pirit he stayed in with the rest and the game continued
until late Sunday afternoon, and by that time he was "out" over twenty
dollars. On Saturday nights, also, a number of balls were generally
given in Packingtown; each man would bring his "girl" with him, paying
half a dollar for a ticket, and several dollars additional for drinks
in the course of the festivities, which continued until three or four
o'clock in the morning, unless broken up by fighting. During all this
time the same man and woman would dance together, half-stupefied with
sensuality and drink.

Before long Jurgis discovered what Scully had meant by something
"turning up." In May the agreement between the packers and the unions
expired, and a new agreement had to be signed. Negotiations were going
on, and the yards were full of talk of a strike. The old scale had dealt
with the wages of the skilled men only; and of the members of the Meat
Workers' Union about two-thirds were unskilled men. In Chicago these
latter were receiving, for the most part, eighteen and a half cents an
hour, and the unions wished to make this the general wage for the next
year. It was not nearly so large a wage as it seemed--in the course of
the negotiations the union officers examined time checks to the amount
of ten thousand dollars, and they found that the highest wages paid had
been fourteen dollars a week, and the lowest two dollars and five cents,
and the average of the whole, six dollars and sixty-five cents. And six
dollars and sixty-five cents was hardly too much for a man to keep
a family on, considering the fact that the price of dressed meat had
increased nearly fifty per cent in the last five years, while the price
of "beef on the hoof" had decreased as much, it would have seemed that
the packers ought to be able to pay it; but the packers were unwilling
to pay it--they rejected the union demand, and to show what their
purpose was, a week or two after the agreement expired they put down the
wages of about a thousand men to sixteen and a half cents, and it was
said that old man Jones had vowed he would put them to fifteen before
he got through. There were a million and a half of men in the country
looking for work, a hundred thousand of them right in Chicago; and were
the packers to let the union stewards march into their places and bind
them to a contract that would lose them several thousand dollars a day
for a year? Not much!

All this was in June; and before long