LONDON SHIRT-MAKERS.
Bloomsbury has a cheerful sound, and, like Hop Vine Garden and Violet
Lane, and other titles no less reassuring, seems to promise a breath of
something better than the soot-laden atmosphere offered by a London
winter. But Hop Vine Garden is but a passage between a line of old
buildings, and ends in a dark court and a small and dirty "public," the
beer-pots of which hold the only suggestion of hops to be discovered.
Violet Lane is given over to cat's-meat and sausage makers, the
combination breeding painful suspicions in the seeker's mind, and
Bloomsbury has long since ceased to own sight or smell of any growing
thing.
But, in a gray and forlorn old group of houses known as Clark's
Buildings, will be found, on certain evenings in the month, a little
knot of women, each with open account-book, studying over small piles of
pence and silver, and if their looks are any indication, drawing very
little satisfaction from the operation. They are the secretaries of the
little societies organized by the late Mrs. Patterson, who, like many
other philanthropists, came to see that till the workers themselves were
roused to the consciousness of necessity for union, but little could be
accomplished for them. A few of the more intelligent, stirred by her
deep earnestness, banded together twelve years ago, and organized a
society known as "The Society of Women Employed in Shirt, Collar, and
Under-linen Making;" and here may be found the few who have, from long
and sharp experience, discovered the chief needs of workers in these
trades. When outward conditions as they show themselves at present have
been studied, when homes and hours and wages and all the details of the
various branches have become familiar, it is to this dim little hall
that one comes for a final puzzle over all that is wrong.
For it is all wrong; nor in any corner of working London, can any fact
or figures make a right of the toil that is an old, old story; so old
that there is even impatience if one tells it again. Numbers are
unknown, each one who investigates giving a different result; but it is
quite safe to say that five hundred thousand women live by the
industries named in the society's title, not one of whom has ever
received, or ever will receive, under the present system, a wage which
goes beyond bare subsistence. Here, as in New York, or any other large
city of the United States, the conditions governing the trade are much
the same. The women, untrained and unskilled in every other direction,
turn to these branches of sewing as the possibility for all, and scores
wait for any and every chance of work from manufactory or small house.
As with us, the work is chiefly put out, and necessarily at once arises
the middle-man, or a gradation of middle-men, each of whom must have his
profit, taken in every case--not from employer, but worker. The employer
fixes his rates without reference to these. He is fighting, also, for
subsistence, plus as many luxuries as can be added from the profits of
his superior power over conditions. He may be, and often is, to those
nearest him, kind, unselfish, eager for right. But the hands are
"hands," and that is all; and the middle-man, of whom the very same
statement may be true, deals with the hands with an equal obliviousness
as to their connection with bodies and souls.
The original price per dozen of the garments made may be the highest in
the market, but before the woman who works is reached there are often
five, and sometimes more, transfers. Where workers are employed on the
premises, they fare better, being paid by the piece. The minutest
divisions of labor prevail, even more than with us--a shirt passing
through many hands, the weekly wage differing for each. The "fitter,"
for instance, must be a skilled workwoman, the flatness and proper set
of the shirt front depending upon correct fitting at the neck. For this
fitting in West End houses, the fitter receives a penny a shirt, and can
in a week fit twenty dozen--this meaning a pound a week. But slack
seasons reduce the amount, so that often she earns but nine or ten
shillings, her average for the year being about fourteen. For the grades
below her the sum is proportionately less. The most thoroughly skilled
hand in either shirt-making or under-linen has been known to make as
high as twenty-eight shillings a week ($7.00), but this is phenomenal;
nor, indeed, does any such possibility remain, prices having gone down
steadily for some years. A pound a week for a woman, as has been stated
elsewhere, is regarded even by just employers as all that can be
required by the most exacting; and with this standard in mind, a fall of
three or four shillings seems a matter of slight importance.
Taking the various industries in which women are employed, the needle,
as usual, leading, and the shirt-makers being a large per cent of the
number, there are in London nearly a million women, self-supporting and
self-respecting, and often the sole dependence of a family. This
excludes the numbers of thriftless and otherwise helpless poor whose
work is variable, and who, at the best, can earn only the lowest
possible wages as unskilled laborers. For the skilled ones, doing their
best in long days of work, never less than twelve hours, the average
earnings, after all chances of slack seasons and accidents have been
taken into account, is never over ten shillings a week. It is worth
while to consider what ten shillings can do.
The allowance per head for rations for the old people in the Whitechapel
Workhouse, one of the best of its class, is according to the
authorities, three shillings eleven pence (96c.) per week, the quantity
falling somewhat below the amount which physiologists regard as
necessary for an able-bodied adult. These supplies are purchased by
contract, and thus a full third lower than the single buyer can command.
But she has learned that appetite is not a point to be considered, and
for the most part confines herself to tea and bread and butter, with a
cheap relish now and then. Thus four shillings a week is made to cover
food, and three shillings gives her a small back room. For such lights,
fire, and washing as cannot be dispensed with, must be counted another
shilling. Out of the remaining two shillings must come her twopence a
week, if she belongs to any trades-union, leaving one shilling and
ten-pence for clothes, holidays, amusements, saving, and the possible
doctor's bill, a sum for the year, at the utmost, of from four pounds
fifteen shillings and ninepence, or a trifle under twenty dollars. These
women are, every one of them, past-mistresses in the art of doing
without; and they do without with a patient courage, and often a
cheerfulness, that is one of the most pathetic facts in their story. It
is the established order of things. Why should they cry or make ado?
Yet, as the workshop has its own education for men, and gives us the
order known as the "intelligent workman," so it gives us also the no
less intelligent workwoman, possessing not only the natural womanly gift
of many resources, but the added power of just so much technical
training as she may have received in her apprenticeship to her trade.
Miss Simcox, who has made a study of the whole question, comments on
this, in an admirable article in one of the monthlies for 1887,
emphasizing the fact that these women, fitted by experience and long
training for larger work, must live permanently, with absolutely no
outlook or chance of change, on the border-land of poverty and want.
They know all the needs, all the failings of their own class. Many of
them give time, after the long day's work is done, to attempts at
organizing and to general missionary work among their order; and by such
efforts the few and feeble unions among them have been kept alive. But
vital statistics show what the end is where such double labor must be
performed. These women who have character and intelligence, and
unselfish desire to work for others, have an average "expectation of
life" less by twenty years than that of the class who know the
comfortable ease of middle-class life.
It is one of these workers who said not long ago, her words being put
into the mouth of one of Mr. Besant's characters: "Ladies deliberately
shut their eyes; they won't take trouble; they won't think; they like
things about them to look smooth and comfortable; they will get things
cheap if they can. _What do they care if the cheapness is got by
starving women?_ Who is killing this girl here? Bad food and hard work.
Cheapness! What do the ladies care how many working girls are killed?"
The individual woman brought face to face with the woman dying from
overwork, would undoubtedly care. But the workers are out of sight,
hidden away in attic and basement, or the upper rooms of great
manufactories. The bargains are plain to see, every counter loaded,
every window filled. And so society, which will have its bargains, is
practically in a conspiracy against the worker. The woman who spends on
her cheapest dress the utmost sum which her working sister has for
dress, amusements, culture, and saving, preaches thrift, and it is
certain the working classes would be better off if they had learned to
save. Small wonder that the workers doubt them and their professed
friendship, and that the breach widens day by day between classes and
masses, bridged only by the work of those who, like the workers in the
Women's Provident League, know that it is to the rich that the need for
industry must be preached, not to the poor. Organization holds education
for both, and it is now quite possible to know something of the methods
of prominent firms with their workwomen, and to shun those which refuse
to consider the questions of over-time, of unsanitary workrooms, of
unjust fines and reductions, and the thousand ways of emptying some
portion of the workwoman's purse into that of the employer. It is women
who must do this, and till it is done, justice is mute, and the voice of
our sisters' blood cries aloud from the ground.