Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/14

14 you feel a bitterness clutch at your throat, for you are on the way that gathers the criminal, the boozefighter and the dope-fiend. I know, because I was up against it in 1897, when the capitalist newspapers were full of "Business Resuming Its Stability, Reports of Great Gains in Trade." It was summer, and the Chicago papers said $3 a day was being. paid harvest hands in Kansas. On the bumpers of freight trains and the tops of passengers, I went West from Illinois, you remember. When I got to Kansas City, the wage for harvest hands was reported at $2.50 per day. Then every mile I traveled westward, the wages dropped. And when I got to Larned, Kansas, and took a job throwing wheat on the tables of a threshing machine, I was getting $1.25 a day and board. The job lasted three weeks. So I don't blame a mechanic who is used to life in a city, and has a wife and children to care for, if he fights shy of advertised farm work. A "hired man" on a farm generally works from "sun-up to sun-down," and there is nothing steady about the job. Besides, the railroads have a custom of demanding money, real coin, from those who use their trains to go from one locality to another.

A scientific Socialist calls a man out of a job "an industrial reserve." This means, Bill, that if the man who has a job won't behave himself and take what the boss gives him, the idle hungry man at his elbow will be used. The man who is out of a job is very useful for breaking a strike and forcing down wages—that's one reason trade unionists and Socialists everywhere