"Leaves Me in Poor Circumstances": New Production Methods Affect Workers

Background: In his testimony before a U.S. Senate committee investigating conditions of labor and capital in October 1883, Thomas O’Donnell (who had immigrated to the United States from England eleven years earlier) describes the introduction of ring spinning machines to replace mule spinners at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked. Ring spinners produced thread with a continuous rather than intermittent motion and could achieve higher speeds. These changes allowed the mill’s owners to employ children and reduce wages. O’Donnell describes the sharp decline in his family’s living standards that followed.

They are doing away with a great deal of mule-spinning there and putting in ring-spinning, and for that reason it takes a good deal of small help to run this ring work, and it throws the men out of work ...There are so many men in the city to work, and whoever has a boy can have work, and whoever has no boy stands no chance. Probably he may have a few months of work in the summer time, but will be discharged in the fall. That is what leaves me in poor circumstances. Our children, of course, are very often sickly from one cause or another, on account of not having sufficient clothes, or shoes, or food, or something...

Q. How much [work] have you had within a year?
A. That would be about fifteen weeks’ work ...I got just $1.50 a day . . .

Q. That would be somewhere about $133 [in annual wages], if you had not lost any time.
A. Yes, sir.

Q. That is all you have had?
A. Yes, sir.

Q. Do you mean that yourself and wife and two children have had nothing but that for all this time?
A. That is all. I got a couple dollars' worth of coal last winter, and the wood I picked up myself. I goes around with a shovel and picks up clams and wood.

Q. What do you do with the clams?
A. We eat them. I don’t get them to sell, but just to eat, for the family. That is the way my brother lives, too, mostly. He lives close by us.

Q. How many live in that way down there?
A. I could not count them, they are so numerous. I suppose there are one thousand down there.

Q. A thousand that live on $150 a year?
A. They live on less...

Q. How long has that been so?
A. Mostly so since I have been married.

Q. How long is that?
A. Six years this month.

Q. Why do you not go West on a farm?
A. How could I go, walk it?

Source: U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Report on the Relations Between Labor and Capital, Vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 451–457.