The folding in this department is also exhausting, and the management is trying to find a better system of conducting this process than that now employed.  The folders here stoop and pick up the sheets and fold them lengthwise and crosswise.  The task is 1200 a day; and the wage with the bonus comes to between $6 and $7 a week.  But after the bonus is earned, payment is, for some reason, not suitably provided on work beyond the task.  One worker said she used to fold one or two pieces above the amount without any objection, but lately she had folded as many as 200 beyond, without payment.

From the folders the sheets are carried away to a mangle, where they are folded over again by young girls.  The work is light, but the payment of $5.80 to $6 for 770 pieces an hour is low.  The mangle is well guarded.  By an excellent arrangement here, the material is piled on a small elevator, so that the girl at the mangle does not have to stoop or lift, but easily adjusts the elevator, so that she can feed the mangle from the pile at her convenience.  The girl at a mangle can earn from $7 to $8 and is not tired in any way by her work.

The final stamping and wrapping in paper and tying with cord are done at a rate of 25 pieces an hour, for a wage coming to $6 a week, by young girls; and the situation is otherwise about the same as with the other wrappers.

Except at the mangle, the operation of the sheet and pillow-case factory was unsatisfactory to the management, who had begun to study the department for reorganization just before the time of the inquiry.  Competition had so depressed the price of the manufacture of sheets that the commission men, for whom these processes described were executed, paid 25 cents a dozen sheets for the work.  This does not, of course, include the initial cost of the material.  It means, however, that all of the following kinds of machine tending and manual labor on a sheet were to be done for 2-1/2 cents:—­

        Tearing; (men workers)
        Hemming; (women workers)
        Folding; (women workers)
        Mangling; (women workers)
        Book-folding; (women workers)
        Wrapping; (women workers)
        Ticketing; (women workers)

The management lost in its payment for labor here, and yet felt the work was too hard for its workers, and should be changed.  Alterations in the rest periods are now being introduced.  For the girls the system of operation at the time of the inquiry in the sheet and pillow-case factory, except on the mangle, was undoubtedly more exhausting than the old method, though their wages had been increased and their hours shortened.

In general in the Cloth Finishing establishment Scientific Management had increased wages.

It had shortened hours.