> Cigar factory
> workers had books read to them at work, though, and the tradition has
> been kept up in Cuba:
Speaking of cigars, this is from _The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860 - 1876_ by Daniel E. Sutherland (NY, 1989), pp. 159 - 162, part of the (for the most part) excellent "Everyday Life in America Series," which Harpers used to publish and has now been taken over by some university press. The "cigar molds" spoken of in the text are simply wooden boards with cigar-shaped indentations in them that are pressed together. They are often found in museum collections now, and few people are able to identify them for what they are.
Jacob Conrad
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The world of artisans and craftsmen was disappearing by the 1870s. Mechanization did not extend much beyond the textile industry, and the evolution of other industries into more modern stages of development advanced unevenly and sporadically over the next several decades. Most workers still used hand tools. Yet many craftsmen found themselves competing against numbers as well as machines. Armies of "factory craftsmen" packed into shops and warehouses, divided old crafts into highly specialized but unskilled steps. ...
Tens of thousands of cigar makers experienced a similar threat. A wartime tax that benfited large producers soon pushed cigar making out of small shops, where individual craftsmen had purchased the tobacco, made the cigars, and sold them to customers, into factory production. ... Then, in the late 1860s, came the hated "molds," small presses used to shape cigars in the "mold and filler system." The molds allowed even unskilled workers to become "cigar makers." The resulting product was clearly inferior to the hand-wrapped variety, but the volume of production and low labor costs persuaded most manufacturers to scrap factory production in favor of "tenement" work. "The manufacturers bought or rented a block of apartments," explained one disgruntled worker, "and subrented the apartments to [unskilled] cigar makers who with their families lived and worked in three or four rooms." Cigar makers bought their supplies from the manufacturer, furnished their own tools, and received "a small wage for completed work sometimes in scrip or in supplies from the company store on the ground floor." It was a return to the old putting-out system, organized along the lines of a company town. It was also a "degrading" system, insisted one worker, "that killed craft skill and demoralized the industry."