WOMEN’S WAGES AND THE TRUCK ACTS; THE PIECEWORKER AND HER PAY
“Tell me what shall thy wages be?”
Long before the beginnings of the modern factory system, and centuries
before the idea of applying standard requirements for health, safety, or
limitation of hours in factories and workshops had arisen, Parliament
had recognised the need and right of the worker to receive full payment
of the wages he had agreed to work for, in current coin of the realm—“in
true and lawful money.”[46] It also recognised his right to spend those
wages as and where it best suited him.
The law relating to Truck[47] was consolidated quite early in the growth
of the factory system by the Act of 1831. This Act, and the Act of 1887,
which first brought in the very necessary aid of the Factory Inspector
to enforce its provisions and strengthened the law,[48] are still in
force, together with the Act of 1896, which first regulated fines and
various deductions from wages, making them illegal unless in pursuance
of a definite agreement or “contract” with every worker affected.
In 1908 a Departmental Committee, appointed by the Home Secretary,
reported on the great need, then generally recognised, for amending and
consolidating these Acts, and a minority of the Committee recommended
entire prohibition of fines and deductions regulated by the Act of 1896.
In the same year there was more than usual activity, with markedly
successful results, on the part of the Women Inspectors in investigating
and prosecuting for contraventions of the Acts. From about 1897 onwards
they had gradually acquired a unique acquaintance throughout the United
Kingdom with the human results of uncertain and low wages, peculiarly
oppressive to women and girls, by their investigation of complaints, by
long-drawn-out legal proceedings, by special enquiries into homework,
and into payments of wages in overvalued groceries and other goods
instead of money. Of a packet of tea given in place of hard-earned coin,
the outworker would say: “And the tea indeed it is not good, it is not
worth putting water on.” “A pair of thin elastic-sided boots which
constituted the ‘wages’ paid to a worker, who, according to the practice
of the country-side (Donegal, 1897), generally went barefoot, were
objects of longing” to the Inspector as “articles of evidence.”[49]
The Women Inspectors have also had carried to the High Courts of England
and Ireland five out of the six appeals, on points of law under the
Truck Acts, taken at the instance of the Factory Department since
1896.[50] Facts and details that came out at their prosecutions in
police and sheriff courts passed into the public press. There, and
through published official reports, it became well known in Parliament
and elsewhere that wages below subsistence level afflicted women in many
factories, as well as in homework. Various voluntary committees pressed
the matter forward, and the Inspectors’ evidence, published year after
year in Annual Reports, strengthened the Anti-Sweating Movement from
about 1904 to 1906. Public opinion was stirred afresh by the Sweated
Industries Exhibition of 1906, and eyes were opened to evils almost
forgotten since the work and report of the Select Committee of the House
of Lords in 1888–90.
The evidence of the Women Inspectors given to the 1908 Committee on
Truck was extensive as to the evils affecting women and conclusive as to
the need of amendment of the law. In the same year the Select Committee
on Homework referred repeatedly to the assistance they had obtained from
“so experienced and competent an observer as Miss Squire, of the Home
Office.”[51] The passing of the Trade Boards Act of 1909 followed very
shortly on their Report. It provided for payment by employers of a
minimum rate of wages “clear of all deductions” in certain industries
specified in a schedule to the Act, and in others to be brought in by
Provisional Order where the “rate of wages prevailing ... is
exceptionally low”; and Trade Boards were set up for the fixing of such
minimum rates. This Act provided for minimum time rates and for general
minimum piece rates, and, on the whole, has secured as solid a general
assent from the community as did the Elizabethan provision in earlier
times for protection of the poorest labourer from starvation pay “both
in times of scarcity and in times of plenty.”
The Act was administered, not by the Factory Department (as was proposed
in 1908 by the Select Committee on Homework), but by the Board of Trade
(later by the Ministry of Labour). It thus only enters into the scope of
this study because so closely linked with the pioneering work of the
Women Inspectors when they really _tested_ the Truck Acts and the
Section in the Factory Act for securing to women pieceworkers (in non-
textile industries) the protection of written “particulars” of their
work and wages. It also had a striking effect in steadily sweeping away
many of the deductions from low wages with which we were specially
concerned. The beneficial movement was carried decisively forward by the
special wages conditions administratively enforced for women during the
War.
The fundamental elements in wages problems are in some ways simpler and
homelier for everyone than problems of scientific hygiene in the
factory. Most of us realise very well how much our freedom and happiness
depend on having, in our recompense for labour, a margin for spending,
above what is just necessary to keep us going, and on being able to
compute definitely from week to week what the recompense will be. We do
not need technical knowledge to develop insight for that. We can all
readily grasp the truth in those words of Adam Smith: “The property
which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation
of all other property so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” and “no
society can surely be flourishing and happy of which the greater part of
the members are poor and miserable.” And thus, when the miseries of
fraudulent payment in goods or of excessive and uncertain deductions
from wages, or of sweated wages, are brought out, it is clear to
everyone that regulation must be attempted with the least possible
delay.
As regards the grosser abuses of payment in goods, the law had become
generally effective for the principal wage earners in organised factory
industry before 1893. For women outside the factory system, these forms
of Truck were then and much later to be found in certain homework
industries in directions to be considered presently. And in the least
organised factory industries enforced purchase and raffling of articles
“damaged” in process of manufacture, and many oppressive forms of
deductions and charges on slender wages, were widespread.
Although, fortunately, laws relating to wages—that is, Truck Acts,
Particulars Clause, Trade Boards Act—were and are applicable to men and
women alike, it is evident that, until strengthened by help from
Inspectors of their own sex in the Factory and Trade Boards Departments,
and by recent development of their own powers through leading women
organisers, women have proved but poor bargainers for themselves, and
weak in securing their own welfare in matters of wages. This weakness
was, no doubt, closely linked with their artificial exclusion from many
well-paid industries and processes suitable for them, which intensified
their competition for available employment. The published reports of the
Women Factory Inspectors down to 1914 remain an historical record of the
depredations on their wages that the women suffered, and of the pitiful
smallness of their average earnings—the details being, as viewed from
the standpoint of later improvements, almost staggering. Their “property
in their own labour,” outside a few well-organised industries and often
even in fine-looking factories was, when we began, neither “sacred” nor
“inviolable,” and, indeed, in many places, barely existed. Although the
Women Inspectors were at work to track out and deal with contraventions
in “hard cases,” yet the range of area, processes, and numbers dealt
with by them in factories, workshops, and among outworkers is so wide,
and the figures were so carefully compared with those given by
manufacturers themselves, that their reports make a decisive addition to
the evidence contained in the Board of Trade Wage Census of 1886 and
1906. The wage levels for women in their chief industries, given in this
census, low as they were, were undoubtedly somewhat higher than in fact,
and only covered returns from the firms responding to an invitation to
disclose information in their wage books. Even if the average wage per
week for women over eighteen years of age in non-textile industries was,
as indicated by the wage census, about 12s. 11d.,[52] those of an
immense number of women employed inside the factory did not rise above
7s. to 8s., out of which came deductions for disciplinary fines, charges
for cotton, needles, etc., use of power, standing-room, cleaning of the
factory, damage, or purchase of damaged articles, hospitals, supply of
hot water for tea; so that for many young women 5s. to 6s. a week was
nearer the mark. To such numerous workers information that an average of
12s. to 14s. was paid to women in their industry would have meant
nothing. It was their own individual daily or weekly wage that was the
reality to them. The Act of 1896 required, as already said, that a
definite contract must be made by any employer with his workers before
deductions could be made from wages; other terms could be specified in a
notice affixed in the workplace. Among other conditions the deductions
had to be fair and reasonable, the acts or omissions which entailed a
deduction had to be specified in the contract, and particulars of any
deduction actually imposed had to be given to the worker at the time.
Even when the Inspector had severely pruned the contract, deductions for
such things as gas, needles, sweeping, sick clubs, made a serious
inroad; a rate of 6s. 6d. would emerge as 5s. 5d., of 7s. 6d. as 6s.
5d., of 12s. as 9s. 9d. for a week’s work that might legally be sixty
hours.[53]
“Girls’ wages are as a rule so pitiably low as to leave no margin,” said
Miss Squire in 1898, “for making good any damage to work entrusted to
them, while the rapidity necessary in order to reach the standard
required of workers—paid by the quantity turned out—increases the risk
of damage.”
In that year a letter reached me from the Leader of a Factory Girls’
Club in London about one of its members, employed in decorated sheet
metal work, who “looked thoroughly miserable and overworked.” The girl
had been set to work, at 8s. a week, on a heavy “grooving” machine in
place of a man paid 28s. a week. A visit from the Inspectors was
desired, and the girl said they would find “plenty things to find fault
with.” Although attention was promptly and closely applied to these
other things, I had to explain to the Club Leader that the Factory
Inspector was not concerned with even the slenderest wages, except in so
far as touched by the Truck Acts, unless the pieceworkers should desire
to submit a claim for extension to them of the Particulars Clause in the
Factory Act.
In the same year an instance of deductions for short quantity from girls
soldering tins containing perishable goods, being engaged, not on
piecework, but on a fixed weekly wage, again illustrates both the
smallness of wages and the subjection to heavy pressure. Here the girls
rarely (some never) received full wage, 1d. being deducted for every ten
trays (twenty-four tins on each) short of the total required daily,
which was 190 trays containing 4,560 tins. The girls complained that
this total exceeded what their best efforts could produce. “It is
slavery. We do not dawdle. We are all for scrambling for fear of losing
our money.” Miss Squire examined the books for eleven workers during
five weeks, and none reached the total required, although two once came
within two trays of it. Rewards were given for care and good work and
were set off against “short quantity.” Thus from a wage of 8s. 9d., 300
trays being declared short, 2s. 6d. was deducted, and 1s. added for good
work, resulting in a net wage of 7s. 3d. The Inspector found in another
factory under the same company a woman whose wages were raised for good
work, who ordinarily sealed 120 to 140 trays daily, and could do 170
trays at a push. Thus the deductions in the first factory were
manifestly unfair and they were refunded after the investigation. The
manager subsequently informed the Inspector that there was no falling
off in number of tins sealed by the girls.[54] In a biscuit factory
labellers, putting labels on four sides and the top of a tin, were paid
at the rate of 1d. for twelve tins; for any one label damaged, 1d. was
deducted, so that twelve tins would then be labelled for nothing.[55]
The Women Inspectors were driven to realise by such experiences that not
merely was starvation pay for women and girls prevalent in many
instances, but that the whole outlook of many employers on their
standard and maximum wages for women was darkened, and these employers
had almost uncontrolled power to fix and alter rates for unorganised
workers. As late as the middle of 1914 Miss Whitworth (Mrs. Drury),
taking evidence for a prosecution, found that a pieceworker, without the
required written particulars, was actually paid for some work in the
week of enquiry, without notice, less than she was paid in the previous
week for the same work. The foreman’s explanation was: “What can one do,
when a girl is earning as much as 15s. a week, but lower the piece
rate.”[56] This was a not unusual attitude throughout our experience up
to the war period. The fact of its existence and the consequences on the
output of the workgirl—faced with the alternatives of earning the same
sum whether on a higher or a lower piece rate, and naturally choosing
the former—may be well seen in Mr. R. H. Tawney’s “Minimum Rates in the
Tailoring Trade.”[57]
Of wholesale clothing factories in Colchester, in 1908, a local leading
manufacturer told an Inspector that he thought 7s. to 8s. would be the
average wage of the girls employed, and her “own observations confirmed
this. Board and lodging cost 7s. a week at the lowest, so it is
obviously impossible for a girl to live unless she is at home.”[58] It
is noteworthy how often this average appeared to rule in various parts
of the country, as one turns over many Annual Reports.
The remarkable thing about this low and limited view of the value of a
woman’s work, which ruled so generally as seriously to depress her own
estimate of its value, was that a sudden alteration in the valuation
occurred immediately there was any failure in punctuality of attendance,
or quantity and quality of output. And yet, sometimes, outside public
opinion, as reflected in the decision of a police court magistrate or a
sheriff, supported the two apparently incompatible estimates.
In a case taken into court in South London, where the contract for
deductions for time lost rendered the worker liable to a fine of 1d. a
minute lost, the information was dismissed on the ground that the
contract was not in general unfairly enforced, although it was shown
that one worker earning 6s. a week was fined 6d. for five minutes lost
and another 4d. for four minutes lost. While the girls were at work the
service was valued at 1½d. an hour, in a week of sixty hours’ work.[59]
In a South London factory, where fining was at the rate of 1d. for any
time lost up to five minutes, and 2d. for more than five minutes, 276
girls out of 500 were fined sums from 4d. to 8d., and the total amount
collected by the firm in this way was £156 in a year. Incidentally
punctuality was not secured here by docking the low and hardly earned
wages of the girls. In many cases the attention drawn to the matter by
Inspectors induced employers to refund deductions that should never have
been made. Heads of firms often gave far too little personal care and
attention to safeguarding their own employees from injustice.[60] In
numerous instances where, after careful investigation in a factory by
the Inspector of the whole effects of the fining system, the matter was
once fully brought to the knowledge of the head of a firm, voluntary
abolition of the system followed. Where it was abandoned in favour of
better methods of discipline, return to the system was unknown. The gain
in efficiency of management was well attested by such employers in their
evidence to the Committee on Truck in 1908.[61]
A contrast appeared frequently between the estimate of value put into an
article by labour expended on it, and of the worker’s share in
responsibility for loss occasioned by any accidental slip of the fast-
moving fingers. In a rubber tyre factory, for example, where the outer
case of the rubber tyre was trimmed—_i.e._, cut neatly along the edges—
by girls, at the rate of 1¼d. a dozen cases, a fine of 1d. was imposed
for each case damaged by the edge being unevenly cut or snipped. The
loss to the employer was indeed reckoned as 2s. 6d.; the loss to the
worker, although only 1d., equalled four-fifths of what she could earn
in an hour’s work.[62] In a safety-pin factory in the West of England,
where only good work was paid for and some waste unavoidable—material
being “weighed out” in lots of 100 gross or 50 gross, and weighed again
when brought in—some exceptionally bad deductions were found. A girl who
had to cap 50 gross of pins for 1s. 3d. was told when she brought the
lot in that she was ¾ pound short, and 2s. 3½d. was deducted from her
weekly wage of 5s. 7d. A married woman bringing in 84 gross of good pins
out of 100 gross booked to her, was charged 2s. for 21 pounds short in
the metal, and instead of receiving 1s. 11½d. for the 84 gross pins,
admittedly well capped, received her pay envelope empty—with a note on
it that she owed ½d. Here the firm, aroused by the miserable conditions
brought to light by the Inspector, voluntarily returned all deductions,
exceeding 5 per cent. off any weekly wage to the workers for the whole
year, and arranged for piecework books with careful entries and for
regular “check-weighing” by the workers.
The number of instances is astounding where, by the aid of the records
required by the Truck Act of 1896, Inspectors were able to track out
preposterous, long-standing “debts” of workgirls to their employers for
“damages” which they could not test or verify themselves, in shirt and
collar and other clothing trades, in pen factories, and other small
metal works; the burden of the system can only be grasped by a careful
study of details in numerous Annual Reports. The difficulties of
successful prosecutions in many bad cases are touched on in Chapter VI.
on legal work. “There were cases in which the worker had remained in
debt for as long as eighteen months on a single batch of collars
machined, gradually paying off by such instalments as her weekly wage of
7s. to 10s. would bear.”[63]
In an Irish linen-weaving factory that I visited with Miss Martindale in
1911 in the course of long negotiations with the Manufacturers’
Association, carried on in the hope of securing voluntary improvements
in harsh contracts regarding damaged work, we found that 65·76 per cent.
of the weavers were fined an average of 8¾d. in one recent week, and
60·5 per cent., an average of 7½d., in another week, six months earlier.
The highest gross average wage was 7s. 2¾d., and the average net wage,
including a so-called time bonus, was 5s. 8½d. The mill was making
little or no profit, and, as I observed at the time, I “never had so
strong an illustration of the truth that thriving manufacture cannot be
built up on the labour of depressed and half-starved workers.” In spite
of warning, the percentage of workers fined there rose yet higher, and
the firm was told that unless there was immediate reform proceedings
must follow. Here and elsewhere I pressed for the institution of method
and application of skill in training the workers, and in this case it
was effectually established with results most satisfactory to the
management, while the number of workers fined fell to 6·9 per cent. In
another weaving shed, where 33 per cent. were fined weekly for cloth
faults, after an Inspector’s visit all fines were abolished “as an
experiment.” The manager in due course wrote that it was an unqualified
success, but that he did not wish his competitors to know, as it gave
him an advantage in getting good weavers.[64]
A great evil, particularly in connection with clothing factories,
developed out of charges for damaged work, in “raffling” in order to
escape the burden of practically enforced purchase by the workers of
garments that they were alleged to have damaged. Even in 1898 factories
were found where this practice had been reduced to a regular system. In
one factory every worker was required or expected to pay 1d. a week to
the foreman towards a fund for paying back to the employee the amount
deducted from her wages for damaged work, receiving in return a ticket
for the raffle by which damaged articles were disposed of week by week.
Three successful prosecutions, taken by Miss Squire in 1905, did
something to check the growth of this practice in Leeds. In each case
the magistrate severely censured the defendants.[65] In 1906 it was
found to be extensively prevalent in Manchester “making-up” factories.
“Leaving aside,” said Miss Paterson, “... the effect on character of
gambling even to so slight an extent, I think it tends to make workers
careless in their work; to make foremen and employers careless about
training good workers, and indifferent to fairness when they assess
damage.”[66] Although compulsory purchase by the worker of damaged work,
illegal as it was, decreased, it was far more difficult to repress the
insidious practice of “giving” the worker or “allowing her” to take
damaged work, for which she had a deduction made from her wages. The
better employers agreed with the Inspector in prohibiting anything of
the kind in their works.
This old evil, of compulsory purchase by the worker of damaged products
of her industry, the damage being due, not only to lack of care, but
sometimes to accident, sometimes to defective material or implements,
sometimes to overpressure or defective training of the worker, appeared
in even the highly organised and relatively well-paid cotton trade,
which had at its own instance been exempted from the scope of the Truck
Act of 1896. Some girls of fourteen and sixteen years left a cotton
factory in 1901 owing to heavy fines for faults in the cloth. On
claiming arrears of wages due, they were each shown a piece of cloth and
told they must take the damaged pieces in lieu of wages. “... Finding
they could make no other terms, they said they would take time to
consider,” and meanwhile wrote to the Inspector, Miss Squire. She
accompanied them in the following week to the factory office, “and the
wages were paid over in coin, the employer finding that the Truck Act,
1831, was not to be lightly set aside.”[67]
Deductions for motive power, used in the manufacturing process, were
often found in our earlier years of inspection, but they had already
begun to die out, and, I think, have long since done so generally. They
were mainly a survival from the time of transition from handicraft to
power-driven industry, and sometimes reflected the hardness of those
days—as when they covered not only cost of fuel and repairs, but wages
also of the man who attended the engine. I made a calculation in the
case of some Lancashire clothing factories in 1897–98 that payment by
the worker of 1d. in the 1s. earned, or 1s. weekly if wages rose above
9s., brought in enough to run the whole power at the workers’ expense,
ownership of the engine remaining with the occupier. Charges or
deductions for cleaning the factory, or parts of it, such as lavatories,
were also a survival from other days when the worker worked in his own
domestic workshop; severe scrutiny by the Inspector of many wage
contracts, and of local practices that were unrecorded in any formal
notice, was necessary to free the worker from the burden of carrying the
occupier’s legal responsibility for keeping his factory in a cleanly
condition. Levies of 1d. a week on every worker in a large factory would
sometimes produce more than the wage of a good charwoman in places where
there was not much evidence of her activity. Even in 1901 the
prosecution of a firm for employing women in the dinner hour gave
publicity, during the hearing, to the details of how women and girls
supplied gratis, the labour, cloths, buckets, etc., necessary to enable
the occupiers of a world-famed textile factory to keep it in the cleanly
state required by the Acts. The conviction did much to “shift the burden
on to the right shoulders.”[68]
The odd topsy-turvy way in which law and administration reacted in the
difficult work of applying the Truck Act was seen by Miss Martindale in
a procession of workers who paraded the streets of Belfast in 1911
carrying boards on which stood in large letters the words: “Down with
the Truck Acts.” This followed our long negotiations with the
Association of Manufacturers (already referred to) in an endeavour to
secure milder contracts regarding deductions for damage. The meagre
results had been embodied, with other rules over which we had no
control, in a notice (drafted by the lawyers to the Association), a copy
of which was handed to each worker. The notices were headed by the
words: “The Truck Act, 1896, requires that a copy of the following terms
and conditions should be handed to every worker.” The “other rules”
included such conditions as instant dismissal of a worker when, in the
opinion of the employer, manager, or overlooker, she had been guilty of
certain acts or defaults, and discharge of workers in any department
without notice or compensation if any of the workers in the factory
strike or decline to work. This blending of incompatible terms could not
be prevented by legal process without amendment of the Act.
Up to the time of the passing of the Truck Act, 1887, and even later, a
common opinion held that deductions from wages in respect of fines were
rendered illegal by the Act of 1831, through its provision that the
entire wages were to be paid in coin. The important decision in
_Redgrave_ v. _Kelly_ (1889), however, established a different
conclusion, and left it so that the question of the reasonableness of
fines could not be raised under that Act. It was chiefly against
uncertainty and unreasonableness in such fines that the Act of 1896 was
aimed. Among the reactions from the very considerable, though
incomplete, degree of control introduced by this Act came the
development, especially in Irish textile factories, of a so-called
“bonus” system, the real meaning of which was in many instances a desire
to “keep clear” of that Act. It appeared in amounts varying from 5 to 20
per cent. of the wage in many and subtle forms; for timekeeping, for
output and equality of piecework, and for amount of wages earned in the
week. Although the bonus seldom seemed to raise the average wage above
the local level, it was treated by the employer as a kind of gift, over
and above wages, and the whole or part was liable to be withheld, in
addition to imposing any specific fine mentioned in the contract or a
deduction for time lost. In a case carried from Petty Sessions to the
High Court in Ireland, _Deane_ v. _Wilson_, a weaver lost 2s. 4d. out of
a weekly wage of 10s. for a single small unpunctuality. Arriving thus at
the mill a few minutes late, she was locked out for a quarter of the day
and forfeited her “bonus” of 2s. in addition to the quarter time lost,
reckoned as 4d. The High Court confirmed the decision of the magistrates
to dismiss the summons, on the ground that the 2s. bonus could not be
computed as wages, and that therefore no fine was inflicted.
The Committee on Truck, 1908, decided that the bonus system was open to
grave abuse, and on the evidence placed before them believed that it was
abused. They made certain recommendations for its control through
empowering a court “after considering all the circumstances of the case
to decide whether the bonus is used by the employer as a means of
evading the requirements of the statute, and, in the event of deciding
that it is so used, to convict the employer.”[69] I confess that it
appears to me that if such a clause had stood in the Act it would not
have altered the decision in _Deane_ v. _Wilson_. Magistrates and Judges
alike arrived at the conclusion that the Truck Act did not provide a
remedy for a reduction by 2s. 4d. of a gross payment of 10s. for a
week’s skilled work (which 10s. was regularly given to the wage earner
if no unpunctuality occurred). The reduction left the wage earner with
7s. 8d. net for a week in which she only lost a few minutes by her own
lateness. The recommendation of the Minority Report of the Truck
Committee “that the bonus system should be prohibited by law” would
hardly solve the difficulty. Extra rewards to workers for good work
could never be effectually prohibited by law. The real problem is to
assure to the worker a secure, net minimum wage, and to defeat evasion
by unreasonable or unjust employers.[70]
The charges upon wages above considered have been taken first—although
not the earliest form of Truck—because they were characteristic of the
factory system and specially harassing to large numbers of women in the
period from 1893 to 1914, before great changes were brought by the War.
Payment in “unprofitable wares” instead of in “lawful money” mainly
troubled unorganised factory operatives during the transition from
handicraft industry to mass production. Truck—that is, in its original
sense—survived in our official experience, and called for our
intensified enquiry and action among outworkers in rural districts: in
Cornwall and Somerset, over wide areas in Ireland, and among knitters in
Shetland. From these directions complaints flowed in upon the Women
Inspectors, keeping them absorbed for many months in activities that
made them, for the time, almost anything but Factory Inspectors. They
led us into almost incredible experiences[71] until eventually various
legal decisions made it plain that any outworker who was not under an
express contract personally to execute the manual work, however poor or
however clearly in need of protection, was outside the Truck Acts.
Two ancient forms of oppressive “agreement ... understanding ... or
arrangement ... direct or indirect” prohibited by law,[72] continued,
however, in our time to trouble ill-organised factory workers, irregular
charges for rent, and compulsory expenditure of wages at an employer’s
shop.
“The people say it was a charity for you to stop the checks, but it
would be a greater charity if you would stop the rents being kept off
the workers.” “If the Inspector would look after shopkeepers giving out
work and making the workers take goods instead of money, I think she
would be doing a service to the poor.” Both these complaints have the
vivid, Irish ring, but they expressed the sore needs of many a worker,
and not only in Great Britain and Ireland. As regards deductions for
rent, without a shadow of a legal right, no reported instance is worse
than that in a lucifer match factory in England in 1898, followed by
prosecution and fine, where, in absence of any contract, the employer
was taking nearly the whole earnings of a half-starved young girl worker
for accumulated and unrecorded rent, unpaid by her father during a long
epidemic of smallpox.[73] Another instance nearly as bad was found in a
factory in a great textile district where, without rent-book or any form
of contract (which in any case could not have been legalised), any wife
or daughter engaged on piecework was liable to receive her earnings
reduced by quite undefined amounts, said to be rent due from husband or
father. The mere fact that the mill was sometimes “standing” added to
the uncertainty of the position; in one case successfully taken into
court, the employer’s ledger showed 17s. 1½d. deducted for rent in six
weeks for a cottage rented at 2s. a week.[74] The Irish complainant
(living in a house owned by his employer) was, however, concerned far
more with insecurity of tenure and with the feature that “if you get
dismissed out of your employment they won’t give you any money (wages)
till the house is empty.” Uncertainty about the poorest roof over his
head, being his home, was to the Irish peasant yet worse than insecurity
of employment.
Miss Martindale sometimes found dressmakers employed in Irish country
towns who “lived-in,” receiving their wages only once a year, who were
obliged to obtain articles on credit from their employers, getting
seriously in debt to them. She also found hand-spinners and weavers in
the tweed industry paid in exorbitantly priced draperies and groceries;
a complainant, telling how a girl’s wages were pledged by her father to
a rich shopkeeper for five years for the paying off of his debts,
described the girl as “sold” to her employer. The remark made to Miss
Martindale by a man who had very special opportunities of knowing the
poorer country districts of Ireland, that “the people are born in debt,
die in debt, and live in bondage,” struck her in the year 1907 as
“undoubtedly only too true.”[75]
In few places could the framework of bondage be more complete than in a
certain “townland,” where the owner of the principal shop and public-
house was also the owner of the flax fields and flax scutch mill, and
employer of many of the inhabitants. The women working for wages in the
mill seldom received coin; one girl, whose father and sister were
dependent on the same employer, received none during a whole winter.
Dealing at the shop was practically a condition of employment.[76] A
successful prosecution in 1907, upheld on appeal against conviction to
Quarter Sessions, brought in many communications of similar cases to
Miss Martindale, as did the well-known earlier prosecution by Miss Deane
at Ardara in 1898, and several more by Miss Squire in Dungloe and
neighbouring districts, which led in 1900 to her hard-fought appeals to
the High Court, touched on in Chapter VI. These ladies were indeed all
the “petticoated Inspectors” of whom a well-known Irish Q.C. declared at
the hearing of an appeal in June, 1900, that there was “an army squatted
around Dungloe, watching every little industry and striving to throttle
them.”[77]
Many of the difficulties that the Inspectors had to encounter in remote
country districts, in their endeavour to scotch or root out the habit of
paying in kind or in tickets usable instead of coin at a particular
shop, were not of legal interpretation. They were largely of local
circumstances. A fortnight’s residence in 1899 in a lovely district of
county Donegal enabled me, beyond my expectations, to gauge the
character of these practices. The open friendliness shown by the peasant
woman and car-drivers to an English visitor showed me some of the
essential factors of the situation. There was a manifest sense of
security among the law-breakers, on the alert to conceal all traces of
their methods of payment since the £44 penalty secured against a
shopkeeping middlewoman by Miss Deane in 1898. In their shops, their
inns, their ownership of cars, they represented the wealth and carrying
power of the local community; in their connections through marriage with
the priests’ and magistrates’ families, and sometimes even their
position as magistrates, they represented the order of the community. It
was possible for me to ascertain, beyond doubt, that not only
outworkers, but also masons and roadworkers, were being paid for their
work mainly (and sometimes wholly) in goods estimated above their real
value; it was a long work of patient skill to establish particular cases
in court, and to Miss Squire I left this part of our task. I could see
carts laden with yarn and groceries that drove out for miles round the
country and that brought back knitted hose; the difficulty was to be on
a spot out in the country, or in a shop, at the exact moment to see the
transactions. “To be an eye-witness,” said Miss Squire, “of such payment
is almost impossible, for that it is illegal is well known; and
immediately a stranger enters a shop all transactions cease. Baffled
frequently, I succeeded on one occasion, by a carefully planned
stratagem ... and saw the socks handed over the counter, yarn for fresh
socks given out, and packets of tea and sugar given in payment. Except
in this one case I had, in undertaking prosecutions, to rely entirely
upon the workers, and even those who beforehand appeared most staunch
managed to evade service of summons, disappeared from their homes in a
wonderful manner, and were with difficulty brought to the court. Once
there and put on oath, the truth is told and conviction of the employers
followed in each case, the maximum penalty being obtained in one case
and £5 in each of the others.... The immediate effect of the proceedings
is that money is handed now to workers by the agents, but a close watch
will have to be kept lest ... the practice is continued in another and
more hidden form.”[78] This was a prophetic utterance, as instances of
struggles in later legal proceedings showed, especially in two distinct
appeals, _Squire_ v. _Sweeney_ in 1900.[79] In many ways, by letter and
by word and gesture, the grateful women showed the gallant Inspectors,
Miss Squire and her successor, Miss Martindale, how highly their
adventurous efforts were valued. At this time it came out clearly that
some local country agents of manufacturers of the big centres suffered
from miserably low commissions. One told Miss Squire that he had no
commission at all, that he had ceased to pay in goods since her
prosecution showed him it was illegal, and he asked her if she could
help him to find a commission-paying employer. Special care was taken to
bring home to the head firms in the North and West of Ireland the grave
responsibility they bore in this matter.
In the following year, not only in Ireland but also in Cornwall, amongst
guernsey knitters, and in Somerset amongst kid-glove makers, Miss Squire
carried forward this endeavour to secure respect for the right of the
worker to “free control of her own earnings unhampered by any condition
as to where and how they should be spent.”
“Only by a daily intercourse with cottagers in remote villages and the
fishing folk of little seaside towns ... can the real nature of their
business transactions be fathomed. The information so obtained and
pieced together disclosed a state of such widespread defiance of the law
and contempt of the rights of the wage earner as it seems incredible
could exist in England at the present time.” In the same year the
Superintending Inspector for the Northern Division noted that there
existed “a considerable amount of the old system of Truck,” in the
Shetland shawl, the Harris tweeds, and the fishing industries of
Scotland. He thought it hardly “remediable under the Acts by the
Inspectorate.” The features he indicated were just those against which
Miss Squire’s carefully devised campaign was directed in Ireland and
South-West England. Unquestionably, new and unconventional methods of
exploration of the trouble had to be tried. The Cornish women excelled
in their knitting of yachtsmen’s guernseys for which the nominal payment
was 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. each, but the payment was in drapery goods from
the employer’s shop “at whatever price and of whatever quality the
employer chooses to supply”; a poor cripple woman was found in great
distress with a man’s coat on her hands, when she sorely needed money
for her rent. In Somersetshire villages the kid-glove makers were being
paid in goods from the grocery shop of an agent who fetched the work
from factories, distributed it to the cottages, collected it again, and
returned it to the factories. The ten cases successfully prosecuted
against five drapers and grocers, who were contractors in these
counties, had an immediate good effect that lasted for some time, and
some manufacturers were moved to open a depôt in Yeovil where they gave
out the work and paid the outworkers in coin through their own
clerk.[80] A recrudescence of the system was found by Miss Slocock in
1907 in Somersetshire after the English High Court decision in _Squire_
v. _Midland Lace Company_. This, like the Irish decision in _Squire_ v.
_Sweeney_, practically withdrew the protection of the Truck Acts, 1831
to 1887, from the English outworker.[81]
These Acts have awaited amendment all these years from 1908 to 1921, and
meantime the scope of wages problems for women has widened and changed,
in Great Britain at least. The War went far towards establishing for
women a legal claim to a reasonable minimum wage; first, temporarily,
when they were employed as substitutes in great organised men’s
engineering industries, and then through Trade Boards gradually set up
in trades where no adequate machinery of organisation existed for the
effective regulation of wages. Women’s own great industrial services to
the nation during the War, fostered and encouraged by specialised
training, of course altered the outlook fundamentally. It was no longer
a favour conferred on them merely to employ them; their work and their
special aptitudes and skill were seen in a new light as a service to the
community.
Yet even before these new motives came in sight, things had not stood
still, for the Factory Act of 1895 had made secure the claim of the
pieceworker to a definite contract as to her prospective earnings on any
given piece of work. That Act directly extended to all pieceworkers in
textile trades the right to _written_ particulars of work and wages, in
a section[82] which was declared by Mr. Birtwistle—first Inspector of
Textile Particulars—to be “without doubt the most popular section of any
Act of Parliament ever passed in the interest of labour.”[83] The strong
organisation of the textile trades, especially the Lancashire cotton
trade, had secured the beginnings of this protection to some textile
pieceworkers in the Act of 1891.[84] It was suggested possibly by a
similar provision for handicraft silk weavers in an Act of 1845.
It was so immediately successful in setting these workers free from the
torment of insecurity in calculating prospective earnings on intricate
piece rates, liable to frequent alterations, that other pieceworkers
soon called for its aid. This was provided for by the power taken in
1895 to apply the benefit of the provision by Order of the Secretary of
State “to any class of non-textile factories or to any class of
workshops ... subject to such modifications as may in his opinion be
necessary for adapting those provisions to the circumstances of the
case.”[85]
This just and simple measure, really indispensable for intricate
piecework in mass production, was valuable, not only for collective
bargaining between employers and employed, but also for enabling
individual workers to understand and discuss the basis of piecework
earnings. It was happily applied further, by the Act of 1901, to
outworkers on prescribed lists kept by the occupier of a factory or
workshop and by contractors.[86]
With the aid of many confidential complaints from women workers, the
Women Inspectors were enabled to make a long series of effective
investigations in many non-textile industries as to the inability of
pieceworkers to calculate what their earnings would be at any given
piece of work, and as to their consequent bitter feeling of grievance in
the matter. In 1896 Miss Deane reported to the Home Office on the need
for application of the clause to workers in blouse, apron, and
handkerchief trades. I reported similarly in that year on the workers’
desire for, and great need of, this provision in the wholesale clothing
trade in the North of England, and I completed this enquiry for the
remainder of the great centres of the industry in England and Scotland
in 1897–98. It was at once found that the practice of giving particulars
to pieceworkers was already in existence in fair-dealing factories, and
that the best manufacturers held that “the only business-like system is
to have a clear contract with the workers, such contract to hold good
until the question of a new one has been fully considered and threshed
out.” In 1898 I reported that the general need of outworkers who then
stood outside the section for the protection afforded by the section was
even greater than the need of the factory worker.[87] The needs of
pieceworkers in pen-making, hand fustian cutting, underclothing, shirt
and collar industries were investigated and reported on in quick
succession chiefly by Miss Squire, and in 1899 our first cases under an
Order for written particulars were successfully taken into court by her.
This advertisement of the possibility of applying a remedy to one of
their greatest handicaps and grievances—lack of power to calculate
earnings—brought a decided increase in complaints about wages from women
and girls.
The 1900 Order for particulars to pieceworkers in the pen-making trade—
where long and intricate investigation into the conditions of
calculating and paying wages had been necessary in this industry of many
minute, successive hand-tool operations[88]—brought strikingly good
results in a remarkably short time. The results were not only material
in wages to the worker, but, still more, moral in engendering confidence
between workers and employers. In 1898 there was much lack of
confidence, workers asserting that their “lots” of pens were frequently
larger than the nominal amount, and employers were more or less
resentful of investigation. In March, 1901, Miss Squire reported that
the occupiers of the twelve pen factories—all situated in Birmingham—had
set to work in a “highly commendable way” to supply the prescribed
particulars. I doubt if any change in methods of stating and fulfilling
wage contracts was ever more quietly and rapidly effected. The employers
seemed to understand thoroughly the spirit of the Order, and they
expressly recognised that Inspectors, manufacturers, and workers had to
work out the details of the new requirement together in a harmonious
way. Here, and in various other trades, the complexity and mass of
detail that had to be mastered in developing the various Orders for
piecework particulars led to continual interchange of information and
help between the District Inspectors and the floating staff of Women
Inspectors. The work done then and later by the whole Factory Department
must certainly have smoothed the way for introduction of Trade Board
minimum wage scales. The Orders for locks, latches, and keys, cables,
chains, and cart gear, of 1902, specially operated in this direction.
In some industries, and strangely in wholesale fustian clothing
factories situated in textile districts where the idea of written
particulars had first prevailed, there was much patient work to be done
by the Inspectorate in overcoming a stubborn adherence to defective
methods of giving particulars, such as chalk marks on garments, use of
symbols, and their refusal even to give particulars at all.
Early in 1903 came the first and very important extension of this
protection to outworkers in the wholesale tailoring trade. Their need
could not be expressed in the same clear, organised way as by the
factory workers. It was none the less surely to be discovered by
research among them, as Miss Squire found when she investigated,
directly or through visits to firms, the needs of over 6,000 outworkers.
Her account of the variety in systems of giving out work in the four
great centres—Leeds, London, Colchester, Bristol—and the risks of the
bag-woman or carrier system in the last two districts, must be read to
acquire an adequate idea of the needs of the women:
“The bag-woman or carrier system is open to much abuse, especially
where these are really contractors receiving the outwork price
themselves and giving what proportion they think fit to those to whom
they pass on the work. Sometimes they keep the grocery shop of the
village, and if they are sharp enough not actually to infringe the
letter of the Truck Act, sail very near the wind and obtain an
injurious control over their customers, dependent as these are upon
them for both work and grocery. The prices paid to outworkers for
either making or finishing are incredibly low at the best; at the
worst, the ‘slop clothing’ rate, they are cruel. With all the sad
experience one has gained in many trades of the amount of work a woman
will do for a penny, one still marvels how anyone, however poor, can
be found to accept the rate given for some classes of work, as, for
example, elevenpence a dozen for finishing (that is, all but the
stitching of the seams) men’s trousers. When the rate of wages is so
low, it is of great moment to the worker to know exactly what the
price is; she wants to be absolutely sure that she has not been misled
by some symbol into putting ‘A’ quality work, which takes more time,
into a ‘B’ quality garment, for which she will receive a halfpenny
less, or to run the risk of being told when she takes the work back to
the factory that she was mistaken if she thought the price would be
eightpence, as it had been lowered to sixpence.
“That there is a real need for the outworker to have ... the written
statement of the price the employer contracts to pay was abundantly
proved. In the absence of such written particulars the homeworker is,
at best, uncertain as to the price she will receive, and is at times
in complete ignorance, so that the door is open for fraud on the part
of ‘passer,’ or carrier, or messenger.”[89]
The need of written particulars for outworkers was voluntarily
recognised by some employers, but not being enforceable had been often
fitfully and carelessly carried out by their agents. It was pre-
eminently a case where law should step in to bring up general practice
to the level admitted by public opinion to be the least that was due
from employer to employed.
At the end of 1903 the Order for particulars to pieceworkers in the
shirt, collar, linen underwear, corset, and other wearing apparel trades
widely extended this safeguard to cover unorganised women—to their
immense satisfaction. “Mrs. A., employed in a chiffon and straw hat
workshop, informed the Inspector how pleased she had been to read in the
political news of _Lloyd’s_ about the new Order. Formerly she never knew
until Saturday night when her job was done, what she would receive for
it.... Miss D., belt and tie maker, ... recently did fifty dozen,
expecting 2d. more a dozen than she received.”[90]
The work of enquiry, followed by extension of the principle of supplying
written particulars to pieceworkers, went on apace. Seventeen or more
trades were added in 1907 by composite Orders, and more in later years.
Every effort was made to give administrative effect to all these Orders
as fast as possible. The Inspectors acquired, as it were automatically,
a wide and detailed acquaintance with prevalent wage rates, and were
again and again struck by the tendency of employers to lower rates
“directly girls get quick and earn too much.” “It appears to be useless
to point out that this is a very short-sighted policy, and that all
incentive to quick, good work is crushed out.”[91]
The time was evidently getting ripe for application of the principle of
minimum wage regulation.
And yet a word may here be added on the valuable help, in ratio of work
to wages, that sometimes could be brought, through the Factory Act and
the Factory Inspector, to a most helpless class of workers, those in
low-paid industries who were practically compelled to take work home at
the close of the legal day in the factory in order to keep body and soul
together. A striking example of an old-standing breach of Section 31 of
the Factory Act of 1901 (restricting employment inside and outside the
factory or workshop on the same day), with a sinister effect on the
wages of the girls, was brought to light by Miss Escreet in Birmingham
in 1913:
“Workers in the warehouses of a pen factory had been regularly taking
home cards to thread with elastic for the reception of pens,
compasses, india-rubber, etc. The workers, who mostly lived some way
from the factory, arrived at their homes about 7.15 p.m., and in
nearly every case worked steadily for three nights in the week for
three hours or more. Many of the girls with large quantities of cards
to do received help from their relations; even where this was given,
their leisure was encroached on to the extent of one and a half to two
hours, and where it was lacking entirely, work sometimes went on till
midnight, or spread to four or five evenings in the week. Ample
evidence was at hand to explain the continuance of this ‘voluntary
work’: the system had been long virtually used to economise on the
wages bill, for ‘cards’ were given out and their quantity increased at
regular intervals, when girls would normally be receiving a rise. That
the economy was a successful one may be seen from the fact that the
average weekly warehouse wage of six adult workers, taken at random,
was 10s. 1d., which they increased to an average of 13s. 5½d. by doing
‘cards.’ This system enabled the employer to economise in his
insurance contributions as well as in wages, for, without the card-
money, he would have been liable for an increased contribution. The
girls were shrewd enough to appreciate the unfairness of the system,
and welcomed its abolition, in spite of the fact that their net wages
have dropped. An increase has been given at the factory, but not to
the extent of the weekly cards. Nevertheless, I was told in one case
by the sister of a worker that they had had ‘the happiest week for
twelve years.’ And a grateful Jewish mother wished me ‘a long life,
and God bless you’ over and over again.”