The Causes of Sweating.
§ 1. The excessive Supply of Low-skilled Labour.--Turning to the
industrial system for an explanation of the evils of "Sweating," we
shall find three chief factors in the problem; three dominant aspects
from which the question may be regarded. They are sometimes spoken of as
the causes of sweating, but they are better described as conditions, and
even as such are not separate, but closely related at various points.
The first condition of "sweating" is an abundant and excessive supply of
low-skilled and inefficient labour. It needs no parade of economic
reasoning to show that where there are more persons willing to do a
particular kind of work than are required, the wages for that work, if
free competition is permitted, cannot be more than what is just
sufficient to induce the required number to accept the work. In other
words, where there exists any quantity of unemployed competitors for
low-skilled work, wages, hours of labour, and other conditions of
employment are so regulated, as to present an attraction which just
outweighs the alternatives open to the unemployed, viz. odd jobs,
stealing, starving, and the poor-house. In countries where access to
unused land is free, the productiveness of labour applied to such land
marks the minimum of wages possible; in countries where no such access
is possible, the minimum wages of unskilled labour, whenever the supply
exceeds the demand, is determined by the attractiveness of the
alternatives named above.
A margin of unemployed labour means a bare subsistence wage for low-
skilled labour, and it means this wage earned under industrial
conditions, such as we find under the "sweating system." In order to
keep the wage of low-skilled labour down to this minimum, which can only
rise with an improvement in the alternatives, it is not required that
there should at any time exist a large number of unemployed. A very
small number, in effective competition with those employed, will be
quite as effectual in keeping down the rate of wages. The same applies
to all grades of skilled labour, with this important difference, that
the minimum wage can never fall below what is required to induce less
skilled workers to acquire and apply the extra skill which will enable
them to furnish the requisite supply of highly-skilled workers. Trade
Unions have instinctively directed all their efforts to preventing the
competition of unemployed workers in their respective trades from
pulling down to its minimum the rate of wages. The strongest of those
have succeeded in establishing a standard wage less than which no one
shall accept; unemployed men, who in free competition would accept less
than this standard wage, are supported by the funds of the Union, that
they may not underbid. Unions of comparatively unskilled workers, who
are never free from the competition of unemployed, and who cannot
undertake permanently to buy off all competitors ready to underbid,
endeavour to limit the numbers of their members, and to prevent
outsiders from effectively competing with them in the labour market, in
order that by restricting the supply of labour, they may prevent a fall
of wages. The importance of these movements for us consists in their
firm but tacit recognition of the fact, that an excessive supply of
unskilled labour lies at the root of the industrial disease of
"sweating."
§ 2. The Contributing Causes of excessive Supply.--The last two chapters
have dealt with the principal large industrial movements which bear on
this supply of excessive low-skilled labour; but to make the question
clear, it will be well to enumerate the various contributing causes.
[Greek: a]. The influx of rural population into the towns constantly
swells the supply of raw unskilled labour. The better quality of this
agricultural labour, as we saw, does not continue to form part of this
glut, but rises into more skilled and higher paid strata of labour. The
worse quality forms a permanent addition to the mass of inefficient
labour competing for bare subsistence wages.
[Greek: b]. The steady flow of cheap unskilled foreign labour into our
large cities, especially into London, swollen by occasional floods of
compulsory exiles, adds an element whose competition as a part of the
mass of unskilled labour is injurious out of proportion to its numerical
amount.
[Greek: g]. Since this foreign immigration weakens the industrial
condition of our low-skilled native labour by increasing the supply, it
will be evident that any cause which decreases the demand for such
labour will operate in the same way. The free importation from abroad of
goods which compete in our markets with the goods which "sweated" labour
is applied to make, has the same effect upon the workers in "sweating"
trades as the introduction of cheap foreign labour. The one diminishes
the demand, the other increases the supply of unskilled or low-skilled
labour. The import of quantities of German-made cheap clothing into East
London shops, to compete with native manufacture of the same goods, will
have precisely the same force in maintaining "sweating," as will the
introduction of German workers, who shall make these same clothes in
East London itself. In each case, the purchasing public reaps the
advantage of cheap labour in low prices, while the workers suffer in low
wages. The contention that English goods made at home must be exported
to pay for the cheap German goods, furnishes no answer from the point of
view of the low-skilled worker, unless these exports embody the kind of
labour of which he is capable.
[Greek: d]. The constant introduction of new machinery, as a substitute
for skilled hand-labour, by robbing of its value the skill of certain
classes of workers, adds these to the supply of low-skilled labour.
[Greek: e]. The growth of machinery and of education, by placing women
and young persons more upon an equality with male adult labour, swells
the supply of low-skilled labour in certain branches of work. Women and
young persons either take the places once occupied by men, or undertake
new work (e.g. in post-office or telegraph-office), which would once
have been open only to the competition of men. This growth of the direct
or indirect competition of women and young persons, must be considered
as operating to swell the general supply of unskilled labour.
[Greek: z]. In London another temporary, but important, factor must be
noted. The competition of provincial factories has proved too strong for
London factories in many industries. Hence of late years a gradual
transfer of manufacture from London to the provinces. A large number of
workers in London factories have found themselves out of work. The
break-up of the London factories has furnished "sweating trades" with a
large quantity of unemployed and starving people from whom to draw.
Regarded from the widest economic point of view, the existence of an
excessive supply of labour seeking employments open to free competition
must be regarded as the most important aspect of the "sweating system."
The recent condition of the competition for casual dock-labour brought
dramatically to the foreground this factor in the labour question. The
struggle for livelihood was there reduced to its lowest and most brutal
terms. "There is a place at the London Docks called the cage, a sort of
pen fenced off by iron railings. I have seen three hundred half-starved
dockers crowded round this cage, when perhaps a ganger would appear
wanting three hands, and the awful struggle of these three hundred
famished wretches fighting for that opportunity to get two or three
hours' work has left an impression upon me that can never be effaced.
Why, I have actually seen them clambering over each other's backs to
reach the coveted ticket. I have frequently seen men emerge bleeding and
breathless, with their clothes pretty well torn off their backs." The
competition described in this picture only differs from other
competitions for low-skilled town labour in as much as the conditions of
tender gave a tragical concentration to the display of industrial
forces. This picture, exaggerated as it will appear to those who have
not seen it, brings home to us the essential character of free
competition for low-skilled labour where the normal supply is in excess
of the demand. If other forms of low-skilled labour were put up to be
scrambled for in the same public manner, the scene would be repeated _ad
nauseam_. But because the competition of seamstresses, tailors, shirt-
finishers, fur-sewers, &c., is conducted more quietly and privately, it
is not less intense, not less miserable, and not less degrading. This
struggle for life in the shape of work for bare subsistence wages, is
the true logical and necessary outcome of free competition among an over
supply of low-skilled labourers.
§ 3. The Multiplication of "Small Masters."--Having made so much
progress in our analysis, we shall approach more intelligently another
important aspect of the "sweating system." Mr. Booth and other
investigators find the tap-root of the disease to consist in the
multiplication of small masters. The leading industrial forces of the
age, as we have seen, make for the concentration of labour in larger and
larger masses, and its employment in larger and larger factories. Yet in
London and in certain other large centres of population, we find certain
trades which are still conducted on a small scale in little workshops or
private houses, and those trades furnish a very large proportion of the
worst examples of "sweating." Here is a case of arrested development in
the evolution of industry. It is even worse than that; for some trades
which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system,
have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and
broken up again into smaller units. The increased proportion of the
clothing industries conducted in private houses and small workshops is
the most notorious example. This applies not only to East London, but to
Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, and other large cities, especially where
foreign labour has penetrated. For a large proportion of the sweating
workshops, especially in clothing trades, are supported by foreign
labour. In Liverpool during the last ten years the substitution of home-
workers for workers in tailors' shops has been marked, and in particular
does this growth of home-workers apply to women.
A credible witness before the Lords' Committee stated that "at the
present moment it would be safe to say that two-thirds of the sweaters
in Liverpool are foreigners," coming chiefly from Germany and Russian
Poland. In Leeds sixteen years ago there were only twelve Jewish
workshops; there are now some hundreds.
Since a very large proportion of the worst sweating occurs in trades
where the work is given out, either directly or by the medium of sub-
contract, to home-workers, it is natural that stress should be laid upon
the small private workshops as the centre of the disease. If the work
could only be got away from the home and the small workshop, where
inspection is impracticable, and done in the factory or large workshop,
where limitations of hours of labour and sanitary conditions could be
enforced, where the force of public opinion could secure the payment of
decent wages, and where organization among workers would be possible,
the worst phases of the malady would disappear. The abolition of the
small workshop is the great object of a large number of practical
reformers who have studied the sweating system. The following opinion of
an expert witness is endorsed by many students of the question--"If the
employers were compelled to obtain workshops, and the goods were made
under a factory system, we believe that they could be made quite as
cheaply under that system, with greater comfort to the workers, in
shorter hours; and that the profits would then be distributed among the
workers, so that the public would obtain their goods at the same
price."[25] It is maintained that the inferior qualities of shoes are
produced and sold more cheaply in the United States by a larger use of
machinery under the factory system, than in London under a sweating
system, though wages are, of course, much higher in America. Moreover,
many of the products of the London sweating trades are competing on
almost equal terms with the products of provincial factories, where
machines are used instead of hand-labour.
§ 4. Economic Advantages of "Small Workshops."--The question we have to
answer is this--Why has the small workshop survived and grown up in
London and other large cities, in direct antagonism to the prevalent
industrial movement of the age? It is evident that the small workshop
system must possess some industrial advantages which enable it to hold
its own. The following considerations throw light upon this subject.
1. A larger proportion of the work in sweating trades is work for which
there is a very irregular demand. Irregularity of employment, or, more
accurately speaking, insufficiency of employment--for the "irregularity"
is itself regular--forms one of the most terrible phases of the sweating
system. The lower you descend in the ranks of labour the worse it is. A
large number of the trades, especially where women are employed, are
trades where the elements of "season" and fashion enter in. But even
those which, like tailoring, shirtmaking, shoemaking, furniture and
upholstery, would seem less subject to periodic or purely capricious
changes, are liable in fact to grave and frequent fluctuations of the
market. The average employment in sweating trades is roughly estimated
at three or four days in the week. There are two busy seasons lasting
some six weeks each, when these miserable creatures are habitually
overworked. "The remaining nine months," says Mr. Burnett, "do not
average more than half time, especially among the lower grade workers."
This gives us one clue to the ability of the small workshop to survive--
its superior flexibility from the point of view of the employer.
"High organization makes for regularity; low organization lends itself
to the opposite. A large factory cannot stop at all without serious
loss; a full-sized workshop will make great efforts to keep going; but
the man who employs only two or three others in his own house can, if
work fails, send them all adrift to pick up a living as best they
can."[26]
Since a smaller sweating-master can set up business on some £2 capital,
and does not expect to make much more profit as employer than as
workman, he is able to change from one capacity to the other with great
facility.
2. The high rent for large business premises, especially in London,
makes for the small workshop or home-work system. The payment of rent is
thus avoided by the business firm which is the real employer, and thrown
upon the sub-contractor or the workers themselves, to be by them in
their turn generally evaded by using the dwelling-room for a workshop.
Thus one of the most glaring evils of the sweating system is seen to
form a distinct economic advantage in the workshop, as compared with the
large factory. The element of rent is practically eliminated as an
industrial charge.
3. The evasion of the restrictions of the Factory Act must be regarded
as another economic advantage. Excessive hours of labour when
convenient, overcrowding in order to avoid rent, absence of proper
sanitary conditions, are essential to the cheapest forms of production
under present conditions. It does not pay either the employing firm or
the sub-contractor to consider the health or even the life of the
workers, provided that the state of the labour market is such that they
can easily replace spent lives.
4. The inability to combine for their mutual protection and advantage of
scattered employés working in small bodies, living apart, and
unacquainted even with the existence of one another, is another
"cheapness" of the workshop system.
5. The fact that so large a proportion of master-sweaters are Jews has a
special significance. It seems to imply that the poorer class of
immigrant Jews possess a natural aptitude for the position, and that
their presence in our large cities furnishes the corner-stone of the
vicious system. Independence and mastery are conditions which have a
market value for all men, but especially for the timid and often down-
trodden Jew. Most men will contentedly receive less as master than as
servant, but especially the Jew. We saw that the immigrant Jew, by his
capacities and inclinations, was induced to make special efforts to
substitute work of management for manual labour, and to become a profit-
maker instead of a wage-earner. The Jew craves the position of a
sweating-master, because that is the lowest step in a ladder which may
lead to a life of magnificence, supported out of usury. The Jewish Board
of Guardians in London, though its philanthropic action is on the whole
more enlightened than that of most wealthy public bodies, has been
responsible in no small measure for this artificial multiplication of
small masters. A very large proportion of the funds which they dispensed
was given or lent in small sums in order to enable poor Jews "to set up
for themselves." The effect of this was twofold. It first assisted to
draw to London numbers of continental Jews, who struggled as "greeners"
under sweaters for six months, until they were qualified for assistance
from the Jewish Board of Guardians. It then enabled them to set up as
small masters, and sweat other "greeners" as they themselves were
sweated. It was quite true that the object of such charity was the most
useful which any society could undertake; namely, that of assisting the
industrially weak to stand on their own legs. But it was unfortunately
true that this early stage of independence was built upon the miserable
dependence of other workers.
6. But while, as we see, there are many special conditions which, in
London especially, favour the small workshop, the most important will be
found to consist in the large supply of cheap unskilled labour. This is
the real material out of which the small workshop system is built. In
dealing with the other conditions, we shall find that they all
presuppose this abundant supply of labour. If labour were more scarce,
and wages therefore higher, the small workshop would be impossible, for
the absolute economy of labour, effected by the factory organization
with its larger use of machinery, would far outweigh the number of small
economies which, as we have seen, at present in certain trades, favour
and make possible the small workshop. Every limitation in the supply of
this low-skilled labour, every expansion of the alternatives offered by
emigration, access to free land, &c., will be effectual in crushing a
number of the sweating workshops, and favouring the large factory at
their expense.
§ 5. Irresponsibility of Employers.--The third view of the sweating
System lays stress upon its moral aspect, and finds its chief cause in
the irresponsibility of the employer. Now we have already seen that this
severance of the personal relation between employer and employed is a
necessary result of the establishment of the large factory as the
industrial unit, and of the ever-growing complexity of modern commerce.
It is not merely that the widening gap of social position between
employer and employed, and the increased number of the latter, make the
previous close relation impossible. Quite as important is the fact that
the real employer in modern industry is growing more "impersonal." What
we mean is this. The nominal employer or manager is not the real
employer. The real employer of labour is capital, and it is to the
owners of the capital in any business that we must chiefly look for the
exercise of such responsibility as rightly subsists between employer and
employed. Now, while it is calculated that one-eighth of the business of
England is in the hands of joint-stock companies, constituting far more
than one-eighth of the large businesses, in the great majority of other
cases, where business is conducted on a large scale, the head of the
business is to a great extent a mere manager of other people's capital.
Thus while the manager's sense of personal responsibility is weakened by
the number of "hands" whom he employs, his freedom of action is likewise
crippled by his obligation to subserve the interests of a body of
capitalists who are in ignorance of the very names and number of the
human beings whose destiny they are controlling. The severance of the
real "employer" from his "hands" is thus far more complete than would
appear from mere attention to the growth in the size of the average
business. Now it must not be supposed that this severance of the
personal relation between employer and employed is of necessity a loss
to the latter. There is no reason to suppose that the close relation
subsisting in the old days between the master and his journeymen and
apprentices was as a rule idyllically beautiful. No doubt the control of
the master was often vexatious and despotic. The tyranny of a heartless
employer under the old system was probably much more injurious than the
apathy of the most vulgar plutocrat of to-day. The employé under the
modern system is less subject to petty spite and unjust interference on
the part of his employer. In this sense he is more free. But on the
other hand, he has lost that guarantee against utter destitution and
degradation afforded by the humanity of the better class of masters. He
has exchanged a human nexus for a "cash nexus." The nominal freedom of
this cash relationship is in the case of the upper strata of workmen
probably a real freedom; the irresponsibility of their employers has
educated them to more self-reliance, and strengthened a healthy
personality in them. It is the lower class of workers who suffer. More
and more they need the humanity of the responsible employer to protect
them against the rigours of the labour-market. The worst miseries of the
early factory times were due directly to the break-up of the
responsibility of employers. This was slowly recognized by the people of
England, and the series of Factory Acts, Employers' Liability Acts, and
other measures for the protection of labour, must be regarded as a
national attempt to build up a compulsory legal responsibility to be
imposed upon employers in place of a natural responsibility based on
moral feeling. We draft legislation and appoint inspectors to teach
employers their duty towards employés, and to ensure that they do it.
Thus in certain industries we have patched up an artificial mechanism of
responsibility.
Wherever this legal responsibility is not enforced in the case of low-
skilled workers, we have, or are liable to have, "sweating." Glancing
superficially at the small workshop or sweating-den, it might seem that
this being a mere survival of the old system, the legal enforcement of
responsibility would be unnecessary. But it is not a mere survival. In
the small workshop of the old system the master was the real employer.
In the modern "sweating" den he is not the real employer, but a mere
link between the employing firm and the worker. From this point of view
we must assign as the true cause of sweating, the evasion of the legal
responsibility of the Factory Act rendered possible to firms which
employ outside workers either directly or indirectly through the agency
of "sweaters." Although it might be prudent as a means of breaking up
the small workshop to attempt to impose upon the "middleman" the legal
responsibility, genuine reform directed to this aspect of "sweating,"
can only operate by making the real employing firm directly responsible
for the industrial condition of its outdoor direct or indirect employés.
This responsibility imposed by law has been strengthened as an effective
safeguard of the interests of the workers by combination among the
latter. In skilled industries where strong trade organization exists,
the practical value of such combination exceeds the value of restrictive
legislation.
"In their essence Trade Unions are voluntary associations of workmen,
for mutual protection and assistance in securing the most favourable
conditions of labour." "This is their primary and fundamental object,
and includes all efforts to raise wages or prevent a reduction of wages;
to diminish the hours of labour or resist attempts to increase the
working hours; and to regulate all matters pertaining to methods of
employment or discharge, and modes of working."[27] Engineers, boiler-
makers, cotton-spinners, printers, would more readily give up the
assistance given them by legislative restriction than the power which
they have secured for themselves by combination. It is in proportion as
trade combination is weak that the actual protection afforded by Factory
and Employers' Liability Acts become important. Just as we saw that
sweating trades were those which escaped the legislative eye; so we see
that they are also the trades where effective combination does not
exist. Where Trade Unions are strong, sweating cannot make any way. The
State aid of restrictive legislation, and the self help of private
combination are alike wanting to the "sweated" workers.