There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as this with not more than two hours’ work to his credit—­which meant about thirty-five cents.  There were many days when the total was less than half an hour, and others when there was none at all.  The general average was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week; and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing bed till one o’clock, or perhaps even three or four o’clock, in the afternoon.  Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve or one o’clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper.  The men were at the mercy of the cattle.  Perhaps the buyers would be holding off for better prices—­if they could scare the shippers into thinking that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.  For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much above the market price—­and you were not allowed to bring your own fodder!  Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day, now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day they were bought.  There was no use kicking about this—­there had been one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance of its ever being altered.  And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till nearly one o’clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the killing bed at seven o’clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst.  For after all the hard work a man did, he was paid for only part of it.  Jurgis had once been among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating; and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity.  One of the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the balance of the hour—­he was not allowed to stand round and wait.  And on the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that—­though often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before the whistle.  And this same custom they carried over to the end of the day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour—­for “broken time.”  A man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out the hour, there was no pay for him.  Thus the end of every day was a sort of lottery—­a struggle, all but breaking into open war between the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and the latter trying to stretch it out.  Jurgis blamed the bosses for this, though the truth to be told it