ve the men on with new machinery--it was said
that in the hog-killing rooms the speed at which the hogs moved was
determined by clockwork, and that it was increased a little every day.
In piecework they would reduce the time, requiring the same work in a
shorter time, and paying the same wages; and then, after the workers had
accustomed themselves to this new speed, they would reduce the rate of
payment to correspond with the reduction in time! They had done this
so often in the canning establishments that the girls were fairly
desperate; their wages had gone down by a full third in the past two
years, and a storm of discontent was brewing that was likely to break
any day. Only a month after Marija had become a beef-trimmer the canning
factory that she had left posted a cut that would divide the girls'
earnings almost squarely in half; and so great was the indignation at
this that they marched out without even a parley, and organized in the
street outside. One of the girls had read somewhere that a red flag was
the proper symbol for oppressed workers, and so they mounted one, and
paraded all about the yards, yelling with rage. A new union was the
result of this outburst, but the impromptu strike went to pieces in
three days, owing to the rush of new labor. At the end of it the girl
who had carried the red flag went downtown and got a position in a great
department store, at a salary of two dollars and a half a week.

Jurgis and Ona heard these stories with dismay, for there was no telling
when their own time might come. Once or twice there had been rumors
that one of the big houses was going to cut its unskilled men to fifteen
cents an hour, and Jurgis knew that if this was done, his turn would
come soon. He had learned by this time that Packingtown was really not
a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef Trust. And every
week the managers of it got together and compared notes, and there
was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of
efficiency. Jurgis was told that they also fixed the price they would
pay for beef on the hoof and the price of all dressed meat in the
country; but that was something he did not understand or care about.

The only one who was not afraid of a cut was Marija, who congratulated
herself, somewhat naively, that there had been one in her place only
a short time before she came. Marija was getting to be a skilled
beef-trimmer, and was mounting to the heights again