With so much exhausting work behind us, it was a great consolation to be paid our joint harvest wages. After receiving our pay, as we wandered back toward our small shack, right past the fields of stubble where we had shed so much sweat, we pressed the beautiful hard thalers into our pockets with a certain sense of satisfaction.
Right after the harvest weeks, I began working at a threshing machine.
[ . . . ]
Not every farm [in the Ditmarsch] has its own threshing machine, as they do on the large landed estates. And there are no machines owned by cooperatives, as there are in other places. Instead, the owners of threshing machines are independent entrepreneurs who buy their own machines for either cash or installments. They also hire the necessary crews on their own, traveling with their manned “gun” from farm to farm to fulfill their threshing contracts.
[ . . . ]
The threshing work itself is one of the most exhausting and grueling types of labor one can imagine. Slaving away, slaving away for hours on end – that’s it in a nutshell. The more hours of work per day, the sooner the farmer can get rid of the machine again, and the fewer meals he has to provide for the laborers. The more hours the machine operator works, the more grain he can thresh, and the higher his profit. The more hours the workers put in, the higher their weekly earnings. Works starts at 4 a.m. at the latest; quite often, however, it begins as early as 3 a.m. and continues all day long, at least until 8 o’clock at night; frequently though, the drudgery does not stop until 9 or 10 p.m., quite often even 11 or 12 at night. The breaks last only as long as it takes to eat a hasty meal, and they total only one hour a day, including the breaks for greasing the machine. Supper is no cause for a break at all, since it is eaten only when the day’s work has ended, no matter how late it may get.
During work you have to “go all out,” moving just as fast as the “slave driver’s box” can swallow the grain. Man has to keep up with the machine, becoming its slave, being transformed into one of its components. Just imagine the incessant howling and rattling of the threshing drum, and the virtually impenetrable dust it generates, and you can easily fathom what this kind of machine threshing means for the human worker. The dust sticks to the laborers in sheets, almost half an inch thick, especially when the grain has been rained on a lot; often, they can barely see out of sore and swollen eyes. Likewise, the nose becomes virtually blocked from inhaling enormous amounts of dust, and if you spit, big gobs of black slime come out of your throat. The dust sticks to skin that is sweaty from backbreaking work; it causes disagreeable itching and burning, making you feel as though your entire body were covered with ants.
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