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Piecework in Lumber Handling 



Hardwood Record recently printed an artii-le on the subject of 

 handling lumber on the piecework basis. This system is of such 

 immediate interest, and the question as to whether it is worth 

 while or practicable in a given yard or mill is being so generally 

 discussed that definite figures showing the experience of a large 

 concern which has the plan in use may not be out of place. 



It should first be emphasized that • until a proper system of 

 cost accounting is in use in the lumber yard, the proprietor of the 

 business is not in a position to discuss the subject of the institu- 

 tion of piecework intelligently. That is to say, if you are manu- 

 facturing hardwoods, and are grouping mill expense, yard expense 

 and office and selling expense together, so that at the end of the 

 year you know merely how much it has cost you to move a 

 thousand feet of lumber from the saw to the buyer, you cannot 

 determine with any degree of accuracy what the result of trying 

 out the piecework system will be. 



The plan of dividing, on the books, each section oi the business 

 into a department, and then figuring the individual expenses in- 

 volved against it, is the only satisfactory one. In addition it will 

 give the lumberman the specific information which will enable him 

 to determine whether he 11 paying too much or too little for his 

 handling, and whether he would be likely to show an improve- 

 ment in this end of the business by changing from the per 

 diem to the piecework basis of paying his men. 



Then, too, the yardman is justified in insisting on the piecework 

 system saving him money; otherwise there is no need of his adopt- 

 ing it. In other words, he cannot know how big a price to pay 

 for each thousand feet of lumber handled unless he knows what it 

 costs him on the per diem basis, and he cannot know that unless 

 he keeps accurate tab on his expenses and figures out to the cent 

 what each operation is costing him. Each inspector ought to be 

 tabulated, on the basis of the amount of lumber handled, the 

 number of men working under him and the exact operations per- 

 fortned. The figures ought to show how many feet were moved 

 from the mill to the pile; ,how much from the pile to the car; how 

 much from the car to the truck; and how much from the truck to 

 the pile. The number of men used in each division of the work, 

 together with the salary of the inspector, indicates the amount 

 paid for the work, and after figures covering a sufficient length 

 of time, including various kinds of weather and various kinds 

 and thicknesses of lumber, have been compiled, the lumberman is 

 in a position to determine "where he is at" and whether he can 

 make money by adopting the new system. 



After he has found out how much he is spending, and decides 

 that he wants to cut off some of the expense, he is in a position 

 to fix a figure which will force the men in the yard to do more 

 work in order to get the returns they have been securing on the 

 per diem plan. It is unnecessary to sympathize with the yard 

 crews at this point, for experience has proved that they are per- 

 fectly able to take care of themselves and that they usually 

 manage to shove the notch up so high that they come out of the 

 game a good deal better oi? than they were before. This sounds 

 a good deal like a lumbermen 's Utopia, but it is nevertheless true. 

 It simply results in each man speeding up his operations, and 

 every man in a crew is so insistent on more work being done that 

 there is no opportunity for the lazy individual to "soldier." As 

 the usual plan is to give the same amount to each member of a 

 crew, based on the amount of, work performed, one man has no 

 opportunity to lag, but is forced to hold up his end with the rest 

 of the crew with which lie is working. 



A big hardwood manufacturer, who also rehandles a lot of lum 

 ber, w^s paving his men $10 a week, or $1.66 a day. He figured 

 out, on the basis of the amount of lumber handled, that it was cost- 

 ing him from eighty to eighty-five cents a thousand to move lumber. 

 That was not the total handling charge, of course, but the cost of 

 taking it from the saw and piling it. He figured that this cost was 



excessive, and by comparisons with some of the other lumbermen 

 in his community, he found that his expenses at this end of the 

 business were lop-sided. He accordingly announced that he would 

 pay forty-four cents a thousand thereafter for performing the work. 



The men in the yard were not acquainted with the figures, and 

 did not know that on the basis of their piast performances they 

 had been getting almost twice that amount, but wei'e told, how- 

 ever, that by "getting a move on" they would be able to make 

 as much or more than they had been making. They started in 

 on the work with a determination not to let their pay-envelopes 

 get any thinner because of the changed u.ode of payment, and 

 this is the result: 



Instead of earning $1.66 a day, they are averaging $2; some 

 days, when conditions are not favorable, they fall as low as $1.50, 

 but on other occasions, and in fact most of the time, they run 

 well above the $2 mark. The average day-in-and-day-out scale i;^ 

 probably $2.2.5. That is, the men are now making $13.50 a week, 

 on an average, compared with $10 previously, an increase of about 

 thirty-three and one-third per cent. On the other hand, the 

 lumberman is getting his work done for almost fifty per cent less 

 than he did before. 



That is a graphic and credible demonstration of what the system 

 does. There is nothing remarkable about it, for it is simply 

 putting into operation the well-known psychological law that man 

 strives in order to get immediate and substantial reward, and 

 relaxes his effort when no extra recompense results. When the 

 yard man knows that he will get his dollar-sixty-si-x per every 

 Saturday night, he jjlugs along, doing enough work to hold his 

 job and keep things moving, and lets the man in the office worry 

 about the increase in handling costs. When he is put on a basis of 

 pay which demands that he perform a certain amount of labor 

 in order to get a given return, he becomes a partner of the 

 employer, as it were, and it is to his interest to reduce the time 

 involved in handling, whereas before this was the problem of the 

 boss only. 



The plan of profit-sharing and bonus-giving has this idea — the 

 employe sees the prosperity of the employer in the same terms as 

 that of himself. In the lumberyard, under the old s.ystem, the 

 welfare of the man demanded getting as much for as little work 

 as possible; under the new plan it means doing as much work in a 

 given time as possible. If it were possible to get a man to go 

 at top speed without the incentive furnished by higher pay for 

 increased efforts, the piecework plan would not be necessary; as it 

 is there does not appear to be any other satisfactory way of getting; 

 around this requirement. 



The piecework plan worked just as eft'eetively in rehandliug lum 

 ber, in the experience of the manufacturer who has been referred 

 to, as it did in the case of stock moved from the saw of his own 

 mill. He found that a seale of payment which gave the yardmen 

 fifty cents a thousand for taking lumber from the pile and loading 

 into cars was economical from his standpoint and satisfactory 

 from theirs. For taking lumber from the ear and distributing on 

 trucks, the scale is thirty cents a thousand; for bulking from 

 trucks, twenty-five cents a thousand, and for stacking dry lumber 

 from trucks, forty cents a thousand. 



The same scale is used for all widths and thicknesses of lumber, 

 and while there is undoubtedly a difference in the labor and time 

 required to pile the various dimensions, the proposition is aver- 

 aged in the course of a day, as the crews get to handle pretty 

 nearly the entire range of the yard's lumber. Naturally more 

 lumber can be piled when the planks are wide and thick than 

 when they are narrow and thin. If a great deal of the latter stock 

 were piled, probably a premium would have to be paid in order 

 to balance with the price paid for piling the other dimensions. 



An interesting comparison was made by this lumberman with 

 another in the same business not long ago. The latter uses the 

 old per diem system of payment, and found that under this jdan 



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