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 be~
tween the packers and the unions expired, and a new agree~
ment 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 receiv~
ing, 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 -hecks to the amount of ten thou~
sand dollars, and they found that the highest wages paid
had been fourteen dollars a week, 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. Con~
sidering the fact that the price of dressed meat had in~
creased 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 pur~
pose 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

[[316]]

p315 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p316w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p317

v?