JF Ptak Science Books                                   

[Source; http://www.ndl.go.jp/exposition/e/data/L/158-002l.html]

This is another in an uncertain series on Found Poetry (a cousin to the Found Book Art series), with this fragment found in the history of technology/labor relations category.  IT seems that in the early and problematic history of the remarkable Eiffel Tower, M. Gustave Eiffel had a few problems with his workers constructing the tower.  Soon after a three-day negotiating session ending the strike of September 19, 1888 (in which workers asked for a four-cent per hour pay increase and where Eiffel slowly met their demands but parsing the raise out one center per month for four months) there was another attempt at a strike, just before Christmas of the same year.  One of the demands floated by Eiffel et C^ie was that the workers engaged in the construction at greater heights should receive a higher pay, what with the rain and wind and the possibility of a fatal trip-and-fall.  Eiffel responded with the following efficient answer, set here to some sort of metre:

The professional risks remained

the same

whether a man fell from 40 meters

or from 300 meters,

the results were the same–

certain death.¹

This was a winning argument, and kept his workers working without compensation for working at a higher height,  and the tower’s completion on schedule. 

Notes:

1.  Eiffel’s Tower, by Jill Jones, Penguin, 2009, pg 49.