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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Gladys and Glenn Hollar, February 26, 1980. Interview H-0128. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Laws regulate working hours

The Hollars remember a fifty-five hour work week at the glove factory, ten hours per day plus five hours on Saturdays, until the National Recovery Administration set maximum hours regulations that eliminated weekend work at the plant. Glenn worked a variety of jobs around the mill, shoveling coal or loading and unloading. Here he briefly describes hauling waste.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Gladys and Glenn Hollar, February 26, 1980. Interview H-0128. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JACQUELYN HALL:
Did Mrs. Shuford ever do anything to help the hands out, like when people were having problems? Somebody told me about her bringing coffee down to people when they were working at night.
GLENN HOLLAR:
Yes, I think theydid bring coffee over there to some of them that worked nights. Yes, they were good.
GLADYS IRENE MOSER HOLLAR:
Back then we worked ten hours a day every day.
GLENN HOLLAR:
Five hours on Saturday morning. Fifty-five hours a week. And you had to work, too; if you didn't… Me and another fellow, , asked him about a raise one time. That's when we was hauling dirt. He jumped in about a raise, and he just looked at us and said, "If you're not satisfied with what you're getting, hunt for another job." He knew you couldn't find one, and we knew it, too.
JACQUELYN HALL:
When did you quit working on Saturdays?
GLENN HOLLAR:
That was after the NRA come in, and they cut down to make a forty-hour work week. But I used to work fifty-five, work a ten-hour day, and then go back. Especially in the fall of the year. Go home and eat supper and go back and work till nine or ten o'clock and get out your fall orders, ship them out. Just three of us, and we couldn't do it through the daytime; we didn't have time when all the mill was there and all the hands. So we'd go back two or three hours a night and mark up orders and next morning load them on the truck. He didn't have trucks to take that; we had to haul them out on a two-horse wagon. My uncle would come out there, and he had a team of horses. Load a wagon and haul the waste and load it in boxcars. We drove it up on the old dirty floor. Oh, you could hardly get your breath, the dust, you can imagine. But it didn't hurt nobody; all through it all, and we're in pretty good shape. Some of them was talking, so I said, "Well, I started before I was sixteen, and I worked until I was sixty-five. I thought I'd worked long enough at public work."