Word: pieceworker
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...line to create a more stable jump rope that is resistant to twisting and swaying. Two years ago, he borrowed $30,000 and recruited family and friends to begin turning out ropes in volume. Today Hinds fills monthly orders averaging 200,000 ropes, all made-for a 23? piecework wage-by physically and mentally handicapped people recommended by seven "opportunity centers" in Madison. Hinds nets a neat $1 per rope, so his profits are running at about $2.4 million a year...
...recovered. "It was pure hell," says Owen. "I couldn't live through anything like it again. For 18 months, issues were coming in at the rate of eight and twelve a day, mostly invented." The issue that finally triggered the strike was a management proposal to equalize the piecework pay system. Under the old system, wages for comparable work could vary by as much as 20% from department to department. "What they were trying to do," as Peach saw it, "was take money out of the higher-paid workers' pockets and give it to the lower-paid workers...
Whether the image of managerial shock troops was fantasy or not, it provoked a strike that cost the company almost $1.5 million. The piecework reform was dropped. Straw was transferred from Darlaston. The effort to centralize management control was abandoned for the more peaceful if ultimately unworkable status quo. Most important, the strike forcibly impressed the Owens with the limits of their power. Says David Owen: "We realized that paternalism was out, that the old gaffer-worker approach had become blurred. The old demarcations of upstairs/downstairs were out the window and well into the past. Coping with that change...
What possesses him is an empty, aimless ambition that forces him to do his piecework as if by rote. His one source of solace is an occasional visit to a friend, Militina, now grown old and a little crazy, who spends his time in the madhouse giving political speeches and reading a child's biography of Spartacus...
...constructions of H.C. Westermann. And then there are the quilts. The best products of America's 19th century women quilt makers anticipate many of the formal devices and color systems of Op art and color-field painting. Seen with an unprejudiced eye, the snap and sparkle of the piecework Cactus Rose-pattern quilt of 1875 can reduce a lot of modernist abstraction to visual mush...