The Connecticut labor news., 1923-09-01
GREAT LINE OF BUNK" IS HANDED ~...s@-
 OUT ABOUT PLAINFIEID MILL TOWN
Eastern Connecticut Village Lened An Eym By New York Writer in Style That Would Make a Horse Laugh Even If 1t
 Didn't Know the Town.

men who clean up the yards about the factories and cut the grass-to from $45 to $50 week for the most highly skilled operatives. A great deal of the work is piece work, this being always so in the case of the most skillful operatives.
 The operatives at the Lawton Mills are carefully selected When they ap- ply for work more is taken into con sideration than their skill. The per |sonal equation is considered and the man or woman who shows indiffer- |ence to a high standard of living and to whom cleanliness and good be- havior are matters of no importance will not be able to find work in the mills. The employees are all Amer jeans, French, English, Scotch and Irish Many of the French are Canadians by birth who have previ- ously lived in other New England industrial centers.
 Then there is the Community House, which cost the company $I35,- 900 to put up handsome building with a clock which chimes the hours beginning with 5 o'clock in the morning but softens the call to labor by a chime which rings out musical ly just before the hour. This is a characteristic idea of the community. No place to spend your money in Plainfeld,' one employe said rather sadly, "only four movies a week. We
 might as we'll save"
 But he was one of the few com lplainers, and if ordinary diversions, such as cost money and keep people out late at night, are few in Plain field there IS endless entertainment in the Community Association to which anybody may belong by paying s a year-whether he IS a mill operative or not.
 work ((and many of them don't want
 to but have to) she can put her infant in the nursery or her older children in the kindergarten and be quite sure they will be we'll taken care of by ex- pert nurses. There is other welfare work connected with the mills, all ex- cellent in character and notable for the effort that IS made to keep 1t in the hands of the workers and free from the spirit of patronage.
 1t was Harold Lawton of Boston, who died several years ago, who founded the Lawton mills and whose name IS commemorated in the Inn. To him is attributed the idea of mak- ing the Plainfeld mills development beautiful by spreading 1t out over a mide area with plenty of space for trees, grass and flowers in between To the advantage of the admixture of old houses, which prevents the mon- otony that mars some industrial vil- lages, even when they are we'll built, is added the beauty of the lay of the land which makes the village a series of green terraces.
 That certainly is enough to make Charlie Williams and his fellow mill workers laugh and it's only aboiIt half the rot that was published about this ideal village There Is an old saying that Republic are ungrateful, but it's safe to bet dollars to dough- nuts that the Sun and Globe repre- sentative who pulled over that bun combe was we'll taken care of-not by the community but by the mill owners Such an advertisement couldn't be bought in the regular channels to say nothing of landing it on the first page of big newspaper But the biggest suckers anyhow are admittedly in New York for all their there.