be a company’s horse or a slave!” But wait a moment. Horses and slaves
are worth something: if you kill them you have to pay for new ones. But
if instead of employing horses and slave you employ “free” children
and women and men, you may work them to death as hard and as soon as
you like: there are plenty more to be had for nothing where they came
from. What is more, you need not support them, as you have to support
slaves, during the weeks when you have no work for them. You take them
on by the week; and when trade is slack, and you have no work for them,
you just discharge them, leaving them to starve or shift for themselves
as best they can. In the heyday of Capitalism, when this system was
in full swing, and no laws had been made to limit its abuse, small
children were worked to death under the whip until it was commonly
said that the northern factory employers were using up nine generations
in one generation. Women were employed at the mines under conditions of
degradation which would have horrified any negress in South Carolina.
Men were reduced to lives which savages would have despised. The places
these unhappy people lived in were beyond description. Epidemics of
cholera and smallpox swept the country from time to time; typhus was
commoner than measles today; drunkenness and brutal violence were
considered as natural to the working classes as fustian coats and horny
hands. The respectability and prosperity of the propertied and middle
classes who grew rich on sweated labor covered an abyss of horror;
and it was by raising the lid from that abyss that Karl Marx, in his
terrible and epoch-making book called Capital, became the prophet of
that great revolt of outraged humanity against Capitalism which is the
emotional force of the Socialist movement. However, your subject and
mine just now is not Emotional Socialism but Intelligent Socialism; so
let us keep calm. Anger is a bad counsellor.
Long before Marx published his book the Government had been forced to
interfere. A succession of laws called the Factory Acts, which include
regulation of mines and other industries, were passed to forbid the
employment of children below a certain age; to regulate the employment
of women and young persons; to limit the hours during which a factory
employing such persons could be kept open; to force employers to fence
in machines which crushed and tore to pieces the employees who brushed
against them in moments of haste or carelessness; to pay wages in money
instead of in credit at employers’ shops where bad food and bad clothes
were sold at exorbitant prices; to provide sanitary conveniences; to
limewash factory walls at frequent intervals; to forbid the practice
of taking meals at work in the factory instead of during an interval
and in another place; to frustrate the dodges by which these laws were
at first evaded by the employers; and to appoint factory inspectors
to see that the laws were carried out. These laws were the fruit of
an agitation headed, not by Socialists, but by a pious Conservative
nobleman, Lord Shaftesbury, who did not find in his Bible any authority
for the Capitalist theory that you could and should produce universal
well-being by breaking all the laws of God and Man whenever you could
make a commercial profit by doing so. This amazing theory was not only
put into practice by greedy people, but openly laid down and explicitly
advocated in books by quite sincere and serious professors of political
economy and jurisprudence (calling themselves The Manchester School)
and in speeches made in opposition to the Factory Acts by moral and
highminded orator-manufacturers like John Bright. It is still taught
as authentic political science at our universities. It has broken the
moral authority of university bred Churchmen, and reduced university
bred Statesmen to intellectually self-satisfied impotence. It is
perhaps the worst of the many rationalist dogmas that have in the
course of human history led naturally amiable logicians to countenance
and commit villainies that would revolt professed criminals.
Now one would suppose on first thoughts that the Factory Acts would
have been opposed by all the employers and supported by all their
employees. But there are good employers as well as bad ones; and
there are ignorant and shortsighted laborers as well as wise ones.
The employers who had tender consciences, or who, like some of the
Quakers, had a form of religion which compelled them to think sometimes
of what they were doing by throwing all the responsibility for it on
themselves and not on any outside authority like the professors of
Capitalist political economy, were greatly troubled by the condition of
their employees. You may ask why, in that case, they did not treat them
better. The answer is that if they had done so they would have been
driven out of business and ruined by the bad employers.
It would have occurred in this way. Cheap sweated labor meant not only
bigger profits: it also meant cheaper goods. If the good employer paid
a decent living wage to his workpeople, and worked them for eight hours
a day instead of from twelve to sixteen, he had to charge high enough
prices for his goods to enable him to pay such wages. But in that case
the bad employer could and would at once offer the same goods at a
lower price and thus take all the good employer’s customers away from
him. The good employer was therefore obliged to join Lord Shaftesbury
in telling the Government that unless laws were passed to force all
employers, good and bad alike, to behave better, there could never
be any improvement, because the good employers would have either to
sweat the workers like the bad ones, or else be driven out of business,
leaving matters worse than ever. They found that social problems cannot
be solved by personal righteousness, and that under Capitalism not only
must men be made moral by Act of Parliament, but cannot be made moral
in any other way, no matter how benevolent their dispositions may be.
The opposition to the Factory Acts by the workers themselves was
actually harder to overcome in some ways than that of the employers,
because the employers, when they were forced by law to try the
experiment, found that extreme sweating, like killing the goose that
laid the golden eggs, was not the best way to make business pay, and
that they could more than make up for the cost of complying with
the very moderate requirements of the Acts by putting a little more
brains into their work. Even the stupid ones found that by speeding
up their machinery, and thus making their employees pull themselves
together and work harder, they could get more out of them in ten hours
than in twelve. The Intelligent Woman, if she has travelled, may have
noticed that in countries where there is no Shop Hours Act, and shops
remain open until everyone has gone to bed, the shopkeepers and their
assistants are far less tired and strained at nine in the evening than
the assistants in a big shop in a big English city are at five in the
afternoon, though the shop closes at six. Impossible as it may sound,
in the ginning mills of Bombay, before any factory legislation was
introduced, the children employed went into the factory, not for so
many hours a day, but for months at a time; and there are such things
in the world as Italian cafés that are open day and night without
regular night and day waiters, the employees taking a nap when and
where they can. And this lazy happy-go-lucky way of doing business may
do no great harm, whilst an eight hour day at high wages under modern
scientific management may mean work so intense that it takes the last
inch out of the workers, and cannot be done except by persons in the
prime of life, nor even by them for many consecutive months.
The employers had another resource in the introduction of machinery.
When employers can get plenty of cheap labor they will not introduce
machinery: it is too much trouble, and though the machine may do the
work of several persons it may cost more. At this moment (1925) in
Lisbon the very rough and dirty business of coaling steamships can be
done by machinery. The machinery is actually there ready for use. But
the work is done by women, because they are cheaper and there is no
law against it. If a Portuguese Factory Act were passed, forbidding
the employment of women, or imposing restrictions and regulations on
it (possibly not really for the sake of the women, but only to keep
them out of the job and thus reserve it for men), the machinery would
be turned on at once; and it would soon be improved and added to until
it became indispensable. But as the women would lose their employment,
they would object to any such Factory Act much more vociferously than
the employers.
All the protestations of the employers that they would be ruined by the
Factory Acts were contradicted by experience. By better management,
more and better machinery, and speeding up the work, they made bigger
profits than ever. If they had been half as clever as they claimed
to be, they would have imposed on themselves all the regulations the
Factory Acts imposed on them, without waiting to be forced by law. But
profiteering does not cultivate men’s minds as public service does.
The greatest advances in industrial organization have been forced on
employers in spite of their piteous protests that they would be unable
to carry on under them, and that British industry must consequently
perish. It may shock you to learn that the employees themselves
resisted the Factory Acts at first because the Acts began by putting
a stop to the ill treatment and overworking of children too young to
be decently put to commercial work at all. At first these victims of
unregulated Capitalism were little Oliver Twists, sold into slavery by
the Guardians of the Poor to get rid of them. But the later generations
were the children of the employees; and the wage on which the employee
kept his family in squalid poverty was added to by the children’s
earnings. When people are very poor the loss of a shilling a week is
much worse than the loss of £500 a week to a millionaire: it means, for
the woman who has a desperate struggle to keep the house and make both
ends meet every Saturday, that her task becomes impossible. It is easy
for comparatively rich people to say “You should not send your young
children out to work under such inhuman conditions”, or, “You should
rejoice in a new Factory Act which makes such infamies impossible”.
But if the immediate result of listening to them is that the children
who were only half starved before are now to be three-quarters
starved, such pious remonstrances produce nothing but exasperation.
The melancholy truth is that, as the Factory Acts were passed one
after another, gradually raising the age at which children might be
employed in factories from infancy to fourteen and sixteen, and half
the children’s time below a certain age had to be spent in school, the
parents were the fiercest opponents of the Acts; and when they got the
vote, and became able to influence Parliament directly, they made it
impossible for anybody to get elected as a member for a factory town
where children’s labor was employed unless he pledged himself to oppose
any extension of the laws restricting child labor. The common saying
that the parents are the best people to take care of the interests of
the children depends not only on the sort of people the parents are,
but on whether they are well enough off to be able to afford to indulge
their natural parental instinct. Only a small proportion of parents,
and these not the poorest, will deliberately bring up their children
to be thieves and prostitutes; but practically all parents will, and
indeed must, sweat their children if they are themselves sweated
so mercilessly that they cannot get on without the few pence their
children can earn.
Now that I have explained the seeming heartlessness of the parents, you
have still to ask me why these parents accepted wages so low that they
were forced to sacrifice their children to the employers’ greed for
profits. The answer is that the increase of population which produced
the younger son class in the propertied class, and finally built up the
middle class, went on also among the employees who lived from hand to
mouth on the wages of manual labor. Now manual labor is like fish or
asparagus, dear when it is scarce, cheap when it is plentiful. As the
numbers of propertyless manual workers grew from thousands to millions
the price of their labor fell and fell. In the nineteenth century
everybody knew that wages were higher in America and Australia than in
Great Britain and Ireland, because labor was scarcer there; and those
who could afford it emigrated to these countries. Half the population
of Ireland went to America, where labor was so scarce that immigrants
were welcomed from all countries. But today the labor market in America
is so choked with them that immigration is sternly restricted to a
fixed number from each European country every year. Australia restricts
its births artificially, and refuses to admit Chinamen or Japanese on
any terms. America also excludes Japanese. But in the days when the
Factory Acts were made really effective (the first ones were evaded
by all sorts of employers’ tricks) emigration from our islands was
unrestricted, and went on at a great rate among those who could afford
the passage money.
This shewed that our labor market was overstocked. When the fish market
is overstocked the fish are thrown back into the sea. Emigration was,
in effect, throwing men and women into the sea with a ship to cling
to and a chance of reaching another country in it. The value of men
and women in England, unless they could do some sort of work that was
still scarce, had fallen to nothing. Doctors and dentists and lawyers
and parsons were still worth something (parsons shamefully little:
£70 a year for a curate with a family); and exceptionally skilled or
physically powerful workmen could earn more than the poorer clergy;
but the mass of manual employees, those who could do nothing except
under direction, and even under direction could do nothing that any
ablebodied person could not learn to do in a very short time, were
literally worth nothing: you could get them for what it cost to keep
them alive, and to enable them to bring up children enough to replace
them when they were worn out. It was just as if steam-engines had been
made in such excessive quantities that the manufacturers would give
them for nothing to anyone who would take them away. Whoever took them
away would still have to feed them with coal and oil before they could
work; but this would not mean that they had any value, or that they
would be taken proper care of, or that the coal and oil would be of
decent quality.
You see, people without property have no other way of living than
selling themselves for their market value, or, when their value falls
to nothing, offering to work for anyone who will feed them. They have
no land, and cannot afford to buy any: and even if land were given to
them few of them would know how to cultivate it. They cannot become
capitalists, because capital is spare money, and they have no money
to spare. They cannot set up in business for themselves with borrowed
money, because nobody will lend them money: if anyone did, they would
lose it all and become bankrupt for want of the requisite education and
training. They must find an employer or starve; and if they attempt to
bargain for anything more than a bare subsistence wage they are told
curtly but only too truthfully that if they do not choose to take it
there are plenty of others who will.
Even at this they cannot all get employment. Although the plea made
for Capitalism by the professors of The Manchester School was that at
least it would always provide the workers with employment at a living
wage, it has never either kept that promise or justified that plea.
The employers have had to confess that they need what is called “a
reserve army of unemployed”, so that they can always pick up “hands”
when trade is good and throw them back into the street when it is bad.
Throwing them back into the street means forcing them to spend the few
shillings they may have been able to put by while employed, selling or
pawning their clothes and furniture, and finally going on the rates
as paupers. The ratepayers naturally object very strongly to having
to support the employer’s workmen whenever he does not happen to want
them; consequently, when the Capitalist system developed on a large
scale, the ratepayers made Poor Law relief such a disgraceful, cruel,
and degrading business that decent working class families would suffer
any extremity rather than resort to it. We said to the unemployed
father of a starving family, “We must feed you and your children if
you are destitute, because the Statute of Elizabeth obliges us to; but
you must bring your daughters and sons into the workhouse with you
to live with drunkards, prostitutes, tramps, idiots, epileptics, old
criminals, the very dregs and refuse of human society at its worst,
and having done that you will never be able to hold up your head again
among your fellows”. The man naturally said “Thank you: I had rather
see my children dead”, and starved it out as best he could until trade
revived, and the employers had another job for him. And to get that job
he would accept the barest wages the family could support life on. If
his children could earn a little in a factory he would snatch at wages
that were just enough, when the children’s earnings were thrown in, to
support them all; and in this way he did not benefit in the long run
by letting his children go out to work, as it ended in their earnings
being used to beat down his own wages; so that, though he at first sent
his children into the factories to get a little extra money, he was at
last forced to do it to make up his own wages to subsistence point;
and when the law stepped in to rescue the children from their slavery,
he opposed the law because he did not see how he could live unless his
children earned something instead of going to school.
48
WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET
The effect of the system on women was worse in some respects than
on men. As no industrial employer would employ a woman if he could
get a man for the same money, women who wished to get any industrial
employment could do so only by offering to do it for less than men.
This was possible, because even when the man’s wage was a starvation
wage it was the starvation wage of a family, not of a single person.
Out of it the man had to pay for the subsistence of his wife and
children, without whom the Capitalist system would soon have come to an
end for want of any young workers to replace the old ones. Therefore
even when the men’s wages were down to the lowest point at which their
wives and children could be kept alive, a single woman could take
less without being any worse off than her married neighbors and their
children. In this way it became a matter of course that women should
be paid less than men; and when any female rebel claimed to be paid as
much as a man for the same work (“Equal wages for equal work”), the
employer shut her up with two arguments: first, “If you dont take the
lower wage there are plenty of others who will”, and, second, “If I
have to pay a man’s wages I will get a man to do the work”.
The most important and indispensable work of women, that of bearing
and rearing children, and keeping house for them, was never paid for
directly to the woman but always through the man; and so many foolish
people came to forget that it was work at all, and spoke of Man as The
Breadwinner. This was nonsense. From first to last the woman’s work
in the home was vitally necessary to the existence of society, whilst
millions of men were engaged in wasteful or positively michievous work,
the only excuse for which was that it enabled them to support their
useful and necessary wives. But the men, partly through conceit, partly
through thoughtlessness, and very largely because they were afraid that
their wives might, if their value were recognized, become unruly and
claim to be the heads of the household, set up a convention that women
earned nothing and men everything, and refused to give their wives
any legal claim on the housekeeping money. By law everything a woman
possessed became the property of her husband when she married: a state
of things that led to such monstrous abuses that the propertied class
set up an elaborate legal system of marriage settlements, the effect of
which was to hand over the woman’s property to some person or persons
yet unborn before her marriage; so that though she could have an income
from the property during her life, it was no longer her property, and
therefore her husband could not make ducks and drakes of it. Later on
the middle classes made Parliament protect their women by The Married
Women’s Property Acts under which we still live; and these Acts, owing
to the confusion of people’s minds on the subject, overshot the mark
and produced a good deal of injustice to men. That, however, is another
part of the story: the point to be grasped here is that under the
Capitalist system women found themselves worse off than men because,
as Capitalism made a slave of the man, and then, by paying the woman
through him, made her his slave, she became the slave of a slave, which
is the worst sort of slavery.
This suits certain employers very well, because it enables them to
sweat other employers without being found out. And this is how it is
done. A laborer finds himself bringing up a family of daughters on a
wage of twenty-nine shillings a week in the country (it was thirteen in
the nineteenth century) or, in or near a city, of from thirty (formerly
eighteen) to seventy, subject to deductions for spells of unemployment.
Now in a household scraping along on thirty shillings a week another
five shillings a week makes an enormous difference: far more, I repeat,
than another five hundred pounds makes to a millionaire. An addition
of fifteen shillings or a pound a week raises the family of a laborer
to the money level of that of a skilled workman. How were such tempting
additions possible? Simply by the big girls going out to work at five
shillings a week each, and continuing to live at home with their
fathers. One girl meant another five shillings, two meant another ten
shillings, three another fifteen shillings. Under such circumstances
huge factories sprang up employing hundreds of girls at wages of from
four-and-sixpence to seven-and-sixpence a week, the great majority
getting five. These were called starvation wages; but the girls were
much better fed and jollier and healthier than women who had to support
themselves altogether. Some of the largest fortunes made in business:
for example in the match industry, were made out of the five shilling
girl living with, and of course partly on, her father, or as a lodger
on somebody else’s father, a girl lodger being as good as a daughter in
this respect. Thus the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters
of his labor at the father’s expense. If the father worked in, say, a
brewery, the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters of his labor
at the expense of the brewer. In this way one trade lives by sweating
another trade; and factory girls getting wages that would hardly
support a prize cat are plump and jolly and willing and vigorous and
rowdy, whilst older women, many of them widows with young children,
are told that if they are not satisfied with the same wages there are
plenty of strong girls who will be glad to get them.
It was not merely the daughters but the wives of working men who
brought down women’s wages in this way. In the cities young women,
married to young men, and not yet burdened with many children or with
more than a room or two to keep tidy at home (and they were often not
too particular about tidiness), or having no children, used to be quite
willing to go out as charwomen for an hour a day for five shillings
a week, plus such little perquisites and jobs of washing as might be
incidental to this employment. As such a charwoman had nothing to do
at home, and was not at all disposed to go on to a second job when she
had secured the five shillings that made all the difference between
pinching and prodigality to her and her husband, the hour easily
stretched to half a day. The five shillings have now become ten or so;
but as they buy no more, the situation is not altered.
In this way the labor market is infested with subsidized wives and
daughters willing to work for pocket money on which no independent
solitary woman or widow can possibly subsist. The effect is to make
marriage compulsory as a woman’s profession: she has to take anything
she can get in the way of a husband rather than face penury as a single
woman. Some women get married easily; but others, less attractive or
amiable, are driven to every possible trick and stratagem to entrap
some man into marriage; and that sort of trickery is not good for a
woman’s self-respect, and does not lead to happy marriages when the men
realize that they have been “made a convenience of”.