Omaha daily bee., 1888-10-06
HANDLING MEN IN LOTS,
The Business of Furnishing Gangs Of
LabOrers to EmpIoYers.


Milwaukee Sentinel: enclosed find
order for pass for 100 men from Milwau-
| kee to Hurley. Send in twenty and
twenty-five lots. Send anything except
German"
Can you send us $50 men at once?
No Irish unless you know them"
Some of the employment agencies on
the east side receive letters and tele-
grams like the above every day. Some
idea of the magnitude of the business
| may be gained from the fact that last
year this agency supplied $500 men to
| applicants for unskilled laborers. Thus
| far this season it has supplied 1900
men.
II have little trouble in getting
| men, said the manager the other day.
81 make it a rule to get my orders first
| and then advertise for the men. / am
kept pretty busy as you may see from
these letters and kilograms. I will send
forty Italians to the Hurley mines on
Monday and Tuesday. Twenty-six go
out tonight to two different places in
the northern part of the state"
''What wages do such men command?"
well, day laborers get $l.75 wheel
scrapers and graders get $l.75 a day,
while in railroad work from 16 to 20
cents cubic foot is paid for what is
called station work, and the men usually
put in long hours on it. | think
they average from twenty-eight to
thirty feet day. One dollar q cord is
paid for cutting wood. Swedes always
prefer piece work, and they will do an
astonishing amount of work in day.
Sometimes they begin their labors be-
fore daylight. There is great differ
ence in the manner OF the various ma
tionalities among laborers. Take the
Italians, for instance; they invariably
go in gangs. One is always looked up
to as leader and he is expected to do
all correspondence, arrange for trans
portation and so forth. They prefer to
do their own cooking, and can live on
gangs of Italians invariably defraud the
mon in various ways, but they seem to
escape detection. The Italians great
ambition is to make money enough to
go back to Italy we'll heeled. They
have their bankers in New York, and
send their savings there little by little.
The Italians are almost the only ones
who will pay their own railroad fares;
others will use almost every possible
effort to get their transportation paid
for Them"
"Where do you send men?"
"All over Wisconsin, Minnesota and
HOTblcTH uiu oCho IuitC a
number south on the government works,
but the interstate commerce law inter
ferred by raising the price of tickets
four.fold. I handle the men over and
over again. When the gangs are about
through their jobs, their leaders write
me asking if any orders for men are
in"
There are risks in your business, of
course?'
Eyes, I have to be careful. For
awhile the men had habit of borrow
ing money OF me and giving me an Or
der on the salaries to come. | had to
shut down on it, as some OF them had a
practice of changing their names when
they got to their work, and thus beat
ing me out of my loan. The men them
selves often defraud each other. Those
| sent south from here gave sealed en-
velopes containing an order for their
tickets on Chicago firm. By giving
bonds was enabled to do this. Well,
some OF the men would buy orders for
tickets to Cairo from me and then on
the train to Chicago would try to ex-
change envelopes with those going to
New Orleans. They would pretend to
compare envelopes and then make
secret exchange.