So, briefly, you don't work every minute of those twelve hours. Besides the delays that arise out of the necessities of furnace work, men automatically scale down their pace when they know there are twelve or fourteen hours ahead of them: seven or eight hours of actual swinging of sledge or shovel. But some of the extra time is utterly necessary for immediate recuperation after a heavy job or a hot one. And none of the spells, it should be noticed, are "your own time." You're under strain for twelve hours. Nerves and will are the Company's the whole shift--whether the muscles in your hands and feet move or are still. And the existence of the long day makes possible unrelieved labor, hard and hot, the whole turn of fourteen hours, if there is need for it. Inseparable from the twelve-hour day in the open-hearth where I worked were the twenty-four-hour shift, and the seven-day week. What does it mean to make steel twenty-four hours a day? to your muscles, to your thoughts, to the production of steel? Sunday morning, at 7.00, you begin work. There is an hour off at 5.00 P.M. Front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall, front-wall, fix spout, tap, back-wall--the second half is something of a game between time and fatigue. For a hot back-wall, or sledging out a bad tap-hole, may as easily come upon you at 5.00 or 6.00 of the second morning as at noon of the first day. I've worked "long turns" that I didn't mind overmuch, and others that ground my soul. If you are young and fit, you can work a steady twenty-four hours at a hot and heavy job and "get away." But in my judgment even the strongest of the Czechoslovaks, Serbs, and Croats who work the American steel-furnaces cannot keep it up, twice a month, year after year, without substantial physical injury. "A man got to watch himself, this job, tear himself down," the second-helper on Seven told me. He had worked at it six years, and was feeling the effects in nerves and weight. Let me make an exception: one Hunky, a helper on Number 4, was famed for having "a back like a mule." He could, I am sure, work seven twenty-four-hour shifts _a week_ with comfort. But for all other men, with the exception of Joe, the long turn is an unreasonable overtaxing of human strength. Lastly, the effort of will, the "nerve" that the thing calls for in the last hours before that second morning, is too heavy a demand, for any wages whatever. The third-helper on Number 8 took, I think, a reasonable attitude when he said: "To hell with the money, no can live!"