apt to arrive late in the day, now that the roads were
blocked with snow, and the packers would buy their
cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would
come into play their iron-clad rule, that all cattle must be
killed the same day they were bought. There was no use
kicking about this -- there had been one delegation after
another to see the packers about it, only to be told that it was
the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance of
its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis
worked till nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on
Christmas Day he was on the killing-bed at seven o'clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For
after all the hard work a man did, he was paid for only
part of it. Jurgis had once been among those who scoffed
at the idea of these huge concerns cheating; and so now he
could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with
impunity. One of the rules on the killing-beds was that a
man who was one minute late was docked an hour; and
this was economical, for he was made to work the balance
of the hour -- he was not allowed to stand round and
wait. And on the other hand if he came ahead of time he
got no pay for that -- though often the bosses would start
up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before the whistle.
And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour -- for
"broken time." A man might work full fifty minutes,
but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no
pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a sort of
lottery -- a struggle, all but breaking into open war
between the bosses and the men, the former trying to
rush a job through and the latter trying to stretch it out.
Jurgis blamed the bosses for this, though the truth to be
told it was not always their fault; for the packers kept
them frightened for their lives -- and when one was in
danger of falling behind the standard, what was easier
than to catch up by making the gang work awhile "for
the church"? This was a savage witticism the men
had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old

[[104]]

p103 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p104w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p105

v?