to rest three-quarters of an hour in the morning
and three-quarters of an hour in the afternoon, with the same period for
dinner at noon in the middle of a ten-and-one-half hour day. After
Scientific Management was introduced, the girls sat at the machine only
an hour and twenty minutes at a time. They then had a twenty-minute rest,
and these intervals of work and rest were continued throughout the day by
an arrangement of spelling with "spare hands." The machines were run at a
more rapid rate than before. The girl's task was set at watching 32,000
yards in a day; and if she achieved the bonus, as she did without any
difficulty, she could earn $9 a week. The output of the tentering
machines was increased about sixty per cent.

The girls at the tentering machines praised the bonus system eagerly.
They said they could not bear to return to the former method of work;
that now the work was easier and more interesting than before, and the
payment and the hours were better. One of the "spare hands" showed me, as
a memento of a new era at tenter-hooking machines, the written slip of
paper the efficiency engineer had given to her, explaining to her how to
arrange the intervals of rest, and to start the "rest" with a different
girl on each Saturday--a five-hour day--so that the same girls would not
have three intervals of rest every Saturday.

But in another part of the factory the girls at the tentering machines
had wished to lump their rest intervals and to take them altogether in
fifty-minute periods in the middle of the morning and of the afternoon.
Here the "spare hands" intervals at the machines fell awkwardly, and they
were obliged to work for an unduly long time. The girls became exhausted
with the monotony in these longer stretches of work; and further wearied
themselves by embroidering and sewing on fancy work in the long rest
periods. Here the girls were much less contented than in the other
departments.[50]

After the cloth is dry and passed through calendering machines where men
are employed, it is run into yard lengths by a yarding machine or
"hooker." At the yarding machines the girls stand under the frame holding
the wooden arms that measure off the cloth back and forth. The workers
here used to earn $7.50 a week. They watch the machine, mark defects in
some kinds of cloth, by inserting slips of paper, stop the machine when
the material runs out, and lift the pile of measured cloth to a table
where it is taken