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- Herausgeber: Science & Technology Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage by A. Cree and W. H. Beveridge is a seminal work that delves into the harsh realities of early 20th-century labor conditions in Britain, focusing on the phenomenon of sweated industries—sectors characterized by low wages, long hours, and poor working environments, particularly for women and unskilled workers. Drawing on detailed investigations, personal testimonies, and statistical data, the authors expose the exploitation and poverty endured by workers in trades such as tailoring, box-making, and chain-making. The book critically examines the economic and social factors that perpetuate these conditions, including the lack of effective labor organization, the oversupply of labor, and the inadequacy of existing legal protections. Central to the book is the discussion of the minimum wage as a potential remedy for industrial sweating. The authors analyze the origins and development of the minimum wage movement, referencing contemporary legislative experiments in Australia and New Zealand, and assess the feasibility and potential impact of similar reforms in Britain. They explore the arguments for and against statutory wage regulation, considering its implications for employers, employees, and the broader economy. Through a combination of empirical research and policy analysis, Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage advocates for state intervention to establish fair wages and improve working conditions, while also acknowledging the complexities and challenges involved in implementing such reforms. Rich in historical detail and social insight, the book provides a vivid portrait of the struggles faced by the working poor and the early efforts to secure economic justice through legislative action. It remains a valuable resource for understanding the origins of labor reform and the ongoing debates surrounding wage regulation and workers’ rights.
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“The whole spectacle of poverty indeed is incredible. As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes—even when you have it before your eyes—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the sentimentalist.”
“The system which produces the happiest moral effects will be found most beneficial to the interest of the individual and the common weal; upon this basis the science of political economy will rest at last, when the ponderous volumes with which it has been overlaid shall have sunk by their own weight into the dead sea of oblivion.”
SWEATED INDUSTRYAND THE MINIMUM WAGE
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION
ix
PART I
SWEATED INDUSTRY
CHAPTER I
THE POOREST OF ALL
1
CHAPTER II
WORKERS IN FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS
23
CHAPTER III
SHOP ASSISTANTS, CLERKS, WAITRESSES
48
CHAPTER IV
TRAFFIC WORKERS
75
CHAPTER V
WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN
104
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY
132
CHAPTER VII
HOW UNDERPAYMENT COMES
144
CHAPTER VIII
LABOUR AS A COMMODITY
161
PART II
THE MINIMUM WAGE
CHAPTER I
EXISTING CHECKS
175
CHAPTER II
SUPPOSED REMEDIES
195
CHAPTER III
THE LESSONS OF THE COTTON TRADE
212
CHAPTER IV
THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE
230
CHAPTER V
FOREIGN COMPETITION
260
CHAPTER VI
GAIN TO THE NATION
272
INDEX
277
INTRODUCTION
The sweating evil has long engaged the attention of social and industrial workers in many fields. Some have approached it from the philanthropic point of view, and have sought a remedy in voluntary means such as consumers’ leagues; others have approached it from the point of view of industrial organisation, and have sought to deal with it by the extension of trade unionism and legislative action. So far all efforts alike have been futile. The evil is too wide-spread and too remote in its operations to be touched by charity. It involves a class too forlorn, too isolated, and too impoverished to be reached by trade unionism. The cry of the victims has hitherto been too feeble and hopeless to command the attention of Parliament.
This has happily been changed by the object lesson presented by the Sweating Exhibition organised by The Daily News last May and opened by the Princess Henry of Battenberg. That exhibition, held right in the heart of West London, visited by thirty thousand people, and commanding the attention of all serious students of our social system, brought the question instantly into the sphere of practical politics. Sweating was no longer a vague term concerning some more or less apocryphal wrongs. It was made real and actual. It was seen to be not an excrescence on the body politic, having no bearing upon its general health, but an organic disease. It was seen to be an evil not simply affecting some obscure lives in the mean streets of our cities, but an evil that wasted the whole industrial physique—a running sore that affected the entire fabric of society, a morass exhaling a miasma that poisoned the healthy elements of industry. Its spectre haunted not only the fever dens of the slums, but was present in the most costly garments of the most fashionable West-End shops, in the rich embroideries of the wealthy as well as in the household matchbox. Well dressed people who came with the comfortable belief that sweated goods were necessarily cheap goods realised with a shock that cheapness and sweating had no intrinsic relationship. They saw with more or less clearness that sweating reduced to its true meaning was not the oppression of the poor in the interests of the poor; but the effort of an uneconomic system to extract from the misery of the unorganised, ill-equipped worker the equivalent of organised, well paid and well equipped industry. It was the competition of flesh and blood with machinery. Sweating, it was seen, did not make goods cheap: it only made human life cheap. It did not benefit the consumer: it only benefited the man who set the slum to compete with the workshop, the man or more often the woman and the child to compete with the machine. It was seen that the evil lowered the whole vitality of industry. It preyed upon the defenceless and used them to depress the general industrial standard. It had no chance in a highly organised community, and found its victims in the hopeless and the broken, among the poor widows of the courts and alleys and all those who had lost heart in the battle and were sunk into the lowest depths of the social abyss.
Not the least disquieting revelation that emerged from the Exhibition and the lectures which accompanied it was the bearing of the evil upon our collective life. The sweated reacted upon the community. It was seen that they not only lowered the industrial standard: they were a menace to the communal good, a drain upon the resources of society in the interests of the people who exploited them. They provided a reserve of incredibly cheap labour which the community had to subsidise from the rates. Having no power of combination or resistance they were beaten down by the employer far below the barest means of subsistence, and the task of keeping them alive was left to the public. This was the case even when they were employed; but in many instances the work was seasonal and subject to long periods of unemployment. Then their whole existence depended upon a mingling of pauperism and charity until a fresh demand for their labour sprang up, and the public purse was relieved of some portion of the task of keeping them alive. It was seen, in short, that sweating meant the maintenance out of the rates of a vast mass of low class labour which enabled the sweater to compete successfully with high class labour. Many of the complaints of high rates in the East End for example came from the very firms whose high dividends were actually being paid out of the rates in the form of poor relief to the underpaid worker.
The bearing of the evil upon child life was made equally clear. It was not merely that the children of the sweated were ill-nourished and ill-clad. They were made to take their share in the incessant struggle for food. They too became competitors with healthy industry, and by increasing the family output actually served to still further lower the starvation wages. For in this social morass there is no minimum. The excess of labour is so great and the demand for food so urgent that the tendency is constantly downward. It is a fight for bread in which the sweater plays off the dire misery of these against the deeper misery of those. And in this struggle the child life of the slums is used as a counter in the game and a new generation of the physically unfit and socially dead springs up like rank weeds to choke the hope and effort of the future.
Finally, it was made clear that sweating is the enemy of the development of industry. It makes it possible to extract from the necessities of the poor what ought to be extracted from highly developed processes. It checks the natural evolution of commercial effort by an uneconomic substitute. Mr Sidney Webb states this point with much force in his “Industrial Democracy” when he says:
“We arrive, therefore, at the unexpected result that the enforcement of definite minimum conditions of employment positively stimulates the invention and adoption of new processes of manufacture. This has been repeatedly remarked by the opponents of Trade Unionism. Thus Babbage, in 1832, described in detail how the invention and adoption of new methods of forging and welding gun-barrels was directly caused by the combined insistence on better conditions of employment by all the workmen engaged in the old process. ‘In this difficulty,’ he says, ‘the contractors resorted to a mode of welding the gun-barrel according to a plan for which a patent had been taken out by them some years before the event. It had not then succeeded so well as to come into general use, in consequence of the cheapness of the usual mode of welding by hand labour, combined with some other difficulties with which the patentee had had to contend. But the stimulus produced by the combination of the workmen for this advance of wages induced him to make a few trials, and he was enabled to introduce such a facility in welding gun-barrels by roller, and such perfection in the work itself, that in all probability very few will in future be welded by hand-labour.’”
The profound impression made by the Exhibition found expression in a universal desire for action. The question one heard again and again was “What can we do? What can we do?” It was the question which the Princess of Wales asked as she passed round the stalls where the workers were engaged at their various forms of slavery. It was the question which continued like a hopeless refrain throughout the six weeks of the Exhibition. Most people came with vague ideas of the evil and went away with vaguer ideas of the remedy. Many of them were doubtless glad to forget this contact with that other forlorn world which seemed such a disquieting challenge to the splendour and luxury of the world of society. It was a painful interlude between a visit to the shops in the morning and a visit to the theatre in the evening.
The general feeling however was not one of idle curiosity, but of grave concern, and when the Exhibition closed it was felt that the public conscience once awakened must not be allowed to go to sleep again. The Exhibition had been an appeal to the individual; but all experience showed that voluntary action on the part of the individual, while worthy and desirable, would not touch the evil. Consumers’ leagues had been at work in this country and still more in America; but they had done little to reduce the vast sum of misery. If the Exhibition was to bear fruit it must be in the direction of legislative action.
The immediate outcome was the formation of the Anti-Sweating League to secure a minimum wage, and later in the year a three days’ conference, opened by the Lord Mayor and representing two millions organised workers, was held at the Guildhall. This conference, which was addressed on various aspects of the evil and its remedy by authorities like Sir Chas. Dilke, Lord Dunraven, Mr Pember Reeves, Mr Sidney Webb, Mr J. A. Hobson, Mr Bernard Wise, Miss Clementina Black and others, unanimously endorsed the programme of the League which was embodied in the Bill now before Parliament. That Bill is purely experimental. It is based upon the lines of the Victorian Wages Board system and is applied only to a certain group of trades which furnish the best field for an experiment which has become firmly established and generally operative in the Australian colony. Many authorities prefer the Arbitration system of New South Wales and New Zealand; but the difficulty in the way of the adoption of that system in this country is the opposition of the trade unions. All are agreed on the principle of the minimum wage, and the Wages Board has been accepted as the only possible legislative expression of that principle in this country. So far as can be seen, then, the Bill offers the one available remedy for an evil which all are agreed must be dealt with.
It is not necessary here to argue at length the case for the principle of the minimum wage. Those interested in the subject will find it stated in the addresses given at the Guildhall Conference and published in pamphlet form by the National Anti-Sweating League, Salisbury Square, E.C. It is forty-seven years since Ruskin shocked the economists of his time by declaring for the regulation of wages irrespective of the demand for labour.
“Perhaps one of the most curious facts in the history of human error,” he said, “is the denial by the common political economist of the possibility of thus regulating wages; while for all the important and much of the unimportant labour on the earth, wages are already so regulated.
“We do not sell our Prime-Ministership by Dutch auction; nor on the decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general advantages of simony, do we (yet) offer his diocese to the clergyman who will take the episcopacy at the lowest contract. We (we exquisite sagacity of political economy) do indeed sell commissions; but not openly, generalships; sick, we do not inquire for a physician who takes less than a guinea; litigious, we never think of reducing six-and-eightpence to four-and-sixpence; caught in a shower, we do not canvass the cabmen, to find one who values his driving at less than sixpence a mile.”
Ruskin was duly punished. The publishers closed their magazines against such revolutionary teaching, and Carlyle’s “ten thousand sparrows” chirped in one furious chorus the current equivalent for “Socialism” and “Wastrel.”
To-day the minimum wage, like so much else of Ruskin’s teaching, is a commonplace of the industrial system. No Government or municipality to-day issues a contract which does not contain a fair wages clause which is drawn up irrespective of the demand for labour, and every healthy organised industry has a fixed scale which is dependent on prices, it is true, but which is wholly independent of the demand and supply of labour. The whole teaching of modern industry is that cheap labour is dear labour, and that it is as important for successful competition to have a well equipped human instrument as to have well equipped machinery.
To take the example of the cotton trade. Sixty years ago the condition of the Lancashire trade was deplorable. It was based largely on sweated labour, including the labour of wretched little slaves drafted in groups from the workhouses, and kept alive on porridge, their compound a shed or barn on the premises. To-day there is no industry more highly organised, and no class of worker—certainly no class of female worker—more adequately paid. Trade unionism with its fixed wage has made the Lancashire cotton trade the most wonderful industrial organism in the world. Four thousand miles from its raw material, ten thousand miles from its greatest market, it yet dominates the cotton industry as completely as our shipping trade, with all its relative advantages in regard to raw material and geographical situation, dominates the shipping industry of the world. Not least important is the peace which this high state of organisation has produced in the trade. It is many years since there was a serious conflict in Lancashire.
The cotton trade in a word has had this enormous success not because labour is cheap, but because labour is dear—and good; because the human machine being kept at the highest point of perfection is the most productive instrument of its kind in the world. It has succeeded, above all, because the standard wage has removed the competition of low class, sweated labour, which is not only iniquitous in itself, but which has the effect of depreciating the whole currency of industry.
And in depreciating the currency of industry it lowers the general standard of the community. Where wages are low, there the poor rate is necessarily high, and the general trader shares in the universal impoverishment. For it must be remembered that the working classes are the bedrock of commerce. Their condition reacts immediately upon society. The money they receive comes back instantly in a fertilising stream to the grocer, the bootmaker, and the clothier. These get nothing but bad debts and insolvency from the operations of the sweater, whose poor instruments, moreover, in falling upon the public purse, still further depress the shopkeeper.
What has happened in the cotton trade may be paralleled by the experience of other trades. Wherever sweating has been eliminated by the regulation of wages, the health of the trade is established. Wherever the trade is only partly organised, as in the umbrella, the boot or the tailoring trade, the wholesome part suffers by the competition of those whose stock in trade is the misery of the unorganised poor. As an illustration of this competition I may quote the following comparison given by Miss Gertrude Tuckwell at the Guildhall Conference.
AMALGAMATED SOCIETY OF TAILORS AND TAILORESSES.
Statement of Prices as Agreed to between this Body and the London Master Tailors’ Association, and of the “Sweated” Rates for Similar Work.
Trade Union.
Non-Union.
Making Dress Coat
£1. 5s. 6d. to £1. 7s. 6d. (6d. to 7d. per hour).
10s. to 16s. (These are prices where middleman is employed —16s. rarely reached.)
Gentleman’s Frock Coat
Do.
Do.
Dress Vest
8s. to 9s. 3d.
2s. 6d.
Dress Trousers
7s. 3d. to 8s. 5d.
2s. to 4s.
Ladies’ Costume—
Pressing
With very little
2½d.
Machining
extras) 30s.
9d.
Baisting
7d.
Felling
1¼d.
——1s. 7¾d.
Ladies’ Jackets—
Pressing
1¼d.
Baisting
23s.
3½d.
Machining
4½d.
Felling
½d.
——9¾d.
Ninepence three farthings against twenty three shillings! How is it possible for honest industry to compete against this exploitation of flesh and blood subsidised by the ratepayer? It was staggering facts of this sort that induced the Guildhall Conference to go beyond the scope of its reference by passing an amendment calling for the abolition of the outworker in all trades and the provision of workshop accommodation.
Trade unionism has succeeded in regulating wages in the great industries whose operations can only be carried on on a great collective scale; but trade unionism alone is clearly unable to destroy sweating in the many industries in which the fabrication of the parts is let and sub-let until the origin of the whole is found in the dim, one-roomed tenement of the slum where the victim of the sweater carries on her tragic struggle with famine.
“Isn’t the remedy Protection?” was a question frequently heard at the lectures given at the Exhibition. Most of us would agree with Mr Bernard Shaw who, in answering such a question, said he would be ready to protect our industry against sweated competition. But the general operation of Protection would be wholly in the interest of the sweater. It would put a new premium upon his vocation. And the fact remains that sweating is more rampant in protected countries even than in our own. It was the Berlin Exhibition which suggested the Daily News Exhibition, and since that event there has been an exhibition in Philadelphia which has shown that the horrors of sweating in Protectionist America go deeper even than those in Free Trade England. And it is three of our Protectionist colonies which, realising the social menace of this trade in misery, have indicated the true path of reform. They have realised that the community must protect not only the individual but itself against a traffic which is slavery in the thinnest disguise, and which is not only cruel to the individual but destructive of honest industry and ruinous to social health. The policy which Australia has applied holds the field as the one effective remedy discovered for dealing with this appalling social evil. The victims cannot protect themselves. They are beyond the reach of organisation. In their isolation and poverty they have no defence against the raids of the conscienceless sub-contractor who is as literal a slave-driver as any who ever wielded a whip in the cotton fields, a slave-driver none the less because his whip is hunger instead of thongs.
It is the State alone which can take care of them, protect them against the rapacity of the oppressor and, in protecting them, protect itself also. For this is primarily not a problem for pity; but a duty to the commonwealth. No Society can be sound in health which has at its base this undrained morass of wretchedness—a morass which charity and the cold mercy of the Poor Law only develop and which social justice can alone drain dry.
PART I SWEATED INDUSTRY
CHAPTER ITHE POOREST OF ALL
“Sweating”—General interpretation of the term—Work in the worker’s home—Some special investigations—Characteristics of home work—Match box making—The process—The payment—History of the Jarvis family—Shirt making—Some individual cases—Paper-bag making—Some cases—Some men home workers—Racquet balls—The process—The payment—Health of home workers—The married woman and the single woman as home workers—Brushmaking—Mrs Hogg’s description—Tooth brushes—Other trades and rates of pay—Home work, underpayment, and high priced goods.
The term “sweating,” to which at one time the notion of sub-contract was attached, has gradually come to be applied to almost any method of work under which workers are extremely ill paid or extremely overworked; and the “sweater” means nowadays “the employer who cuts down wages below the level of decent subsistence, works his operatives for excessive hours, or compels them to toil under insanitary conditions.” It is in this wide general sense that the word will be employed in these pages; and the first part of this volume will be devoted to showing how wide-spread is the prevalence of sweating throughout the whole field of British industry.
Probably the most completely wretched workers in our country may be found among those who ply their toil in their own poor homes. It is by no means the case that all home work is sweated; but it is the fact that a good deal of home work, in this country and in others, exists solely because the home worker can be ground down to the lowest stage of misery. As an acute French observer writes:—
“Home work, or at least an important fraction of that industry, is in the odd condition of only surviving on account of its evils. Low pay and long hours of work are among the chief conditions of its existence.”[1] Into the conditions of women workers in this branch of industry—which, however, is by no means confined to women—the Women’s Industrial Council made an investigation, published in 1897.[2] Two inquiries were also made by Miss Irwin, in Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades; and particulars as to the home work of women in Birmingham appear in Women’s Work and Wages.[3] All these records exhibit much the same features: unremitting toil, a high degree of mechanical speed and accuracy, and at the same time the lowest standard of workmanship that will pass muster; above all, a cruelly heavy burden resting on the shoulders of the woman who tries to be at the same time mother, housekeeper, and bread-winner, and who in return for her endless exertion seldom receives enough even to keep her properly fed, and never enough to satisfy her own very modest standard of comfort.
The investigators of the Women’s Industrial Council visited personally nearly four hundred workers. Perhaps the very poorest trade investigated was matchbox-making, which, for the last fifteen years at least, has occupied some hundreds of workers in East London alone. The women fetch out from the factory or the middlewoman’s, strips of notched wood, packets of coloured paper and sandpaper, and printed wrappers; they carry back large but light bundles of boxes, tied up in packets of two dozen. Inside their rooms the boxes, made and unmade and half-made, cover the floor and fill up the lack of furniture. I have seen a room containing only an old bedstead in the very last stage of dirt and dilapidation, a table, and two deal boxes for seats. The floor and the window-sill were rosy with magenta matchboxes, while everything else, including the boards of the floor, the woodwork of the room and the coverings of the bed, was of the dark grey of ingrained dust and dirt. At first sight it is a pretty enough spectacle to see a matchbox made; one motion of the hands bends into shape the notched frame of the case, another surrounds it with the ready-pasted strip of printed wrapper, which, by long practice, is fitted instantly without a wrinkle, then the sandpaper or the phosphorus-paper, pasted ready beforehand, is applied and pressed on so that it sticks fast. A pretty high average of neatness and finish is demanded by most employers, and readers who will pass their matchboxes in review will seldom find a wrinkle or a loose corner of paper. The finished case is thrown upon the floor; the long narrow strip which is to form the frame of the drawer is laid upon the bright strip of ready-pasted paper, then bent together and joined by an overlapping bit of the paper; the edges of paper below are bent flat, the ready-cut bottom is dropped in and pressed down, and before the fingers are withdrawn they fold over the upper edges of the paper inside the top. Now the drawer, too, is cast on the floor to dry. All this, besides the preliminary pasting of wrapper, coloured paper and sandpaper, had to be done 144 times for 2¼d.; and even this is not all, for every drawer and case have to be fitted together and the packets tied up with hemp. Nor is the work done then, for paste has to be made before it can be used, and boxes, when they are ready, have to be carried to the factory. Let any reader, however deft, however nimble-fingered, consider how many hundred times a day he or she could manage to perform all these minute operations. But practice gives speed, especially when stimulated by the risk of starvation.
The conditions of life secured in return for this continuous and monotonous toil are such as might well make death appear preferable. The poor dwelling—already probably overcrowded—is yet further crowded with matchboxes, a couple of gross of which, in separated pieces, occupy a considerable space. If the weather be at all damp, as English weather often is, even in summer, there must be a fire kept up, or the paste will not dry; and fire, paste, and hemp must all be paid for out of the worker’s pocket. From her working time, too, or from that of her child messenger, must be deducted the time lost in fetching and carrying back work, and, too often, in being kept waiting for it before it is given out. The history of one matchbox-making family visited by a representative of the Women’s Industrial Council may be given in detail, since no single member survives.
The Jarvis household consisted of a father, mother, and nine children. They lived in an alley some fifty yards long and very narrow, entered through a row of posts from a street that runs northward from Whitechapel Road. Mr Booth’s “Poverty” map shows it coloured with the dark blue that signifies “Very poor, casual. Chronic want.” The houses in it, of which there were not many, were and are four-roomed cottages of two floors, and the Jarvis family occupied the upper floor of No. 9. Below them lived a young man with his wife and their baby, his mother, and three sisters; sixteen persons thus inhabiting the four rooms. All these people seem to have been industrious and respectable. Mr Jarvis, who had poor health, worked in the last summer of his life at matchbox-stamping, and earned “sometimes” 16s. a week. His wife worked constantly at matchbox-making, two of the girls nearly all day, and two of the boys out of school hours. The journey to and from the factory took from an hour to an hour and a half. In the beginning of the winter of 1897 the father fell ill, and had to go into the infirmary. The mother and the children remained at home, and the combined earnings of Mrs Jarvis and her four young helpers produced from 10d. to 1s. a day. It was at this time that the investigator of the Women’s Industrial Council paid her visit, and she notes in the brief space for “Remarks”: “This house was very poor and bare.... Family is often nearly starving.”
At about half past six on the morning after Christmas Day—a Sunday morning, when it was freezing hard and when there was a thick fog, the young man who lived on the ground floor awoke and got up to make tea for his wife. He found smoke in the room, and when he opened the door of the room in which his mother and sisters were sleeping, a burst of smoke met him. He succeeded in getting out his own family—in their nightdresses—sent a neighbour to call the fire engine, and tried in vain, as did a next door neighbour, to arouse the Jarvises. The firemen arrived within a very few minutes—three minutes, indeed, from the time of their summons—but the house was already in a blaze, the windows gone and the roof fallen in. The engine could not get through the posts at the entry of the court, but while it was being taken round to the back, a ladder was carried in, and a fireman bravely attempted to enter the burning house. But it was too late; all ten were already dead. All had, it was believed, been suffocated before the first call of their neighbour from below. The children had probably passed out of life without warning, but the mother was found lying on the floor, with her baby of seven months old in her arms, its body so protected by hers as to be scarcely burned at all. The father died next day in the infirmary, without having learned what fate had overtaken his wife and children; and their poor neighbours—for whom the weeks after Christmas are the leanest of the year—raised a subscription to defray the funeral expenses of the eleven, who were buried together.
In all but its tragically sudden close the history of the Jarvis family is the history of scores of East End households. In some there is a husband in intermittent work; in some the mother is widowed; in all the children, if children there are, help; in all the human beings are slaves of the matchbox. The nine years since that December morning have brought no change, unless it be that, impossible though it would have appeared, pay has rather decreased than advanced, and that a recent investigation, not yet completed, seems to reveal a higher proportion of workers in receipt of out-relief.
Such matchbox makers, if they worked at the same rates in the factory during the far shorter hours permitted by the Factory Acts, would earn no less than they do now, for they would no longer waste time in putting together box and drawer—whereby at present some other worker also wastes time in separating them again before they can be filled—and the employer would pay for paste and drying. That, indeed, is really the reason why they are working at home.
But although matchbox-making is among the poorest of trades, there are others but a shade better. The wages of shirtmaking, for instance, are often extremely low, and are yet further reduced by the fact that the home worker provides cotton for sewing. I remember seeing, seventeen years ago, a young deserted wife who was trying to support herself and two young children by making shirts. These were flannel shirts of a fair quality, and were handed to her cut out. She did not sew on buttons nor make button holes; but except for these items made the shirt throughout, by machine, and put in a square of lining at the back of the neck. She was paid 1s. 2d. a dozen, and bought the cotton herself. She could make in a week “five dozen all but one”; for which the payment would be five shillings, eightpence and a fraction of a penny, less the cost of cotton, machine needles, oil, and perhaps hire of machine.
At the Daily News Exhibition of Sweated Industries was to be seen an elderly Scotchwoman cutting and making shirts from the first stitch to the last, who was a singularly intelligent, skilful, and industrious worker. For varying styles of shirts she received from 9½d. to 1s. 9½d. per dozen. “For the shirts paid at 1s. 9½d. per dozen the following work is required:—Make and line yoke and bottom bands, put in four gussets, hem skirts, run and fell side seams, make sleeves and put them in.... The shirts paid at 9d. per dozen require her to hem necks, button-stitch two stud holes, sew on six buttons and clip threads from all seams. The shirts at 1s. per dozen have two rows of feather stitching, six button holes, eight buttons, four seams bridged and eight fastenings made.”[4]
The better sorts of these shirts were such as are worn, not by poor, but by well-to-do purchasers.
“Paper-bag making,” says the Factory Inspectors’ Report for 1905, “is an industry largely carried on in homes in Glasgow, and no trade is more disturbing to the home. The paste seems to find its way everywhere, and many more things than the bags are found firmly pasted together. I visited two women, who, working usually in workshops, were, during the enforced period of absence owing to the birth of a child, given employment as outworkers. Nothing could exceed the misery and squalor amongst which the work was done. In both cases the workroom was also the living room and bedroom, and the whole of the available furniture, including the bed, was covered with damp bags, some hundreds of which had to be removed in one home before I could be shown the baby. The surroundings were unpleasant ones for making bags destined to hold pastry.” (p. 322.) Of another woman it is reported that “she personally took out work until the day before her child’s birth, and found the load of bags which had to be carried downstairs and upstairs very heavy and tiring. This work is poorly paid. Bags, by no means of the smallest size, are made for 3d. to 5d. a thousand, so that it is indeed a heavy weight which has to be carried for the daily shilling.” (p. 320.)
Although the cases quoted hitherto are those of women, and although the very worst instances of underpayment invariably occur among women, it must not be supposed that all home workers are women. In the nail and chain making districts many men as well as women work at forges in their own backyards; and even in London there is quite a small population of home working tailors, shoemakers, and cabinetmakers, to say nothing of men who make toys and trifles of various sorts for hawking in the streets.
In one afternoon last summer I was taken to visit some men working in their own homes, all within a very short distance. Two were toy makers, two manufactured pipes, and another cages for parrots; one was a shoemaker, and the last was the most skilled handweaver in London. One toy maker was engaged upon wooden hoops with handles and beaded spokes, for South Africa. He also made wooden engines, finding all the materials, iron wheels included, and for these he was paid 22s. a gross. The selling price is sixpence each. In his workshop, too, were to be seen attractive little waggons with sacks in them; and horses of that archaic type which has a barrel body, straight legs, and harness of red and blue paper. The other toy maker was making little go-carts adapted to the use of good-sized dolls. All the material was found by the maker, and the price received by him varied from 3s. 3d. to 6s. 6d. a dozen, according to size. Here again iron wheels had to be provided. In both these cases the wife and some other member of the family helped. The pipes were roughly shaped by hand, then pressed in a mould, the seam scraped smooth, and the pipes stacked in great clay pans and fired in an oven. They are not made to order, but sold by the maker to private customers—generally
