Word: pieceworkers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heavyset black woman who did piecework and was barely able to survive financially under the Batista regime, does not suffer for lack of some freedoms. Today she is a singer in a cultural group, secretary of the union where she works, and a member of the Federation for Cuban Women. With the availability of day care and a guaranteed job, she says the Cuban women have more "liberty" than ever before...
Freelancing has never been the gentlest of callings. Samuel Johnson in his 1755 Dictionary immortalized the ink-stained wretches who lived on London's Grub Street turning out literary piecework. "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," said Dr. Johnson, who nonetheless spent most of his life in poverty. In the platinum age of periodicals, roughly from the 1920s to the 1950s, it was possible for man to live by word alone, provided he sold it to a magazine. The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Collier's, LIFE, Woman's Home Companion and Coronet routinely...
...moment in human transactions, that propelled his work for the next three decades. It transcended formalism without damaging his aesthetic sense. Any event is an infinitely divisible string of moments, and Hine had an uncanny eye for the right one. An Italian woman, carrying a floppy bundle of sweatshop piecework on her head through the Lower East Side, is transformed into an icon of labor - solid as a young Mother Courage, but turned into a caryatid by the iron lamp post that rises above her head, exactly on the axis of her body...
...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...
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...