The twelve-hour day makes the life of the steel-worker different in a far-reaching manner from the life of the majority of his fellow workers. It makes the industry different in its fundamental organization and temper from an eight-hour or a ten-hour industry. It transforms the community where men live whose day is twelve hours long. "What is it really like? How much of the time do you actually work? Are you 'all in' when you wash up in the morning after the shift, and go home?" To tell it exactly, if I can: You go into the mill, a little before six, and get into your mill clothes. There may be the call for a front-wall while you're buttoning your shirt. You pick up a shovel and run into a spell of fairly hot work for three quarters of an hour. On another day you may loaf for fifteen minutes before anything starts. After front-wall, you take a drink from the water fountain behind your furnace, and wash your arms, which have got burned a little, and your face, in a trough of water. A "clean-up" job follows in front of the furnace, which means shoveling slag--still hot--down the slag-hole for ten minutes, and loading cold pieces of scrap, which have fallen on the floor, into a box. Pieces weigh twenty, forty, one hundred pounds; anything over, you hook up with a chain and let the overhead crane move it. This for a half-hour. Suddenly someone says, "Back-wall!" Lasts say thirty or forty minutes. It's hot--temperature, 150° or 160° when you throw your shovelful in--and lively work for back and legs. Everybody douses his face and hands with water to cool off, and sits down for twenty minutes. Making back-wall has affinities with stoking, only it's hotter while it lasts. The day is made up of jobs like these--shoveling manganese at tap-time, "making bottom," bringing up mud and dolomite in wheelbarrows for fixing the spout, hauling fallen bricks out of the furnace. They vary in arduousness: all would be marked "heavy work" in a job specification. They are all "hard-handed" jobs, and some of them done in high heat. Between, run intervals from a few minutes to two or three hours. From some of the jobs it is imperative to catch your breath for a spell. Sledging a hard spout, making a hot back-wall, knocks a gang out temporarily--for fifteen or twenty minutes; no man could do those things steadily without interruption. It is like the crew resting on their oars after a sprint. Again, some of the spells between are just leisure; the furnace doesn't need attention, that's all; you're on guard, waiting for action. Furnace work has similarities with cooking; any cook tends his stove part of the time by watching to see that nothing burns up. I have had two or three hours' sleep on a "good" night-shift; two or three "easy" days will follow one another. Then there will come steady labor for nearly the whole fourteen hours, for a week.