Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 October 1889 — LABOR NOTES. [ARTICLE]

LABOR NOTES.

Steel pavements are in use. English railways pay a ion for eoal. Pittsburg reports a scarcity of laborers. American building trades employ 2,000,000 hands. A Colorado wheat-field employs 300 hands. At Newport |521,000 was offered for a cottage, The vessels that prose the ocean in six days burn 400 tons of coal daily. About 4QO Belgian and English glassblowers in America go home each summer. Boston has 7,000 organized tailors. They want New York tenement-house work boycotted. At Jacksonville, Fla., 400 cigarmakers struct to have their pay brought to their benches. Two Holyoke (Mass.) mills that were to shut down if Cleavland should be elected are closed. Boston has a Merchants’ week. Storekeepers from the towns around have their fares paid to the city. In the manufacture of boots and shoes the work of 500 operatives is now deme by 100 with the use of machinery. In the manufacture of flour modern improvements save 75 per cent, of the manual labor that once wasneccessary. New Hampshire compels working children of from fourteen to sixteen'to go to school three months of the year.

By the use of coal-mitfing machines 1«9 miners in a month can mine as much coal in the same time as 500 miners by the oldjnethods. In the manufacture of brick improvdevices save one-tenth of the labor, and in the manufacture of fire brick 40 per cent, of the manual labor is displaced. In stave-dressing twelve co-laborers with a machine can dress 12,000 staves in the same time that the same number of workers by hand could dress 2, - 500 staves.

England allows children of thirteen to work if they attend school half the day. No one under eighteen and no woman can work over sixty hours week. The Lynn Lasters’ Protective Union paid $12,000 for ground for a hall to contain a lecture-room, library, bil-liard-hall, etc. The protective union has 10,000 members.

A railroad in the Northwest built 1,000 miles of line in half as many days, and had at one time 20,000 men at work, nearly as many as Napolean had in battle at Marengo.

London boss bakers make from $5 to sls per week, workman from $8 50 to $6, cleaning up boys $2. Each is allowed a loaf to take home. Most of the bakers sleep in the shops. The number of immigrants who have passed through Castle Garden so far this month is 11,919, a falling off from lastyear of 2,405. Since January 210,818 immigrants ; have arrived. Last year during the same period, the number was 228,839. Many Brooklyn grocers' will not

sell non-union bread, since the bakers struck rather than leave the union. Co' operative bakeries are talked of. The organization has reduced a day’s work from seventeen hours per day to eleven, and to thirteen on Saturday. The trade organizations of the Hebrews of New York are steadily growing in strength under the sillful management of the organization known as the United Hebrew Trades. The Hebrew Purse-makers’ Union has just been organized, and the membership of the Hebrew Jewelers’ Union has beeu considerably enlarged. The Hebrew Musical Union has been reorganized on a co-operative basis.

The steel pen trade at Birmingham is reported as buoyant, the average weekly production exceeding 160,000 gross, something that would give an aggregate annual product of 1,198,080,000 steel pens. In her Majesty’s stationary office one year the consumption of steel pens was about two millions against half a million of quill ones. In the clubs the proportion of quill pens used is larger than that in the government offices.