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casual labor used always to be hired through employment offices, and a big employment office would always charge something to assemble men to work on the railroads.

So this paying the hiring boss is not new and it is not necessarily scandalous. Now, it can be abused. In San Francisco there probably was a tipping of the hiring boss by some of the longshoremen, but it was not an excessive fee that they paid him. In many cases the better companies, like the Moore-McCormack Line and like the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company, had their own hiring bosses and did not permit him to accept any fees whatsoever from the men that they hired, because they wanted discriminatory hiring. They claimed, of course, that they were hiring for efficiency, and to a very large extent they were. The ones who had a good scheme of hiring got probably the most efficient workers, and got quicker and better loading and stowing.

Stowing in longshoreman's work is a very highly skilled operation. You can't take Tom, Dick and Harry for that. There have to be men employed who know how. The hiring boss performs a very real function in supervising and being responsible for that stowing, that proper loading and unloading of a ship.

However, the increase of the “sling-loads,” both