ek to avoid me.

I destroy, crush or maim; I give nothing but take all.

I am your worst enemy.

I AM CARELESSNESS

Any kind of carelessness which results in injury (or is likely to result
in it), whether the injury is mental or physical, is criminal. No plea
can justify building a theatre which cannot stand a snowstorm, a school
which cannot give a maximum of safety to the children who are in it, a
factory which does not provide comfortable working conditions for the
people employed there, or allowing any unsafe building or part of a
building to stand.

There is a factory (this story is true) which places the lives of the
majority of its employees in jeopardy twice a day. There are two sets of
elevators, one at the front of the building for the executives and their
secretaries and visitors, one at the rear for the rank and file of the
employees. Since there are several hundred of the latter the advantages
of the division are too obvious to need discussion. We have no quarrel
with it. But the apparatus upon which the elevators in the rear run is
so old and so rotten and so rusty that there is constant danger of its
breaking down. Three times already there have been serious accidents.
The men who are hired to operate the cars rarely stay more than a week
or so. Protests have been sent in but nothing has been done. The
management knows what the conditions are but they have never stopped to
realize the horror of it. It is not that they value a few dollars more
than they do human life, but that they simply do not stop to think or to
imagine what it would be like to have to ride in the ramshackle elevator
themselves. In the offices of this factory there is an atmosphere of
courtesy and good breeding far beyond the ordinary--in justice to the
people there it must be said that they do not know the conditions in the
rear, but the management does. And the management is polite in most of
its dealings, both with its employees and outside, but polish laid over
a cancerous growth like this is not courtesy.

There are three essentials for good work: _good lighting_ (it must be
remembered that a light that is too glaring is as bad as one that is too
dim), _fresh air_ (air that is hot and damp or dry and dusty is not
fresh), and _cleanliness_ (clean workrooms--and workers--clean drinking
water with individual drinking cups, and in places where the work is
unusually dirty, plenty of clean water for bathing purposes.)

In the m