Word: pieceworker
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...strike started when 16 female button sewers at a Hart Schaffner & Marx factory, earning $3 to $8 a week, walked out over a 4? reduction in piecework pay. (One of the 16 strikers was round-faced, Russian-born Bessie Abramovitz, whom Hillman later married.) For three weeks, more & more workers left their sweatshops until the 16 strikers had become 41,000. Each night there were meetings, usually at Hull House, addressed by Welfare Worker Jane Addams, Lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the strike leaders...
Incentive Pay. But the deepest quagmire for production was a fantastic incentive pay plan. Colt had always had incentive pay. When mass production came to Colt, it kept the same piecework rates as for the slow handwork. Thus semiskilled filers came to earn as high as $8,200 a year, while the highly skilled toolmakers made as little as $3,000 a year. Result: many workers drew big pay for little work, had no incentive to work harder, fearing rates would be cut if wages, became too fantastic. Colt went through a series of small strikes. The War Labor Board...
...this came about because of one Anton Jankowski, a Herculean (6 ft. 2 in., 250 lb.) employe of Muskegon's (Mich.) Norge Division of Borg-Warner (plane parts, vacuum pumps, valves). Last November, the War Department ordered Norge to cut back production of gun mounts. This reduced the piecework earnings of its employes. The U.A.W.A.F. of L. promptly protested, but agreed to go along if the company would clamp down on Jankowski. The union had al ready expelled Jankowski for nonpayment of dues. Now the union claimed that his great strength enabled him to work too fast. Thereby...
Down to $18. Detroit-born son of a Syrian immigrant, Tom Saffady went to work in a machine shop after graduating from high school. He moved from shop to shop because he liked to tackle new problems. At the N. A. Woodworth Co. he so simplified his piecework job that in four hours he turned out double the work of the eight-hour men and earned $600 a month. With too much time on his hands, he quit to start his own tool shop in a building he constructed. In the first several months, he did exactly $18 worth...
...problem of incentive pay is the hottest potato in U.S. war production. It has been championed as the answer to the manpower pinch, as a shot in the arm to hop war production up as much as 30%. It has also been condemned as a backward step towards the piecework system (particularly unpopular with automotive workers), the speedup, the sweatshop...