apping cloth.[60] The factory, on the outskirts
of a charming old city in Delaware, is an enormous, picturesque cement
pile, reaching like a bastion along the Brandywine River, with its
windows overlooking the wooded bank of the stream.

The girls stand in a large room, before tables piled with great bolts of
material, and stamp tickets and style cards, fasten them to the roll,
fold over the raw edges of the material in a lap, tie two pieces of
ribbon around the bolt, wrap it in paper, stamp and attach other tickets,
and tie it up with cord to be shipped. Here, after a time-study was made
of the quicker girls in all the operations, different tasks were set for
different weights of material; and if the task was accomplished, a bonus
was paid, amounting, roughly speaking, to a quarter of the worker's
hourly wage. The arrangement of the different processes was so different
for each worker, after and before the system was installed, that none of
the girls could compare the different amounts of work she completed at
the different times. But the whole output, partly through a better
routing of the work to the tables, and by paying the boys who brought it
a bonus of 5 cents for each worker who made her bonus, was increased from
twenty-five to fifty per cent.

The girls' hours were decreased from 10-1/4 a day with frequent overtime
up to nine at night to 9-1/4 a day with no overtime, the Saturday
half-holiday remaining unchanged. Here is a list of the changes in the
week wages. The work at the time of the inquiry was slack. Sometimes
there were only a few hours in the day of wrapping of a kind on which the
task and bonus was applied. Besides, these workers were in the midst of
an establishment managed by another system. The bonus was given on the
basis of the former wage. And this remained lower in the case of workers
employed fewer years by the firm, though sometimes their task was the
same as that of workers employed longer. Where the girls wrapped both the
heavier and the lighter materials, the allotment of these was in the
hands of a sub-foreman, who, instead of being in the new position of a
teacher rewarded for helping each worker to make her bonus, was in the
old position of a distributor of favors. The slackness of the work had
led the management, in a good-willed attempt to provide as well as
possible for the employees, to place several girls from other departments
under this sub-foreman. One of these less strong and e