Code 2623 applies to employers engaged in tanning hides, patent or enamel leather manufacturing, leather splitting, finishing, or dressing, dehairing animal hides, tanning, or wool pulling.

Tanning involves receiving cured or raw hides from which hair is removed by soaking skin in lime and other chemicals and then scraping with dehairing and wet shaving machines, or beamster machines.  The extraneous fat and tissue are removed from the inner side of the skins by machines with rubber rollers and a shaft to which spiral knives are attached.  The hides are tumbled in solvent filled drums to remove the fats and oils.  The tanned hides are split, dyed and finished.     

The clean skins are tanned by soaking them in a solution of either vegetable tanning (from bark or other vegetation), common salt solution or chromate of soda and acid for mineral tanning (also known as chrome tanning).  Impregnating with oils, grease or waxes (fat liquoring or stuffing) is also part of the tanning process.  This is done after hides have been run through wringers to squeeze out chemicals and hung on racks to dry.

Operations such as boarding, staking, toggling, buffing, abrading and/or splitting are also contemplated under this classification.

If the employer also finishes (dresses) the leather, such finishing operations are inclusive under this classification. 

Tanned hides are split into desired thickness, degreased, given a coat of linseed oil and lampblack thinned with naphtha, and again coated with a mixture of linseed oil and pyroxylin.  Stock is then backed and rubbed down with pumice.  The coating (adding varnish and coloring), baking, and rubbing down may be repeated several times.

There are three methods of pulling wool from pelts.  The simplest is “sweating” the pelts until wool is loosened to be pulled by hand or machine.  This method may damage the valuable skin.  The lime process involves the painting of the flesh side of the pelts with lime.  This loosens the wool, but it may cause skin damage and have a negative effect on the dyeing quality of the wool.  The depilatory process differs from the lime process in that a solution of sodium sulfate, sulphuric acid, and oyster shells is used instead of lime.