At the further twisting and plying of the cotton, the processes succeeding the spooling, men are employed.  From these the yarn goes to the winding room in the newer building, where better air and temperature are possible than in the carding and spinning rooms.  The winding room is large and light.  At one side stand the warps, very tall and interesting to see, with their lines of delicate filament and high tiers of bobbins.  In the winding room girls are engaged at machines which wind the yarn from spools back to bobbins for filling in the looms and also for the warp.

In winding the filling bobbins the girls watch the thread from eighteen bobbins, and replace and stop bobbins by pressing on foot pedals.  The worker had made from $7 to $7.50 a week before a time-study was taken and the task increased.  She can now make from $8 to $10.50 a week.  The work is lightened for her by the fact that whereas she formerly placed the bobbins on the warp, doffers now do this for her.  But the increased stamping of the pedals made necessary by the larger task is very tiring.

There are no women on bonus in the weave room, where the warp and the filling are now carried.  After the woven product comes from the weaving room—­an extremely heavy, strong stuff of the highest grade, used for filter cloth and automobile tires—­it is hung in a large finishing room in the newer building over a glass screen lighted with sixteen electric lights which shine through the texture of the material and reveal its slightest defect.  After it has been rolled over the screen, it is sent to girls who remedy these defects by needlework.

It is again run over the lighted screen by the inspectors and returned to the girls if there are still defects.  Before the bonus system was applied, the girls had made $5.04 a week, and finished about 5 rolls a day.  After the system was applied, they made from $7 to $8 and did sometimes 10 and sometimes 12 rolls a day.  But, in spite of the greatest care on Mr. Gantt’s part in standardizing the quality in this department, here, as with the spool tenders, requirement as to quality had recently caused a temporary drop in wages.  This change in requirement was occasioned, not as at the spool tending by the negligence of the workers, but by the somewhat unreasonable caprice of a customer.  Knots in the texture, formerly sewed down as they were, are now cut and fastened differently.  To learn this process meant just as hard work for the girls, and put them back temporarily to their old day rate,[59] though they were recently becoming sufficiently quick in the new process to earn the bonus as well as before.

By and large, the wages of the women workers in the cotton mill had been increased by Scientific Management.