ask him a question.

So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis' faith
in things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was hunting
a job--and it was yet wider when he finally got it. For one evening the
old man came home in a great state of excitement, with the tale that he
had been approached by a man in one of the corridors of the pickle rooms
of Durham's, and asked what he would pay to get a job. He had not
known what to make of this at first; but the man had gone on with
matter-of-fact frankness to say that he could get him a job, provided
that he were willing to pay one-third of his wages for it. Was he a
boss? Antanas had asked; to which the man had replied that that was
nobody's business, but that he could do what he said.

Jurgis had made some friends by this time, and he sought one of them and
asked what this meant. The friend, who was named Tamoszius Kuszleika,
was a sharp little man who folded hides on the killing beds, and he
listened to what Jurgis had to say without seeming at all surprised.
They were common enough, he said, such cases of petty graft. It was
simply some boss who proposed to add a little to his income. After
Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply
honeycombed with rottenness of that sort--the bosses grafted off the
men, and they grafted off each other; and some day the superintendent
would find out about the boss, and then he would graft off the boss.
Warming to the subject, Tamoszius went on to explain the situation. Here
was Durham's, for instance, owned by a man who was trying to make as
much money out of it as he could, and did not care in the least how he
did it; and underneath him, ranged in ranks and grades like an army,
were managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the
man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as