THE SWEATING SYSTEM IN GENERAL.
"History repeats itself," is a very hackneyed phrase, yet, for want of
any better or more expressive one, must lead such words as are to be
said on an old yet ever new evil; for it is just forty years ago, since
the winter of 1847-1848 showed among the working men and women of
England conditions analogous to those of the present, though on a far
smaller scale. Acute distress prevailed then as now. Revolution was in
the air, and what it might mean being far less plain to apprehensive
minds than it is to-day, a London newspaper, desirous of knowing just
what dangers were to be faced, sent a commissioner to investigate the
actual conditions of the working classes, and published his reports from
day to day. Then, for the first time, a new word came into circulation,
and "sweating" became the synonym, which it has since remained, for a
system of labor which means the maximum of profit for the employer and
the minimum of wages for the employed. The term is hardly scientific,
yet it is the only one recognized in the most scientific investigation
thus far made. That of 1847-1848 did its work for the time, nor have its
results wholly passed away. Charles Kingsley, young then and ardent, his
soul stirred with longing to lighten all human suffering, took up the
cause of the worker, and in his pamphlet "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," and
later, in the powerful novel "Alton Locke," showed every phase of the
system, then in its infancy, and, practically, entirely unknown on the
other side of the Atlantic.
The results of this agitation became visible at once. Unions and
Associations of various sorts among tailors and the one or two other
trades to which the sweating system had applied, were organized and from
year to year extended and perfected till it had come to be the popular
conviction that, save in isolated cases here and there, the evil was to
be found only among the foreign population, and even there, hedged in
and shorn of its worst possibilities. This conviction remained and made
part of the estimate of any complaints that now and then arose, and
though the work of the organized charities, and of independent
investigations here and there, demonstrated from year to year that it
had increased steadily, its real scope was still unbelieved. Now, after
forty years, the story tells itself again, this time in ways which
cannot be set down as newspaper sensationalism or anybody's desire to
make political capital. It is a Blue Book which holds the latest
researches and conclusions, and Blue Books are not part of the popular
reading, but are usually tucked away in government offices or libraries,
to which the public has practically no access. A newspaper paragraph
gives its readers the information that another report on this or that
feature of public interest has been prepared and shelved for posterity,
and there the matter ends.
In the present case public feeling and interest have been so stirred by
the condition of unexampled misery and want among masses eager to work
but with no work to be had, that the report has been called for and
read and discussed to a degree unknown to any of its predecessors. While
it gives results only in the most compact form and by no means compares
with work like that of Mr. Charles Peck in his investigations for the
New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor, it still holds a mass of
information invaluable to all who are seeking light on the cause of
present evils. As with us the system is closely a part of the
manufacture of cheap clothing of every order, tailoring leading, and
various other trades being included, furniture makers, strange to say,
being among the chief sufferers in these.
With us the system is so clearly defined and so well known, at any rate
in all our large centres of labor, that definition is hardly necessary.
For England and America alike the sweater is simply a sub-contractor
who, at home or in small workshops, undertakes to do work, which he in
turn sublets to other contractors, or has done under his own eyes. The
business had a simple and natural beginning, the journey-worker of fifty
years ago taking home from his employers work to be done there either
by himself or some member of his family. At this time it held decided
advantages for both sides. The master-tailor was relieved from finding
workshop accommodations with all the accompanying expense and from
constant supervision of his work people, while good work was insured by
the pride of the worker in his craft, as well as his desire not to lose
a good connection. There was but the slightest subdivision of labor,
each worker was able to make the garment from the beginning to the end,
apprentices being employed on the least important parts.
Work of this order has no further place in the clothing trade, whether
tailoring or general outfitting, save for the best order of clothing.
Increase of population cheapened material, the introduction of machinery
and the tremendous growth of the ready-made clothing trade are all
responsible for the change. The minutest system of subdivided labor now
rules here as in all trades. When a coat is in question, it is no longer
the master-tailor, journeyman and apprentices who prepare it, but a
legion of cutters, basters, machinists, pressers, fellers, button-hole,
and general workers, who find the learning of any one alone of the
branches an easy matter, and so rush into the trade, the fiercest and
most incessant competition being the instant result.
In 1881 a census was taken in the East End of London which showed over
fifteen thousand tailors at work, of whom more than nine thousand were
women. The number of the latter at present is estimated to be about
twelve thousand, much increase having been prevented by various causes,
for which there is no room here. As the matter at present stands, every
man and woman employed aims to become as fast as possible a sweater on
his or her own account. For large employers this is not so easy; for the
small ones nothing could be simpler, and here are the methods.
If the trade is an unfamiliar one, there is first the initiation by
employment in a sweater's shop, and a few months, or even weeks, gives
all the necessary facility. Then comes the question of workroom; and
here it is only necessary to take the family room, and hire a sewing
machine, which is for rent at two shillings and sixpence, or sixty
cents, a week. To organize the establishment all that is necessary is a
baster, a machinist, a presser, and two or three women-workers, one for
button-holing, one for felling, and one for general work, carrying home,
etc. The baster may be a skilled woman; the presser is always a man, the
irons weighing from seven to eighteen pounds, and the work being of the
most exhausting description, no man being able to continue it beyond
eight or ten years at the utmost. The sweater-employer often begins by
being his own presser, or his own baster; but as business increases his
personal labor lessens. In the beginning his profits are extremely
small, prices varying so that it is impossible to make any general table
of rates. Even in the same branch of trade hardly any two persons are
employed at the same rate, and the range of ability appears to vary with
the wage paid, subdivision of labor being thus carried to its utmost
limit, and the sections of the divisions already mentioned being again
subdivided beyond further possibility. So tremendous is the competition
for work that the sweaters are played off against each other by the
contractors and sub-contractors, the result upon the workers below
being as disastrous as the general effect of the system as a whole.
As one becomes familiar with the characteristics of the East End,--and
this is only after long and persistent comings and goings in street and
alley,--it is found that there are entire streets in Whitechapel or St.
George's-in-the-East, the points where the tailoring trade seems to
focus, in which almost every house contains one, and sometimes several,
sweating establishments, managed usually by men, but now and then in the
hands of women, though only for the cheapest forms of clothing. Here,
precisely as in our own large cities, a room nine or ten feet square is
heated by a coke fire for the presser's irons, and lighted at night by
flaming gas-jets, six, eight, or even a dozen workers being crowded in
this narrow space. But such crowding is worse here than with us, for
reasons which affect also every form of cheap labor within doors.
London, under its present arrangements, is simply an enormous smoke
factory, and no quarter of its vast expanse is free from the plague of
soot and smoke, forever flying, and leaving a coating of grime on every
article owned or used, no matter how cared for. This is true for
Belgravia as for the East End, and "blacks," as the flakes of soot are
known, are eaten and drunk and breathed by everything that walks in
London streets or breathes London air.
There is, then, not only the foulness engendered by human lungs
breathing in the narrowest and most crowded of quarters, but the added
foulness of dirt of every degree and order, overlaid and penetrated by
this deposit of fine soot; the result a griminess that has no
counterpart on the face of the earth. "Cheap clothes and nasty" did not
end with Kingsley's time, and these garments, well made, and sold at a
rate inconceivably low, are saturated with horrible emanations of every
sort, and to the buyer who stops to think must carry an atmosphere that
ends any satisfaction in the cheapness. Setting aside this phase as an
intangible and, in part, sentimental ground for complaint, the fact that
the cheapness depends also upon the number of hours given by the
worker--whose day is never less than fourteen, and often eighteen,
hours--should be sufficient to ban the whole trade. Even for this
longest day there is no uniformity of price, and with articles
identically the same the rate varies with different sweaters, the
increasing competition accentuating these differences more and more. The
sweater himself is more or less at the mercy of the contractor, who says
to him: "Here are so many coats, at so much a coat. If you won't do them
at the price, there are plenty that will."
Already well aware of this fact, the sweater, if the rate falls at all
below his expectation, has simply to pursue the same course with the
waiting worker in his shop, a slight turn of the screw, half a penny off
here and a farthing there, bringing his own profit back to the rate he
assumes as essential. There is no pressure from below to compel justice.
For any rebellious worker a dozen stand waiting to fill the vacant
place; and thus the wrong perpetuates itself, and the sweater, whose
personal relation with those he employs may be of the friendliest,
becomes tyrant and oppressor, not of his own will, but through sheer
force of circumstances. Thus evils, which laws have not reached,
increase from day to day. Inspectors are practically powerless, and the
shameful system, degrading alike to employer and employed, grows by what
it feeds on, and hangs over the East End, a pall blacker and fouler than
the cloud of smoke and soot, also the result of man's folly, not to be
lifted till human eyes see clearer what makes life worth living, and
human hands are less weary with labor that profiteth not, but that
deadens sense and soul alike.
This is the general view of the system as a whole. For the special there
must still be a further word.