T INTRODUCTORY HE aim of this book is to present, as a new basis for labor legislation, the results of the modern study of fatigue. It seeks to show what fatigue is, its nature and effects, and to explain the phenomena of overwork in working people. It draws upon the scientific study of fatigue --one of the most modern inquiries of physiological, chemical, and psychological science-for aid in the practical problem of reducing the long working day in industry. Such a scientific basis of legislation has been almost wholly absent during the century which has elapsed since the first factory laws were enacted. First for lack of the necessary scientific equipment, and in recent times, for lack of that coordination of knowledge which should apply the teaching of science to the problems of a new industrial order, labor legislation has been deprived of the authoritative sanction which it might have. In this country, at least, the laws of fatigue, verified by years of experiment in the seclusion of the laboratory, have been practically unknown to those who have been most active in preserving for working people a minimum of human leisure. Yet such scientific authority is precisely what is most needed today for a more rational progress in the future than in the past; something more exact and demonstrable than the appeal to pity, less subject to temporary variations than what the Italian physiologist Treves calls the "illusory profits of long hours." Just because the more cruel, dramatic exploitation of workers is in the main a thing of the past, exact scientific proof is needed of the more subtle injuries of modern industry, its practically illimitable speed and strain. After a hundred years of human experience throughout the world, it remains true in our own country that the most helpless workers are still, in respect to the length of their working hours, the least protected. The most recent government investigation of the iron and steel industry in the United States shows* that of the 172,671 employes whose hours of labor were reported in May, 1910, nearly one-half (42.58 per cent) were kept at work seventy-two hours a week or over; that is, at least twelve hours daily on six days of the week. Nearly a quarter of all the workers (20.59 per cent) were kept employed eighty-four or more hours in the week; that is, at least twelve hours each day, including Sundays. In the largest single department in the industry, the blast furnaces, 88 per cent of the 31,321 employes, engaged in both productive and general occupations, were regularly kept at work seven days in the week. These prodigious and terrible figures concern the work of men. It might reasonably be supposed that the centurylong effort to gain legal protection for women and children in industry would have safeguarded them from the bare possibility of such inhuman usage. But, to mention only random examples, young boys of fourteen years may still be employed all night long in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and other great glass producing states; girls upon reaching their sixteenth birthday in New York state may be employed twelve hours a day during five days of the week in factories,† and unlimited hours in stores during the season of "rush" before Christmas. The decision of the Illinois Supreme Court in 1910, upholding the constitutionality of the ten-hour law for women employed in factories and laundries, is estimated to have freed from overstrain in Illinois alone more than 30,000 working women who were employed over ten hours a day. Some great manu * Report on Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States. Summary of the Wages and Hours of Labor, pp. 36 and 57. Senate Document No. 301, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, 1912. †The New York factory law was amended in 1912 so as to prohibit the employment of women more than ten hours in one day or fifty-four hours in one week. |