VI

REGULARITY OF EMPLOYMENT: FATIGUE AND

T

OVERTIME WORK

1. OVERTIME AS A SEPARATE ISSUE

HE discussion of overtime is something to be sharply differentiated from the general question of reducing

the length of the workday. It is true that when overtime is added to the day's work, making it nine to twelve hours or longer as the case may be, all the arguments that apply against the long day apply against overtime as well. It is bad because it results in too long a stretch of working hours, with all that implies for subject and object, worker and work.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise? For whether the last exhausting hours of the day be called "overtime," or are a regular part of the day's work, the practical results of such protracted hours must be the same.

But overtime means something more than an over-long period of work. It means irregular work; it means evening work after and in addition to day work, often without previous notice to the employe; it means in many trades that worst sequence, overwork followed by out-of-work, a "rush" season of too much work with the slack season of no work and destitution close behind it. Hence in discussing overtime, besides the evident injuries to health and output, a number of other fundamental points need to be taken into account and realized. Is overtime inevitable and uncontrollable? How can it be replaced or avoided? This discussion is the more important because the really large issues involved in overtime, seemingly so subordinate and technical a question, are, as we have pointed out, so often totally misunderstood

or ignored. These large issues we will attempt to outline under two heads: first, the relation between overtime and greater continuity or regularity of employment; and second (in Chapter VIII), the relation between overtime and the crux of all legislation, enforcement.

First, however, as to the evident likenesses between overtime and the long day in general. On the physiological side, we have seen that overtime, like other forms of overwork, injures health because, in one word, it strains. It postpones rest beyond the point when rest can normally accomplish its office of repair. "Too late," is nature's answer to the slack period or let-up after an overtime bout in factory or store, and grievous are nature's revenges for the postponement of our metabolic debts. Through the overstrain of that mysterious agency which, as we have seen, "directs, controls, and harmonizes the work of the parts of the organic machine" our ramified nervous system-any or every organ may retain the semblance of perfect health and may yet refuse to function. Nervous dyspepsia, nervous palpitation of the heart, nervous eyestrain, and such functional ills are well recognized products of some form of "over-doing," as we call it among the well-to-do. Among working people, the same disorders and their causes have, in this country, received scant notice. These are what overtime work invites and brings with it, requiring during over-long hours increasing stimuli for wearied muscles from already tired nerve

centers.

On the economic side, too, overtime work, like all overwork, results in deteriorated quantity and quality of output. In the long run, the enlightened employer is obliged to conclude that overtime does not pay. To this day, "spoiled work" is as marked a result of overtime as it was of the late working hours famous in the first English struggles for legislation.*

Such an occupation as dressmaking illustrates the deterioration due to overtime work. Here the caprice and in*See Part II of this volume, pp. 433-440.

considerateness of customers have been in large part responsible for the universally outrageous duration of overtime, which is common in the creation of women's wearing apparel in every country. Year after year, the French and British factory inspectors have enlarged on the essentially wasteful, uneconomical character of overtime in destroying the efficiency of the workers. After a comparatively short period of pressure, output not only becomes inferior, but progressively so. Each week's work bids fair to be progressively poorer than that of the previous week.

Another reason why output falls off during overtime is due to the irregular habits which it fosters. It is hardly surprising that workers should come to work late the next morning after evening overtime, and that the reaction after a spurt should lead to "loafing" and inferior production in consequence.*

2. OVERTIME AND REGULARITY

So much for the evident similarity of results, physical and economic, between overtime and the long day. We turn next to the distinctive characteristic of overtime, its irregularity and the supposed necessity for longer working. hours at certain times or seasons of the year. Indeed, in a certain sense, overtime is a survival of the long day, a stray left over from the time when any legislative regulation of working hours was considered intolerable. First, men held that the working day could not be regulated at all without financial disaster. Then, when it was shortened, and industry still throve, the same kind of argument insisted, and still insists, that the law must allow concessions, privileges for certain occupations which, according to the employers, can not be compressed within the specified limit of hours.

The provision for overtime work proceeds on the theory that at certain times and seasons employers cannot manage or meet their obligations under their regular schedule of • See Part 11, pp. 440–444.

hours, but must be free to call upon their employes for extra work. This theory has obtained in almost every industrial country that has restricted the hours of labor by law: the regulation of overtime has been one of the most vexed chapters.

In innumerable trades it has been assumed that the demands of customers, reasonable or unreasonable, and the necessities of the season, avoidable or not, can be met in no other way than by lengthening the day's work for a longer or shorter period of time.

3. EFFORTS TO EQUALIZE SEASONS

But to lengthen the day's work is in fact not the last word on the subject. In many industries the most enlightened employers have found that overtime work is essentially inefficient, that excessive irregularities in work are as demoralizing to business as they are physically damaging to the workers. It has proved possible to replace overtime, in large part, by spreading work more uniformly over the entire year, instead of concentrating it into short periods of intense overwork. Untold effort and money have been spent to equalize more nearly the week's and month's business. Thus, for instance, the now prevalent January "white sale" of the department stores was devised some years ago by a prominent New England firm, to attract customers during the stagnant period after the Christmas "rush." It was not written in the eternal fitness of things that the purchase of new linens should be associated with the first month of the year. But such is the psychological force of advertising, that the shopping public has become educated up to the January "white sale" throughout the country, and now no well-conducted store is without an artistic display of damasks, table linen, bed linen, and women's white underwear, as soon as the new year opens. When the heavy spring trade starts later in the year, the sale of white goods is, for the most part, over. Indeed, this effort to equalize seasons has been carried to such

lengths that the January "white sale," invented as a stopgap between seasons, has itself become a "rush" period.

This example is only one of many such efforts which might be cited. It has been found profitable by merchants to make the week's as well as the month's business approximately equal. In many cities, the custom of making Monday a day of special "bargains" and "green trading stamps" has likewise been implanted in the public mind, for the sake of attracting customers on a previously dull day, and more nearly equalizing the business of the week.

But the more important and more radical movements of this order have been carried out in manufacture rather than in commerce. The most farsighted manufacturers have shown how work can be more uniformly spread over the entire year, instead of allowing it to be crowded into short. "rush" periods followed by stagnation.

By way of concrete illustration, the reorganization of two great New England establishments, for the precise purpose of more nearly equalizing seasons, may be briefly described.

The first of these is one of the largest shoe factories in the United States. The shoe trade was, and in many instances still is, a seasonal industry. Manufacturers wait for the spring and fall orders, slack periods alternating with seasonal rushes of work. The firm in question decided that this system was too great a strain upon their equipment; that it was wasteful and unnecessary. They determined to continue at work during the slack season by opening up new lines, requiring customers to send in their orders earlier, and by similar devices. Customers were notified that in order to have orders filled they must be received by certain fixed dates. Once received, the order is like a promissory note which will be met by the manufacturer at the given time. The dates for receiving and delivering orders are fixed in rotation, arranged so that each month's work is approximately equal. The scheme has been worked out in minutest detail, and since it has been put into practice this establishment has completely abolished overtime, as well as a slack season.