The Way We Labored

...There was nothing of the storefront or tenement about them, yet social relations between operatives and owners retained the characteristics of shop life...

...These were "human scale work sites where skilled people tested their abilities against the constraints of materials and markets, under the caring supervision of proprietors who shared their laboring and immigrant origins...

...Outside work was done in the apartments of the employees, usually by women...

...We witness as well the hazards of the plant floor—steelworkers cut and burned by flying chips of metal stare at us without expression, bearing their wounds...

...The availability of work was erratic...

...I'd love to have some...

...One wartime photo shows five black employees of the Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company who worked in the "Negro Yard...

...Reviewed by Robert Leiter Contributor, New York "Times, " "New Republic, " "American Scholar" One evening several years ago, the MacNeil / Lehrer show had a discussion of the supposed decline in the quality of American goods and services...

...One of the most interesting sections of Work Sights' text is devoted to the social life of plant workers...

...Inside workers traveled each day to a rented loft or rowhouse to assemble specific pieces of clothing for a contractor...

...We don't identify with the fact...

...My ancestors were living in some pretty ratty tenements...

...that the people who made these handmade goods had very tough lives...

...Philip Scranton of Rutgers and Walter Licht of the University of Pennsylvania wanted to fill in the blind spot in America's present-day "quest for the best" by showing us the sort of people who produced the "quality goods" of the past and the conditions they labored under...

...In this respect the Scranton and Licht volume is a distinct triumph...

...The authors stress, though, that other types of mills did emerge...

...As an entity they were the center of production for the bulk of Philadelphia's industrial achievements from the era of General Grant to that of General Eisenhower...

...Each worker was responsible for one part of a larger job—making the legs for a table, say, or the soles of a pair of shoes...

...The authors thus conclude by endorsing the popular wisdom: Any future economic revival in the city will probably result from growth in the service area—insurance, health care, education, tourism—not in the manufacturing sector...

...In the 1890s, men earned $3-6 per week in shops, women earned a third less...

...In a typical year, the sweatshop employee could expect to make only half the income of his skilled industrial counterpart...

...The city was not a one-product industrial giant like Pittsburgh (steel) or Detroit (autos)—its strength lay in its great variety of specialty firms...

...If some of the information and place names in this book will be of interest mainly to nostalgia-prone natives of Philadelphia, there are plenty of tidbits for the general reader...

...The directors' purpose was obvious: Making employees feel cared for would increase their identification with the firm and reduce the threat of unionization...

...Athletic competitions were sponsored by management as part of what might be called an overall corporate welfare scheme...

...The most telling observation of the evening was made by Goodman...

...But we don'tsay the truth, which is that on the whole most of us would have been the people not buying the lace but sitting in little tiny cottages...

...And we see the dangers labor organizers risked from indignant bosses and the local police...

...My ancestors weren't the people living in these grand old houses on wonderful streets...

...The rejection of traditional notions of craft implicit in all this caused unrest among artisans, and led to the first stages of labor activism and trade unionism surfacing in Philadelphia before the Civil War...

...Skilled artisans are portrayed carrying out intricate tasks:-a comber washing raw wool in 1906, a worker putting the finishing touches on a two-man saw in 1906, a craftsman painting and trueing a wheel in 1941, mechanics assembling beam compasses in 1943...

...The needle trades, in particular, were completely transformed...

...these workers, according to the authors, were the most easily abused in an industry where cost-shaving and exploitation were the norm...

...So the two historians gathered 300 vintage photographs of Philadelphians at work and wrote an accompanying text, which, while not profound, is always clear and helpful...

...Mills were single sites where firms consisting of 50-500 workers engaged in production...

...The familiar horrors of the sweatshops are given fresh vividness...

...Work Sights was motivated by precisely such an insight...

...No believer in the good old days, she said she was struck by how "Americans always identify with the consumers of quality rather than the producers...

...But a book like Work Sights, whatever the merits of the text, succeeds or fails on the strength of its photos...

...Work sites fell into three categories, according to scale: shops, mills and plants...

...The role of play, the authors show, was surprisingly important...

...Like layers of a cake," the authors write, "these three divisions coexisted and at times intersected in complex production sequences...

...Gradually, congested inner city blocks that had been havens for small companies were transformed by urban renewal into areas filled with high-rise office buildings, and expressways cut deeply into working-class neighborhoods...

...In 1943 these men "proudly launched the first steel-hulled ship ever constructed 'entirely with black labor.'" Just as the authors hoped, Work Sights offers us a peek into the past that changes our perception of it...

...And conditions in the early mills were generally deplorable: 12-13 hour days prevailed, a stiff system of fines was maintained, and children were cruelly exploited...

...For this the book deserves the highest praise— and a place on the small but growing shelf of works (including Dorothy Hartley's Lost Country Life) that retrieve a slice of our collective history and make it real for us...

...Sprawling, faceless structures, they served as the homes for mass production industries such as steel, autos, glass and appliances...

...And we were among them...

...making lace with our hands for two dollars a week...

...Plants made a decisive break from the human scale...

...Skilled male workers in custom tailor establishments were replaced by women, children and immigrants packed in sweatshops that came in two varieties, inside and outside...

...As early as the 1830s, workers in Philadelphia's mill districts—Kensington, Manayunk, Germantown—were receptive to labor organizing efforts...

...Although they sometimes flirt with the Left-wing view of workers as "the salt of the earth," their effort is generally free of ideology...

...Throughout the 60 years covered by Work Sights, Philadelphia advertised itself as "the workshop of the world...

...Plant floor celebrations of marriages and 21st birthdays were fairly common, too...

...The guests were Stanley Marcus (of Neiman Marcus fame), Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, and ILGWU Assistant President Guy Tyler...

...Some merchants even hired novices and taught them only a single task...

...Early in the 19th century, technical innovations led to the "deskilling" of labor and set the stage for the establishment of the shop, where journeymen were hired to turn out standardized goods...

...Some, in fact, were nothing more than overgrown shops powered by steam engines...

...I mean we'll say, 'Isn't it a shame that they don't make that beautiful handmade lace anymore...

...After World War II signs of decay began to spread throughout industrial Philadelphia, as manufacturing gave way to the service economy...

...In size and output they embodied America's role as a world economic power...

...With the Great Depression, however, fear of unemployment became paramount, and the drive for labor organization focused on the goal of a single union for all workers, skilled and unskilled...

...Other concessions to workers included suggestion boxes, plant canteens, and savings or insurance plans...