the day men commence at 7; there is an hour to get the machines oiled, go over the tools, and so forth. Then a half hour at noon; then a half hour at midnight, between the shifts. Of course, the men stop to get their lunches, to get the tools in shape. Mr. EMERY. To make it clear, when you speak of there being a ten or a twelve hour day, you refer exclusively to the manufacturing department? Mr. MORRISON. Oh, the erection has only an eign. hour basis. Mr. DAVENPORT. Assuming that this bill became a law and you did did take a contract, with the supervision and inspection of the work and keeping track of it, doing eight-hour work and ten-hour work side by side, would it be practicable without an enormous number of inspectors? Mr. MORRISON. I would say we could not do it at all. Mr. DAVENPORT. How many men would it require, do you suppose, on the part of the Government in your shops to see? Mr. MORRISON. In the first place, I want to state that in the making of steel you could not do it at all, because your steel is made in a continuous process; that is, in the making of your steel that is prohibitory, you could not do it at all; and in the working of your shops, you take a piece of work and set it on a machine that is to work twenty-two hours; you would simply have to let that machine stop, that is all, or let somebody else come in to relieve it. Mr. DAVENPORT. Who would keep track of all these men and each man, whether he was working overtime or not? Mr. MORRISON. I do not see how we could; I do not think we would undertake to do it. I think we would simply try to get along without Government work. It would simply mean, in my judgment, that a few small concerns would undertake to do that work, and simply run exclusively on the eight-hour basis. Mr. EMERY. Speaking for the Pennsylvania Steel Company as a result of your understanding of the meaning of this bill, in your opinion would they undertake, as contractors or subcontractors, under a penal stipulation, to fulfill the stipulations of such a contract? Mr. MORRISON. I do not think our president would ever seriously consider a contract under that bill. That is my judgment. STATEMENT OF MR. JAMES BAIRD, OF WASHINGTON, D. C. Mr. BAIRD. I represent the George A. Fuller Company, building construction. We have an office in the Munsey Building. It has only been in the last three or four years, you might say, that the Fuller Company has bid on Government work. The policy of the company used to be to handle private contracts only, but within the last two or three years our working office has taken up the bidding on Government work. We have had innumerable inquiries to bid on Government work, so a year or so ago we started to bid on Government work, and we have three Government contracts now, amounting to six or seven hundred thousand dollars. One is the Freedmen's Hospital building, at Sixth and Pomeroy streets, and we are doing this naval hospital building down at Norfolk and also the McKinley Manual Training School of the District and Government together. In case we had a law of this kind before us it would put us out of business as far as the Government is concerned. We could not possibly bid on Government work under those conditions, and from a practical point of view I do not see how any other building contractor could do the same thing, unless he confines himself exclusively to Government work, and of course that would limit his business very materially. As I think the matter over, there are many complications in connection with it in the building business, which is made up of the bidding on innumerable small items. You can look right around the room here and see them. You take, for instance, a marble mantel or electric fixtures, woodwork, or steel such as we buy from the Pennsylvania Bridge Company. In a Government work of this kind, with every one of those materials on an eight-hour basis, we would have to put these people under bond to have their men work only eight hours. Then we would have to have inspectors there to see that they did it, and it would be a practical impossibility. You could not watch every piece of material that went into a building. You would have to have inspectors on the stone and dynamos and plumbing fixtures, and it would take more money to see the law carried out than it would take to build the building, because it takes a great while to build a dynamo, for instance. That is not a very large item, and yet you would have to watch to see that it was made on an eight-hour basis. Most of the big concerns turn out a great amount of these small materials, and I do not believe there is one of them that works on an eight-hour basis. So, from a practical point of view, again, I am sure they would not want to change their shops and I do not know where we could go for our materials. Every man who manufactures, from whom we buy for Government work, would either have to change a portion of his shop or else he would have to cut that off his list, and we all know what they do; they cut that off their list, because it is only a very small portion of their business and it would resolve itself into a very small amount of business simply to take care of the Government work. Mr. PAYSON. That is to say, that the amount of business which any one of these manufacturers of subordinate things has, relative to the entire output, is so small that there would be no inducement for them to do the work? Mr. BAIRD. Not at all. There would be only small shops springing up, very naturally, working short hours and doing Government work. They would put the price away out of sight. Mr. NICHOLLS. You mentioned something about the danger to the contractor in the subcontractor's working the men overtime. The fine, I think, is $5 a day per man? Mr. PAYSON. That is for each offense. Mr. NICHOLLS. Could you not, in the contract made with the subcontractor, place him under sufficient bonds to guarantee that, although you would be made the responsible party, you could collect from him? I am Mr. BAIRD. The people we buy of, I do think, would not be willing to put themselves under bond for such a small amount of work. sure that they would say they did not care for the order, and providing they did care for the order and we put them under bond, under such a law as this it would be such an unusual thing that the chances are that there would be a great tendency to overlap it and not carry it out, and if we wanted to be sure that it was enforced, to save ourselves from fines it would be necessary for us to have someone to see that it was carried out. Mr. NICHOLLS. Is there not, ordinarily speaking, enough of confidence between business men for one to believe that another will live up to his written word as well as his spoken word, or more so. you not trust each other? Can Mr. BAIRD. Yes; I would not say that the manufacturers would deliberately do that, but it would be very much out of the ordinary from his line of business, and the chances are that there would be a very great tendency not to carry out that provision. Mr. NICHOLLS. Suppose you were a subcontractor and you agreed to take this work, and of course one provision was that your men must not work more than eight hours. Would you violate that provision? Mr. BAIRD. I would not want to say that I would, but if I were a large manufacturer supplying such materials the chances are that I would not want to change my shop or any of the men working in my shop to such an extent. That is out of the ordinary run of the busi ness. Mr. PAYSON. In other words, you would not take that order? Mr. DAVENPORT. Just on that point, the job might be a $500 job and the fines might amount to a thousand. For any man who works more than eight hours it is $5. If there were 100 men, it would be $500. How could you protect yourself by withholding any of the contract price? The fines might be more than the stipulated price that you were to pay. |