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:
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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."