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Title: Sweated industry and the minimum wage
Author: Clementina Black
Contributor: A. G. Gardiner
Release date: February 25, 2025 [eBook #75467]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Duckworth & Co, 1907
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Carla Foust, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SWEATED INDUSTRY AND THE MINIMUM WAGE ***
SWEATED INDUSTRY
AND THE
MINIMUM WAGE
“The whole spectacle of poverty indeed is incredible. As soon as you
cease to have it before your eyes—even when you have it before your
eyes—you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people
deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the
sentimentalist.”
W. D. HOWELLS.
“The system which produces the happiest moral effects will be found
most beneficial to the interest of the individual and the common weal;
upon this basis the science of political economy will rest at last,
when the ponderous volumes with which it has been overlaid shall have
sunk by their own weight into the dead sea of oblivion.”
R. SOUTHEY.
SWEATED INDUSTRY
AND THE
MINIMUM WAGE
BY
CLEMENTINA BLACK
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
A. G. GARDINER
CHAIRMAN OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-SWEATING LEAGUE
[Illustration: [Logo]]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1907
_All rights reserved._
So many persons have kindly helped me with material for this volume that
it is impossible to name all of them; but I cannot forbear to express my
thanks to Mr W. Pember Reeves, to Mr Tom Garnett of Clitheroe, to my old
friends Mrs Bogue Luffmann and Mr H. H. Champion, who have collected
information for me in Australia, and last, but not least, to Mr Gardiner
for his valuable introduction.
C. B.
_March 1907_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
PART I
SWEATED INDUSTRY
CHAPTER I
THE POOREST OF ALL 1
CHAPTER II
WORKERS IN FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS 23
CHAPTER III
SHOP ASSISTANTS, CLERKS, WAITRESSES 48
CHAPTER IV
TRAFFIC WORKERS 75
CHAPTER V
WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN 104
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY 132
CHAPTER VII
HOW UNDERPAYMENT COMES 144
CHAPTER VIII
LABOUR AS A COMMODITY 161
PART II
THE MINIMUM WAGE
CHAPTER I
EXISTING CHECKS 175
CHAPTER II
SUPPOSED REMEDIES 195
CHAPTER III
THE LESSONS OF THE COTTON TRADE 212
CHAPTER IV
THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE 230
CHAPTER V
FOREIGN COMPETITION 260
CHAPTER VI
GAIN TO THE NATION 272
INDEX 277
INTRODUCTION
The sweating evil has long engaged the attention of social and
industrial workers in many fields. Some have approached it from the
philanthropic point of view, and have sought a remedy in voluntary means
such as consumers’ leagues; others have approached it from the point of
view of industrial organisation, and have sought to deal with it by the
extension of trade unionism and legislative action. So far all efforts
alike have been futile. The evil is too wide-spread and too remote in
its operations to be touched by charity. It involves a class too
forlorn, too isolated, and too impoverished to be reached by trade
unionism. The cry of the victims has hitherto been too feeble and
hopeless to command the attention of Parliament.
This has happily been changed by the object lesson presented by the
Sweating Exhibition organised by _The Daily News_ last May and opened by
the Princess Henry of Battenberg. That exhibition, held right in the
heart of West London, visited by thirty thousand people, and commanding
the attention of all serious students of our social system, brought the
question instantly into the sphere of practical politics. Sweating was
no longer a vague term concerning some more or less apocryphal wrongs.
It was made real and actual. It was seen to be not an excrescence on the
body politic, having no bearing upon its general health, but an organic
disease. It was seen to be an evil not simply affecting some obscure
lives in the mean streets of our cities, but an evil that wasted the
whole industrial physique—a running sore that affected the entire fabric
of society, a morass exhaling a miasma that poisoned the healthy
elements of industry. Its spectre haunted not only the fever dens of the
slums, but was present in the most costly garments of the most
fashionable West-End shops, in the rich embroideries of the wealthy as
well as in the household matchbox. Well dressed people who came with the
comfortable belief that sweated goods were necessarily cheap goods
realised with a shock that cheapness and sweating had no intrinsic
relationship. They saw with more or less clearness that sweating reduced
to its true meaning was not the oppression of the poor in the interests
of the poor; but the effort of an uneconomic system to extract from the
misery of the unorganised, ill-equipped worker the equivalent of
organised, well paid and well equipped industry. It was the competition
of flesh and blood with machinery. Sweating, it was seen, did not make
goods cheap: it only made human life cheap. It did not benefit the
consumer: it only benefited the man who set the slum to compete with the
workshop, the man or more often the woman and the child to compete with
the machine. It was seen that the evil lowered the whole vitality of
industry. It preyed upon the defenceless and used them to depress the
general industrial standard. It had no chance in a highly organised
community, and found its victims in the hopeless and the broken, among
the poor widows of the courts and alleys and all those who had lost
heart in the battle and were sunk into the lowest depths of the social
abyss.
Not the least disquieting revelation that emerged from the Exhibition
and the lectures which accompanied it was the bearing of the evil upon
our collective life. The sweated reacted upon the community. It was seen
that they not only lowered the industrial standard: they were a menace
to the communal good, a drain upon the resources of society in the
interests of the people who exploited them. They provided a reserve of
incredibly cheap labour which the community had to subsidise from the
rates. Having no power of combination or resistance they were beaten
down by the employer far below the barest means of subsistence, and the
task of keeping them alive was left to the public. This was the case
even when they were employed; but in many instances the work was
seasonal and subject to long periods of unemployment. Then their whole
existence depended upon a mingling of pauperism and charity until a
fresh demand for their labour sprang up, and the public purse was
relieved of some portion of the task of keeping them alive. It was seen,
in short, that sweating meant the maintenance out of the rates of a vast
mass of low class labour which enabled the sweater to compete
successfully with high class labour. Many of the complaints of high
rates in the East End for example came from the very firms whose high
dividends were actually being paid out of the rates in the form of poor
relief to the underpaid worker.
The bearing of the evil upon child life was made equally clear. It was
not merely that the children of the sweated were ill-nourished and
ill-clad. They were made to take their share in the incessant struggle
for food. They too became competitors with healthy industry, and by
increasing the family output actually served to still further lower the
starvation wages. For in this social morass there is no minimum. The
excess of labour is so great and the demand for food so urgent that the
tendency is constantly downward. It is a fight for bread in which the
sweater plays off the dire misery of these against the deeper misery of
those. And in this struggle the child life of the slums is used as a
counter in the game and a new generation of the physically unfit and
socially dead springs up like rank weeds to choke the hope and effort of
the future.
Finally, it was made clear that sweating is the enemy of the development
of industry. It makes it possible to extract from the necessities of the
poor what ought to be extracted from highly developed processes. It
checks the natural evolution of commercial effort by an uneconomic
substitute. Mr Sidney Webb states this point with much force in his
“Industrial Democracy” when he says:
“We arrive, therefore, at the unexpected result that the enforcement of
definite minimum conditions of employment positively stimulates the
invention and adoption of new processes of manufacture. This has been
repeatedly remarked by the opponents of Trade Unionism. Thus Babbage, in
1832, described in detail how the invention and adoption of new methods
of forging and welding gun-barrels was directly caused by the combined
insistence on better conditions of employment by all the workmen engaged
in the old process. ‘In this difficulty,’ he says, ‘the contractors
resorted to a mode of welding the gun-barrel according to a plan for
which a patent had been taken out by them some years before the event.
It had not then succeeded so well as to come into general use, _in
consequence of the cheapness of the usual mode of welding by hand
labour_, combined with some other difficulties with which the patentee
had had to contend. But _the stimulus produced by the combination of the
workmen for this advance of wages_ induced him to make a few trials, and
he was enabled to introduce such a facility in welding gun-barrels by
roller, and such perfection in the work itself, that in all probability
very few will in future be welded by hand-labour.’”
The profound impression made by the Exhibition found expression in a
universal desire for action. The question one heard again and again was
“What can we do? What can we do?” It was the question which the Princess
of Wales asked as she passed round the stalls where the workers were
engaged at their various forms of slavery. It was the question which
continued like a hopeless refrain throughout the six weeks of the
Exhibition. Most people came with vague ideas of the evil and went away
with vaguer ideas of the remedy. Many of them were doubtless glad to
forget this contact with that other forlorn world which seemed such a
disquieting challenge to the splendour and luxury of the world of
society. It was a painful interlude between a visit to the shops in the
morning and a visit to the theatre in the evening.
The general feeling however was not one of idle curiosity, but of grave
concern, and when the Exhibition closed it was felt that the public
conscience once awakened must not be allowed to go to sleep again. The
Exhibition had been an appeal to the individual; but all experience
showed that voluntary action on the part of the individual, while worthy
and desirable, would not touch the evil. Consumers’ leagues had been at
work in this country and still more in America; but they had done little
to reduce the vast sum of misery. If the Exhibition was to bear fruit it
must be in the direction of legislative action.
The immediate outcome was the formation of the Anti-Sweating League to
secure a minimum wage, and later in the year a three days’ conference,
opened by the Lord Mayor and representing two millions organised
workers, was held at the Guildhall. This conference, which was addressed
on various aspects of the evil and its remedy by authorities like Sir
Chas. Dilke, Lord Dunraven, Mr Pember Reeves, Mr Sidney Webb, Mr J. A.
Hobson, Mr Bernard Wise, Miss Clementina Black and others, unanimously
endorsed the programme of the League which was embodied in the Bill now
before Parliament. That Bill is purely experimental. It is based upon
the lines of the Victorian Wages Board system and is applied only to a
certain group of trades which furnish the best field for an experiment
which has become firmly established and generally operative in the
Australian colony. Many authorities prefer the Arbitration system of New
South Wales and New Zealand; but the difficulty in the way of the
adoption of that system in this country is the opposition of the trade
unions. All are agreed on the principle of the minimum wage, and the
Wages Board has been accepted as the only possible legislative
expression of that principle in this country. So far as can be seen,
then, the Bill offers the one available remedy for an evil which all are
agreed must be dealt with.
It is not necessary here to argue at length the case for the principle
of the minimum wage. Those interested in the subject will find it stated
in the addresses given at the Guildhall Conference and published in
pamphlet form by the National Anti-Sweating League, Salisbury Square,
E.C. It is forty-seven years since Ruskin shocked the economists of his
time by declaring for the regulation of wages irrespective of the demand
for labour.
“Perhaps one of the most curious facts in the history of human error,”
he said, “is the denial by the common political economist of the
possibility of thus regulating wages; while for all the important and
much of the unimportant labour on the earth, wages are already so
regulated.
“We do not sell our Prime-Ministership by Dutch auction; nor on the
decease of a bishop, whatever may be the general advantages of simony,
do we (yet) offer his diocese to the clergyman who will take the
episcopacy at the lowest contract. We (we exquisite sagacity of
political economy) do indeed sell commissions; but not openly,
generalships; sick, we do not inquire for a physician who takes less
than a guinea; litigious, we never think of reducing six-and-eightpence
to four-and-sixpence; caught in a shower, we do not canvass the cabmen,
to find one who values his driving at less than sixpence a mile.”
Ruskin was duly punished. The publishers closed their magazines against
such revolutionary teaching, and Carlyle’s “ten thousand sparrows”
chirped in one furious chorus the current equivalent for “Socialism” and
“Wastrel.”
To-day the minimum wage, like so much else of Ruskin’s teaching, is a
commonplace of the industrial system. No Government or municipality
to-day issues a contract which does not contain a fair wages clause
which is drawn up irrespective of the demand for labour, and every
healthy organised industry has a fixed scale which is dependent on
prices, it is true, but which is wholly independent of the demand and
supply of labour. The whole teaching of modern industry is that cheap
labour is dear labour, and that it is as important for successful
competition to have a well equipped human instrument as to have well
equipped machinery.
To take the example of the cotton trade. Sixty years ago the condition
of the Lancashire trade was deplorable. It was based largely on sweated
labour, including the labour of wretched little slaves drafted in groups
from the workhouses, and kept alive on porridge, their compound a shed
or barn on the premises. To-day there is no industry more highly
organised, and no class of worker—certainly no class of female
worker—more adequately paid. Trade unionism with its fixed wage has made
the Lancashire cotton trade the most wonderful industrial organism in
the world. Four thousand miles from its raw material, ten thousand miles
from its greatest market, it yet dominates the cotton industry as
completely as our shipping trade, with all its relative advantages in
regard to raw material and geographical situation, dominates the
shipping industry of the world. Not least important is the peace which
this high state of organisation has produced in the trade. It is many
years since there was a serious conflict in Lancashire.
The cotton trade in a word has had this enormous success not because
labour is cheap, but because labour is dear—and good; because the human
machine being kept at the highest point of perfection is the most
productive instrument of its kind in the world. It has succeeded, above
all, because the standard wage has removed the competition of low class,
sweated labour, which is not only iniquitous in itself, but which has
the effect of depreciating the whole currency of industry.
And in depreciating the currency of industry it lowers the general
standard of the community. Where wages are low, there the poor rate is
necessarily high, and the general trader shares in the universal
impoverishment. For it must be remembered that the working classes are
the bedrock of commerce. Their condition reacts immediately upon
society. The money they receive comes back instantly in a fertilising
stream to the grocer, the bootmaker, and the clothier. These get nothing
but bad debts and insolvency from the operations of the sweater, whose
poor instruments, moreover, in falling upon the public purse, still
further depress the shopkeeper.
What has happened in the cotton trade may be paralleled by the
experience of other trades. Wherever sweating has been eliminated by the
regulation of wages, the health of the trade is established. Wherever
the trade is only partly organised, as in the umbrella, the boot or the
tailoring trade, the wholesome part suffers by the competition of those
whose stock in trade is the misery of the unorganised poor. As an
illustration of this competition I may quote the following comparison
given by Miss Gertrude Tuckwell at the Guildhall Conference.
AMALGAMATED SOCIETY OF TAILORS AND TAILORESSES.
│
STATEMENT OF PRICES AS AGREED TO BETWEEN THIS BODY AND THE LONDON
MASTER TAILORS’ ASSOCIATION, AND OF THE “SWEATED” RATES FOR SIMILAR
WORK.
│
│ TRADE UNION. NON-UNION.
│
Making Dress Coat│£1. 5s. 6d. to £1. 7s. 6d. 10s. to 16s.
│ (6d. to 7d. per hour). (These are prices where
│ middleman is employed
│ —16s. rarely reached.)
Gentleman’s Frock│ Do. Do.
Coat │
Dress Vest │ 8s. to 9s. 3d. 2s. 6d.
Dress Trousers │ 7s. 3d. to 8s. 5d. 2s. to 4s.
Ladies’ Costume— │
Pressing │ With very little 2½d.
Machining │ extras) 30s. 9d.
Baisting │ 7d.
Felling │ 1¼d.
│ ——1s. 7¾d.
Ladies’ Jackets— │
Pressing │ 1¼d.
Baisting │ 23s. 3½d.
Machining │ 4½d.
Felling │ ½d.
│ ——9¾d.
Ninepence three farthings against twenty three shillings! How is it
possible for honest industry to compete against this exploitation of
flesh and blood subsidised by the ratepayer? It was staggering facts of
this sort that induced the Guildhall Conference to go beyond the scope
of its reference by passing an amendment calling for the abolition of
the outworker in all trades and the provision of workshop accommodation.
Trade unionism has succeeded in regulating wages in the great industries
whose operations can only be carried on on a great collective scale; but
trade unionism alone is clearly unable to destroy sweating in the many
industries in which the fabrication of the parts is let and sub-let
until the origin of the whole is found in the dim, one-roomed tenement
of the slum where the victim of the sweater carries on her tragic
struggle with famine.
“Isn’t the remedy Protection?” was a question frequently heard at the
lectures given at the Exhibition. Most of us would agree with Mr Bernard
Shaw who, in answering such a question, said he would be ready to
protect our industry against sweated competition. But the general
operation of Protection would be wholly in the interest of the sweater.
It would put a new premium upon his vocation. And the fact remains that
sweating is more rampant in protected countries even than in our own. It
was the Berlin Exhibition which suggested the _Daily News_ Exhibition,
and since that event there has been an exhibition in Philadelphia which
has shown that the horrors of sweating in Protectionist America go
deeper even than those in Free Trade England. And it is three of our
Protectionist colonies which, realising the social menace of this trade
in misery, have indicated the true path of reform. They have realised
that the community must protect not only the individual but itself
against a traffic which is slavery in the thinnest disguise, and which
is not only cruel to the individual but destructive of honest industry
and ruinous to social health. The policy which Australia has applied
holds the field as the one effective remedy discovered for dealing with
this appalling social evil. The victims cannot protect themselves. They
are beyond the reach of organisation. In their isolation and poverty
they have no defence against the raids of the conscienceless
sub-contractor who is as literal a slave-driver as any who ever wielded
a whip in the cotton fields, a slave-driver none the less because his
whip is hunger instead of thongs.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
How shall your loop’d and window’d raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? Oh, I have ta’en
Too little care of this.
It is the State alone which can take care of them, protect them against
the rapacity of the oppressor and, in protecting them, protect itself
also. For this is primarily not a problem for pity; but a duty to the
commonwealth. No Society can be sound in health which has at its base
this undrained morass of wretchedness—a morass which charity and the
cold mercy of the Poor Law only develop and which social justice can
alone drain dry.
PART I
SWEATED INDUSTRY
CHAPTER I
THE POOREST OF ALL
“Sweating”—General interpretation of the term—Work in the worker’s
home—Some special investigations—Characteristics of home
work—Match box making—The process—The payment—History of the
Jarvis family—Shirt making—Some individual cases—Paper-bag
making—Some cases—Some men home workers—Racquet balls—The
process—The payment—Health of home workers—The married woman and
the single woman as home workers—Brushmaking—Mrs Hogg’s
description—Tooth brushes—Other trades and rates of pay—Home work,
underpayment, and high priced goods.
The term “sweating,” to which at one time the notion of sub-contract was
attached, has gradually come to be applied to almost any method of work
under which workers are extremely ill paid or extremely overworked; and
the “sweater” means nowadays “the employer who cuts down wages below the
level of decent subsistence, works his operatives for excessive hours,
or compels them to toil under insanitary conditions.” It is in this wide
general sense that the word will be employed in these pages; and the
first part of this volume will be devoted to showing how wide-spread is
the prevalence of sweating throughout the whole field of British
industry.
Probably the most completely wretched workers in our country may be
found among those who ply their toil in their own poor homes. It is by
no means the case that all home work is sweated; but it is the fact that
a good deal of home work, in this country and in others, exists solely
because the home worker can be ground down to the lowest stage of
misery. As an acute French observer writes:—
“Home work, or at least an important fraction of that industry, is in
the odd condition of only surviving on account of its evils. Low pay and
long hours of work are among the chief conditions of its existence.”[1]
Into the conditions of women workers in this branch of industry—which,
however, is by no means confined to women—the Women’s Industrial Council
made an investigation, published in 1897.[2] Two inquiries were also
made by Miss Irwin, in Scotland, on behalf of the Scottish Council for
Women’s Trades; and particulars as to the home work of women in
Birmingham appear in _Women’s Work and Wages_.[3] All these records
exhibit much the same features: unremitting toil, a high degree of
mechanical speed and accuracy, and at the same time the lowest standard
of workmanship that will pass muster; above all, a cruelly heavy burden
resting on the shoulders of the woman who tries to be at the same time
mother, housekeeper, and bread-winner, and who in return for her endless
exertion seldom receives enough even to keep her properly fed, and never
enough to satisfy her own very modest standard of comfort.
The investigators of the Women’s Industrial Council visited personally
nearly four hundred workers. Perhaps the very poorest trade investigated
was matchbox-making, which, for the last fifteen years at least, has
occupied some hundreds of workers in East London alone. The women fetch
out from the factory or the middlewoman’s, strips of notched wood,
packets of coloured paper and sandpaper, and printed wrappers; they
carry back large but light bundles of boxes, tied up in packets of two
dozen. Inside their rooms the boxes, made and unmade and half-made,
cover the floor and fill up the lack of furniture. I have seen a room
containing only an old bedstead in the very last stage of dirt and
dilapidation, a table, and two deal boxes for seats. The floor and the
window-sill were rosy with magenta matchboxes, while everything else,
including the boards of the floor, the woodwork of the room and the
coverings of the bed, was of the dark grey of ingrained dust and dirt.
At first sight it is a pretty enough spectacle to see a matchbox made;
one motion of the hands bends into shape the notched frame of the case,
another surrounds it with the ready-pasted strip of printed wrapper,
which, by long practice, is fitted instantly without a wrinkle, then the
sandpaper or the phosphorus-paper, pasted ready beforehand, is applied
and pressed on so that it sticks fast. A pretty high average of neatness
and finish is demanded by most employers, and readers who will pass
their matchboxes in review will seldom find a wrinkle or a loose corner
of paper. The finished case is thrown upon the floor; the long narrow
strip which is to form the frame of the drawer is laid upon the bright
strip of ready-pasted paper, then bent together and joined by an
overlapping bit of the paper; the edges of paper below are bent flat,
the ready-cut bottom is dropped in and pressed down, and before the
fingers are withdrawn they fold over the upper edges of the paper inside
the top. Now the drawer, too, is cast on the floor to dry. All this,
besides the preliminary pasting of wrapper, coloured paper and
sandpaper, had to be done 144 times for 2¼d.; and even this is not all,
for every drawer and case have to be fitted together and the packets
tied up with hemp. Nor is the work done then, for paste has to be made
before it can be used, and boxes, when they are ready, have to be
carried to the factory. Let any reader, however deft, however
nimble-fingered, consider how many hundred times a day he or she could
manage to perform all these minute operations. But practice gives speed,
especially when stimulated by the risk of starvation.
The conditions of life secured in return for this continuous and
monotonous toil are such as might well make death appear preferable. The
poor dwelling—already probably overcrowded—is yet further crowded with
matchboxes, a couple of gross of which, in separated pieces, occupy a
considerable space. If the weather be at all damp, as English weather
often is, even in summer, there must be a fire kept up, or the paste
will not dry; and fire, paste, and hemp must all be paid for out of the
worker’s pocket. From her working time, too, or from that of her child
messenger, must be deducted the time lost in fetching and carrying back
work, and, too often, in being kept waiting for it before it is given
out. The history of one matchbox-making family visited by a
representative of the Women’s Industrial Council may be given in detail,
since no single member survives.
The Jarvis household consisted of a father, mother, and nine children.
They lived in an alley some fifty yards long and very narrow, entered
through a row of posts from a street that runs northward from
Whitechapel Road. Mr Booth’s “Poverty” map shows it coloured with the
dark blue that signifies “Very poor, casual. Chronic want.” The houses
in it, of which there were not many, were and are four-roomed cottages
of two floors, and the Jarvis family occupied the upper floor of No. 9.
Below them lived a young man with his wife and their baby, his mother,
and three sisters; sixteen persons thus inhabiting the four rooms. All
these people seem to have been industrious and respectable. Mr Jarvis,
who had poor health, worked in the last summer of his life at
matchbox-stamping, and earned “sometimes” 16s. a week. His wife worked
constantly at matchbox-making, two of the girls nearly all day, and two
of the boys out of school hours. The journey to and from the factory
took from an hour to an hour and a half. In the beginning of the winter
of 1897 the father fell ill, and had to go into the infirmary. The
mother and the children remained at home, and the combined earnings of
Mrs Jarvis and her four young helpers produced from 10d. to 1s. a day.
It was at this time that the investigator of the Women’s Industrial
Council paid her visit, and she notes in the brief space for “Remarks”:
“This house was very poor and bare.... Family is often nearly starving.”
At about half past six on the morning after Christmas Day—a Sunday
morning, when it was freezing hard and when there was a thick fog, the
young man who lived on the ground floor awoke and got up to make tea for
his wife. He found smoke in the room, and when he opened the door of the
room in which his mother and sisters were sleeping, a burst of smoke met
him. He succeeded in getting out his own family—in their
nightdresses—sent a neighbour to call the fire engine, and tried in
vain, as did a next door neighbour, to arouse the Jarvises. The firemen
arrived within a very few minutes—three minutes, indeed, from the time
of their summons—but the house was already in a blaze, the windows gone
and the roof fallen in. The engine could not get through the posts at
the entry of the court, but while it was being taken round to the back,
a ladder was carried in, and a fireman bravely attempted to enter the
burning house. But it was too late; all ten were already dead. All had,
it was believed, been suffocated before the first call of their
neighbour from below. The children had probably passed out of life
without warning, but the mother was found lying on the floor, with her
baby of seven months old in her arms, its body so protected by hers as
to be scarcely burned at all. The father died next day in the infirmary,
without having learned what fate had overtaken his wife and children;
and their poor neighbours—for whom the weeks after Christmas are the
leanest of the year—raised a subscription to defray the funeral expenses
of the eleven, who were buried together.
In all but its tragically sudden close the history of the Jarvis family
is the history of scores of East End households. In some there is a
husband in intermittent work; in some the mother is widowed; in all the
children, if children there are, help; in all the human beings are
slaves of the matchbox. The nine years since that December morning have
brought no change, unless it be that, impossible though it would have
appeared, pay has rather decreased than advanced, and that a recent
investigation, not yet completed, seems to reveal a higher proportion of
workers in receipt of out-relief.
Such matchbox makers, if they worked at the same rates in the factory
during the far shorter hours permitted by the Factory Acts, would earn
no less than they do now, for they would no longer waste time in putting
together box and drawer—whereby at present some other worker also wastes
time in separating them again before they can be filled—and the employer
would pay for paste and drying. That, indeed, is really the reason why
they are working at home.
But although matchbox-making is among the poorest of trades, there are
others but a shade better. The wages of shirtmaking, for instance, are
often extremely low, and are yet further reduced by the fact that the
home worker provides cotton for sewing. I remember seeing, seventeen
years ago, a young deserted wife who was trying to support herself and
two young children by making shirts. These were flannel shirts of a fair
quality, and were handed to her cut out. She did not sew on buttons nor
make button holes; but except for these items made the shirt throughout,
by machine, and put in a square of lining at the back of the neck. She
was paid 1s. 2d. a dozen, and bought the cotton herself. She could make
in a week “five dozen all but one”; for which the payment would be five
shillings, eightpence and a fraction of a penny, less the cost of
cotton, machine needles, oil, and perhaps hire of machine.
At the _Daily News_ Exhibition of Sweated Industries was to be seen an
elderly Scotchwoman cutting and making shirts from the first stitch to
the last, who was a singularly intelligent, skilful, and industrious
worker. For varying styles of shirts she received from 9½d. to 1s. 9½d.
per dozen. “For the shirts paid at 1s. 9½d. per dozen the following work
is required:—Make and line yoke and bottom bands, put in four gussets,
hem skirts, run and fell side seams, make sleeves and put them in....
The shirts paid at 9d. per dozen require her to hem necks, button-stitch
two stud holes, sew on six buttons and clip threads from all seams. The
shirts at 1s. per dozen have two rows of feather stitching, six button
holes, eight buttons, four seams bridged and eight fastenings made.”[4]
The better sorts of these shirts were such as are worn, not by poor, but
by well-to-do purchasers.
“Paper-bag making,” says the Factory Inspectors’ Report for 1905, “is an
industry largely carried on in homes in Glasgow, and no trade is more
disturbing to the home. The paste seems to find its way everywhere, and
many more things than the bags are found firmly pasted together. I
visited two women, who, working usually in workshops, were, during the
enforced period of absence owing to the birth of a child, given
employment as outworkers. Nothing could exceed the misery and squalor
amongst which the work was done. In both cases the workroom was also the
living room and bedroom, and the whole of the available furniture,
including the bed, was covered with damp bags, some hundreds of which
had to be removed in one home before I could be shown the baby. The
surroundings were unpleasant ones for making bags destined to hold
pastry.” (p. 322.) Of another woman it is reported that “she personally
took out work until the day before her child’s birth, and found the load
of bags which had to be carried downstairs and upstairs very heavy and
tiring. This work is poorly paid. Bags, by no means of the smallest
size, are made for 3d. to 5d. a thousand, so that it is indeed a heavy
weight which has to be carried for the daily shilling.” (p. 320.)
Although the cases quoted hitherto are those of women, and although the
very worst instances of underpayment invariably occur among women, it
must not be supposed that all home workers are women. In the nail and
chain making districts many men as well as women work at forges in their
own backyards; and even in London there is quite a small population of
home working tailors, shoemakers, and cabinetmakers, to say nothing of
men who make toys and trifles of various sorts for hawking in the
streets.
In one afternoon last summer I was taken to visit some men working in
their own homes, all within a very short distance. Two were toy makers,
two manufactured pipes, and another cages for parrots; one was a
shoemaker, and the last was the most skilled handweaver in London. One
toy maker was engaged upon wooden hoops with handles and beaded spokes,
for South Africa. He also made wooden engines, finding all the
materials, iron wheels included, and for these he was paid 22s. a gross.
The selling price is sixpence each. In his workshop, too, were to be
seen attractive little waggons with sacks in them; and horses of that
archaic type which has a barrel body, straight legs, and harness of red
and blue paper. The other toy maker was making little go-carts adapted
to the use of good-sized dolls. All the material was found by the maker,
and the price received by him varied from 3s. 3d. to 6s. 6d. a dozen,
according to size. Here again iron wheels had to be provided. In both
these cases the wife and some other member of the family helped. The
pipes were roughly shaped by hand, then pressed in a mould, the seam
scraped smooth, and the pipes stacked in great clay pans and fired in an
oven. They are not made to order, but sold by the maker to private
customers—generally publicans—at 2s. 6d. or 3s. a gross. The cage maker,
a consumptive man, transforms bands of tin and thick wires into domed
cages, with a speed and dexterity amazing to the beholder. I have
mislaid my note of the prices paid for this skilful work, but I know
that they were horribly low. The elderly shoemaker and his
wife—interesting, intelligent people—were full of family cares and of
curious industrial reminiscences. They are now on a dry bank, as it
were, a foot or two above the deep waters of hopeless struggle, in which
the Jarvises, their neighbours, were immersed. The weaver was a survivor
from another period, and a child of another race. Face and name alike
proclaim him a descendant of the Huguenots; and not only is he a weaver
of silk, but also one of the very, very few hand weavers of velvet still
left in our country. The coronation robe of King Edward—perhaps the
finest velvet ever woven, was his handiwork.
Moreover, a little remnant is still left of the old silk-weaving trade
that came to Spitalfields and Bethnal Green when Louis XIV. was so ill
advised as to revoke the Edict of Nantes. Instances of man and wife
working at home together appear in the Report of the Factory Inspectors.
“Husband and wife, with two children, occupy one room only. The wife
weaves, while her husband is occupied in ‘finishing’ canvas boots in the
same room.” “Husband, wife, and six children occupy the workroom (which
contains two looms) and an attic.” “In the weaving room are three low
beds _under_ the looms, in which three adults sleep. They cannot sit
upright in bed, as they knock against and injure the warp.” (p. 322.)
Racquet balls are articles bought mainly by persons in prosperous
circumstances, few of whom would desire that women engaged in making
their tools of play should receive less than a living wage. Yet the
rates of pay are such that probably no coverer of racquet balls ever
subsisted without aid from other sources. The cores or centres of these
balls are made of shreds of rag, much compressed, and covered with
strands of wool. These are prepared in the factory, but the covering is
done by women working at home. The coverer receives a gross of cores,
together with a gross of squares of white leather and a skein or skeins
of a special thread. The squares of leather must be damped between wet
cloths. Laying one of these damp squares on her left palm, the worker
places upon it the core, “pulls the skin tightly over it, pares off with
a pair of sharp scissors any superfluous leather, and sews together with
neat regular stitches the edges at their meeting-places. While still
damp the ball must be rolled, so as to smooth down any projection of the
seam. This rolling is best effected between two slabs of marble, the
upper one of which need be only a little larger than the ball.
Considerable pressure is necessary, but in the hands of a practised
worker the process is a quick one. These slabs of marble are not
provided by the employer, and many women roll their balls between two
plates; to do this takes rather longer, because the plate will not bear
so much pressure as the slab. The scissors also have to be provided and
kept sharp by the worker.” For covering a gross of the smallest sized
balls (sold retail at 2d. or 3d.), the usual payment is 2s. per gross;
but there is one prosperous employer who still pays only 1s. 10d.
Working steadily for eleven to twelve hours a day, a superior young
woman known to me who covered balls before her marriage used to earn
about 5s. a week. She was quick and skilful, but obviously
ill-nourished, and an accidental sprain, from which a girl in good
health would quickly have recovered, developed in her case into an
ulcer, in consequence, said the doctor who saw her, of her anæmic
condition.
Ill-health, indeed, is the chronic state of the woman home worker. She
misses that regular daily journey to and from her work-place which
ensures to the factory worker at least a daily modicum of air and
exercise; and she misses also that element of changed scene and varied
human intercourse which makes for health and happiness. If she depends
upon her own exertions she will inevitably be ill fed and ill clothed;
and this is probably one reason for the fact, noted both by the
investigators of the Women’s Industrial Council and by Miss Irwin, that
the woman who is self-supported often earns less, even at the same rates
of pay, than the woman who is comfortably married. The half-starved and
apathetic human creature cannot maintain a high output of work; and even
the out-relief which is so frequent a factor in the income of the
widowed or single home worker, seldom suffices to keep her in more than
a half-starved condition. Her work grows, like herself, poorer and
poorer; and the employer thereupon declares that it is worth no more
than its poor price. From a national point of view it would pay better
to save the human machine from falling into that state of disrepair
wherein it ceases to be profitable.
Tooth brushes, again, are articles purchased by the wealthy even more
frequently than by the poor, and so are household brushes of all kinds.
Of brushmaking an account was written in 1897 by the late Mrs Hogg,[5]
and being still applicable, was printed in the Handbook of the Sweated
Industries Exhibition. “The brushes are given out in dozens, ready
bored, and the worker supplied with fibre or bristles, as the case may
be. Their work consists in selecting the little bundles of bristles from
the heap, fastening them securely in the centre with wire, and then,
with a sharp pull against the edge of the table, drawing them through
the hole. They are kept in position by a wire at the back of the brush,
and each row of bristles is trimmed with a large pair of shears fastened
to a table-vice. The fingers, though protected by a leather shield, are
often badly cut with the slipping of the wire, and the constant jerk of
the drawing causes a strain to the chest. All the women complain of
this. More serious accidents occasionally happen from the shears, which
are hard to manipulate, and often beyond the strength of these
exhausted, underfed workers. Materials, with the exception of lamp-black
for painting the backs of the brushes, are provided by the shop. As
lamp-black costs something, and soot can be had for nothing, a
concoction of soot and water boiled is often used as a substitute for
the more expensive pigment. But the shears are a serious outlay, costing
from 18s. to £1, and needing constant sharpening. Many of the drawers,
never having been in possession of the capital to buy them, or being
forced by hunger to ‘put them away,’ are obliged to get their trimming
done at the shop, at the cost of terrible waste of time and of
iniquitous and capricious deductions from the price given for the work.
Deductions are also made for short returns of fibre or bristle
sweepings, where these have to be returned to the shop. The material is
weighed out and weighed in. It is calculated that if the material
weighed so much, the clippings or sweepings ought to weigh so much; but
the worker is never told _how_ much, and has no means of checking the
calculation; yet if the amount is short, she either ‘gets the sack’ or
has to pay for the deficiency. The rate of payment varies with the
number of holes and the quality of brush, bristles always commanding a
higher rate than fibre. Coarse fibre scrubbing brushes fetch anything
from 3½d. to 1s. a dozen. One woman will make brushes with 145 holes for
10d., while another will get 9d. for brushes with only 100. There is no
uniformity of payment; it all depends, they tell you, on the shop you
work for.... The fibre drawers rarely make more than 7s. to 8s. for a
week of seventy-two hours. Taking into consideration the various lets
and hindrances to which they are subject, and the time wasted at the
shop, 6s. would fairly represent the average during the season when it
suits the masters to keep them regularly employed.... It is only by
seeing the homes of the brush drawers that it is possible to realise all
that is implied in the carrying on of a trade and of the travesty of
family life in one single room, or the misery of these lives of endless
toil, where the tragedy which endures on is so much more pitiful than
the tragedy to which death brings rest from labour.”
Tooth brushes, of which it is estimated that a worker can make four in
an hour, are paid at the rate of 4d. a dozen, and best hair brushes at
2d. each, or ¾d. for 100 holes.
These examples might be multiplied a hundredfold. Blouse makers
(receiving from 1s. 6d. a dozen), underclothing makers, trouser
finishers (from 2½d. a pair), sack makers (at 8d. or 9d. for a “turn” of
12, 15, or 18), makers of boot boxes (at 1s. 4d. a gross), of soap boxes
and tack boxes, makers of baby clothes and of children’s shoes,
finishers of woollen gloves, tassel makers, umbrella coverers,
artificial flower makers, forgers of chains and strikers of nails,
carders of buttons (at 3s. per 100 gross), and of hooks and eyes (at 8d.
and 9d. per 24 gross), cappers of safety pins (at 1s. 6d. per 100
gross)—all of these are busy among us hour after hour, and day after
day, for seven days a week, and are receiving in return a remuneration
ranging from ¾d. to 2d. per hour. Their work, in some shape or form,
comes into every house in this country. Our potatoes and our flour are
carried in sacks, although not perhaps to our doors; our eggs are sold
to us in cardboard boxes; our garments are fastened with buttons or with
hooks—or perchance with safety pins; the gentleman’s collar and tie and
the lady’s waist belt may probably be the handiwork of some half-starved
home worker whose life is being shortened by her poverty. Only ignorance
can flatter itself—as indeed ignorance is fond of doing—with the idea
that none but cheap goods or cheap shops are tainted with sweating. Any
person inclining to that opinion is advised to hang about the back doors
of leading shops soon after they open in the morning, or just before
they close at night, and to observe the furtive figures that pass in and
out with bundles. The taint is everywhere; there is no dweller in this
country, however well-intentioned, who can declare with certainty that
he has no share in this oppression of the poorest and most helpless
among his compatriots.
CHAPTER II
WORKERS IN FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS
Wherein factory workers are better off than home workers—Life on five
to ten shillings a week—Health—Ancillary processes—Paper
bags—Packers—Case of a cocoa filler—Of a cartridge filler—Jam
fillers—Pay sheets of confectionery workers—Observations of an
uninstructed observer—Slack times—Long hours—Some
cases—“Emergency” processes—Discomforts—Some cases—Danger of
fire—Lead poisoning—Instances—Washing appliances—Extremes of
temperature—Fines and deductions—Divergent views of two employers
upon fines—“Earned too much”—Summary.
The poorer class of workers in factories and workshops are financially
little better off—if, indeed, better off at all—than the poorer sort of
home workers; but they have some other advantages. Their hours and
conditions are in some degree regulated, and at least some degree of
change and variety enters into their lives. But for them too existence
is a hard battle. Upon a wage of from five to ten shillings a week life
cannot but be narrow and stinted. Food, clothing, and lodging must all
be of the poorest; an omnibus fare, a halfpenny newspaper, a penny stamp
are luxuries in which only the thriftless indulge; and good health, as
the middle class man or woman knows it, is a treasure seldom enjoyed.
There is, indeed, no fact more painfully forced upon the middle class
observer who becomes intimately acquainted with ill paid workers than
the frequency with which they succumb to ailments that would be regarded
in the observer’s own circle as trifling. Many girls injure themselves
permanently by going to work when they are actually seriously ill. To
stay away means loss of pay and possibly loss of employment, so they
hold out to the last gasp.
Many of the worst paid workers are engaged in various processes that
facilitate buying and selling, rather than in actual manufacture. The
paper-bags into which a civil shop assistant so obligingly pops our
small purchases are given nominally without charge to us, and are bought
in very large quantities at a very low rate by the shopkeeper, their
real cost being paid in flesh and blood by the women who make them. Some
of these women, as appears in the previous chapter, work at home; some,
possibly, in well-appointed workshops, but many, as the women factory
inspectors truly observe, “in the poorest kind of workshop, badly
lighted, ventilated, and heated. To these conditions, no doubt, the
weak, inflamed eyes so often seen among the workers are due, at least
partly. The workers themselves attribute it to the strain involved in
counting over the bags.”[6] This remark shows us that the simple and
time-saving plan of weighing instead of counting (which is employed for
wares so valuable as those of the Royal Mint) is not in use in paper-bag
manufactories. Packing of various kinds occupies vast numbers of women
and girls, most of whom are paid at low rates, by the dozen or the
gross, and some of whom attain a celerity almost incredible. No foreman
in the world can drive so hard as her own low wage drives the piece
worker who has to support herself and, often enough, to help to support
relatives. The most worn-out girl whom I remember ever to have seen was
engaged upon no harder task than the packing of cocoa. My attention was
called to her, in a room full of girls, by her ghastly appearance. She
may have been eighteen or nineteen; she was absolutely colourless, and
although there was no sign about her of any specific illness, seemed
exhausted literally almost to death. She sat day after day pouring
powdered cocoa into ready made square paper packets, of which she then
folded down the tops and pasted on the wrappers. She received a
halfpenny for every gross. In the week previous to that in which I saw
her she had earned 7s. Each shilling represented 24 gross of packets;
she had therefore filled, folded and pasted, in the week, 188 gross, or
21,792 packets. Her mother, who was present, said that the drive was
killing her and that she must leave. The cocoa was of a brand well known
in its day and sold in good shops, but the firm has now, I believe,
disappeared. Would that its methods had disappeared with it.[7]
Tea packers and jam fillers often receive wages barely higher. Girls
whom I have known personally have been paid at the following rates for
filling pots with boiling jam or marmalade: 11 lb. pots (in four trays
of thirty-six pots), 2d. per gross; 2 lb. jars (in six trays of
twenty-four jars) or 3 lb. jars (in nine trays of sixteen jars), 2½d.
per gross. Two girls worked together, and my informant reckoned that the
pair could fill a gross of the largest size in about half an hour. This
would bring the wages of each to the comparatively magnificent figure of
2½d. an hour, or over 11s. a week. In some factories these heavy trays
have to be lifted and stacked by the girls, the weight of the jars being
added to that of the contents.
I was fortunate enough, some years ago, to obtain possession of a number
of “pay sheets” showing the wages received in two consecutive weeks by
girls employed in a large London confectionery factory. For the first
week I had 107 sheets; for the second 98. Five sheets in the first week
and ten in the second were left out of my reckoning as probably not
representing a full week’s work; in each of these the total was below
4s. The highest net payment (there was a deduction for a compulsory sick
club) was, in the first week, 15s. 9½d.; in the second, 16s. 1½d. The
girls who received these wages (both well known to me) were superior
young women of from 22 to 25 years old; both helped to support widowed
mothers with younger children. There were, in the first week, 20 girls,
and in the second 24, who received from 10s. to 16s., and most of them
came much nearer to the lower than to the higher figure. In the first
week 78, and in the second 64, received from 5s. to 10s. (57 out of the
78, and 49 out of the 64 earning less than 8s.); while in the first week
9, and in the second week 10, received from 4s. to 5s. Two-thirds,
therefore, of the whole 190 sheets (excluding 15, which showed less than
4s. received) testified to a net weekly wage of less than 10s.—the
average being a fraction over 7s. 6d. a week. Yet so easy is it for the
inexperienced enquirer to be misled that a lady actually published an
account of this very factory, in which she assured the public of wages
“rising steadily to 18s. a week,” and declared that a girl, “if she
ultimately becomes a piece worker, may make as much as 24s. to 25s. a
week.” This lady was evidently not aware that piece work is not a state
“ultimately attained,” but the usual system throughout the
establishment. Nearly all—probably, indeed, every one—of those 190 pay
sheets represented piece work wages. Upon the basis of this illusory
wage of 24s. and upwards the writer proceeded to compare the payment of
confectionery “hands” with that of High School mistresses, forgetting,
however, to compare the hours of a school with those of a factory, or to
deduct those slack seasons to which the confectionery trade is so sadly
liable. A High School mistress, moreover, works forty weeks in the year
and is paid by the year; a confectionery worker often works for less
than forty weeks in the year, and since she is paid by the week her
blank weeks are blank to her exchequer, so that even if she did earn £1
a week (which she does not) she would not earn £52 a year.
Seasonality—the word is so useful that it must be admitted—though it
falls one degree less heavily upon the factory worker than upon the
worker at home, is to her too a terrible evil. The long “slack times” of
the West-End tailor or tailoress reduce a wage that looks handsome in a
pay sheet of May or June to a very meagre annual income; and many a West
End dressmaker who has worked overtime—as often as not without extra
pay—through the long hot evenings of the London season finds herself, in
January or February, shivering, without work or pay, beside her own
empty grate.
Long hours, which are in effect one form of low wages, have been checked
by the Factory Acts, but not yet ended. The inspector for West London
writes: “The Jew tailor of West London has an idea that seven days a
week is not too long to work his hands.”[8]
From Birmingham a case is reported of a Christmas card maker, who had
already been cautioned for keeping “female young persons,” _i.e._ girls
under eighteen, at work till 9 of an evening. He was found to be keeping
two women and a girl at work till 6.15 on Saturday, a day on which work
should, by law, end early, and was said to be keeping his hands at work
on Sundays also—a privilege which the law allows only to the laundry
proprietor. “On the succeeding Sunday,” writes the inspector, “the place
was inspected, but with difficulty. It was only after considerable delay
that admittance was obtained, and then, although the place had every
appearance that work had been going on, no females were found. The upper
parts of the premises were in use as residence, and I had reason to
think that women had been sent up there upon my arrival, but the
occupier would not allow me to go up. It has subsequently been admitted
that eight women and two female young persons were at work and hidden as
suspected.”[9]
That such cases would be not the exception, but the rule, if there were
no legal prohibition and no fear of fines, may be judged by the state of
things actually existing in laundries, where, although the law allows
the monstrous stretch of 14 consecutive hours of work, the permitted
hours are frequently exceeded. The report of the lady inspectors
contains a significant paragraph on this subject. “The hours worked in
London laundries by women and girls,” says Miss Vines, “seem to be
increasing in length, and to be more excessive than ever.... The firm I
prosecuted in February had employed several young women, one of them
only 17 years of age, for 28 consecutive hours, from 8 A.M. on Friday
till 12, midday, on Saturday; while their hours, including meals on the
previous days of the week, had numbered 14 on Thursday, 12 on Wednesday
and Tuesday, and 11 on Monday. The 28 hours’ period included 2½ hours’
interval during the night, when the girls were permitted to lie on the
floor of the calendar-room with their coats for pillows ‘for a rest!’ I
prosecuted the other firm twice in June, and on the second occasion it
was proved at the hearing of the case that an ironer had been employed
for 37 consecutive hours, including meal times and short breaks, and
another, an ironer and calendar worker, 32½ hours ... 14 days previously
I had taken proceedings against the same firm.... It was then proved
that, in one week, a young packer had been employed by them, exclusive
of meal hours and absence of work, for 73½ hours; and two girls, aged
respectively 16 and 17, for 68½ hours.”[10]
Very similar results ensue in the jam-making industry, where, on the
pretext of emergency, the law permits the working of prolonged hours.
“In more than one case,” writes the inspector, “I have found emergency
created by the simple expedient of allowing fruit to lie untouched at
the factory till the close of the normal working day, when workers from
all departments were turned on to it.”[11]
It must be remembered that, in the case of workers paid by the day, as
is usual in dressmaking establishments, and in some departments of
laundry work, there is frequently no extra payment made for overtime. I
have indeed heard a West-End working woman declare that overtime would
cease if the law made payment for it compulsory; and although that
assertion was much too sweeping, the experience of strong trade unions
shows that when employers are compelled to pay at a higher rate for
overtime, that necessity for overtime of which so much is heard whenever
the Factory Acts are under discussion, does diminish in a very
remarkable manner. Meanwhile, the law does its best to make undue hours
of work costly by prosecuting persistent offenders. In 1905 the fines
inflicted in the North-Western district of England alone, for illegal
overtime, amounted to no less than £728, 4s. 0d., and the accompanying
costs to £627, 16s. 0d.; and this in spite of the fact that magistrates
in certain localities are decidedly hostile, and inflict derisory
penalties. When we further reflect that the North-Western district
contains both a large number of highly-organised workers, ready to
complain of any breach of law, and also a large number of exceedingly
enlightened employers who believe long hours to be inimical to their own
true interests, we may fairly infer that there are other districts in
which things are considerably worse, and in which the inspectors,
zealous though they are, fail to discover all or nearly all the
offenders.
Sanitary conditions are still sometimes far from satisfactory, although
greatly bettered of late years. There is perhaps no point upon which the
influence of women inspectors has been more beneficial. A case is
reported to me, by a most trustworthy witness, of a box factory, where
“women and men worked together in a room in which was the lavatory, with
seldom a flush of water.” The same witness reports another case, in a
rope factory employing both men and women, the details of which are so
repulsive, that it is impossible I should print them.
Nor are long hours and underpayment the only ills from which factory
workers suffer. In spite of laws and of inspectors, dangers and
discomforts are still prevalent in many workplaces—especially in those
where workers are ill paid. Many instances may be gathered from a single
year’s Report of the factory inspectors; and of course the inspectors
neither discover all the instances nor print all that they discover.
Looking into the Report for 1905, we find, on p. 13, an account from
Southampton of the tea-room “provided by a high class dressmaker
employing about 60 females.” This apartment was “underground with
concrete floor and walls and the ceiling only 6 feet high, with no
ventilation and no natural light.” Not a few women employed by West-End
firms may be found at the present day, not only eating, but also
working, by artificial light, in basement-rooms that are little better
than cellars, or in cramped upper rooms, from which there would be
little hope of escape in case of fire. The law, in its wisdom, does not
require a special fire escape except in places where as many as 40
persons are at work; and certain frugal employers are careful,
therefore, to employ but 39. “In one such workshop,” writes Miss Squire,
“the condition of the 39 women working there seemed one of grave danger;
it is a large new rag sorting warehouse, so filled with bales that only
narrow passages down which one person can pass are left. On the second
floor the women rag sorters work, their tables ranged along a sort of
gallery ... the centre of the building being open for the hoisting of
bales; the only means of exit is a narrow wooden staircase with open
treads, at one end of the spacious floor. Were a fire to break out
below, all exit would be cut off very quickly. In this case the local
authority reply they have no bye-laws and can do nothing, as less than
40 persons are employed.”[12]
Another case is reported on the same page, in which a building
originally meant for offices only has been turned into a factory and
warehouses. “There is no second staircase and no exit on to the roof,
which is higher than the adjoining houses.... The third floor is
occupied ... by a blouse manufacturer employing between 50 and 60 women.
On the top floor there is a lace warehouse where 15 women are employed
finishing laces and veilings; a large amount of light inflammable
material is stored on both these floors; there are no fire buckets or
any means kept for extinguishing fire.” Miss Squire sent a notice to the
Corporation about this building; and the Corporation replied that it
“did not see its way to making any recommendations owing to the
impossibility of providing an outside staircase.” Miss Squire and the
City Surveyor in vain pointed out how an exit could be provided; six
months later nothing had been done, and, on again approaching the
Corporation, she found that authority “of opinion that no additional
means of escape can be provided at a reasonable expense.” “The chief
officer of the Fire Brigade told me he has himself reported this
building as unsafe to the Corporation years ago in vain.” From Bristol,
Mr Pendock reports a case of a clothing factory “employing about 50
females.” “The work is carried on, on the third and fourth floors, and
these are reached by means of an internal wooden, winding, narrow
staircase, always imperfectly lighted on account of its position.” The
local authority demanded an additional staircase. The owner, on the
strength of a decision in a previous appeal case, did nothing.
Immediately afterwards the premises were considerably damaged by fire
which, fortunately, took place in the meal time when all the workers had
left the factory. Since then work has been resumed under unimproved
conditions.[13]
None of these are cases of ignorance, or even of carelessness; they are
instances of the deliberate disregard, for money’s sake, of danger to
the lives of fellow creatures.
Scarcely less blameworthy is the criminal negligence shown by some
employers in carrying out those precautions prescribed by the law,
where, as in the potteries, there is a risk of lead poisoning. Thus,
Miss Vines remarks “how frequently one finds the necessary supply of
soap, nail brushes, and towels missing. Yet, when giving instructions as
to such irregularities, one is almost invariably met with an attitude of
_non possumus_. Over and over again managers defend themselves by the
assertion that these things, although provided by them, have been and
are constantly stolen by the workers.” She goes on to quote the
observation of a predecessor: “It is impossible not to believe that if
expensive and highly-finished ware disappeared from the factory with the
same speed and to the same degree that soap, nail brushes, and towels
disappear, steps would be taken to discover the offenders.”[14]
In one instance a girl of nineteen, after no more than six weeks’
employment at pottery dipping, suffered “acute pains, with weakness and
subsequent unconsciousness for several hours.” On the premises where she
had worked, the inspector found 17 persons engaged in dangerous
processes. “Notwithstanding, in the lavatory for their use, which was
extremely dirty, there was neither towel nor nail brush, and not more
than one tiny piece of soap. Eventually one small and very dirty towel
was discovered; this, it was stated, had been taken away by the foreman
to dry.... There was not a single clean towel in stock or in reserve on
the premises, and when I questioned the workers it appeared that this
condition of affairs was normal.”[15]
Even where no risk of poison occurs, the provision of decent washing
appliances would, to most of us, appear an essential part of a civilised
factory. Many employers, however, hold a different opinion. The authors
of “Women’s Work and Wages” write that “regulations against washing are
still found in many factories where excellence of work does not depend
upon cleanliness of handling. Painters and japanners are generally
provided with turpentine, etc., but the rank and file are fortunate if
they can get a bucket at the sink, and there do exist places where there
is a fine of 6d. for washing.”
I remember seeing girls, to the number of 50 or more, packing tea in a
large room where an old and grubby sink with one wash bowl and one towel
formed the sole provision for washing. Access to this room was gained by
one wooden ladder-stair. Yet the manager who exhibited this place to a
group of visitors was not only satisfied, but actually boastful. The
personal attention of the head of the firm was called to these defects,
and I am happy to say both of them have now been remedied.
The discomfort formerly undergone in many work-rooms during winter was
extreme. Until the law required the maintenance of “a reasonable
temperature” (generally interpreted by inspectors as 60 degrees
Fahrenheit), a very large proportion of women who worked for West End
dressmakers did so in rooms absolutely unwarmed, or warmed only by the
gas jets meant for lighting the room. I knew of a shirt factory in East
London, which was a wooden edifice erected in a back yard and entirely
unprovided with any means of warming, and have known women who worked
there during the bitterest days of a particularly cold winter.
On the other hand, some processes of manufacture are generally carried
on in overheated workplaces. “The temperature in starch drying stoves,”
says one inspector, “is the most consistently excessive I have found....
The manager of one starch works is of opinion that women stand the heat
better than men do, but says those whom he employs are all hard
drinkers; no temperate woman will stay.[16]
Some processes also of lacemaking and of cotton spinning are facilitated
by damp heat, and it can hardly be doubted that, but for the constant
vigilance, both of the organised workers and of the inspectors, there
would be still, as there were before the law intervened, many working
places in which such processes would be carried on without proper
ventilation or proper precautions for the health of the workers. Many
people now living have seen women and girls come out of a weaving shed
that has been kept full of steam, their clothes wet through and
presently frozen stiff upon them as they walked home through the cold
air.
The plan of reducing wages by fines and deductions is one dear to the
low type of employer; and as long as workers remain ill paid and
desperately afraid of being out of work, the evil will probably persist
to some extent, in spite of increasingly stringent Truck Acts. There are
many factories and work-rooms in which silence is more or less rigidly
enforced, and fines are inflicted for talking or laughing. In many,
again, some part of the material used is charged to the worker. I had in
my hands, some years ago, 14 or 15 wage books belonging to skilled
machinists employed in a provincial stay factory and paid by the piece.
The following are the figures of 3 books for 3 successive weeks. _A_
represents the highest, and _C_ the lowest sums received.
_A._ Nominal wage 9/8½ 8/– 10/2½
Deductions 1/4 9½ 1/6
Wage received 8/4½ 7/2½ 8/8½
_B._ Nominal wage 9/2½ 8/6 8/4
Deductions 2/2 1/7 1/11
Wage received 7/8½ 6/11 6/5
_C._ Nominal wage 5/3½ 5/3 5/5
Deductions 1/4 1/9 1/9
Wage received 3/11 1/5 3/8
These deductions represent mainly material—cotton, and tools—machine
needles. Some employers oblige their workers to pay hire for the sewing
machines used in the factory, and where these machines are worked by
steam, gas, or electricity, a charge varying from a halfpenny to
sixpence “for power” is not unusual. I have known instances in which the
rent of a factory has been partly—perhaps wholly—defrayed by a charge
upon the workers, who had to pay so much a week for their places in it.
“Cleaning, as well as rent, is sometimes met in the same way by a weekly
charge of 2d. or 3d. for cleaning the workroom. I am assured that one
ingenious employer pays a man 15s. a week for performing this duty in
addition to others, while the payments made by the women amount to 30s.
In a certain provincial town in a factory which I visited, there was no
apparent method of lighting. I was informed that in the winter the women
brought their own candles. A local competitor, more acute, provides gas,
and charges each girl 3d. a week throughout the dark seasons, at which
rate, according to his fellow townsmen, he must make a profit on his gas
bill.”[17]
In a large box factory deductions were made for glue, for gas to heat
the glue, for string to tie the boxes together, and for work
books—amounting in all to 1s. 6d. per week.
A charge for hot water to make tea is not unusual, and is sometimes
enforced on all workers, the resulting sum, where many are employed,
being ridiculously in excess of the cost of the boiling water. One young
woman known to me paid this tax (in her case 2d. a week) for six weeks,
and never once used the hot water.
Deductions for spoiled work or alleged damage are those which seem the
most to arouse heartburnings and that general feeling of grudge which it
is so greatly the interest of an employer to avoid arousing. Where, for
instance, glass or earthenware jars are filled with boiling preserve,
one or two jars in every few hundreds are sure to crack. “The breakage
will probably come to light under the hands of the girl who washes the
jar and sticks on the label, and in some factories she is made to pay.”
I have known a girl charged the full selling price for a seven-pound jar
from which the bits of glass were afterwards picked out and the preserve
reboiled and sold. Many instances of a similar kind from other trades
might be quoted if space allowed.
Other deductions are in the nature of punishment; and of these it may
safely be said that the master or foreman who cannot keep order without
the use of them does not know his business. One of the best employers
and kindest men whom I ever knew said, indignantly, when I asked him
whether there were fines in his factory: “If I could not run a factory
without fines I should be ashamed to run one at all.” My real reason for
the question was that an employer of a very different stamp had within
the same week defended himself against an accusation of excessive fining
by a public declaration that unless he inflicted fines his factory would
be a “bear-garden.” The contrast between these two men—carrying on
industries not at all dissimilar—between the two factories, and, above
all, between the manners, morals, and appearance of the young women
working for the one and of those working for the other, formed one of
the most instructive object lessons which it has ever been my lot to
receive.
Deductions for lateness are sometimes made a source of profit to the
employer. Men who pay a penny for an hour’s work will sometimes deduct
threepence for an hour’s absence; and piece workers—who, of course, lose
pay for the time of absence, are sometimes made to pay in addition. I
have seen the wage-book of an umbrella-coverer, which showed that in the
course of two years she had paid in fines (to the same employer) nearly
£6, chiefly for coming late in the morning. The case was particularly
flagrant, because she was a piece worker, and was not using a power
machine, and because work in this workshop was so irregular that when
she did come early she was often kept sitting unoccupied, while, if
orders happened to come in of an afternoon, the women were kept late to
fulfil them. Thus, although there might be no work for them, they were
fined if they came late; being piece workers, they were paid nothing for
the time spent in waiting for work, and they were paid at no extra rate
for work done late.
Worst of all, there are factories—though I hope but very few—in which
piece workers, when they have succeeded in making up a total slightly
better than usual, are liable to have the surplus deducted. I have in my
mind a factory where the foreman frequently deducted 1s. or 2s. from a
week’s payment, on the ground that the girl who should have received it
had “earned too much.”
To sum up then: workers in factories and workshops, although they are,
on the whole, better off in respect of hours, and although their lives
cannot at the worst, be so horribly monotonous as can that of the home
worker, are frequently exceedingly ill paid, even in trades demanding
considerable skill: not a few of them are employed in places that are
uncomfortable, unwholesome, or even actually dangerous; their poor wages
are apt to be docked by irritating fines and deductions; they have no
choice as to the companions with whom they spend their days, and they
share with the home worker the constant dread of being left without
employment and without means to pay for lodging or food. These are the
conditions in which hundreds and hundreds of young women in this country
are earning what it is customary to call “their living,” although all of
us are aware that no young woman can really live, in a large town, the
life of a civilised human being upon ten shillings a week or less.
CHAPTER III
SHOP ASSISTANTS, CLERKS, WAITRESSES
The daily life of the shop assistant—Her bedroom—“No pictures, photos,
etc.”—“Anything so left”—The dining-room—Meals—Impossibility of
ever being alone—Long hours—Fines and rules—Examples—Some notes on
health—Baths—Payment—“Premiums” and “intro” goods—“Taking the
book”—Diminished salary with commission on sales—Case of a
milliner’s assistant—The dictum of a draper—Why not domestic
service?—The social grade—Assistants who do not “live in”—Some
Scotch cases—Trade expenses of waitresses—Breakages—Clerks and
bookkeepers—Salaries offered to a competent young woman—Some shops
in fiction—The question of morals.
How many of us, as we sit at ease on the customer’s side of the counter,
reflect upon the life led by the spruce, black-coated young man or the
trim, deft young woman who stands upon the other? For myself, the
elaborate hairdressing of the shop-girl—all those curls and waves and
puffs that represent so much care and time—always sets me thinking of
the same girl before her looking-glass (taking her turn, probably, with
others). The dormitory in which she occupies a place is bare and
unhomelike, all the beds, chairs, and chests of drawers of the same
pattern; the walls unadorned, for the decoration of them is forbidden.
As the rule of one large establishment says, with equal harshness and
bad grammar: “No pictures, photos, etc., allowed to disfigure the walls.
Any one so doing will be charged with the repairs.” The room is chill in
winter and stuffy at all seasons, and her companions are chosen by
chance. Amid such surroundings she combs and rolls and twists with the
skill of a practised lady’s maid, in preparation, not for an evening’s
gaiety, but for a day’s toil. Hastily she crams into the small chest of
drawers which is her sole receptacle all her little apparatus of brush
and comb and curlers and wavers. For what says the rule? “Brushes,
bottles, etc., must not be left about in the room, but put away in the
drawers. Anything so left will be considered done for.” Carefully
dressed as to the head, but very inadequately washed—for baths are too
often lacking and hot water seldom provided in the mornings—the young
lady hurries down to breakfast in a dining-room which has the same
impersonal, depressing character as the dormitory. Too often it is a
basement room, and sometimes infested by black beetles. Here, among a
crowd of companions, she takes her meal, consisting in the great
majority of cases, of bread and butter and weak tea.
Twenty or twenty-five minutes later the assistant must be in the shop,
where, again among a crowd of fellow workers, she remains till the
midday dinner time. In many, indeed in most, shops the space behind the
counter is too narrow, and the assistant is jostled every time another
passes her. To a tired woman with aching back and feet the repetition of
this discomfort grows, towards the end of the day, almost intolerable.
The work itself is sometimes by no means light; in some departments the
boxes that have to be lifted down from high “fixtures” are of
considerable weight; the exhibiting of such things as mantles or coats
and skirts involves much carrying to and fro of heavy garments; so that
a young woman may well be physically exhausted by closing time.
Nervously exhausted she will surely be if the day has been busy, for the
whole of her occupation is a strain upon the nerves. She has to confront
strangers all day long; to touch without damaging numbers of articles,
often of a delicate kind; to fill up a number of forms, the omission of
any one of which will bring upon her reproof and probably a fine. She is
never alone. She eats her dinner to an accompaniment of clatter and
chatter in the same dull dining-room where she breakfasted. In many
shops that meal is neither good nor sufficient; and even if good the
food is monotonous. Each day of the week has generally its appointed
bill of fare. “In many houses the assistants know what the dinner will
be to-morrow, to-morrow week, to-morrow month, to-morrow year. I have an
Islington shop in my mind where the menu for years past has been this:—
Sunday: Pork.
Monday: Beef, hot.
Tuesday: Beef, cold.
Wednesday: Mutton, hot.
Thursday: Mutton, cold.
Friday: Beef, hot.
Saturday: Beef, cold, and resurrection pie.
On Thursday there is a roly-poly pudding, or stewed fruit densely
thickened with sago.
At a large Clapham house the week is mapped out thus:—
Monday: Mutton, hot.
Tuesday: Beef, hot.
Wednesday: Mutton, hot.
Thursday: Beef, cold.
Friday: Fish.
Saturday: Beef.[18]
These meals are often supplemented by private purchases; in some houses
the cook is allowed to supply extras at a price; in others the
assistants may bring in food; in yet others there is a refreshment bar
at which they may and do purchase food. In some establishments they are
actually fined for leaving any food on the plate.
From dinner the shop assistant returns, generally after a bare half
hour, to the counter. An extra interval of even ten minutes to be passed
in rest and solitude would be precious, and even the institution-like
dormitory would be a welcome refuge. But, no; rare indeed is the “house
of business” in which the assistant is allowed to enter his or her own
bedroom during the day, except by special permission from the
shopwalker.
For tea, which affords a welcome break at about five o’clock, a quarter
of an hour or twenty minutes will, as a rule, be allotted, and the meal
will in most cases consist of tea and ready-cut bread and butter. After
tea work will go on again till closing time. That happy hour varies
enormously according to the locality and nature of the shop. In the West
End of London most shops are closed by seven, and on Saturdays by two;
but in poorer districts shops will habitually be kept open until 9.30,
and on Saturdays until much later.
When the shop has been cleared of customers the business of tidying up
and covering in for the night begins. After that comes supper, rather a
Spartan meal as a rule; and then—then, the assistant is free till 11
P.M., or on Saturdays till 12. Fifteen minutes after that hour the gas
of the firm is turned out, and no private light must be kept burning.
“Any one having a light after that time will be discharged.” The “young
lady” may now sleep, if she can, in her narrow bed, with her companions
around her, until the morning’s bell calls her to rise, wash and
dress—still not alone—and begin another day like the last.
In lower-class shops the assistant does not always have even her bed to
herself, and has, of course, no choice as to the companion who shares
it. In such shops, where the hours are long, many young women never,
except on Sundays or holidays, go out of doors in the daylight. What
wonder that they grow anæmic, that they suffer continually from
headaches and indigestion and from all the long train of woes that lie
in wait for the overworked, underfed, and shut-in women.
In the matter of hours, of food, and of restrictions, young men are no
better off than young women. They also are subject to fines for every
petty error, and to a code of rules covering every detail of life and
work. I have inspected several such codes, and very curious reading I
have found them. I do not remember any instance in which the number of
rules was less than 50. Mr Whiteley’s, at the time when I saw them, were
159; those of another shop in the same district ran up to 198. Here are
a few sample rules, taken almost at random: “Young men coming to
business with dirty boots, soiled shirts or collars, etc., and young
ladies with soiled collars or cuffs, or otherwise appearing in business
in an untidy manner, fine 3d.” Of course the washing of these immaculate
collars, cuffs, and shirts is paid for by the wearer. “Gossiping,
standing in groups, or lounging about in an unbusinesslike manner, fine
3d.” “Assistants must introduce at least two articles to each customer,
fine 2d.” “Unnecessary talking and noise in bedrooms is strictly
prohibited, fine 6d.” “For losing copy of rules, 2d.” “For
unbusinesslike conduct, 6d.”[19]
It is needless to dwell upon the nagging, ungenerous tone that marks
such rules as these. That their harassing character helps towards that
collapse of health and nerves which is so frequent among women shop
assistants, I feel persuaded; and it is more than probable the abolition
of “living-in” with all its accompanying petty annoyances would lead to
a marked improvement in the health of the whole class.[20]
Here are a few notes upon the question of health made by a trustworthy
observer at close quarters.[21]
_A._ “During the fifteen weeks I spent at ——’s, three girls in my
department had to leave on account of illness. The department was
entered through others, and had no street door. In summer it was so
oppressively hot that even customers often complained. Out of the
sixteen assistants I worked with, one was anæmic, one had varicose
veins, one had a chronic cough, one chronic indigestion; all suffered
from lassitude and headache, and four frequently lost their voices
through weakness. One of those who left broke down from extreme
weakness, and had to give up altogether. Another was the case of
varicose veins. A vein burst, and the girl was taken to the hospital,
where she was told she must not stand much. She could not give up
business, however, and now wears elastic stockings above and below the
knee on both legs. Anæmia was common. At my table at dinner there were
six persons with the same colourless lips, leaden skins, and hollow
eyes. This house compares favourably with most business houses in
London.”
_B._ “I very clearly remember some very hot days ... behind the fancy
counter of a West-End house. The atmosphere was filled with fluff and
dust, the very board floors seemed to scorch one’s feet, and the effort
to drag a heavy lace box out of the fixtures made one faint and giddy.
One day my companion at the counter gave a little gasp and collapsed on
a heap of collar-boxes. The shopwalker carried her out of the shop to
the housekeeper’s room, and in about half an hour she regained
consciousness. In another half hour she was at the counter again. It was
only the heat and the standing! That night when we went to bed she
showed me her blistered feet and told me they had been very painful
during the day. She had been unable to bathe them for three days, for
there had only been enough water in the bedroom for washing in the
morning, and she hadn’t time to wash her feet then.”
_C._ “Only strong girls can manage to keep a berth in this house for any
length of time. Ailments: weakness, anæmia, and fainting attacks, with
frequent headaches and other symptoms of a low state of health.
Underground dining-room lit with gas; a damp unpleasant room. In summer
it is very close and infested with black beetles. The shops are warmed
with gas in winter.”
_D._ “The shops of this firm are bitterly cold in winter, as there is no
artificial heat. The assistants get thoroughly chilled and are not
allowed a fire in the sitting-room unless the weather is exceptionally
cold. Sanitary accommodation objectionable.”
The hours of work are in some localities very long. I have known of
shops in poor districts that remained open on Saturdays till 11, 11.30
or 12; and cases are cited by credible witnesses of 12.30 as the
Saturday closing time. Tobacconists’ and sweet shops are often open on
Sundays, and assistants employed in them are liable to a seven days’
week. On the other hand, in shops that are never open on a Sunday there
is often a tendency to discourage the presence of the assistants on the
premises during Sundays. It used to be not an uncommon practice actually
to turn the assistants out, from closing time on Saturday till Sunday
night or Monday morning; but it is a good many years now since I have
met with any instance of this. The cruelty and meanness of this form of
economy are sufficiently obvious; yet I have known it practised by a
draper who was a churchwarden and who was greatly surprised at receiving
from his vicar earnest remonstrances upon the subject.
Sad to say, a bath or bathroom is by no means regarded by employers as a
necessity. There are still houses of good repute in which the
assistants, male and female, have nothing but a basin in which to wash.
On the very day that I write these words a letter is published in the
_Daily News_ from a shop assistant who cites the case of “a large house
in the West-End where hundreds of young men and women ‘live in,’ and not
a single bath is provided for them.... When the poor assistant feels
inclined to take a bath he has to take it before the public baths close
at eight o’clock; and as there is no fire in the sitting-room he is
obliged to go straight to bed to avoid catching cold on a cold winter’s
night after taking his bath.”[22]
The salaries both of men and women are poor. The shopwalker and the
buyer may, in some instances, receive handsome salaries; but for the
ordinary saleswoman, £35 a year is high pay; indeed, there are many
young men receiving no more than £20 or £25. Out of this income the
assistant has to keep up the required standard of appearance, providing
black coats or gowns, as the case may be, and spotless starched linen.
Often the collar and cuffs of the young lady are of a regulation pattern
that may perhaps not suit her again if she goes into another house.
Towels are not generally included in the furnishing of the bedrooms; the
purchase and washing of these come out of the assistant’s pocket.
These wages are supposed to be supplemented by “premiums,” and the
subject of premiums is not without interest for the customer. Certain
goods, which for some reason it is particularly desired to sell, are
“premiumed,” _i.e._ a small commission is given to the assistant who
effects a sale of them. The premium, which is in proportion to the
selling price, is generally but a small sum. Half a crown is about the
highest figure, and would represent a purchase running to some pounds.
On small things the premium may be as low as a halfpenny. The existence
of premiums explains in great measure the annoyance to which all of us
have been subjected by the endeavours of an assistant to force upon us
goods for which we have not asked—goods known behind the counter as
“intro” (or introduced) goods. A rule quoted above shows that there are
shops in which an assistant is bound to press two “intro” articles, at
least, upon every customer. To dispose largely of “intro” goods is
obviously to the assistant’s interest, not only because the premiums
make a welcome addition to his small income, but also because the
disposal of these articles is viewed with favour by his superior
officers. To the customer who knows what she wants and is anxious to
spend no more than the needful time and money in getting it, “intro”
goods are an irritation and a burden—especially if she is sufficiently
behind the scenes to know their significance to the girl or youth who
compulsorily obtrudes them upon her. Such customers are apt to forget
the great commercial truth that shops exist not to supply the needs of
the public but to fill the pockets of the shopkeeper.
Nor is the premium the only instrument of pressure applied to the shop
assistant. There is, in most establishments, an unwritten law that each
assistant must, each week, sell goods to a certain amount. That total
goes by the name of the “book”; and each young man and young woman is
aware that repeated failure to “take” his or her “book” will be followed
by dismissal. One very capable employer has a different method. He
engages the assistant at a fixed salary; and when she has been at work
for a couple of months, she is informed that for the future her salary
will be diminished by a substantial deduction, and that she will receive
a commission of 1¼ per cent. upon her sales. The assistants are said not
to keep a reckoning of their commission, but to be of opinion that they
rather gain than lose. In the “wools” department, where sales would not
generally run to high figures, £10 was deducted from the £30 a year of
one assistant, and £8 from the £28 of another. From a salary of £35 in
the underclothing showroom, no less than £23 was taken off.
There are houses in which a list of weekly “takings” is posted up; and
some in which the names that stand low in the list are marked by the
employer with signs of disapprobation. To be a good salesman or
saleswoman is to be an adept in the art of inducing fellow creatures to
make purchases that they did not intend to make. Indeed, there are shops
where failure to effect a sale, if it occurs three times running, means
dismissal. I knew an instance (a good many years ago) in which a girl
was dismissed at a moment’s notice from a London millinery shop, because
she had failed to cajole a customer into buying any bonnet. She was
“living-in”; her home was not in London; the dismissal took place
between 5 and 6 o’clock, and she did not know of any lodging to which
she could go. Fortunately a policeman whom she consulted was able to
direct her to one of London’s many safe havens for young women. But what
of the employer, who, suddenly, and late in the day, turned a young girl
out of his house into the unknown world of London, her only fault being
that another woman had found in his shop no bonnet to suit her—and had
been resolute enough to resist buying one that did not?
It is related of a certain provincial draper that seeing a customer
depart having made no purchase, he called up the assistant who had
waited upon her. “Why did not that lady buy anything?” “We hadn’t what
she wanted, sir.” “Anybody can sell people what they want. Remember that
I keep you to sell people what they don’t want.” That in a nutshell is
the present condition of retail shopkeeping—especially, perhaps, in the
department of drapery; and that condition is one reason why some
customers find it preferable to deal at co-operative stores. The
business of the assistant in a private shop is to sell, reluctantly
perhaps, but under stern compulsion, articles that the shopkeeper
desires sold to a customer who does not really desire to buy them. Can
any employment be imagined more straining to the nerves, or more trying
to the temper of a refined and delicate minded person? And there are
many shop assistants of refinement and of delicate feeling; some of them
daughters of clergymen and of other professional men who have died
leaving their girls unprovided for.
At this point some reader will certainly be found to demand why these
young ladies do not, in a body, abandon the shop and enter domestic
service. The answer is a simple one enough. These girls, like the vast
majority of their compatriots, will endure much hardship rather than
lose caste; and, whatever may be the opinion of the wage-payers, there
can be no doubt that among wage-earners domestic service ranks as a
low-caste occupation. The middle class mother who will not send her
little girl to a public elementary school, the middle class father who
would rather see his son making a small income as a professional man
than a large income as a tradesman, ought rather to applaud than to
condemn the “young lady in business” who refuses to exchange her black
uniform and her title of “Miss” for the cap and apron and the name
without a handle of the domestic servant.
The question of class distinction has, as Mr Charles Booth has pointed
out, a marked influence upon the choice of employment; and this
influence, the authors of _Women’s Work and Wages_ truly observe has led
to curious economic anomalies, which are generally beneficial to the
employers.[23]
An observation somewhat to the same effect may be found on pp. 67, 68 of
_Women in the Printing Trades_.[24]
In Scotland “living-in” is not customary, but the advantages of freedom
have been, in the past, sometimes counterbalanced by serious drawbacks.
Here are some instances from one of Miss Irwin’s reports:—
“In some of these shops the girls are kept on duty continuously; this is
more especially the case where only one girl is employed.... In scarcely
any of the shops in this district is lavatory accommodation provided.
Witness said she knew of drapery shops where the hours are from 8 A.M.
to 9 P.M., and in some cases to 10 P.M.; while they are kept open till
11 P.M. and 12 midnight on Saturdays. In these shops the girls are
allowed half an hour off for breakfast and one hour for dinner. Total
hours worked per week 82 and 89 (not including meal hours). No seats are
provided and there is no sanitary accommodation. Witness stated that
there are frequent cases of girls completely breaking down in health in
these shops.”
“Witness 504 is about 24 years of age. She is saleswoman and manager in
a confectioner’s shop and is paid 7s. per week. The shop she keeps is an
East end branch belonging to a leading firm in this trade. The shops of
this firm in better localities are closed at 8 P.M. In the other the
following are the hours: open 9.30 A.M., close at 10 P.M. Saturdays,
open at 8.30 A.M., close at 11 P.M. As witness has sole charge of the
shop she cannot leave it to take her meals, or for any other purpose.
Her dinner is brought to her and she takes it as she can; tea is taken
in the same way. Witness has in all nine holidays in the year.”
“Witness 418 had been engaged as an assistant in a tea shop and gave the
following evidence: Her hours were from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., five days in
the week; and from 9 A.M. to 11.30 P.M. on Saturdays. Witness had sole
charge of the shop and was not allowed to go out for meals, except on
such days as her employer, a commercial traveller, and seldom at home,
came to relieve her; frequently she was obliged to fast all day, and
finally she was obliged to leave on account of her health breaking down.
Total hours worked per day, 12; Saturdays, 14½; per week 74½ hours.”[25]
In restaurants, both in London and elsewhere, the hours are sometimes
excessive. I have known instances of girls who were employed at the
refreshment rooms of stations who were not allowed to leave until after
the last train had gone at night—which meant that they had to walk home
every night after midnight.
Miss Irwin, in her evidence before the Committee of the House of Lords
upon the early closing of shops, quotes a very similar instance: “In
another baker’s shop where six girls were employed, the hours were from
6.45 A.M. to 8 P.M., and to 11.30 on Saturdays. The girls had to provide
their own food, and all meals, including breakfast, were made and
partaken of on the premises, the girls having the use of the kitchen for
this. No regular time was allowed for meals, and they were kept running
backwards and forwards to the shop all the time. Very often they were
kept beyond the nominal closing hour of 11.15 P.M. and lost the last car
home. This was a great hardship to the girls who lived at a distance. My
informant said: ‘When I get home, I just sit down and cry with fatigue.’
The firm have a number of branch shops. There are in all twenty-eight
girls employed in them.”[26]
The nominal maximum hours in restaurants visited by her are given by
Miss Irwin as follows:—
“In 3 cases 16 hours on one or more days in the week 96 hours.
„ 1 „ 15½ „ „ „ 93 „
„ 1 „ 12 to 17 „ „ „ 93 „
„ 1 „ 15 „ „ „ 90 „
„ 2 „ 16 „ „ „ 87 „
„ 1 „ 14½ „ „ „ 87 „
„ 2 „ 13 to 14 „ „ „ 79 „
„ 4 „ 12½ to 15½ „ „ „ 78 „
„ 1 „ 17 „ „ „ 77 „
„ 3 „ 12 to 12½ „ „ „ 72 to 75 „
„ 1 „ 13 „ „ „ 70 „
“These,” adds Miss Irwin, “are the _nominal_ hours, but ... in several
cases the information was taken from the women assistants at a later
hour than the nominal closing time.”[27]
The expenses of a waitress are often considerable; she almost always has
to pay for the washing of the aprons, collars and cuffs that are a part
of her uniform, and in most cases to provide them. As nearly every
company has its different pattern the articles are apt to become useless
when employment is changed. Moreover in some restaurants and
refreshment-rooms, all breakages, whether made by them or by customers,
are paid for by the assistants. I have known girls subject to this
deduction who complained that they received no statement as to how the
amount deducted was made up. That the sum is in some cases not trifling
is shown by a newspaper correspondence that occurred in the year 1890. A
representative of Messrs Spiers & Pond, Ltd., wrote to a newspaper
complaining that the amounts habitually deducted at Waterloo Station had
been overstated, and assigned 1s. 9½d. as the weekly average for each
assistant. This being the firm’s own estimate, there can be no injustice
in quoting it. When we remember that the wages of waitresses average,
roughly, from 7s. to 14s. a week, less 8d. or 9d. for washing, we shall
probably regard an average deduction of 1s. 9½d. a week as by no means
inconsiderable. A certain proportion of breakages is manifestly
incidental to the refreshment trade and the renewal of crockery is as
much one of its natural expenses as the renewal of fuel. Either of these
items might just as fairly be laid upon the waitresses. It is often made
a reproach to schemes of industrial partnership that the employees share
the profits without sharing the losses. This particular form of
partnership, in which employees bear losses but take no share in gains
seems to have escaped the economists.
In the matters of poor pay, uncertainty of employment and compulsorily
“respectable” clothing, clerks and bookkeepers occupy much the same
position as shop assistants; and when their employment happens to be in
shops, their hours are equally long. A young woman known to me, a highly
competent clerk and book-keeper, showed me letters from employers with
whom she was in treaty. In one case she was to be cashier and
book-keeper in a very well known and flourishing shop; she was to be at
her post until 11 P.M. on Saturdays and until 8 (or it may have been
8.30) on other evenings. Her pay was to be 8s. a week, living out. I may
add that shortly afterwards I myself saw this shop open one evening, not
Saturday, at nearly 9 o’clock. The other post, again that of cashier and
book-keeper, was in the office of an extremely wealthy wholesale City
firm, where thousands of pounds would have passed through her hands
weekly and where the book-keeping would have been very complex. The
salary offered was 14s. a week.
Reviewing this chapter, I see that I have dealt almost exclusively with
large establishments. In smaller ones and especially in poor districts
the food and housing may be worse, and the payment will almost certainly
be lower. On the other hand the regulations will in all likelihood be
less rigid and sometimes the relations between employer and employed
will be quite human and even homelike.
Of the general conditions in a thoroughly low class shop, Mr Maxwell’s
_Vivien_ presents a picture faithful probably in most particulars. A
more typical case, illuminated by a spark of real genius, is portrayed
in Mr Wells’s _Kipps_; and there is an admirable vignette in Gissing’s
_The Odd Women_.
It is only just to add that neither the somewhat exhaustive
investigations made under the auspices of the Women’s Industrial Council
nor such information as, during a considerable course of years, I have
been able to collect personally, confirm those accusations of prevalent
immorality which might be suggested by such novels as Zola’s _Au Bonheur
des Dames_, and which are freely made in some quarters. No doubt
instances must from time to time occur in which a shopwalker or an
employer makes use of his position as a weapon of seduction; but such
instances are certainly the exception. There may also possibly have
existed, somewhere, at some time, a basis of fact for that persistent
legend of the employer who offers to young women the free use of a latch
key by way of compensation for low payment.
For the large majority of shop girls, however, the temptations of shop
life take the form not of illicit lovemaking within the shop but rather
of continued dulness, driving and discomfort, constantly pressing them
towards any offered means of escape. The passion that really prevails in
the modern shop is the passion for money, which, no less than more lurid
passions preferred by the romance writer, devours the youth and lives of
girls. It does not, however, consciously fall under the classification
of the decalogue, and the destroyers of these victims often honestly
believe themselves to be men of singular righteousness and virtue, the
pillars and bulwarks of an industrious, commercial nation. The feudal
baron, not improbably regarded himself in no very different light.
_Note._ The daily papers of the week in which this chapter was written
contained two cases that corroborate the statements made in it; and
that show the evils described to be by no means matters of the past. I
give them verbatim, except that in the second case I have concealed
the name of the accused lad.
George A. Evans, coffee-shop keeper, of Goldsmith’s Row, Hackney Road,
was summoned at Old Street for breaches of the Shop Hours Act by
employing two young persons as waitresses for more than 74 hours in
any one week.
Mr D. Carter, for the London County Council, explained that girls
under the age of 18 were denominated “young persons,” and while they
might be worked 12 hours for the first five days of the week, and 14
hours on a Saturday, all meal times were to be counted in as part of
the employment.
The defendant was found employing a girl aged 17 years and 7 months,
and another 16 years and 2 months, and both had in the week ending May
26th worked 85 hours each. Further, the defendant had no notice of the
hours of labour, as allowed by the Act, exhibited in his shop. He was
also summoned for that offence.
Defendant pleaded guilty, and Mr Dickinson imposed fines and costs
amounting to £4, 18s.—_Daily News_, 23rd August 1906.
A well dressed clerk, named Y. Z., aged 16, was charged at Marylebone
with having embezzled £2, 2s. belonging to his employers Ryland & Co.,
auctioneers of Edgeware Road. His duty was to collect rents, and it
was alleged that his defalcations amounted in all to £7, 10s. In
extenuation of the offence he pointed out that his wages only came to
12s. a week, out of which he had to pay 4s. rent and 2s. travelling
expenses, leaving him but 6s. a week with which to clothe and feed
himself. He took the £2, 2s. intending to pay it back, but he was
found out before he could do so. His hours were from 9 to 6. Mr Paul
Taylor said he was at a loss to know how Z. could have sustained life
on the small salary he was receiving. He remanded him to give the
missionary an opportunity of seeing what could be done for
him.—_Tribune_, 24th August 1906.
CHAPTER IV
TRAFFIC WORKERS
The traffic worker and the public safety—“Privileged
cabs”—Railway workers—The hours of signalmen—The seven day
week—“Blacklisting”—London’s omnibus men—Paying the police
for leave to work—“The rest of the evening”—What is required
of a driver—What is required of a conductor—Wages stopped
for fogs, fires and processions—Curiosities of an “Accident
Club”—How a motor man is “passed” for a licence—The “journey
system”—What it means to the passenger—What it means to the
men—Breakdowns—Wages in the garage—3d. a day for
uniform—“The bar up”—The best employer in London—Tram men
under the London County Council.
In these days of much journeying, there is scarcely one of us whose life
and safety do not depend, again and again, upon the skill, the
steadiness, the nerve and the judgment of the men who steer our public
conveyances. Not only in their own interests, therefore, but in the
interest of public security, it is essential that the men upon whom
rests so vast a responsibility should not be overworked, underpaid nor
harassed. The sad fact is, however, that the vast majority of them are
both overworked and harassed; and that, if not the majority, at least a
very appreciable minority are decidedly underpaid.
Of cabmen I do not propose to speak; the subject of their hours,
conditions and rates of pay being so intricate that anything like a
general view is difficult to present. I will content myself with
indicating, by means of a paragraph from a Parliamentary Report, the
kind of exactions to which cabmen are exposed. “Privileged cabs” are
those admitted, upon payment of a fixed charge, to ply in railway
stations. It appears that the lowest charge made by any company
maintaining the privileged cab system is 1s. per week. The smallest
number of cabs is “15, at Clapham Junction, and the largest number of
cabs, 290, at Paddington, which at 3s. per week provide the Great
Western Railway with the substantial sum of £2262 per annum.”[28]
The railway workers of Great Britain are, as a class, men of excellent
character, intelligent, careful, attentive and worthy of the trust
reposed in them. They have a strong trade union, and their secretary now
sits in Parliament. Yet this body of grown men, most of them voters, was
so unable to secure from its employers a reasonably short working day
that the legislature, unwilling though it has always shown itself to any
direct regulation of the working hours of men, felt compelled in the
interests of public safety, to intervene; and a special order of the
Board of Trade has, for many years past, limited the hours of railway
men. Yet, even now, there are porters, generally at small stations, who
are on duty for 16 hours a day; and 8 hours, which should be the longest
day of any signalman, are extended, except in the busiest boxes, to 10
and, in some cases, to 12. Many a porter works seven days a week for
16s., perhaps at some small station where “tips” are infrequent. In this
connection it is worthy of note that such companies as pay additionally
for Sunday labour find it possible to do with much fewer workers on
Sundays. Of how much improvement the railway man’s lot is still
susceptible may be judged from the programme of the union, drawn up at
the close of 1906, and about to be submitted to the various companies.
Its demands are as follows:—
An eight-hour day for trainmen, shunters and signalmen.
No railway employee to work more than ten hours a day.
An increase of 2s. per week in the wages of all grades receiving less
than 30s. per week.
Sunday labour to be paid for at the rate of time and a half; and
overtime at the rate of time and a quarter.[29]
The worst form of oppression, however, to which the railway man is
exposed is one very difficult to prove and very easy to deny:
“blacklisting.” A railway servant, on leaving the employ of one company,
(whether at the company’s instance or at his own) receives no written
character, nor can he refer any intending employer to the report of his
immediate superior. Enquiry must be made at headquarters; and it seldom
happens that a man who, for whatever cause, has left the service of one
company, succeeds in getting taken on by another. The men are convinced
that a deliberate understanding exists, and this conviction leads many
of them, unwillingly subservient, to endure the ills they have, rather
than face loss of employment and of pay. Any trade that is in the
hands—as the railway industry of course is—of comparatively few and very
powerful employers is especially liable to develop the tyranny of
“blacklisting.” The existence of the practice is almost invariably
denied, and can, in the nature of things, very seldom be substantiated;
but it is possible to remark that, as a matter of experience, one
company does not engage the man who has previously worked for another.
The men know, experimentally, that to leave their present employers
means, in the great majority of cases, leaving the industry altogether.
How much such knowledge must sap a man’s independence, how much it must
try his nerves and his temper, it is, surely, unnecessary to insist.
The railway workers have, in the course of years, conquered the immense
difficulties that beset the organising of men whose hours are long and
varying, and whose work brings them rather apart than together. Other
workers, whose employment is closely akin to theirs, are still involved
in those early struggles which seem to the men engaged in them almost
hopeless. Comparing their position with that of the railway men, we
shall see, once again, how great are the benefits which organisation can
bestow, and how powerless are even skilled and licensed workmen unless
backed by a strong union.
The omnibus men of London form a group of workers familiar to all
London’s citizens. The most tedious of “blocks” has been enlivened for
us by their “chaff”; the blackest of fogs and the most scorching of
dog-days have failed to destroy their patience and their good temper.
With the advent of the motor omnibus, however, a change has become
apparent which fills observant Londoners with foreboding. The motor man
is, to put it plainly, snappish; he hustles his passengers in and out;
he not infrequently turns a blind eye to the breathless pursuer; and he
is apt to be caustic in remarks upon the slowness of the aged or the
unwieldy traveller. To this impatience the jarring motion and irritating
jangle of the car may perhaps contribute; but the main reason of it may,
I believe, be found in the conditions under which the drivers and
conductors of motor omnibuses mostly work.
It may be of some interest to compare the conditions of three different
groups of men, all of whom are busied in the work of carrying London’s
inhabitants to and fro; especially since their cases exemplify a
transition which is in course of progress around us.
All drivers and conductors are compelled to pay for leave to exercise
their calling. It is considered that the security of the passenger
requires to be safeguarded, and that no person should be allowed to
officiate upon a public conveyance unless he has been licensed to do so.
In London the ultimate licensing authority is the Home Secretary, to
whom Section 8 of the Stage and Hackney Carriages (Metropolis) Act of
1869 has allowed a power little less than autocratic. These are the
terms of it: “A licence to the driver or conductor of a hackney or stage
carriage may be granted at such price, on such conditions, be in such
form, be subject to revocation or suspension in such events and
generally be dealt with in such manner as the said Secretary of State
may by order prescribe, subject to this provision, that any licence
shall, if not revoked or suspended, be in force for a year, and there
shall be paid in respect thereof to the Receiver of the Metropolitan
Police Fund such sum not exceeding 5s. as the said Secretary of State
may prescribe.” Successive Home Secretaries have seen fit to fix the
maximum charge of 5s. for each year’s licence; and between the 1st of
April, 1905 and the 31st of March, 1906, the Commissioners of Police
received as many sums of 5s. as sufficed to make up a total of £7928,
10s.[30]
Of the manner in which the police authorities exercise their power
something will appear later on; but, apart from any question of
administration, there is surely some injustice in taxing the men for a
licence demanded not at all in their interest, but solely in that of
their passengers. That the owners of public conveyances, who derive a
profit from running them on the public roads, and who in doing so assist
to wear out those roads, should pay for a licence may be not
inequitable; but that the paid servants of such owners should be taxed,
as a condition of entering that service, can hardly, when judicially
considered, be pronounced defensible, and it is not surprising that the
Select Committee should advise alteration. “The theory of the Home
Office,” says the Report, “seems to be that, in view of the special
benefits derived by the cab and omnibus trade from its connection with
the police, it is only fair that the trade should be specially taxed for
the maintenance of the police.... There seem, however, to be few other
classes of the community who are charged in this way for their own
police inspection, and in our opinion, the system requires
modification.”[31]
The drivers and conductors of horse omnibuses (though there have been
changes in their conditions) are still employed upon the system which
was once the only one in vogue, and are, at least nominally, paid by the
day. The length of day varies somewhat on different routes, but the
average is about fifteen hours—or very nearly twice the length of the
working day in the best managed industries. Moreover, the omnibus man
works as a rule thirteen days in a fortnight. His share of leisure is
pretty well described by the reply of an elderly driver who, in the
hearing of my informant, was asked by a passenger, at something after 11
P.M., whether this was the last journey. “Yes, sir,” the man answered
mildly, “this is our last journey—and the rest of the evening we have to
ourselves.”
Out of his nominal daily wage of 7s. or 8s., the driver has to provide
rugs, capes and whips. Custom requires of him “tips” to horse-keepers,
pullers-up, &c., the total of which is estimated at not far short of a
shilling a day. In only a few cases are the men near enough to their
homes at dinner time to be met by a small son or daughter carefully
conveying “Father’s dinner” in a covered dish or basin—an economy
possible to very many cabmen. Their meal, on this account, inevitably
costs them rather more than if it could be prepared at home; and the
same increase of cost attends their tea. Less than two meals in 15
hours, a man who works in the open air can scarcely do with.
Superhuman punctuality is expected of the omnibus. Should it arrive two
or three minutes late—or two or three minutes early—at one of its
“points,” its driver may be suspended from work for from two to seven
days. The conductor, whose nominal wage is 6s. a day, is liable to be
suspended or discharged if his takings fall below the average. When a
journey is stopped by fog, fire or the occurrence of a procession, the
proportion of pay for that journey is deducted from the wage of driver
and conductor alike, even although they may not succeed in bringing the
omnibus into the yard until after the usual hour, or even if, as happens
occasionally, they may have to stay out all night with it. As one of the
fraternity sardonically remarked to me: “It’s a new experience for them,
that’s all.”
At the present moment, the drivers and conductors of horse omnibuses are
face to face with the prospect of a lowered wage. On one line, there has
been a reduction of one journey _per diem_ (the working day having
previously been one of 16 hours) and a reduction in the day’s pay of 1s.
6d. for the driver (from 8s. to 6s. 6d.) and of 1s. for the conductor.
It is fully expected that men on other lines will, before long,
experience the same change.
It will, I am sure, surprise many readers to learn that the drivers and
conductors of omnibuses are expected to defray the expenses of
accidents. The men employed by one large company subscribe to a fund for
the purpose of meeting such expenses. I cannot learn that any direct
rule obliges them to belong to this so-called “Drivers’ and Conductors’
Accident Club,” but they are of opinion that any man who declined to
belong would not find himself, for long, in the employ of the company. I
have been fortunate enough to inspect the rules of this club, and have
carefully preserved a copy. It is a document equally remarkable for its
oppressiveness and for its grammar. The preamble runs thus: “This
Club ... is for the purpose of creating a fund by which the expenses so
frequently arising from accidental causes may be met without allowing
these expenses to fall unjustly upon the company, or subjecting the
individuals who may be the immediate cause of such expenses to perilous
and embarrassing circumstances, and, be it further understood, that each
Driver and Conductor are responsible for all damages to property or
person to the amount of Ten Pounds, and any Driver or Conductor not
conforming with the Club Rules will not be allowed any assistance from
the Funds thereof for any accident they may meet with.” Rule 1 requires
“Each Driver to pay 2s. entrance fee as soon as he is passed eligible to
drive an Omnibus belonging to the Club. Each Conductor to pay 1s.
entrance fee. Each Service Driver to pay 1s. per week contribution. Each
Service Conductor to pay 6d. per week contribution.” Rules 3 and 5 are
worth quoting. “Whatever accident may occur by any Driver and Conductor,
whether regular or spare men, he shall pay towards such accident not
less than one quarter of the amount the accident may cost the Club to
settle. If not able to pay the whole of such fourth in one payment it
must be paid by instalments of not less than 2s. 6d. per week. Should it
be further proved that such accident was brought about by intoxication
or any kind of neglect, the Committee shall, at their next meeting, have
power to levy any further sum they agree upon, and, whatever sum fixed,
may be paid by weekly instalments by such sums as may be agreed upon by
the Committee.” “Should any Member of the Club leave or be discharged
from the Company’s service within three months of his becoming a Member,
such Member shall forfeit all claims upon the Club funds.” Rule 7, after
providing for quarterly meetings, proceeds: “The fourth meeting to take
place on the most convenient date in December, when after putting away
as reserve fund, not less than £40, any surplus remaining to be equally
divided among the Members in accordance with what they may be entitled
to.” Rule 9 is, perhaps, the most remarkable piece of grammatical
construction that ever presented itself under the guise of English. “Any
Member having left the Club and is indebted thereto shall not be
entitled to share, unless all arrears be paid up. Any Member having left
the Club and is entitled to share must apply for same within the first
calendar month of the ensuing year, if not his share will be lost and
will be placed to the credit of the Club for the ensuing year.”
Thus the nominal wage of every driver in this company’s service is
really reduced by 1s. weekly, and that of every conductor by 6d.; while
a fund of “not less than £40,” saved up out of these men’s earnings, is
held in hand to indemnify the company for possible accidents, whether
such accidents are caused by the fault of the men or not. The conductor,
indeed, can seldom be even remotely responsible for an accident; yet the
conductor, no less than the driver, is made to pay this tax. It would be
interesting to know whether the law would uphold a man who should refuse
to pay anything at all towards the cost of an accident not caused by
neglect or misconduct. He would, of course, lose all chance of further
employment in the trade; but he might conceivably put an end, once and
for all, to these exactions.
It will hardly appear, from all that has been said, that the life of the
omnibus man is extraordinarily enviable; yet his situation is decidedly
preferable to that of the man who exchanges the society of a pair of
horses for that of a snorting and self-willed motor. Like the horse
driver, the motor driver must secure a licence, for which, when he gets
it, he must pay 5s. yearly to the Police Commissioners; and if
possessing a horse licence he desires to retain it he must pay an
additional 5s. per annum. Moreover, when he enters his application, he
has also to pay a fee of 5s. to the London County Council for
registration. The Commissioners have been known to refuse motor licences
to men who have been driving for years, but whose licence shows an
endorsement, sometimes of distant date and sometimes for an offence of
trivial character. To the lay mind it appears that a man, whose
misdemeanours were not too great to make him unfit for driving a horse
omnibus, is likely to be a safer driver for a motor than a man from some
other calling, quite inexperienced in the art of threading the maze of
London traffic. In any case it is clearly an injustice that such a man
should not be able to learn, before spending time and money upon special
training, that a licence will not be granted to him. The test of
competence applied is curious but probably effective. A certain
inspector, whose name I refrain from giving, collects a number of
candidates and places himself with one of them on the driving stand of a
motor omnibus, the remainder of the candidates occupying seats as
passengers. The driver, under orders from the inspector, steers the car
hither and thither until such time as his instructor dismisses him to
inaction, and selects another. Not until the party has returned home,
does any man learn his fate. Then the inspector remarks to each as the
case may be: “You have passed,” or “You must come up again.” The fiat of
this gentleman being unchecked, it is well that it appears to be
dictated by justice. Beloved, indeed, of his licencees he is not; but I
found myself hardly able to sympathise with complaints of his unsmiling
disposition. How should a man smile, whose calling in life it is to
imperil his existence at the hands of an endless succession of
unpractised motor drivers? A certain proportion of these candidates are
men who have never driven in the London streets—some of them never on
any road whatever. There is a legend of one, said to have been
originally a shop assistant, who entered upon his career unaware that he
was expected to drive to the left rather than to the right. I have
myself travelled in a motor omnibus the driver of which took the wrong
side of three refuges between Maida Vale and Tottenham Court Road.
Whether ignorance guided his course or a desire to achieve a full
complement of journeys _per diem_ I cannot, of course, tell.
Having secured his licence and an engagement, the motor driver is put
upon a certain route, to perform a shift, not of so many hours, but of
so many journeys. The “journey system,” which is responsible for nearly
all the ill temper and not a few of the accidents that attend the course
of the motor omnibus, is as follows. A certain number of journeys each
day is allotted to each car. Driver and conductor are paid by the
journey, and the required number of journeys is such that only under the
most favourable possible conditions can it be completed. At least one
car in every three will fail in the task. Let us consider, for instance,
the case of certain cars which, at one period, were timed to do four
journeys, but have recently been required to make six in the day. Two
shifts are worked, each set of men being supposed to make three
journeys. Since the very barest measure of time is allowed, the men are
constantly on the strain; they are tempted to take risks, and are
unwilling to pause long enough for the picking up and setting down of
passengers. At the close of the period allowed for the first shift, the
third journey will in all probability not be finished, but it may have
been begun, and will be concluded before the car is brought in. It thus
becomes more impossible than ever for the second set of journeys to be
compressed into the shortened hours left for the second shift, the
rather that the car will very probably have suffered from the strain put
upon it in the endeavour to get out of it the utmost amount of work. Two
journeys may be achieved, in which case the driver may receive from 4s.
to 5s., and the conductor from 3s. to 4s.; or only one may be completed,
in which case the payment of each will be but half as much. Is it
wonderful that the tempers of men working under such conditions display
some uncertainty, nor that accidents are frequent especially in the
latter half of the day? The wonder is that so many cautious City
gentlemen, who obviously regard their own lives as precious, should
continue to entrust their persons to vehicles so precarious.
On some lines, the men work early and late shifts in alternate weeks; on
others, they change twice a week. A driver, working on these terms,
explained to me how, on a certain evening in the week, he came off duty
about midnight, after which time he had to get home, to get himself
clean—no rapid process, as many an amateur motorist well knows—and to
get his supper. Soon after six, next morning, he was due at the garage
to take on his early shift, and was obliged, therefore, to leave home by
about half past five. His next leisure for a meal not arriving until
seven hours later, it behoves him to get his breakfast before he sets
out. How many hours’ rest fall to his share on such occasions, and how
fit he is, in the morning, to assume the responsibility of a motor
omnibus and its complement of passengers, readers may judge for
themselves.
Among other evils arising from this system we may note the way in which
every man’s hand is turned against his comrade. It becomes the interest
of the first shift to snatch time enough for their own journeys, to the
loss of the second shift; while the second shift would be more than
human if they did not resent the time thus lost. The employing company
alone profits by setting up an impossible, or almost impossible, task as
the measure of the day’s payment. By pretending that three journeys
instead of two form the task of one shift of workers, the payment for
each journey can be fixed at one-third instead of at one-half of what
may be reckoned as the wage of a man’s working day.
From the moment when the car breaks down—and how frequently it does so
our own eyes assure us—the payment of its driver and conductor cease.
They must remain by the disabled vehicle until a trolley comes to drag
it away; their period of waiting may stretch into several hours—it may
even extend through the night, but for that part of their time in which
they were not actually conveying passengers they will not receive a
penny. Some companies have indeed a rule upon their code that payment
will be made if the road engineer employed by the firm certifies that
the driver is not responsible for the accident. One can understand that
certificates, the granting of which means money out of pocket to the
company, are not likely to be very lavishly issued by an engineer in the
company’s employ; and there are men who declare that this rule is a dead
letter and that broken journeys are never paid for. Industrially
speaking, the history of the motor omnibus industry in London has been
unfortunate. One, at least, of the firms that appeared early in the
field followed the tactics rendered familiar by the example of American
trusts. It began, as the trust does, by underselling competitors, and
offered the passenger a longer journey for a penny. A hope was probably
entertained that these low fares would deter the older companies from
setting up motor conveyances. The older companies were not deterred; but
they found themselves compelled to compete on their rival’s terms; so
that, for a time, the curious alternative was offered to the Londoner,
of travelling from the Marble Arch to Victoria, either in a slow horse
omnibus, for 2d., or in a quick motor omnibus for 1d. To travel for 1d.
instead of for 2d. is the desire of every passenger; but the
gratification may be bought too dear, and danger is a high price to pay.
How much danger the passenger incurs, who travels in the motor omnibuses
of certain companies may be guessed by persons who have heard—as I
have—the drivers of these vehicles talking among themselves of the
accidents and of the hairbreadth escapes that have formed part of their
own experience. The running into the river of the Barnes omnibus was
foretold, less than a week before its occurrence, as a thing that must,
sooner or later, come to pass. The trained men who face them are fully
aware what risks they are running; and to some of them, no doubt, the
very risk is an attraction. No motor man need complain that modern life
lacks incident and adventure. The passenger, on the other hand, who,
when he sits behind a horse, can see for himself its weakness or its
restiveness, cannot possibly judge the strength or the weakness of
machinery that is not even open to his view. Some omnibuses, no doubt,
are in excellent condition; but it is equally certain that there are
others, the essential parts of which are perilously near to being worn
out. Accumulated experience has convinced even so technically unskilled
an observer as myself that there is at least one company whose vehicles
are not, in themselves, dangerous, and at least one other with whose
habitual passengers a prudent life insurance company should have nothing
to do. In the hands of an unskilled driver, or of a driver rendered
temporarily unskilled by fatigue, by too long a fast, or by too little
sleep, every motor omnibus is dangerous; and every hardship of the men
thus becomes a source of public danger.
The frequency of breakdowns has undoubtedly been increased by the
shortsighted policy of some owners who, for economy’s sake, have
employed in the repairing shop, not qualified engineers, but merely
“fitters,” or even those humbler persons known as “fitters’ mates.” The
lesson of experience, however, seems to be teaching wisdom in this
respect; and the motor companies are learning, as other employers have
learned before them, that to entrust costly property to unskilled hands
comes expensive, however low the wages paid. Meanwhile, we are informed
by the Report of the Select Committee upon the Cabs and Omnibuses
(Metropolitan) Bill, that during the period covered by that Report, 25%
of the cars were on an average always out of use. This means, of course,
that a certain ratio of the men employed upon such cars were always out
of a job. Most of these would be set to various kinds of work in the
garage, their payment while so employed being but 3s. 6d. a day, a rate
representing, for ten hours, less than fourpence an hour. These are
truths which should be recollected when persons familiar only with the
nominal figure of a wage that can hardly ever be earned, talk of the
good pay of motor drivers. Moreover, instances are quoted in which men
have not received even this pittance for the time spent in the garage,
but have been paid only for one day instead of for two or three. By one
company a notice has been posted up that, from the day upon which these
words are written, no work done in the garage will be paid for, unless a
certificate has been obtained from the superintendent of the garage.
It may be remarked that this principle of proportional deduction which
is so dear to the hearts of the companies is not applied in the matter
of the uniform, for which although it never becomes the wearer’s
property a charge of threepence a day is demanded, even though the day
may have been broken and the uniform worn only during an hour or two. A
tale is told of a conductor to whom, the car having come to grief early
in the shift, fourpence was handed as the fraction of wage to which he
was entitled, out of which sum he was requested to hand back threepence
in payment for his uniform. He had not presence of mind enough to reduce
this charge in proportion to the reduction of his own wages, and to
proffer a farthing as the nearest equivalent to one-fifteenth of
threepence, but weakly yielded to the demand and went away with a penny.
At threepence a day and 339 days in a year (_i.e._, deducting 26
Sundays) each man would pay £4, 4s. 3d. for his coat, cap, &c. It would
be interesting to know what price is paid for the articles by the
company.
Employment in the omnibus trade, whether behind a horse or behind a
motor, is thus full of discomforts and of weariness. Yet, such as it is,
the men would be thankful for any certainty of retaining it. They are
liable to discharge upon any complaint from an inspector (or possibly
from an outside person) and no opportunity is allowed of exculpating
themselves. Furthermore they are firmly convinced that a number of
spies—“spots” is their own slang term—travel to and fro in the character
of ordinary passengers and constantly present complaints, ill or well
founded as the case may be, to the companies. “There’s plenty of
people,” said one man, “who never pay their omnibus fares. They send in
their tickets to the company and get back their money.” “Of course,”
said another, “they must make plenty of complaints or the companies
wouldn’t think it worth while to keep them on.” Whether this belief is
right or wrong, its existence is, at least, highly significant of the
light in which the men regard their employers, and is, I venture to say,
a symptom of very unsatisfactory relations.
The men are also persuaded that there exists among the Federation of
masters a tacit compact in accordance with which a man who has quitted
the service of any one of them will not, for a certain length of time,
be admitted into that of any other. In their own language “the bar is
up” against such a man. How far this opinion is well founded it is
difficult to judge; but it is unquestionably the fact that instance
after instance can be adduced of drivers, holding unendorsed licences,
who, on leaving the employment of one company, have been refused week
after week, by the others, and have been obliged at last to find some
other calling. One finds himself happier and wealthier as a street
sweeper. In at least one such case the responsible post eventually
secured is a guarantee of good character and steadiness.
It is always instructive to compare the conditions offered by the best
and the worst employers, respectively, in the same trade. In the matter
of traffic, the best employer in London is the London County Council. To
begin with, the men who work upon its trams pay nothing for their
uniforms. Their working day is of ten hours. Time lost by such
hindrances as fog, fire and processions is paid extra (at the rate known
to the trade as “time and a half”). Work on a seventh day in the week
when it occurs is paid at time-and-a-quarter rates. Moreover any horse
driver in the Council’s service who desires to qualify as an electric
driver can be trained, free of charge, in the municipal technical
school; whereas the charge for training made by one of the private
companies is £5. Not only does the London County Council issue to its
inspectors special instructions to avoid arbitrary and domineering
treatment of subordinates; it also affords to every man accused by an
inspector the opportunity of meeting his accuser face to face, and of
telling his own story. In short, the London County Council treats those
deserving citizens who do its work, with justice and with respect; and
they, in their turn, treat the public with a degree of kindly courtesy
most refreshing after the asperities of the motor omnibus man. Nor can
it be maintained by any truthful person that the comparatively
comfortable conditions of the municipal tram men have cost the ratepayer
too dear; since the profits of the Southern tramway lines alone in the
year 1905 were assessed by the Exchequer for income tax purposes at
£203,831; while, in addition to the large profits thus indicated, the
reduction of fares on these lines must, by this time, have saved
hundreds of pounds to the travelling public.
With the exception, then, of that fortunate minority employed by the
municipality, the workers on the public conveyances of London present no
very cheering spectacle. In the beginning of this 20th century, and in
the capital of a country that prides itself upon the freedom of its
citizens and upon the representative character of its government, we
find adult skilled male workers, performing valuable public services and
occupying positions of great responsibility, apparently as powerless as
any sweated home worker in her garret to secure for themselves either a
reasonably short working day, or equitable treatment, or payment for the
whole of the hours spent in the employer’s service. Yet one group of
them is guaranteed by the licence of a public department as efficient;
the services which they render are eagerly demanded by the public; their
industry is one in which foreign competition is impossible; and the
companies employing them are in many instances paying high dividends.
These, surely, are facts very much worth the consideration of all those
fellow citizens for whom, in the last resort, the railway man and the
omnibus man are working.
CHAPTER V
WAGE-EARNING CHILDREN
Children and home work—Boot making—Box making—All night at match box
making—“Can do nearly everything”—A boy tooth brush maker—A boy
belt maker—Polishing “spindle legs”—Children and laundry
work—Errands—Street sellers—Boys in bakehouses—In brick
fields—Girls and heavy trays of jam—Half timers’ heavy
loads—Things as they were—Terrors of the early cotton mills—A five
year old maker of “blonde net”—Miss Edgeworth’s “Ellen”—Mrs Hogg
and wage-earning children—Children in American cotton mills—The
glass bottle works—Effects of juvenile work on health—On
education—On morals—On industrial efficiency.
The very worst feature of underpaid labour is that it tends to make wage
earners of children and, in so doing, deteriorates the coming generation
of adult wage earners. Where work is carried on in the home, the
temptation to press children into the service is very great. The tedious
process of fetching and carrying work from and to the factory or
workshop generally falls to their lot; indeed, workers who have no
children of their own not infrequently hire a child, for a few pence, to
perform that duty. The time of a child is considered to be of little
value—of less value than the three halfpence or twopence earned by the
home worker in the hour or more that is often spent in waiting. Not a
few children are habitually late for school, in consequence of being
thus employed. Here is an instance.
“Jane B. Standard 6. Age 13. Father a potman at 25s. a week. Mother
machines uppers of boots; common goods, 10d. a dozen; better, 1s. 3d. a
dozen. Jane sews on buttons, cuts apart work, inks round button holes. A
little brother, aged nine, does buttons” (_i.e._, I suppose, sews them
on). “Mother, who does sometimes three dozen in a day, sometimes only
three pairs, begins work at 7 A.M. Jane begins at 7.45. She goes to the
shop for work, in the morning, and carries it in—a heavy load of three
dozen pairs sometimes—when she comes home from school. She gets late for
school, and is only in time in the afternoons.”
At the same school, a girl of eleven, Alice J., pastes in the soles of
babies’ shoes and sews together the pairs. A sister “sews and beats.”
These are white buck shoes, and are paid at the rate of 1s. 1d. to 1s.
3d. a dozen. Two dozen can be done in a day. The father is a cabinet
maker in regular work; the mother a cleaner (apparently at an office or
warehouse). The sister, of 18 or 19, makes 10s. a week. The little Alice
works from 12 to 1, and again from 5.30 to 6.30, doing in that time a
dozen or fifteen pairs; she reckons that it takes her five minutes to
finish a pair, or perhaps twenty minutes for six pairs.
Esther S., aged ten, and a sister aged six, help their mother at the
midday break, and also in the evening, in lining and covering boxes. 5d.
a gross is paid for the smaller sort; 1s. 9d. for the larger sort. The
work of the children is said to be absolutely necessary. “Dreadful home;
nice woman,” is the observation of the visitor whose notes I have been
permitted to use.
A schoolfellow of Esther’s, Sarah W., is thirteen years old and in
Standard 4. Her father was in prison. Her mother drinks. These parents
hid their children for eight months, and the educational authorities had
great difficulty in finding them. This child, “a very bright girl,” used
to stay up all night making match boxes, so as to get them taken in by
11 the next morning. She now works, between school times, at capping
sticks.
Another little girl sews and opens Japanese fish and poultry baskets,
and sews the handles upon string bags; she also sometimes makes the
bags. She does not like the work, because it makes her hands sore and is
hard work. “I can do nearly everything,” this person of thirteen is
reported as saying.
Employment out of school hours is not of course confined to girls.
Stanley G., aged eleven, works from 5 to 7, wiring tooth brushes, and
can do seven in an hour; 3½d. a dozen is paid for them. The visitor
notes that he had a sore face.
Alfred D., age 13, Standard 7, helps in making white kid belts, receives
1d. in the dozen, and can do fifteen or sixteen dozen in the week.
George W., who is thirteen years old, and only in Standard 3, does wood
chopping and dislikes it, because it hurts his hands. His mother “does
frame work,” and his father, looking glasses.
Thomas P., who is thirteen, and in Standard 5, polishes spindle legs for
a cabinet maker, from 5 to 8 every evening, and from 9 to 2 on
Saturdays. He receives 2s. 6d. a week; and announces that he is going to
be a tobacconist—a calling for which the polishing of furniture legs
hardly seems a valuable preparation.
Cases like these might be multiplied almost indefinitely.
“At a recent enquiry during the spring of this year, it was found that
in a Hackney school one-fourth of the girls were engaged in match box
making, steel covering, baby shoe making and fish basket sewing. This
latter work is of a specially disagreeable character, and little girls
often complain that the manipulation of the reeds is a most painful
process. Children working with their parents at home are frequently kept
at their sewing or pasting until ten or eleven o’clock at night. They
are sent to “shop” before coming to school in the morning, and many of
them are never marked for regular attendance. Particularly severe is the
lot of the children of small laundresses, who are often employed, both
in housework and in ironing in a steam laden atmosphere, two or three
nights weekly till ten o’clock, and all day Saturday.”[32]
Other children are employed by shopkeepers; milk and newspapers are
delivered before and after school, boys are employed by grocers,
greengrocers, &c., to carry out goods, and—sometimes for incredibly long
hours—by barbers. Girls run errands and match stuffs and trimmings. In
the Parliamentary Return obtained from school teachers by Sir John Gorst
in 1899, out of 144,026 children, about 12% were described as engaged in
street trading, exposed inevitably to every inclemency of weather and to
all the hazards of promiscuous companionship, while acquiring habits
that unfit them for regular work later in life. Moreover, the street
seller, juvenile no less than adult, is apt to seek for customers in the
public house. Very few, comparatively, of employed children are engaged
in work that is likely to be of use to them industrially in their
maturer life; and even of those few, some are working under bad
conditions. The Factory Inspectors’ Reports are seldom free from
instances of the overwork of children. In last year’s, for example,
mention is made of boys under thirteen years of age, and even under
twelve, being found, on several occasions, at work in bakehouses. One
boy of twelve, who was found by the inspector clearing ashes from the
oven, before 6 in the morning, had for two or three years been employed,
before school, in delivering rolls, and at the midday break, as well as
after school, in running errands.[33]
Several children under 13 years of age were found working full time in
brick fields.[34]
A bad case is noted on p. 99: “A lad of 15, employed in a large tin
works in West Wales, had started work at 6.30 A.M. on a certain Monday
morning and continued working till 6 A.M. on the following Tuesday.
During this period he only left the works for one hour, viz., 5 till 6
P.M. on Monday, when he went home and took a short rest. He had
therefore worked during the whole twenty-four hours with only about one
hour’s rest.”
The chief lady Inspector says, on pp. 302–3, “Carrying of jam and of
jam-pots, empty or full, is still done largely by women and girls, and I
have cautioned several occupiers about the weights I have found little
girls lifting. A 40-pound tray is a heavy load for a girl of fourteen,
and the repeated carrying of such trays all day long must have a bad
effect.”
Nor are jam makers the only employers who offend in this way. Cases have
occurred in “textile factories, the places where one most expects to
find labour-saving methods, but undoubtedly whenever there is a fairly
abundant supply of young, cheap labour, there is less anxiety to
introduce these, and carrying, pushing or pulling heavy weights is one
of the duties of the apprentice in almost every trade. In a cotton
weaving factory in Lancashire I found children and young persons[35]
carrying cloth from the shed to the warehouse in an upper floor. One
bundle was proved to weigh 44 lbs. and another 40 lbs. In a similar
factory, also in Lancashire, I was not able to have weighed any of the
tins of weft which children were found carrying to the looms, but from
the evident effort it was to raise the tin to the shoulder, it was clear
that the weight was too great. In both cases the entire weight was on
one shoulder, and it was pitiful to see the twisted little figures of
the children doing their best to accomplish more than they were
physically fit for.”[36]
On the same page Miss Martindale speaks of a boy whom she saw in 1903
carrying a piece of clay “weighing 69 lbs., his own weight being 77 lbs.
During the two years which has elapsed he has hardly grown, and he
informed me that he weighs at the present time 81 lbs., showing an
increase of only four lbs.”
While it is reported that in Scotland “the half time system has almost
ceased to exist,” there has recently been in some districts of England,
a marked increase in the number of half timers, owing to the unexampled
prosperity of the cotton trade, and the difficulty of satisfying the
demand for labour in that industry. In a good many districts, a half
timer may be as young as twelve years old.
What the conditions of children’s employment would be, if there were no
Factory Acts, may be guessed by the nature of the first Act of
Parliament passed in their interests. In 1784 certain Manchester
physicians investigated an outbreak of fever. They failed to discover
its primary cause, but reported that “we are decided in our opinion that
the disorder has been supported, diffused and aggravated by the ready
communication of contagion ... and by the injury done to young persons
through confinement and too long continued labour, to which several
evils the cotton mills have given occasion.” They went on to say that
they regarded a longer recess at noon and a shorter working day as
“essential to the present health and future capacity for labour of those
who are under the age of fourteen; for the active recreations of
childhood and youth are necessary to the right growth and conformation
of the human body.” The Manchester magistrates, who had asked for this
report, resolved not to allow in future “indentures of Parish
Apprentices whereby they shall be bound to owners of cotton mills and
other works in which children are obliged to work in the night or more
than ten hours in the day.”
The condition of these unfortunate pauper children was wretched in the
extreme. They were “sent down from the workhouses of London and other
great towns to any manufacturer who would take them, a small premium
being usually paid as an inducement. There was no system of control or
inspection from outside; the factories were frequently set up in some
remote glen or lonely valley where a waterfall or stream provided cheap
power for the machinery and where the restraint of public opinion and
observation was almost entirely absent. There can be no reasonable doubt
that these unhappy children were often worked almost or entirely to
death by their masters or by their overseers whose interest it was to
work the apprentices to the utmost, their pay being in proportion to the
labour they could extract. Sir Samuel Romilly says in his diary that he
had known cases where the apprentices had been actually murdered by
their masters in order to get fresh premiums with new apprentices.”[37]
The Act of 1802, the first on this subject, dealt only with apprentices
and only with the textile trades. It limited the hours of work to twelve
a day, forbade night work, and required a modicum of elementary
instruction; moreover it provided for inspection.
By and by, it became apparent that the evils at which this measure had
been aimed were not confined to any one group of child workers. As late
as 1844, Sir Robert Peel told the House of Commons that in the
potteries, “children worked in a temperature of from 100 to 130,
carrying pieces weighing 3 lbs, and each child carrying two pieces at a
time. The calculation is that the child will carry per day some
thousands of pounds weight. In manufactures other than cotton, work
might sometimes be continued thirteen, fifteen, even seventeen or
eighteen hours consecutively.”[38]
Nor was there any limit as to the earliness of the age at which a child
might be set to work. About five or six seems to have been a common age
for beginning. I have, myself, been acquainted with a woman of about
eighty years old who told me that as a child of five, when she was too
little to reach the work table and had to stand upon a stool, she was
employed all day long in “running blonde net.” Evidence was brought
forward—exactly as similar evidence is brought forward to-day in
America—to show that it was not really injurious to children of nine
years old and under to be kept working for 14 or 15 hours daily; and, no
doubt, there were persons not in the least inhumane who really thought
so. The best of us are liable to social blindness, and able to see but a
small part of contemporary evils that become plainly visible and
unendurable to succeeding generations. An instance of such blindness, in
the case of the disinterested and open minded Maria Edgeworth, may be
found in the pages of her _Rosamond_—that delightful children’s book too
little known to the modern child. In reading the passage it should be
remembered that the whole Edgeworth family were persons of unusual
enlightenment and benevolence, and that the view presented probably
typifies the bettermost stratum of contemporary sentiment.
Rosamond, with her parents, goes to visit a cotton mill conducted by “a
very sensible, humane man, who did not think only of how he could get so
much work done for himself, but also how he could preserve the health of
those who worked for him; and how he could make them as comfortable and
happy as possible.” This good employer was in all probability drawn from
some member of the Strutt family. By and by, while the visitors are
resting and eating “cherries, ripe cherries, strawberries and cream,”
provided by “this hospitable gentleman,” Godfrey calls to his parents to
“‘look out of this window.... All the people are going from work. Look
what numbers of children are passing through this great yard!’
“The children passed close by the window at which Godfrey and Rosamond
had stationed themselves. Among the little children came some tall girls
and among these there was one, a girl about twelve years old, whose
countenance particularly pleased them. Several of the younger ones were
crowding round her.
“‘Laura, Laura, look at this girl! What a good countenance she has,’
said Rosamond, ‘and how fond the little children seem of her!’
“‘That is Ellen. She is an excellent girl,’ said the master of the
manufactory, ‘and those little children have good reason to be fond of
her.’”
He then relates how a good clergyman, who had taught the children and
won their grateful affection, had been appointed to a post elsewhere.
“‘All the children in the manufactory were sorry that he was going away,
and they wished to do something that should prove to him their respect
and gratitude.
“‘They considered and consulted among themselves. They had no money,
nothing of their own to give, but their labour; and they agreed that
they would work a certain number of hours beyond their usual time, to
earn money to buy a silver cup, which they might present to him the day
before that appointed for his departure. They were obliged to sit up a
great part of the night to work to earn their shares. Several of the
little children were not able to bear the fatigue and the want of sleep.
For this they were very sorry, and when Ellen saw how sorry they were,
she pitied them, and she did more than pity them. After she had earned
her own share of the money to be subscribed for buying the silver cup,
she sat up every night a certain time to work, to earn the shares of all
these little children.
“‘Ellen never said anything of her intentions, but went on working
steadily, till she had accomplished her purpose. I used to see her night
after night, and used to fear she would hurt her health, and often
begged her not to labour so hard, but she said, “It does me good,
sir.”’”
The modern reader will sigh to think of what the admirable Ellen’s
health and strength would probably be at thirty, and will find it
difficult to forgive the complacency of the employer in whose mill she
was permitted so to squander her physical resources.
In our own country the general development of factory legislation has
gone far towards stopping the overwork of children in mills and
factories; though it is only of late years, and thanks to the exertions
of Mrs Hogg, that the law has begun to attempt the regulation of
children’s labour out of school hours either in their own homes or for
outside employers.[39]
In the United States, however, where each State is free to make its own
regulations, there is, at this present day, one State (Georgia) in which
the work of children is absolutely unrestricted, and several in which
the practical limitation is extremely small. Children of any age may be,
and actually are, kept at work in the cotton mills of the Southern
States, precisely as they used to be in the mills of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. “Only last year, in North Carolina, the testimony of two
doctors was introduced to show that there was no need from a hygienic
point of view, for a law forbidding girls under fourteen to stand at
their work for twelve hours a day, or for boys or girls under fourteen
to work a twelve-hour night.”[40]
Boys of twelve may still legally work in the coal mines of Kansas and in
all mines in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina; and do so work. “No
colliery has been visited in which children have not been found employed
at ages prohibited by the law of the State.”[41]
In some American glass bottle works, quite small boys are kept running
to and fro with loads of hot glass all through the day or the night as
the case may be. Mrs Kelley, reporting personal visits of inspection,
says that she found it impossible to get from any boy “a consecutive
statement as to his name, address or parentage. A boy would say, ‘My
name is Jimmie’; and then trot to the cooling oven with his load of
bottles; and returning would say, in answer to a fresh question, ‘I live
in a shanty boat,’ then trot to the moulder for another load of bottles;
and returning say, ‘I’m going to be eight next summer,’ and so on. Among
twenty-four lads questioned during one night inspection, not one
ventured to pause long enough to put together two of the foregoing
statements.”[42]
“There was no restriction upon night work and pitifully little children
were found at work at two o’clock in the morning.”[43]
Some of these children are directly imported—as the little serfs in
English cotton mills often were—from other districts; and in these
States of America, as in England once, not only ruthless employers but
worthless adults of their own class, parents and others, make profits
out of the toil of half grown children.
“A worn out and dissolute glass blower, who had a pension of $8 a month
and five children under the age of fourteen years had recently married a
widow with six children under fifteen years. Father, mother and the
eleven children were living in a tent between the river and the works
where several of the children were employed, some by night and some by
day, so that the beds in the tent were used by different children, one
set rising to go to work when the others returned to sleep.”[44]
Upon the future of these poor children the effect of this early toil is
most injurious. Physically, mentally and morally, the children—the
citizens of the next generation—are damaged.
Significant is the remark of a mother quoted in one of the articles in
_Child Labor_: “‘When Charley works on the night shift, he hasn’t any
appetite.’” (p. 303.)
Doubtless the half timers in a good English mill are examples of
children working under the best of existing conditions; and
manufacturers are fond of assuring us how good these conditions are. Yet
I shall never forget the painful impression made upon myself by the
peculiar mixture of pallor and eagerness on the faces of the little half
timers, the first time that I went over a weaving mill. The working
place was light and airy, and the situation, just outside a healthy
Northern town, was admirable; the work was not physically hard, and the
management, as I was assured by a trustworthy witness, who was himself
at work there, considerate. He, for his part, seemed unaware that the
children looked ill. Incidentally, however, he mentioned that a large
proportion of his fellow workers drank; and I felt that it would be
interesting to know how many of them had been half timers, and whether
early exhaustion might not lie at the root of their intemperance. As to
the children, I am quite sure that any London doctor, or any woman
accustomed to the care of children, would have thought their appearance
unhealthy and their expression of face abnormal.
Evidence more valuable than any untrained observer’s impression is on
record in regard to London school children. Dr Thomas, assistant Medical
Officer of Health to the London County Council, in investigating the
physical condition of 2000 school children, in 14 different schools,
gave special attention to 384 wage earners among the boys. “Of this
number 233 showed signs of fatigue, 140 were proved to be anæmic, 131
had severe nerve signs, 64 were suffering from deformities resulting
from the carrying of heavy weights, and 51 had severe heart signs.
Barbers’ boys were found to suffer most in physique, 72 per cent being
anæmic, 63 per cent showing severe nerve strain, and 27 per cent severe
heart affection.”[45]
Before the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school
children, appointed in 1901, evidence was given by Alderman Watts, of
Manchester, of the abnormal death-rate among children in industrial
schools, many of whom had drifted thither from the streets; and in 1904
Sir Lambert Ormsby, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, of
Dublin, gave to the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration, particulars of the miserable physique of the little
street sellers and of the many cases of pneumonia among them which had
been brought to his notice in the children’s hospitals.[46]
In July 1905, when an inquiry was held by the Home Office into the
Bye-laws for the Employment of Children proposed by the London County
Council, Mr Marshall Jackman, of the Michael Faraday School, Walworth,
gave evidence that, out of 227 boys in that school, 27 were at work of
whom 13 were employed more than eight hours a day, and 13 after nine
o’clock at night. All except six were in poor health. One had broken
down altogether; one had a weak circulation; one had fainted in school
during the previous week; yet another had a defective circulation. In
one single week, nine boys who worked out of school hours were taken ill
in school, were obliged to leave the class and suspend lessons for the
rest of the afternoon.[47]
Very similar evidence may be found in the pages of Mrs Kelley’s volume,
in those of _Child Labor_, and in the Report of the American Consumers’
League. On p. 297 of _Child Labor_ appears the following paragraph which
should make every British reader thankful for the comparative stringency
of our own Factory Acts: “A recent study of the reports of factory
inspectors in several of our industrial States shows a remarkable
uniformity in the percentage of accidents. We find in the textile mills,
foundries and iron mills, glass houses and machine shops employing
children that, in proportion to the number of children employed,
accidents to children under sixteen years of age are from 250 to 300%
more frequent than to adults.”
Educationally, the results of early industrial labour are naturally
disastrous. “In none of the great Southern States,” writes Mrs Kelley,
“in which young children are employed in manufacture are 80% of the
children between 10 and 14 years of age able to read and write.”[48]
At the Home Office enquiry, Mr Marshall Jackman stated that although the
boys who worked out of school hours were of more than average mental
capacity, they were more than twelve months behind the average of the
whole school in educational standing, and moreover were low down even in
their lower classes. Of the 27 boys in his school who were employed,
eleven were one standard below the average, two, two standards below;
four, three standards below; and one, four standards below the general
average.
A report prepared in 1901 for the Scottish Council for Women’s Trades
gives the opinions of 14 head masters, who are practically unanimous as
to the detrimental effect upon the children’s progress of long hours of
work out of school. No. 3 says: “I consider this exploiting of children
is one of the greatest crimes against the children themselves, and the
greatest possible hindrance to their education.” No. 6 thinks “there can
be no doubt that children who have such long spells of employment are
heavily handicapped”; and No. 7 says: “There is no doubt whatever that
these long hours stand very much in the way of educational progress.”
“Message running,” says No. 14, “certainly tends to sharpen intelligence
of a superficial kind but weakens the power of sustained attention and
vigorous mental work in school.”[49]
When we remember that the Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment
of school children—a cautious official body—estimated the _minimum_
number of school children employed in the United Kingdom at 200,000, and
that there is no reason to suppose that number materially lessened, we
perceive that the deterioration of national education from this cause
alone must be by no means trifling.
Of moral injury, especially from street selling, there is abundant
evidence, both in our own country and in the United States. The
committee of 1901 received a statement from the Town Clerk of Newcastle
on Tyne that children had been found in the streets afraid to go home,
lest they should be punished for not bringing in enough money. The
children often, in consequence, slept out, gambled or stole, the girls
sinking lower yet in order to procure sufficient money to take home. The
number of such children he reported to have increased greatly of late
years, and many of them were, he feared, on the threshold of a life of
vice and crime. The Chief Constable of Manchester presented a list of 16
women known as degraded characters, who had formerly been street
sellers. The Chief Constable of Birmingham produced tables showing that
of 713 children engaged in street trading during July 1901, 458 had been
prosecuted for various offences during the previous six months. 163 of
the number were girls.[50]
Boys in American glass works are almost proverbially ill conducted. One
manufacturer, in Ohio, said, in answer to an appeal for the education of
the boys: “You can’t do anything for them. The little devils are vicious
from their birth.” Statements of the same kind used to be made about the
poor little victims in the English mills but it is not observed that the
modern half timer, whose hours and health are protected by law, is any
more vicious than other children. The principal of a Pennsylvanian
school sets the corruption of the boys at a much later date than
infancy. He says: “‘My observation is that when a boy leaves school and
goes into the factory at twelve or thirteen, by the time he is fifteen
or sixteen he is too foul-mouthed to associate with decent people.’”[51]
Street occupations on the farther as on the hither side of the Atlantic
are shown to form an easy avenue to worse things. “Although the street
trades in Washington engage only one-fourth of the total number of
children engaged in all occupations, yet of the number of children under
15 who have gone to the reform school, or who have been turned over by
the courts to the care of the probation officers, over two-thirds have
come from the ranks of the children engaged in the street trades.”[52]
“A judge told the writer that one-third of all the delinquent boys
brought before him had at one time or another served the public as
messenger boys.”[53]
Nor are those children of school age who go to work often found to be
acquiring any sort of technical training or industrial skill. On the
contrary, indeed; their employment is almost always of a kind that
rather unfits them than prepares them to become industrially efficient.
Sadly true are the words written by Mrs Kelley out of prolonged and wide
experience. “The State which accepts the plea of poverty and permits the
children of the poorest citizens to labour prematurely, accepts the
heritage of new poverty flowing from two sources; namely, on the one
hand, the relaxed efforts of fathers of families to provide for them,
and on the other hand the corruption of weak children by inappropriate
occupations which involve temptations beyond the child’s power of
resistance and the exhaustion of strong children by overwork. It is
exactly the most conscientious and promising children who are worked
into the grave or into nervous prostration, or into that saddest state
of all, the moral fatigue which enables a man to sit idly about for
years while his wife or his sister or his children support him.”[54]
Thus the employment of the young which is generally regarded as a result
of poverty is really one of the causes of poverty, and that for several
reasons. It tends to lower the wages of the adult worker and tends to
make the family, instead of the father, the industrial unit; it
diminishes the adult working power of the child itself,[55] and it also
retards the progress of every trade in which it occurs, for as Mr
Schoenhof says: “The cheapness of human labour where it prevails is the
greatest incentive for the perpetuation of obsolete methods.”[56]
Thus, in every respect, the industrial employment of children is an
injury to the community; and it is more than possible (I am not
recommending the course as a practicable one) that, in the long run, the
nation would save money by undertaking the whole support and education
up to the age of sixteen of every child who now works for wages. Short
of this extreme measure, however, there is little doubt that, except for
the fear lest hardships might be intensified, public opinion is ready
for far more stringent limitation of child labour. If it were known that
the wages of parents were, even approximately, adequate (as they would
be under a Minimum Wage Law) most of the objections now made to the
restriction of child labour would die away. That fact alone is no
inconsiderable argument in favour of a Minimum Wage Law.
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY
Home work—Factory work—The working girl—Her manners, virtues and
code of honour—The woman into whom she developes—Shop
assistants—Traffic workers—Children—“Sweated” workers often
producing high priced goods—Not drunken—Not idle—Not
unskilful—Men as helpless, economically, as women—Sweating an
invariable accompaniment of unregulated labour.
The preceding chapters do not profess to give anything like a general
survey of the whole field of British labour. It has seemed wise for many
reasons to confine myself to aspects with which I am, in a greater or
less degree, personally familiar; and therefore the work of women, and
of London women especially, looms rather large. But I hope that I have
shown, by a sufficient range of instances, certain general truths. In
trade after trade, men, women and children are exhibited working in the
conditions which are indicated, comprehensively but vaguely, by the term
“sweating.” We have seen the dwelling of the home worker robbed of every
feature that makes a home, its narrow space littered with match boxes,
or with shirts or trousers or paper-bags—in any case transformed into
one of the most comfortless of workshops. In some homes the rattle of
the sewing machine forms a ceaseless accompaniment to the whole course
of family life; in others, meals, such as they are, are eaten in the
immediate neighbourhood of the glue pot or the paste pot; the smell of
new cloth, the dust and fluff of flannelette pervade the room of the
“finisher”; damp paper-bags or damp cardboard boxes lie piled on beds;
home, parents and children are all subservient to unintermittent and
most unremunerative labour.
One step, but only one step, higher comes the factory “hand.” We have
seen girls filling pots with boiling jam, carrying to and fro heavy
trays and stacking these trays in piles, two together raising, sometimes
to above the height of their own heads, trays some of which weigh well
over half a hundredweight. We have seen them, even when their work was
not in itself heavy, worn out by the rapidity with which they repeat
endlessly, day after day, and week after week, operations of mechanical
monotony. Some glimpse has been given of those horrible intervals in
which the semistarvation of “full work” gives place to the acute
privation of “slack time.” The dangers, discomforts, hardships and
exactions that must be borne if an employer chooses to inflict them,
have been indicated, though but very inadequately; and the example of
laundries and jam factories has served to suggest how far worse yet
would be the conditions of factory operatives if the law did not
intervene for their protection.
One thing I have not succeeded in picturing—and it is the thing which
seems to me perhaps the most terrible of all: the change of the working
girl into the working woman. I have not drawn the factory girl as I have
known her and delighted in her, gay to “cheekiness,” staunchly loyal,
wonderfully uncomplaining, wonderfully ready to make allowances for “the
governor” as long as he speaks her fair and shows consideration in
trifles, but equally resolute to “pay him out,” when once she is
convinced of his meanness or spitefulness. Her language is devoid, to a
degree remarkable even in our undemonstrative race, of any tenderness or
emotion. She accepts an invitation with the ungracious formula: “I don’t
mind if I do.” Upon the “mate” of her own sex, to whom she is so much
more warmly devoted than to her “chap,” she never bestows a word of
endearment. “Hi, ‘Liza, d’y’ think I’m going to wait all night for you?”
is the tone of her address to the friend with whom she will share her
last penny or for whom she will pawn her last item of pawnable property.
She speaks roughly to her relatives and aggressively to the world at
large; she is no respecter of persons, and her eye for affectation or
insincerity is unerring. Condescend to her and she will “chaff” you off
the field. But meet her on equal terms, help her without attempting to
“boss” her, and within a month or two you will have won her unalterable
allegiance; her face will light up at your coming; she will bear the
plainest speech from you, and on occasion of emergency will obey
implicitly your every command. Nor is she lacking in the fundamental
parts of politeness. Here is an instance. Years ago, in the days when
some of us still believed in the possibility of organising unskilled
women, a member of the Dockers’ Union sent me word that I should find it
possible to walk at dinner time straight into the dining-room of a
certain factory and talk to the workers undisturbed, since at that hour
both the foreman and the porter went home to their own meals. I went,
accordingly, though I confess that I felt myself very much of a
trespasser. As I mounted the extremely grimy stair to the dining-room, I
heard the loud voices of the girls. Their language was singularly vile.
It did not, no doubt, mean very much to them; they used horrible words
as the young of another class use slang. I went in and said my little
say. After the first few words, most of them listened; several asked
questions; a certain amount of conversation continued to go on. But
while I was in the room—and, remember, I was a complete stranger to all
of them—not one word was spoken which I could justly have felt to be
offensive. I distributed my handbills, told them I hoped they would come
to the meeting, and departed. As I went downstairs, I heard them
relapsing into their hideous vernacular. But I could not help reflecting
that they had shown the essence of good manners; and also that, if the
literature of the eighteenth century is to be trusted, the same form of
good manners was far from being universal among those swearing country
gentlemen who were the great grandfathers of our smooth spoken
generation.[57]
The factory girl’s code of honour is curiously like that of the school
boy. In no circumstances will she denounce a companion. To the governor
or to the forewoman she will lie freely if occasion demands. To those
whom she recognises as allies, she is truth itself. I do not recall one
single instance, in disputes between workers and employers, in which the
tale told by working girls has not been proved true in every detail.
With employers, I am sorry to say, this has often been by no means the
case. Two qualities, in particular, mark the factory girl of from
sixteen to twenty: her exuberant spirits and energy, and the invariable
improvement in manner and language that follows upon any sort of
amelioration in her position. To watch the rapid development of
refinement and gentleness consequent upon joining a good club is to feel
how sound is the national character and how lamentable the yearly waste
of admirable human material.
A few years pass, a very few, and these bright girls become apathetic,
listless women of whom at 35 it is impossible to guess whether their age
is 40 or 50. They are tired out; they toil on, but they have ceased to
look forward or to entertain any hopes. The contrast between the factory
girl and her mother is perhaps the very saddest spectacle that the
labour world presents. To be the wife of a casual labourer, the mother
of many children, living always in too small a space and always in a
noise, is an existence that makes of too many women, in what ought to be
the prime of their lives, mere machines of toil, going on from day to
day, with as little hope and as little happiness as the sewing machine
that furnishes one item in their permanent weariness.
We ascend another step and come to the shop assistants, the clerks and
the waitresses in restaurants. We find that these dapper young men and
trim young women whose hands and faces are so much cleaner and whose
speech and manners are so much smoother than those of the factory
worker, are scarcely better off in the matter of pay, and often
absolutely worse off in the matter of working conditions. The factory
worker is at least free after the factory closes, and, except in
laundries, the law generally succeeds in bringing down the hours of work
to something near a reasonable limit.
But the shop assistant is subject to rule during practically the whole
of his or her working life; food, companions, dress, sleeping
arrangements, hours of going to bed and of getting up, nay, the very
medical man to be consulted in case of illness are thrust upon him
without any choice of his own. The privilege, so dear to the natural
man, of wearing an old coat and old slippers in the hours of relaxation,
is not for the shop assistant; nor the modern diversion of experimenting
with new and strange foods, nor the right of voting at elections, either
municipal or parliamentary. The position combines, in short, the
disagreeables of boarding school with those of domestic service, while
failing to offer the pleasant features of either. It is indeed a moot
point in my own mind whether it is not worse to be a shop assistant than
a home worker, supposing the home worker to be a single woman.
Personally, I would rather make cardboard boxes in silence and solitude,
and buy for myself my own inferior bread and cheap tea.
Chapter IV. brings us to the case of workers who are all men, who are
engaged in a most necessary public service and employed for the most
part by rich companies paying high dividends. Here the inexperienced
would expect to find high wages and good conditions prevailing. In fact,
however, we find, in the case of railway servants, that the hours of
work imposed were so excessive as to constitute a public danger and to
demand the intervention of the law. The drivers and conductors of trams
and omnibuses have been shown to be in a large measure enslaved by the
companies for which they work, their hours often cruelly long, their pay
often reduced from a decent nominal to a quite inadequate actual wage,
their conditions of work, in many cases, singularly oppressive and their
liberty of passing into fresh employment, although not so completely
barred as the railway servant’s, yet very seriously hampered and
restricted. In short we behold a body of grown men, skilled and of good
character, almost as unable as the isolated home worker to defend
themselves against a strong and tyrannical employer.
Last of all, we come to the children. In these days we are continually
talking in tones of alarm about a declining birth rate and are at last
seriously considering how to check the appalling infant mortality that
makes an annual massacre of the innocents; but most of us are still very
little awake to the sacrifice of childhood that is daily being made in
our midst. We pass a pale child in the street, carrying a long bundle in
a black wrapper, and the sight makes no impression. But, to those of us
who have seen the under side of London, that little figure is a type of
unremunerative toil, of stunted growth, of weakened vitality and of
wasted school teaching: an example of that most cruel form of
improvidence described by the French proverb as “eating our wheat as
grass.” Labour in childhood inevitably means, in nine cases out of ten,
decadence in early manhood or womanhood; and the prevalence of it among
ourselves is perhaps the most serious of national dangers. There is
probably no branch of home work in which child labour is not involved,
and but very few branches of retail trade. Our milk, our newspapers, our
greengrocery are brought to us by small boys; young boys are out at all
hours and in all weathers with parcel-delivering vans; and many and many
a perambulator is pushed by a small girl whose chin is on a level with
the handle. If, in 1901, there were, as the Interdepartmental Committee
declared, _at least_ 200,000 school children working for wages, and if,
as seems practically certain, the number is larger now, can we wonder
that so many grown up workers have remained inefficient, incompetent and
listless? We cannot have grain, if we choose to eat the wheat in the
blade.
We see, then, that large bodies of British workpeople are, in these
early years of the twentieth century, extremely overworked and
underpaid. These evils are not, as is so often declared, a result of
cheap selling. One of the worst examples of underpayment in the Sweated
Industries Exhibition was a lady’s combination garment, of nainsook, the
selling price of which was 22s.; and much of the work produced by the
underpaid is sold at a good price to the well-to-do. On the other hand,
under a well organised factory system, goods that are sold at a very low
price are sometimes produced by workers receiving comparatively high
wages. Nor is it true that any large proportion of these ill paid
workers are either drunken or idle, or yet incompetent. Incompetent,
indeed, they eventually become, if they are starved, physically and
mentally, for a long enough period; but many of them remain competent
for a surprising number of years. Very many of them are pathetically
industrious, and by no means all are unskilled. Neither my reader nor I,
for instance, could cover a racquet ball so that it would pass muster
when inspected by the paymaster; it is improbable that either of us
could cover an umbrella, and pretty certain that neither could make a
passable artificial rose of even the poorest description. The driver of
a motor omnibus is—in theory at least, and often in practice—a highly
skilled mechanic; but his skill does not enable him (his trade union
being still comparatively young and weak) to retain his freedom of
action nor to resist the most exhausting and harassing conditions of
labour.
The evil is thus not confined to women, nor to home workers, nor to any
class or trade. Nor is it confined to any one country. Nearly every
instance quoted could be matched from Germany and from America.
“Sweating,” in short, invariably tends to appear wherever and whenever
industry is not either highly organised or else stringently regulated by
law.
CHAPTER VII
HOW UNDERPAYMENT COMES
A shirtmaker’s story—The “higgling of the market” as seen at the
factory gate—Mr Booth’s percentage of poverty—Mr Rowntree’s—The
living wage in America—How wages are determined—By relative
needs—Not by efficiency—Mr Bosanquet’s fundamental
fallacy—Ambiguity of word “earn”—Effect upon the poor of the
pressure of the poorer—Efficiency only of pecuniary value while
rare—Not inefficiency but poverty the real disease.
More than seventeen years ago I sat in the neat but poverty stricken
room of a most respectable family and listened to the pathetic,
uncomplaining words of an admirable woman who, together with her sister,
had, for years, helped to support an early widowed sister-in-law and her
three children. All three women worked at home at shirtmaking, and this
one of the aunts had certainly gone short of food. It was not she who
told me of her good deeds. She was showing me, at my request, the shirts
that they were at that time making for a payment of 1s. 2d. a dozen. I
continue in the words of my own report, written immediately afterwards.
“These shirts are of fair average quality and are striped in gay
colours. They have to be fetched ready cut out but not folded; all the
sewing has to be done to them, including a square of lining at the back
of the neck but not the button holes.... ‘Has the price gone down much?’
I asked. ‘Oh, yes’ said Miss Y.; ‘my sister and I used to get sixpence
apiece. But that was for rather better shirts than these. We worked for
B.’s then. One day my sister was there, waiting for the work, and a
gentleman came in and said to Mr B., “I’ll take the whole lot at 4s. 6d.
a dozen”; and Mr B. said to my sister: “Miss Y., will you take the work
at that, or must I give it all to this gentleman?” And my sister
thought, if we stood out for the price, they would come round to us, and
she said, “No,” she would not take it, and so he gave it to the
gentleman and we were thrown out; and instead of coming round to
sixpence again, that work has gone down to 2s. 6d. a dozen, and even
lower than that. I know of people who do the very cheapest cotton shirts
at 9d. or even 7d. a dozen.’”
Miss Y.’s little story is the story of work in hundreds—nay in
thousands—of work places. Sometimes it is at the factory gate that the
cheapening process goes on. Towards the end of those bitter weeks, “the
slack time,” there will be scores of factory girls, pale and pinched
under their shabby feathered hats, going from firm to firm and asking
whether hands are wanted. At last word will go round that X.’s are
“taking on” on Monday morning. Before the opening hour on Monday
morning, the entrance to Mr X.’s factory will look like the pit door of
a popular theatre. Often have I heard girls describe the dialogue that
follows.
“The foreman says to a young girl in front of me: ‘What wages do you
want?’ And she says: ‘Eight shillings.’ And he told her: ‘No, she could
go.’ So when he come to me, I knew it was no good to say, ‘Eight’; so I
said: ‘Seven and six.’”
At seven and sixpence, perhaps, she gets taken on; and when, presently,
the slack time comes again, the girls weeded out, to be first
discharged, are those who have been receiving eight shillings weekly
ever since their engagement in the previous season. Seven shillings and
sixpence a week (translated or not, according to the custom of the
factory, into terms of piece work) now becomes the usual wage; and next
season this descends by another sixpence or another shilling.
Below six shillings or five shillings, an employer or foreman seldom
tries to drive the time wage, even of girls, unless, indeed, he can
salve his conscience by regarding them as learners. Yet I have known a
wealthy employer admit without any signs of compunction, both that
certain girls in his employ were paid four shillings a week, and that
they could not live on that sum.
The home worker, when he thus suffers diminution of an already
insufficient wage, tries to increase output by setting his children to
work.
“The same pressure that leads to the employment of the children
presently leads, in a slack time, to the acceptance of yet lower pay for
the sake of securing work. The poorer the worker the less possible is
any resistance to any reduction in pay. Thus, by and by, mother and
children, working together, come to receive no more than did the mother
working alone. The employer—and eventually in all probability the
public—has in fact obtained the labour of the children without extra
payment. To such an extent has this process been carried that in the
worst paid branches of home work, subsistence becomes almost impossible
unless the work of children is called in.”[58]
It is thus true that, economically, a man’s enemies are those of his own
household; and that, wherever workers are not protected by organisation
or by special laws, the wage, first of the individual and then of the
family, tends to be brought down to the lowest possible level of
subsistence, and even, possibly if a poor-law subsidy can be obtained,
below it. It is not by chance, nor because their work is of little
value, nor because they are contented to take little pay, that all these
many households of workers are living lives so cruelly straitened by
poverty. Nor is it a mere effect of chance that in other countries as
well as in our own, national wealth is beheld increasing side by side
with extreme poverty on the part of those citizens who toil most
incessantly.
In our own country, the investigations of Mr Charles Booth and of Mr
Seebohm Rowntree, carried out independently and on slightly differing
methods, the one in London, the other in York, have resulted in figures
strikingly similar. Mr Booth puts the proportion living in poverty, of
the whole population of London, at 30·7%; Mr Rowntree, that of the whole
population of York, at 27·84%.[59]
In America the same problem has received the attention of various
careful enquirers, the most recent of whom, perhaps, is Father Ryan,
Professor of ethics and economics in the St Paul Seminary,
Minnesota.[60]
In this volume may be found a careful estimate of the figure that may be
taken as affording a “living wage” in different parts of the United
States. Professor Albion Small, head of the Department of Sociology at
the University of Chicago, is quoted as having said “a few years ago”
that “No man can live, bring up a family, and enjoy the ordinary human
happiness on a wage of less than one thousand dollars a year”
(£200).[61]
Mr John Mitchell, President of the United Mine Workers, says, in a
passage quoted by Professor Ryan: “In cities of from five thousand to
one hundred thousand inhabitants, the American standard of living should
mean, to the ordinary unskilled workman with an average family, a
comfortable house of at least six rooms. It should mean a bathroom, good
sanitary plumbing, a parlour, dining-room, kitchen and sufficient
sleeping room that decency may be preserved and a reasonable degree of
comfort maintained. The American standard of living should mean, to the
unskilled workman, carpets, pictures, books and furniture with which to
make his home bright, comfortable and attractive for himself and his
family, an ample supply of clothing suitable for winter and summer and
above all a sufficient quantity of good, wholesome, nourishing food at
all times of the year. The American standard, moreover, should mean to
the unskilled workman that his children should be kept at school until
they have attained the age of sixteen at least, and that he is enabled
to lay by sufficient to maintain himself and his family in times of
illness or at the close of his industrial life, when age and weakness
render further work impossible, and to make provision for his family
against premature death from accident or otherwise.”[62]
The minimum wage upon which a family could be supported, in towns of the
size named, was estimated by Mr Mitchell in 1903 at $600 a year (£120).
In larger cities the cost would, he considered, be higher. Professor
Ryan is, no doubt, right in saying that “the irreducible minimum of
necessaries and comforts” could not “now” (he was writing in October
1905) be obtained in any city of the United States for less than $600,
and that though that sum might be “_possibly_ a Living Wage in the
moderately sized cities of the West, North and East ... in some of the
largest cities of the last-named regions, it is certainly _not_ a Living
Wage.”[63]
Having established this figure for annual income Professor Ryan goes out
to enquire into its actual prevalence and from various official reports
and statistics draws the conclusion that, “the number of male adults
receiving less than $12.50 (£2, 10s.) per week, in 34 manufacturing
industries was, in 1890, 66%, and, in 1900, 64%.[64]
And it must be remembered that in America as in England there are few
manufacturing industries in which wage earners are in full work
throughout the year.
Thus it appears that, in the two great English speaking empires, a
considerable proportion, even of the upper working classes, do not
receive remuneration that allows to them and to their families that
minimum of space, food, clothing and recreation which at the present day
are esteemed essential to civilised life.
The reason of this state of things is a fairly simple one. Wages, in a
state of free competition, are determined not by the intrinsic cost of
the work performed but by the relative needs of the worker to sell and
of the paymaster to buy. Where there are many workers able to offer the
same service and comparatively few buyers, the work will be paid for at
a low rate, however excellent; where would-be buyers’ workers are few
and would-be buyers many, the work will be highly paid, however ill
done. Among ourselves the numbers competing for manual work are very
large, and the need of each particular workman for employment far
greater and more pressing than the need of any employer for any
particular man. Consequently, the wages of the manual worker are low in
proportion to the cost of livelihood; and the individual worker is
absolutely powerless by himself to increase them.
These facts are so familiar, and, when definitely stated, so universally
admitted, that it almost seems necessary to apologise for reiterating
them. Yet they are continually ignored by ordinary middle class people
in conversing upon labour questions, and not infrequently even by
writers of some standing. Categorically, they are not—and doubtless
would not be—denied; but whole volumes are founded upon the basis of
their falsity. The entire constructive argument, for instance, of Mrs
Bosanquet’s “The Strength of the People,” a book which, having gone into
a second edition, may be supposed to have influenced a good many
readers, rests upon a tacit assumption that payment is determined by
quality of work: an assumption masked by the ambiguous character of the
word “earn,” which at one moment is used in the sense of “deserve” and
at another in the sense of “receive.” Mrs Bosanquet—except indeed when
dealing with the old Poor Law—cheerfully ignores the painful law that
wages are determined by the conflict of needs, and writes, throughout,
as though the manual worker who does good work were sure of being well
paid. From this assumption she goes on, very logically, to suppose that
the cure for a man’s poverty is to make him do good work. Many persons
who are not themselves exposed to the pinch of competition may be found
expressing the same view, which obtains apparent support from the fact
that the very ill paid are observed not to be producing good work. For,
although it is unfortunately not true that good work always “earns” good
wages, it is true that bad pay, sooner or later, but quite inevitably
leads to bad work. Without a certain modicum of food, comfort, good
clothing, leisure and ease of mind, no human being long remains capable
of producing good work. The father of a family who receives 18s. a week
and pays 7s. for lodging cannot, if he also feeds his wife and children,
either remain or become a very good workman. Before he can do better
work he must be better paid.
Mrs Bosanquet thinks otherwise. Efficiency and consequently prosperity
might, she appears to believe, be enforced upon the poor by the
withdrawal of such help as is now accorded them. The prospect of that
beloved refuge, the workhouse, prevents them from providing for their
old age; but the prospect of literal starvation would probably be more
effective. The hunger and hardship of their daily lives do not furnish
an adequate spur; but perhaps despair might do so. We seem to hear Mrs
Chick exhorting the dying Mrs Dombey to “make an effort.”
Again, that terrible pressure of the poorer upon the poor which Mr Booth
regards as so serious an evil appears to Mrs Bosanquet an element of
hope and strength. Morally, the charity of the poor to one another is
undoubtedly a beautiful thing; economically, it is assuredly one of the
causes that increase and aggravate poverty; and such diminution of
pauperism as is produced by the maintenance out of the workhouse of an
aged or sick relative may, in the long run, lead to the destitution of a
whole family. The last result of such maintenance may, if wide-spread,
be far more nationally expensive than if all the sick and aged were
supported out of the public purse.
Let us see, in an example of the commonest kind, how this mutual help
works out. Smith and Brown, manual labourers, are working side by side
at a wage of £1 a week or thereabouts. Both are married men with
children. Both are contributing to a provident society which, if they
survive the age of sixty, will furnish a small pittance to their
declining years. Slack times come; Smith is discharged; Brown is
retained. Within a fortnight, Smith, with his wife and children, begins
to suffer hardship; the household property goes, piecemeal, to the
pawnshop; the “club money” is no longer forthcoming, and Smith’s
provision for his old age lapses. Brown, whose pound a week affords, as
may be supposed, no great superfluity for him and his, finds himself
unable to see his “mate” and his mate’s children in want of bread;
Brown’s club money and a good deal more which can ill be spared goes to
their assistance, and Brown’s provision for old age lapses.
The Smith family, it is true, has been kept from the workhouse—at the
cost, not improbably, of some weakly little Smith’s life—but has not
this result been bought too dear? Do not justice and good sense alike
suggest the unfitness of leaving the burden of maintaining the Smith
family to rest upon precisely that class of the community which is least
able to support it? The maintenance of those who cannot maintain
themselves by those who can barely maintain themselves keeps both groups
upon a dead level of destitution. If our aim is really the strengthening
of the people we must not begin by increasing the burdens of the
weakest—burdens borne often at so cruel a sacrifice of health and life,
and with so amazing an absence of complaint. The Smith family and the
Brown family alike are suffering because their income is barely adequate
to their elementary current needs; and their troubles will only be cured
by the possession of a larger real income. This, indeed, Mrs Bosanquet
sees plainly enough. “How can we bring it about,” she asks, “that they”
(_i.e._ “those whom we may call the very poor”) “shall have a
permanently greater command over the necessaries and luxuries of life?”
Gifts she perceives to be no true remedy, though she fails to assign the
economic reason, which is that the possession of outside resources
enables the recipient to “go one lower” than his unendowed competitor in
the battle for employment. The same objection does not apply to the
workhouse, which withdraws the pauper from the battle altogether, but it
does apply to outdoor relief, and is the one valid economic argument
against it. The best charity—as Dr Johnson long ago pointed out—indeed,
the only effectual charity, is to set a man to work at good wages. This
is not, however, Mrs Bosanquet’s plan. “The less obvious, but more
effective remedy is to approach the problem by striking at its roots in
the minds of the people themselves; to stimulate their energies, to
insist upon their responsibilities, to train their faculties. In short,
to make them efficient.”[65]
Unfortunately the ill-nourished, ill clothed and ill taught cannot be
made efficient. Moreover if we could make every one of them efficient,
they would be no better off, financially in their efficient state than
they are now, in their incompetence.[66] While rare, efficiency, like a
tenor voice, commands a monopoly price; if universal, its money worth
would be no higher than that of the ability to read, which in the Middle
Ages was a commercial asset of value. Furthermore, since extreme poverty
destroys efficiency, these ill paid efficient persons would presently
become, like our poorer manual labourers of to-day, weak of brain and of
body, dull, languid, inert and therefore bad workers.
Thus efficiency, however desirable upon other grounds, is no economic
remedy for underpayment. Not inefficiency but poverty is the real
disease, and since poverty is an inevitable result of unlimited
competition in labour, the disease can only be cured by some
interference with the free course of competition. How to apply such
interference effectually is the real problem which organised society has
to solve. Towards its solution Mrs Bosanquet, able though she is, offers
no assistance, because she never acknowledges the character of the
problem. For her there are only inefficient people to be taught better,
not underpaid people to be paid better. In this respect she represents a
considerable school of thought and therefore it has seemed worth while
to examine her thesis at some length; especially since any writer is
pretty sure of welcome who preaches a doctrine so soothing to the
general conscience. Much sympathetic distress would be spared to all of
us, and much racking of anxious brains to a few, if it were but possible
to believe with Mrs Bosanquet that the poor are themselves the
architects of their own poverty and that they must themselves be its
physicians. Unfortunately this is not the case. The process of
cheapening described above is, in a state of unlimited competition,
absolutely inevitable; and neither talent nor industry can exempt from
it any isolated worker whose qualifications do not create for him some
sort of monopoly.
CHAPTER VIII
LABOUR AS A COMMODITY
What is a “fair wage”—Two meanings of “worth”—What work costs to the
worker—Work done below cost price—How the worker may lose upon his
work—The effect upon commodities in general of free
competition—The effect upon labour—The robber employer—Eventual
powerlessness of the single employer—Cost to the nation of the
underpaid worker—Difference in essence between labour and other
commodities—Ambiguity of word “law”—Recognition of the true cost
of labour the basis of reform.
There are few phrases more current than those which include the
expression “a fair wage.” All workers conceive that they have a right to
it; and I never met an employer who did not maintain that he paid
it—although I have met more than one who admitted that his “fair wage”
was one upon which the worker who received it could not live. To any
enquirer venturing to point out this peculiarity, the reply is given:
“But the work is not worth more,” and the reply generally silences the
enquirer for the moment—whereby the employer comes to believe it
unanswerable.
In the enquirer’s mind two questions eventually arise: “Can a wage be
fair upon which the worker cannot live?” and: “Has labour a worth
measurable otherwise than by the market price?”
We begin presently to perceive that there are two faces to that word
“worth”; that it represents sometimes the price to the buyer and
sometimes the cost to the worker. The price to the buyer—the “worth” of
the work in the answer quoted above—is neither more nor less than its
market price, or, in other words, the price brought about by the balance
of competition between those who want to buy labour and those who want
to sell it. This price is regulated solely by the numbers competing on
either hand and by their greater or less degree of combined action. But
the cost of work to the worker is the expenditure of energy which he has
made upon it. Every hour’s work of a man or woman takes out of that man
or that woman a certain fixed amount of strength, of energy,—in short, a
certain amount of life. When we work, we spend, literally, something of
our substance. To make up that expenditure, we must have both a certain
amount of nourishment and a certain amount of rest. If our work is not
paid at such a rate as to give us that, we lose something in every hour
we work. We spend a little more life than is restored to us. Even if we
are paid at a rate that enables us just to make up what we have spent,
we have earned nothing—we have only had our outlay repaid to us. The
purchaser who pays a worker just enough to make him as fit for work
afterwards as before, has only paid the worker’s expenses; he has not
yet begun to pay him for his work. The worker in such a case is
precisely in the position of a capitalist who has lent money, and got it
back, but has made no profit on its use.
The wage of much labour in this and in other countries is on that scale.
So accustomed, indeed, are we to this state of things that many of us
think a worker quite well paid if he receives enough to keep him in good
bodily condition. Yet the same people who hold this opinion in regard to
that labour which is the sole capital of the worker, consider themselves
to have made a very bad bargain if they so invest their pecuniary
capital as to receive no interest upon it. It would be well if we should
bear in mind that the worker who receives no more than enough to make up
the strength expended, is in exactly that financial position.
But there is a financial stage lower than this: the stage of the worker
who not only gets no interest upon his capital, but does not get even
back the whole of his capital. That labour is so often yielded for less
than its cost is one reason why a working man’s expectation of life is
considerably less than that of a professional man; or, to put it in
other words, why the dock labourer and the omnibus conductor die younger
than the lawyer and the clergyman.
There are two ways in either (or both) of which any worker may lose upon
his work, and the names of them are Long Hours and Low Wages. For
instance, a railway company or an omnibus company that keeps a man at
work for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four uses up more of that man’s
vitality than the other eight hours can restore. Though he were to be
paid, like Miss Edna May, at a salary of £200 a week he would still lose
on the bargain. At no price can his employers repay him. They have
consumed some of his capital, and capital of that sort when once spent
is spent for ever.
Or the worker may receive for each hour’s work, even though the stretch
of hours be not unduly long, too little money to pay for those
necessaries by which alone his outlay can be made up. On each
transaction he pays out a little more than is returned to him. He
becomes, at each step, a little poorer in bodily resources; he is never
quite sufficiently fed, never quite sufficiently clothed nor healthily
housed, and he never has that reasonable certainty of to-morrow’s
provision which goes so far towards giving peace of mind and health of
body. Finally, like other persons who spend more than they receive, he
becomes bankrupt; that is to say, he either dies several years earlier
than the average of men who are better paid, or he sinks into the
invalid condition of the pauper. “Labour,” says Mr Schoenhof, “is an
expenditure of vital force. Unless this is replaced by wholesome
nutrition (air, light, sanitation and even cheerful surroundings are
part of wholesome nutrition) the frame will work itself out and the
labour will become economically of smaller and smaller value.”[67]
The cost, then, of labour as a commodity is the cost of the worker’s
existence, a cost paid by the worker not in money, but in exhaustion, in
hunger, in actual flesh and blood. This is the point in which labour
differs from every other commodity, and the reason for which it should
not be treated in the same way as other commodities.
In regard to all commodities, the tendency of free competition is, as we
all know, to bring down the selling price to a figure very little above
the cost of production; and in regard to all commodities other than
labour, it is easy enough to see that this result is advantageous to the
buyer. It is less easy to see, but is probably no less true that, in the
long run, it is advantageous also to the seller, and that every
hindrance to free competition in goods tends to diminish the volume of
production and consequently that of human enjoyment.
But when we come to consider that exceptional commodity, labour, we find
a different result ensuing from free competition; we find the inevitable
consequences to be impoverishment of the seller, deterioration of the
product and increase of human misery. The underpaid worker is not only
inevitably wretched and inevitably unhealthy; he is also a danger and a
burden to the country in which he lives. Since he—or more often
she—receives less than a living wage for his work, and since he
continues to live, it is obvious that some one else is in part
supporting him.
I can never forget the impression made upon me in the first factory
which I ever visited by a little scene of which I was a silent witness.
The head of the firm had shown us over various departments, and
incidentally had talked of how some of his children had just gone to the
other side of the world in a yacht. He was himself a man beginning to be
elderly, well grown, well groomed, fresh coloured, speaking with an
educated accent and presenting that air of prosperous content which is
common with elderly business men who are making money. He presently took
us into a department where very young and very poor-looking little girls
were employed; and one of our party shyly asked what were their wages.
“Four shillings a week,” was the answer. The first speaker, himself an
employer who pays high wages by choice, said deprecatingly:
“But—surely—they can’t live on that!” “Oh, no!” returned their employer,
cheerfully. “They live at home with their parents.” And I, new, then, to
the facts of commercial life, stood staring, silent, at this well fed
gentleman, with sons and daughters of his own, who frankly confessed
that poor men’s daughters had to be supported by their parents in order
that he might have their work for less than it cost. He seemed to me to
be owning himself a thief. And that, indeed, was exactly what he
was—although, strangely enough, he failed to perceive the fact. He was
committing a daily robbery upon persons too weak to withstand his
demands. His being, however, a variety of robbery not recognised by the
laws, he pursued his course not only unremorseful and unpunished, but
with great profit, and died, leaving behind him a large fortune which
only a small minority of his fellow countrymen consider to have been
disgracefully acquired. Yet his course was attended with much more
suffering to other people than that of any highwayman. It was akin
rather to that of the mediæval baron who by force of arms extracted a
reluctant toll from all his poorer neighbours. The girls submitted to
the extortion because it is even worse to starve than to be robbed, and
because they lacked the combination that might have enabled them to
resist both robbery and starvation.
The individual worker whose skill is but the dexterity born of constant
practice—the worker, that is to say, who has no sort of monopoly—is no
more able to regulate the payment of his services than an apple or a
sack is able to regulate its market price. Nor, at a certain stage of
the downward course, is any individual employer able to regulate it. It
is, for instance, probable enough that at the present moment not the
Brothers Cheeryble themselves could sell safety pins at a profit if they
paid a living wage to the women who “cap” them.[68]
For, in the long run, the process of competition generally succeeds in
filching from the employer that unfair profit which he had originally
filched from the worker. It is now the public at large which, by paying
for safety pins a fraction less than they really cost, pockets the
balance of the worker’s living wage. For the manufacturer who desires to
pay his workers better there are now two courses open; he must either,
if he can, find out some improved method, which, by diminishing his
other expenses, will allow him to pay higher for labour, or must combine
with his fellow manufacturers to raise the selling price. In practice,
he generally does neither of these things, but continues to take
advantage of his workers and to say—not without some show of
justification—that he cannot help it, and that they would be worse off
if he gave up business. The public at large, meanwhile, though it
automatically pockets the unfair profits, does not, in the long run,
gain by the transaction. For the underpaid worker who fails to be wholly
supported by the proceeds of his own labour is inevitably supported in
part out of the pocket of some other person or persons. Moreover, both
the health and the work of the underpaid worker presently deteriorates.
He contributes less than he might and ought to the general wealth, and,
by and by, when his health fails sufficiently, he becomes a charge upon
the public. Finally, he dies before his natural time, so that his
country fails to receive the full natural return for those costly and
unproductive years of childhood during which he was supported.
Furthermore, his working life is one of continued hardship, fatigue and
suffering. His existence is not an addition to, but a deduction from,
the total general happiness, the rather that underpayment is a burden
not only to its victim but also to the onlooker. No person of ordinary
sensibilities can fail to be depressed by the knowledge that large
numbers of his fellow citizens are struggling, to their physical, moral
and mental detriment, in hopeless poverty. Yet this state of things
arises inevitably if labour is left, like any other commodity, at the
mercy of unrestricted competition.
This difference in kind, between labour and other commodities, is the
justification of trade unionism, and the explanation of how it is that a
man can logically be at the same time a free trader and a trade
unionist. Except the trade unionists and the professed socialists,
however, no great body of persons seems to have perceived this
peculiarity of labour; and while underpayment is very generally
deplored, the various efforts of the benevolent are mostly directed
either towards supplementing inadequate wages or towards transferring
the underpaid to other branches of work, rather than towards securing
better payment for the work at present done. In the eyes of the average
Briton, the settling of wages by free competition appears, for some
unexplained reason, as a sacred and permanent principle. Perhaps, if
this attitude could be exhaustively analysed, we should find at its root
a vague respect for “the laws of political economy,” which respect is,
in the last resort, but the result of a confusion of mind about two
aspects of the word “law.” Laws in the moral world are, of course,
different from laws in the scientific world. The moral (or social) law
is a command; the scientific law merely a statement of effects. This we
see, plainly enough, when the effects are material and immediate. We do
not dream of regarding the law that fire burns as a command to put our
fingers in the flame. But when we come to consider the results of
wide-spread human action, we seem to ourselves to be in the region
rather of morals than of science, and without clearly realising our
attitude, we begin, many of us, to regard the laws that govern these
matters rather as precepts to be obeyed than as sequences to be avoided.
The law that free competition in labour leads to starvation wages is a
law of the same kind as the law that a dose of prussic acid leads to
death; and the conclusion to be drawn in each case is that if we wish to
avoid the result we must avoid the cause. Persons who are not desirous
of committing suicide must abstain from prussic acid; persons who desire
to see underpayment vanish must resist free competition in labour.
If the nature of labour were as generally apprehended as is the nature
of prussic acid, the laws of our country (which are laws of the other
kind—laws of command) would gradually be so altered as to prevent and
punish that kind of robbery which was practised, for years, by that
prosperous gentleman who, year after year, paid girls for their work at
a trifle under a penny an hour, and died thereafter wealthy and highly
respected. It is more than conceivable that persons now living may
survive to a day in which wealth so accumulated will be held as
discreditable as wealth accumulated by slave trading, and when the
stealing of labour will be held no less criminal than the stealing of
cash. The foundation upon which any such reform must rest will be the
recognition that labour is a commodity differing in its nature from
every other commodity; and that while there is, intrinsically, no such
thing as a fair price, there is, intrinsically, and in every case, such
a thing as a fair wage.
PART II
THE MINIMUM WAGE
CHAPTER I
EXISTING CHECKS
How it is that some workers are not “sweated”—Non-competitive
systems—Co-operation—Public services—Trade unions—Who is to blame
for strikes?—How trade unions promote trade—Limits of their
success—Factory Acts—How restriction raises wages—An example—How
restriction drives the employer into better ways—Limit of legal
restrictions in Great Britain.
If it be true that unlimited competition tends to reduce the wage earner
to the lowest possible rate of subsistence, how does it happen, some
reader may enquire, that under our present competitive system all wage
earners are not, in fact, at that low level, but that, on the contrary,
there are occupations in which wages tend steadily to rise.
The answer is that the course of competition among ourselves is not
unchecked, and that, wherever concerted human action has interposed a
check, the downward course of wages has been stayed. Nor, indeed, is the
competitive system, though the most widely prevalent, the only system in
existence among us.
A very considerable proportion of the trade of these islands is carried
on not upon a competitive but upon a co-operative basis. The actual
sales of goods made by industrial co-operative societies in the year
1904 amounted to £90,681,406,[69] and this total was “exclusive of the
sums (amounting to £11,874,643 in 1904) representing the value of the
goods produced by the productive departments of the wholesale and retail
societies and transferred to their distributive departments.” The
membership of the various societies included in 1904 no less than
2,103,113 persons, an appreciable fraction of the population.
The great movement known as Industrial Co-operation has two forms: (_a_)
Associations of Consumers; (_b_) Labour Copartnerships.
The theory of Associations of Consumers is simple in the extreme. It
consists in the elimination and reduction of intermediate profits, and
the purchase by the retail customer of goods as nearly as possible at
prime cost. The method employed is to sell at the usual market price and
to return the surplus in the form of a percentage upon the total of
purchases—which percentage is usually called a dividend. The fund from
which such payments are paid is “the fund commonly known as profit,” and
commonly retained under that name by the individual employer. Some
writers have pointed out that this fund is in truth not profit but only
savings. “‘Wealth is not created, it is only economised by
distribution’; but in co-operative distribution it is economised to such
effect that, for the workers at any rate, it has appeared to create
wealth where none existed nor could exist for them under the old system
of competitive trading.”[70] The “fund commonly called profit” is in
fact “the margin between the prime cost of an article and the price paid
for it over the counter by the individual customer.” The appropriation
of this margin, or of a considerable part of it, to the customer is a
feature not only of stores belonging to working class members but also
of such undertakings as the Civil Service or the Army and Navy Stores.
In these instances, however, the method adopted is to diminish the
selling price; and this slight difference of procedure has led to a wide
difference of results. The ordinary customer of the middle class stores
feels himself, for the most part, but a purchaser at an exceptionally
good and cheap shop; the customer at a store that follows the plan of
the original Rochdale Pioneers feels himself the member of a community
and the inheritor of a tradition. The fund, being collected in the hands
of the society at large, is recognised more clearly as the property of
all members alike; its destination is regulated by the governing body
whom those members elect; and it forms a continual object lesson in
political economy.
In these cases, it is clear to all persons who understand the processes,
that competition has been checked. The margin no longer goes into an
employer’s pocket but returns to the customer; and since the working
classes are the largest customers, most of it returns to them. In nearly
all instances, however, a part of the fund is retained for public uses;
few, indeed, are the societies that contribute nothing towards
educational or federal purposes.
The other group of co-operators views its members not as consumers but
as producers, and by this very fact narrows its range, since every human
being is a consumer, but not all of us are, or can be, in the strict
sense, producers. There must be clerks, distributors of all kinds,
policemen, organisers. The work of such persons is necessary and useful,
but it does not produce, like that of the weaver or the engineer, an
immediate and apparent increase in the wealth of the world. In theory,
the early associations of producers were workers who combined themselves
into self governed workshops and divided the profits of their labours.
But this ideal is applicable only to industries demanding but a small
outlay of capital, and such industries are always growing fewer. “The
ideal ... was modified; individual sympathisers outside the workshop
were admitted as members ... so too were societies of consumers. Thus,
in place of the old self governing workshop, the modern copartnership
workshop developed.” Associations of this type have been rapidly growing
in the last ten or twelve years, and during the last two or three have
spread amazingly in Ireland. All sorts of industries are represented:
baking, weaving (of cotton, wool and silk), spinning, building,
printing, quarrying, dairying, sick nursing, typewriting, cab-driving
and bookbinding among them; there are societies that make wearing
apparel of various sorts, pianos, harness, nails, mineral waters,
photographs, brushes, watches, cutlery, padlocks and bricks.
“Desborough, with its two important productive societies and its
flourishing store which owns much of the land and has built most of the
houses, is almost a co-operative community.”
Of the great English and Scotch Wholesale Societies made up of
federations of societies, of the annual conferences, the annual
festivals, the Women’s Co-operative Guild—that greatest and most
interesting of working women’s associations—it is not my business here
to speak in detail. Readers who desire to become acquainted with
co-operation as it exists to-day should procure _Industrial
Co-operation_.[71]
It must be enough to say that in the ocean of commercial competition,
co-operation lies like a fertile island inhabited by workers who are
putting into their own pockets the profits of their buying and selling,
and very often also of their labour.
Nor is industrial co-operation the only part of the nation’s business
carried on, in part at least, upon non-competitive principles. The whole
civil service of any country, the army, navy, hospitals, museums,
prisons, endowed schools and municipal undertakings of all kinds are
examples of enterprises established on a non-competitive basis, although
often influenced as regards internal management by competitive methods.
In many of these cases, the payment of workers is fixed otherwise than
by competition. Military and naval officers are not asked what is the
lowest figure at which they will consent to serve their country; nor do
we find in advertisements for town clerks or borough surveyors that
preference will be given to candidates willing to accept a reduction of
salary.
Even in the wider labour market, competition has not entirely a free
course. It is checked by trade organisations, by Factory Acts and by
Sanitary Acts. It is even checked in some slight degree by an uneasy
feeling that it is not decent to let people work for us in return for
obviously inadequate payment.
The avowed aim of trade unions is to check freedom of competition, with
the object of obtaining or maintaining for the workers a high level of
pay and of comfort. Their attempted method has been, almost invariably,
the establishment not of a fixed wage but of a minimum wage. A
misconception upon this point is so deeply engrained in the mind of the
ordinary middle class Briton that I entirely despair of being believed
when I make this statement. If I should live to celebrate a hundredth
birthday, I should expect still to hear in the last year of my life the
words: “What I really can’t bear about trade unions is that they insist
upon all men being paid alike.” Let it be repeated, once again, however
vainly, that trade unions do not so insist. I have never known, nor
heard of, any trade union that objected to any of its members getting
paid as much above the minimum rate as they possibly could. What the
union does forbid is the taking of wages below the minimum; and the
reason of this prohibition will be clear to any person who has read the
chapter: “How Underpayment Comes.”
The means employed by trade unions for securing a minimum wage is the
combined refusal of all members to work at any lower rate. In trades of
skill, as distinguished from trades of mere practice—trades that is to
say which possess in some degree a natural monopoly—unions have often
attained considerable success; and wherever they have done so, poverty
has been in a measure checked. Not only have the members of the union
themselves been comparatively well paid, but the fact of their being so
has helped to raise the level around them. Thus, since national poverty
is the greatest enemy of trade, the unions have almost invariably, and
indeed inevitably, been promoters of trade and prosperity.
At this point the question “How about strikes?” becomes almost
physically audible. Certainly, a strike, during its continuance, hinders
trade and prosperity in exactly the same way as warfare does. It is in
fact warfare on a lesser scale and—in our country—with restrictions upon
the weapons that may be employed; and war is always an evil, though
sometimes the lesser of two evils. In a strike, as in greater wars,
responsibility rests upon both parties, but seldom in equal degrees. The
apportionment of blame must largely depend upon the cause in which each
is fighting. The employer, in nine cases out of ten, is fighting for
cheap labour; the union primarily for access to amenities of life which
the employer enjoys already. In nine cases out of ten, therefore, the
union is really fighting the battle of the whole nation, while the
employer is fighting against it. Mr Schoenhof, a grave State official,
sent by his own government to examine economic questions in Europe,
declares of the acts of British trade unions that: “economically these
acts speak of a high degree of wisdom. On the other hand the attempts of
the employing classes to depress the rate of wages show frequently an
entire misapprehension of the principles under which production is
conducted. Most of the strife would disappear if it were more fully
recognised that a high rate of wages has all the time been the powerful
lever to reaching the low cost of production which practically rules
to-day in the industries of the United States.”[72]
If therefore that combatant is to be held most responsible who is
fighting in the worse cause, it is not the trade unionist but the
employer, who, on the whole, is chiefly to be blamed for the occurrence
of strikes.
There may, indeed, have been cases—I believe there has, in our own day
and country, been at least one—in which a union has followed a mistaken
course, has restricted output, and so lessened the volume of trade, and
to that degree injured the country. In so far as unions have
occasionally done this, they have been blind to the larger issues; but
not so blind, even thus, as those employers who thought to cheapen
production by lowering wages. Poverty, always and everywhere, hinders
production; the wise employer desires to see more money in the pockets
of working class purchasers, and the wise statesman more money in the
pockets of working class taxpayers. Some day, when the history of Great
Britain comes to be seen in the truer perspective of retrospect, it will
be the leaders of trade unionism and the promoters of Factory Acts who
will stand out among the real makers of this nation’s wealth.
But trade unions have seldom been really successful among unskilled
workers—precisely those who, having no natural monopoly, are most liable
to the pressure of economic competition and most likely to be underpaid.
Women workers, too, have always been difficult to organise; not
primarily, as is sometimes supposed, because they are women; but partly
because women, in our present social state, expect to leave the labour
market upon marriage, and therefore are comparatively indifferent about
earning high wages; and partly because women have, as a rule, less of
companionship with one another and of common social life out of working
hours than men, and therefore less opportunity of that “talking over” of
affairs out of which concerted action grows. Home workers are, of
course, especially isolated; and the successful organisation of a union
among unskilled female home workers would be an industrial miracle not
looked for by the most sanguine toiler in the industrial field.
Co-operation and trade unionism have both been, in the main, working
class movements, and both are examples of that curious inarticulate
instinct for right collective action which seems to be inherent in the
English democracy. From an assembly of average English artisans—I say,
English, not British—you will not get logically reasoned statements; you
will very seldom get a clear exposition of principles; but you will,
very generally, get that main line of conduct which true principles and
sound logic would dictate.
Not all the checks, however, in the course of free competition have come
from the workers. The direct interposition of the law was invoked and
secured by men whose personal concern in the question was only that of
fellow citizens. These men were actuated by a horror of the sufferings
undergone by the poorest workers; they felt that moral order was
outraged and the nation disgraced by the existing industrial conditions.
Restriction of hours was the first check imposed by British law, which
has shrunk hitherto from directly fixing a rate of wages.[73]
But since prolonged hours of labour are in fact but a form of diminished
wages, the law has, as it were despite itself, led to a real, and often
also to a nominal, rise of wages. The way in which this comes about was
exemplified with singular completeness in a case that occurred some
years ago in London. The managers of a girl’s club, enquiring into the
non-attendance of a certain member of the club, learned that her
employer was giving every day to her and to her fellow workers a
considerable number of articles to be made at home after the closing of
the work room and to be brought in next morning. In order to complete
this task, she was often, she declared, obliged to work till two in the
morning. The articles were accessories of dress, and were paid for, by
the dozen, at such a rate that the girls (there were seven of them)
earned each about seven shillings a week, or about 1s. 2d. a day for a
working day of from 14 to 16 hours. The ladies of the club reported the
case to the Women’s Industrial Council, the members of which knew—as the
girls did not—that the Factory Act forbade such employment at home after
a working day on the employer’s premises. Now this, it will be seen, was
just the kind of case in which, to people who have but little industrial
experience, the interference of the law seems harsh, and its strict
enforcement disastrous. If, working 14 to 16 hours a day, these poor
girls earned but 1s. 2d., how cruel to let them work but 10 hours, and
so earn but ninepence or tenpence! The Women’s Industrial Council,
however, ruthlessly reported the facts to the Factory inspectors; and
one evening, shortly afterwards, a lady inspector appeared at the
workshop door just as the girls were leaving. Each girl carried a
parcel. The inspector enquired the contents, and on learning them,
turned the girls back and made each leave behind her the work which
should have occupied her until after midnight. She herself interviewed
the employer and no doubt expounded to him the provisions of the Act.
Next morning—or possibly a day or two later—this ingenious gentleman
presented to his employees a statement for their signature which
declared that they carried home work to be done, not by themselves but
by their relatives. They all signed; girls who work part of the night as
well as all day and who receive but seven shillings a week are not
persons likely to have spirit for much resistance. But they told the
club leaders, and the club leaders told the Women’s Industrial Council,
and the Industrial Council hastened to tell the Factory inspectors.
Again the lady inspector appeared and met the girls coming out with
parcels. Again she bade them return the work, and again she went in and
saw their employer. What she said to him can only be surmised; for
neither Factory inspectors nor employers report these things to the
outer world. Whatever it may have been, it was effectual. No more work
was given out to be carried home and the girls were thenceforward able
to spend their evenings, if they chose, at the club and their nights in
sleep. But, at the week’s end, every girl had done much less work, and
being paid at the usual piece work rate, received considerably less than
her weekly average. Thereupon, they represented to their employer their
hard case. The inspector had forbidden them to work at night, and they
could not live upon the proceeds of their work by day. Would he
therefore be pleased to raise their pay; otherwise, they would be
obliged to seek work elsewhere. The employer did raise their wages,
paying them at a rate per dozen which, while still but a very few pence,
was yet somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent. higher than he had paid
before. Nor was this all. Finding that seven girls were now unable to
accomplish all his work, he enlarged his workshop and took on six more.
There were now therefore thirteen girls at work instead of seven, and
all thirteen were receiving wages a shade higher for ten hours’ work
than the seven had received for about fifteen hours. Nor did the retail
selling price of the goods advance by so much as the fraction of a
penny. In such ways as this do legal checks tend to impede the course of
free competition and to prevent the extremity of underpayment.
It is not, however, only by preventing undue hours of labour but also by
insisting upon reasonable sanitary conditions that the law promotes
better wages and improved trade. An employer who can no longer either
overwork or overcrowd his “hands” is driven to seek other channels of
saving. He demands some method of getting more work done in an hour, and
finds it worth his while to pay for the best possible machinery. All
sorts of improved processes are introduced, some of which may demand
increased skill and attention from the workers. The workers as soon as
they have leisure enough to think, and health enough to develop
initiative, begin to insist upon better payment, and because they are
better paid are able to respond to demands for better work. The improved
methods of production, where introduced, lead to an increase of
production which renders possible a lowering of selling price, while the
rise in wages at the same time increases the buying power of the
workers. Trade expands and finds a ready outlet.[74]
The profits of the manufacturer, in these circumstances, are greatly
increased, no longer at the cost of increased hardship to the workers
but with advantage to the whole community. Thus the law has already, in
various ways, interfered with the free course of competition, and its
interference has been beneficial all round. The grounds of its
intervention have always been moral; legislators and constituents alike
have felt that certain evils must be suppressed at whatever loss of
profits or of trade. But the results have been, not only morally but
also economically, of immense national benefit. Slowly the great truth
is emerging into recognition that the enforcement of good conditions and
good payment for the workers of a nation is not only the humane but also
the profitable policy. Slowly, step by step, in that piecemeal, groping
and wasteful manner which seems to be a part of the English nature, and
which, while so maddening to some of us who happen to possess an
infusion of more logical but hotter blood, yet, on the whole, works out
so well in practice, the British law goes forward, setting check after
check in the path of unlimited competition. Almost every step has been
taken amid outcries of opposition and prophecies of ruin. At every
advance, the “practical man” has assured the government of the day,
beforehand, that his particular trade would be destroyed, and,
afterwards, that he had lost nothing.
In spite of all these steps and all these consequences, the vast
majority of English people still believe themselves to be living under a
_régime_ of pure competition and are ready to declare such a _régime_
not only beneficial but inevitable. In fact, however, modern life, even
in our own small islands, comprises not one _régime_ only but many.
Every stage, from a modified feudalism up to an almost undiluted
socialism, is represented by existing conditions in Great Britain. Some
stages are dwindling; some are growing; and it is well within the power
of concerted human action to determine which shall grow and which shall
dwindle.
As far as we have gone, our law has directly stopped many gross forms of
overwork and oppression. The home worker it has helped, if at all, only
in so far as it has enforced certain provisions as to housing and
sanitation. Indirectly, the Factory Acts have served to raise wages by
forming a basis of minimum comfort upon which trade union organisation
could be built. In Great Britain, the law has never yet intervened,
directly and of set purpose, to raise wages. In parts indeed of Greater
Britain the law has directly so intervened; but the history of that
intervention belongs to another chapter.
CHAPTER II
SUPPOSED REMEDIES
Emigration—Valuable to the individual—Useless for the
community—Assumed improvidence of early marriage—Drunkenness cause
of individual poverty, not of general poverty—The amazing thrift
of working people—Dangers of thrift—Observations of a sagacious
Scotchman—Consumers’ Leagues—Why impracticable as remedy for
underpayment—Fields in which a Consumers’ League may be of use.
The evils described in the first part of this volume are no new ones;
they have been familiar for many years to many persons; a variety of
remedies have been suggested and in many cases attempted. Of these
remedies, only those are in any degree effectual which act as checks
upon competition. One group of proposed remedies is founded upon the
assumption that the country is overpopulated. This assumption, is,
however, disproved by the fact (which is unquestioned) that
notwithstanding the presence among us of a large class of rich
non-producers, the national income has increased at a greater rate than
the population of the country. Still, there are persons who believe that
England has too many people and who, therefore, very logically, desire
to reduce the number.
Some reformers of this way of thinking desire to see fewer births;
others desire the removal, to parts of the world where population is
still sparse, of those persons who, in this country, are seen to be
vainly struggling for remunerative employment. Emigration has, no doubt,
in many individual cases, meant a change from indigence to prosperity;
but, as a remedy for general indigence, it has the fatal flaw that every
worker removed is also a consumer removed, and that every consumer
removed means the loss of a customer and, therefore, to that extent, a
diminution of trade. The supply of labour is, indeed, lessened, but the
demand for labour’s product, and thus for labour itself, is lessened
too. It would be better for British trade if the emigrant could be made
prosperous at home instead of being sent to seek prosperity in exile. It
is, however, true that most emigrants go to British colonies, and that
these colonies need them. For these reasons, emigration is, no doubt,
useful, but as a remedy for general poverty at home it must always
remain delusive. Moreover, so long as the immigration of foreigners is
permitted, the emigration of British subjects is in effect little more
than a game of “General Post.”
Another school of reformers holds the poor themselves responsible for
their own poverty. “Why do they marry so young?” “Why do they drink?”
“Why don’t they save?” These questions are heard at every turn; and
persons who do not know the life of the poor regard them as
unanswerable.
To take first the question of early marriages, a point upon which the
better off are apt to judge with singular unfairness of their poorer
brethren. The market value of the middle class man is probably highest
after 40, certainly after 30. The market value of the average workman,
on the other hand, decreases after 40, if not earlier, and, in a vast
number of cases, is as high at 22 as it will ever be. Therefore, while
the middle class man is in a financial sense, prudent in deferring
marriage till 30 or thereabouts, the workman would be foolish indeed to
delay the birth of his eldest children until within ten years or so of
his own decline in market value. The workman who desires, like the
middle class man, that the infancy and schooltime of his children shall
coincide with his own period of greatest prosperity should marry—as in
fact he does—between the ages of 20 and 24. Then, by the time that the
father begins to experience increasing difficulty in getting well paid
employment—or perhaps employment at all—the elder children will at least
be of an age to earn for themselves. It should be remembered, too, that
workpeople as a class die younger than people who are better off, so
that a bricklayer, married at 20, and a barrister, married at 30, have
about even chances of seeing the manhood of their elder sons—another
reason why the former is wise to marry early, if at all. Early
marriages, then, whether improvident or no in the case of middle class
brides and bridegrooms, are not improvident in the case of working
people—unless indeed it be contended that it is improvident for working
people to marry at all—a contention fraught with rather alarming
possibilities to the future of the race.
To the question: “Why do they drink?” the answer is not quite so simple.
One may begin by remarking that there are a great many total abstainers
among wage earners; one may also remark that, if drinking were as
universal among wage earners as, let us say, the wearing of boots, even
the lowest rate of wages would stand at a figure allowing for the
purchase of drink. Economically, it is because the majority of wage
earners do not drink to excess that the excessive drinker finds himself
at a disadvantage. Of course, he is at a disadvantage also in various
other respects, but these do not enter into the economic argument. That
intemperate drinking may conduce to poverty is undeniable; but that
poverty also often conduces to intemperance is no less true. Of the two
kinds of drunkenness that exist among wage earners one is largely in the
nature of an escape from fatigue and from despair. Of the other—the
outbreak at intervals of the able, energetic and often comparatively
prosperous man, I do not pretend to have fathomed the mystery; but it
seems likely that the monotony of modern working life and the lack of
abundant personal interests may be among the contributory causes. It may
also be noted that to carouse at intervals was a deeply rooted habit
among our Northern ancestors, who admired a man potent in drinking as
they admired a man powerful in fight. It is at least conceivable that
the energetic, capable man who “breaks out” every month or two is a
survival of the old type; and it certainly seems to be the case that his
type does not occur among purely Latin races. Be this as it may,
experience shows convincingly that, on the whole, in this country, any
and every class of workers grows by degrees more sober as its hours of
work are shortened and its wages raised. Individuals of the class may
still drink heavily, but the average of sobriety steadily rises with
improved conditions. Moreover, in spite of the temptations presented by
poverty, a steady rise in the sobriety of this country is shown by the
excise returns. If poverty spreads and deepens—as I fear it does—the
cause cannot be found in an increase of drunkenness; for the consumption
of drink per head grows yearly less and less. Temperance is doubtless
advantageous in many ways to those who practise it; but, like
efficiency, it possesses a money value only while it fails to be
universal. If every man were temperate, no employer would make a point
of retaining his temperate “hands” when reducing his establishment.
To the question: “Why do not working people save?” truth requires the
paradoxical reply that they do save, and that they cannot afford to do
so. As a class, working people save a larger proportion of their income
than any other class of the community. The shares in Industrial
Co-operative Societies amounted in 1904 to £27,739,123; the Reserve and
Insurance funds of the same societies to £2,677,420. The great Friendly
and Provident Societies are supported almost wholly by working class
contributors; and, in addition to these, the majority of Trade Unions
are also provident Societies.[75]
Of the thirty families whose household expenditure has been tabulated in
Vol. I. of Mr Booth’s _Life and Labour_ (East London), only five spent
nothing upon insurance or club money; and in one household this item ran
up to 11½ per cent. of the whole expenditure. Considering that the
weekly income, as estimated, ranged from about 10s. 3½d. to about 33s.
7d. and that the households consisted seldom of less than four, and in
one case of eight persons, these contributions are by no means trifling.
Yet it is probable that not two families out of the thirty were able to
make anything like an adequate provision for old age. It hardly, indeed,
requires demonstration that a person earning just enough to support life
can only make an adequate provision for his old age by laying by 100 per
cent. of his income. Upon 10s. a week, or less, the saving of money
becomes something very near to a slow form of suicide. Moreover, at the
risk of horrifying every middle class reader, I must frankly declare
that, in my opinion, a worker does more wisely to abstain from all forms
of thrift beyond participation in his trade union and his co-operative
society. His union will help to keep up his wages; his co-operative
society will increase their purchasing power; the return upon both these
investments is immediate and certain: but anything more is apt to cost
too dear. It is now a good many years since an old Scotchman of great
intelligence and judgment, the secretary of his trade union, a member of
the municipal council, and justly respected by his fellow townsmen of
various ranks, gave me his opinion on this subject. He related to me
how, as a young man, he had accompanied a benevolent gentleman to a
lecture upon thrift, and how, as they afterwards walked away, the
gentleman waxed eloquent upon the duty of every man to lay by. But my
old friend, canny even at five-and-twenty or so, replied that he was a
married man with two children, that his earnings were two pounds a week,
that, if he spent less, either his children must go short of what was
necessary to make them strong, healthy and well trained, or he himself
must go short of what was necessary to maintain his efficiency; and
that, in his belief, the best form of thrift for a man in his position
was to maintain the highest standard of living which his small total
income would secure. In his case the plan had fully succeeded. He was, I
suppose, well over sixty, as hale, as active and as much interested in
the progress of the world as any man of thirty, and a most valuable
citizen. His children had both grown up healthy, capable and
industrious; both were skilled workers, regularly employed and in
receipt of good wages. But supposing—and his trade was one reputed
unhealthy—that the father had died, leaving a widow and young children
unprovided for? We may note that his risk of doing so was lessened by
his being better fed and better clothed than his more sparing neighbour.
Still, death is liable to seize even the best nourished and the most
fitly clothed; he might have died long before his children had completed
their excellent education or become capable of self support. Even in
that case, however, would these orphans, in whom a foundation had been
laid of good health and good teaching, have been really worse off than
if, with a poorer endowment of personal advantages, they had inherited
the money pittance—so sadly inadequate at best—that their father might
have scraped together in his few years of life? For how miserably small
is the provision that _can_, even with the utmost exercise of parsimony,
be made out of a family income of two pounds a week! In their inevitably
inadequate efforts to make such provision, workers too often deny
themselves the absolute essentials of healthy living. To abstain from
buying new shoes in order to save the price for one’s old age, and then
to die of pneumonia, induced by want of sound shoes, is but a doubtful
form of thrift, both for oneself and one’s nation. The interests of the
nation, especially, are certainly better served by the maintenance among
working class families of the highest attainable standard of life than
by the accumulation of very small individual provision for possible
orphans or possible old age. Even two pounds a week will not suffice
(except in remote country districts—where no man earns so much) to
provide really very good food, clothing and housing for four persons;
and the working class family does not often consist of no more than
four. The present cost of thrift, as thrift is generally understood, is
too heavy and the future return too light; and the wise man is not he
who saves his money, but he who spends it to the best advantage.
The supposed remedies hitherto touched upon have been measures demanding
the agency of the wage earner himself; but there is another scheme,
particularly attractive to the inexperienced reformer, in which the
consumer is to be the active person. When men and women who are not
themselves underpaid come face to face with the evil of underpayment, it
is natural enough for them to resolve that henceforth the articles
purchased by themselves shall be articles the makers of which have been
adequately paid. From this individual resolve it is but one step to an
association of persons all thus resolved, and banded together for the
purposes of investigation and exclusive dealing. Such an association is
a “Consumers’ League,” the aim of which is “to check unlimited
competition not at the point of manufacture but at the point of sale.”
Such associations, the first of which was formed, I believe, in
consequence of a suggestion made by myself, many years ago, in
_Longman’s Magazine_, are likely to reappear at a time like the present
when many consciences are disturbed by recognition of the fact that a
considerable proportion of British workers are scandalously underpaid.
It seems desirable, therefore, to point out how and why a Consumers’
League must inevitably fail in its aims.
The complexities of modern commerce are such that it is absolutely
impossible for any group of purchasers, however large and however
earnest, to attain that accurate knowledge of myriads of facts which
would be necessary; or, even, supposing such knowledge to have been once
obtained, to keep abreast of the unceasing changes. Let us take the
comparatively elementary problem of the large retail drapery shops. It
appears to be the general practice in such establishments for each
separate department to be under separate management, and for the head of
each department to have a free hand, subject to the one condition of
producing a certain percentage of profit. The ability to manage
successfully and develop a large branch of trade is not, as may well be
believed, very common, and one part of the payment that it demands is
freedom to do its work in its own way. Thus it is not uncommon for one
department of a large business to be conducted in a spirit of justice
and consideration, while another is marked by the total lack of such a
spirit. For instance, there was at one time, in a certain firm, a
manager of the mourning department who was among the best employers in
the London trade; but at the same time, the man in charge of the
workshop in which certain garments were made up or altered, was a
cutter-down of wages, rude and bullying in his behaviour to the workers
and entirely inconsiderate of their comfort. What reply, in a case like
this, can be given to a lady who asks: “Can I safely go to X’s shop?”
How, if she is furnished with the information just given, can she
discriminate, or how, even if she did, can she or her informant be sure
of the continuance of these conditions? Six months later, the one
manager may have taken a better post, and the other have been dismissed.
The new man at the workshop may be an enlightened organiser, who
introduces improved machinery and methods, knows the value of contented
and well fed workers, and raises wages; while the new man at the
mourning department may have been trained in the ways of “a driving
trade,” and may believe good management to consist in harrying his
employees, in nibbling at their wages and in “cribbing” their leisure.
If we multiply these facts by the number of shops or departments touched
by the weekly purchases of any well-to-do customer, we shall begin to
have some conception of the scale upon which a Consumers’ League would
have to conduct its investigations.
Moreover, all this is only on the uppermost plane. Few of these
retailers manufacture the goods sold. In regard to every single article
it becomes necessary to trace every step of production and transmission.
A pair of shoes cannot be satisfactorily guaranteed until we have
discovered the wages and conditions of employment not only of every
person who has worked upon the actual shoe, but also of the tanner, the
thread weaver and winder, the maker of eyelets, the spinner and weaver
of the shoe-lace and the various operatives engaged upon the little
metal tag at the shoe-lace’s end. Nor is the matter finished even then.
At every stage of its evolution, a shoe requires the services of clerks,
bookkeepers, office-boys, warehousemen, packers, boxmakers, carmen,
railway servants &c., and each new service introduces other material and
other service—paper, ink, ledgers, harness, stable fittings, cardboard,
string, glue, iron, coal—the series is endless. Yet compared with a
woman’s completed gown, or a man’s suit of clothes, how simple a product
is a pair of shoes. The fact is that even the most apparently simple of
commercial acts is but one link in a network that spreads over the whole
field of life and labour; and the fabric of that network is not woven
once and for ever, but is in continual process of change.
At the present stage, then, of our commercial development it appears
absolutely impossible for a Consumers’ League to fulfil its aims. If
labour were thoroughly organised in every branch, so that a strong trade
union existed in every trade, capable of giving information upon every
point, then indeed a Consumers’ League might become truly efficient, but
it would become proportionately superfluous.[76]
The cure of underpayment needs to be applied at the point of payment;
and the establishment of a legal minimum wage is the most direct method
of application.
But although a Consumers’ League can never hope to counteract the
results of unlimited competition, it may, as the National Consumers’
League of America shows, exert a valuable influence upon public opinion,
and may succeed in remedying certain industrial scandals. The Report of
that body for the year 1905–6 (up to March 6, 1906) is a most
interesting pamphlet, full of details that show how useful may be the
work, as industrial detectives and agitators, of a group of citizens,
banded together for the purpose of exposing and abolishing oppressive
and insanitary conditions of labour. In a country where public feeling
is not yet nearly ready for the enactment of a minimum wage, the
formation of a Consumers’ League may possibly be the best step forward.
An effectual remedy it cannot be; but it undoubtedly affords means of
education, both for its members and for the community at large. In our
own country, however, where the evils are already more or less generally
recognised, and where an increasing number of persons are already
beginning to hope for a minimum wage, the Consumers’ League marks a
stage that has been left behind.
We see, then, that emigration, though it may help the individual, can
but affect the trade of the country injuriously; that temperance, while
eminently desirable on other grounds, is only of any economic value
because it is still not universal; that effectual thrift is absolutely
impossible for the underpaid, and that the exercise of even an illusory
thrift can only be achieved by a sacrifice of things essential to good
health. We see, furthermore, that a Consumers’ League may be a valuable
social agency, but can never hope to be an economic remedy for
underpayment. Having looked up all these turnings and found all of them
blind alleys, we now proceed to examine a road along which younger
sisters of ours have travelled already, and at the end of which a ray of
hope seems to be shining. But before entering upon this examination we
will pause to consider the lesson of facts as presented in the history
of our own cotton trade.
CHAPTER III
THE LESSONS OF THE COTTON TRADE
The pessimist view—False assumption on which it rests—Cotton trade not
natural to Britain—Climate—Temperature—Fallacy of inherited
skill—Cotton workers as they were—Advancing legal
restrictions—Rise of wages—Amazing development and prosperity of
the British trade—Change in the mills—Change in the workers—Change
in the employers—The case of Bristol—The verdict of Mr Schoenhof.
Many people who would gladly see working people better paid, honestly
believe that a general rise in wages is not commercially possible. Any
attempt at giving a fair wage all round would, they declare, so diminish
trade as to throw out of work an additional number of persons whose
added competition would inevitably reduce the average wage to below its
original level: or who, if their competition were effectually barred by
the existence of a legal minimum wage, would be left without employment,
in a state more wretched than before. It may be remarked that this view
involves an admission that we live under commercial conditions which
render dishonesty not only the best, but actually the only possible,
policy. Such a belief would appear to furnish an unanswerable argument
in favour of the destruction of such commercial conditions, and it is
difficult to understand how any human being can hold it and not become a
convinced revolutionist. Yet, strange to say, it is from the mouth of
upholders of things as existing, that this doctrine is most frequently
heard. In some quarters, indeed, there would seem to be actual hostility
to the idea of bettering the workman’s lot, an inclination to grudge him
any greater share than he now possesses of the comforts and conveniences
of modern life. This attitude—to some extent, it must be supposed, a
feudal survival—indicates a very ugly spirit of class selfishness which
may possibly be dangerous, and is certainly ignorant. Dull, indeed, must
be the man or woman upon whom modern conditions of life do not impress
the closeness of human interdependence. Never, since the beginnings of
history, has the daily life of every man been so wonderfully interwoven
with that of all his fellows: never was there a time when the deeds of
each were so much a part of his neighbour’s pains or pleasures. Consider
for a single moment how changed would be one’s own life, if there were
no longer in Great Britain any person very poor, very dirty or very ill
mannered, if, in short, no one fell below the standard of that skilled
artisan class which is not only the most solidly virtuous, but also, in
essentials, the most truly courteous section of our society. Is there
one of us, however selfish, however callous, from whose daily existence
a burden would not be lifted?
Yes, the pessimist will say, the change would be delightful, but it is
not possible. That very interdependence of which you speak makes the
whole world but one market, and renders it impossible for any one
country to raise wages while other countries keep theirs low. This
alleged impossibility rests, it will be observed, upon the assumption
that higher wages conduce to higher selling prices, an assumption which
experience shows to be fallacious. And since it is always more
convincing, especially, perhaps, to the British mind, to narrate what
has happened than to declare what must happen, the purposes of my
argument will be best served by a brief account of the English cotton
trade.
Before entering upon this, let me point out how very remarkable a
phenomenon it is that there should exist an English cotton trade at all.
We cannot grow the required material: every ounce of raw cotton has to
be imported at a price, imported too from a great distance, and owing to
its bulky nature, at comparatively a high heavy cost. Originally the
possession of coal, iron and a seaboard gave advantages to England: the
factory system developed early with us, and we manufactured cotton, as
we manufactured other goods, because our energies were turned towards
manufacture in general. But the same influences which caused mechanical
production to begin here have caused it to arise elsewhere, and the
natural development of industry must, one would suppose, eventually
carry the manufacture of cotton to regions where cotton can be grown,
especially if they happen also to possess the means of motive power. The
Southern States of America, where cotton grows, where coal and water
power are plentiful, and where population is no longer sparse, would
seem to be marked out by nature as the home of the cotton industry. And
in fact mills are rapidly rising in that region. Not only so, but the
workers in them are employed for much longer hours and paid at a far
lower rate per hour than English cotton workers. Readers of the chapter
upon child labour, in Part I. of this volume, will be aware that
children are working, both by day and by night, in these mills, whereas
no child may work full time in any English mill, nor any child or woman
at night. Yet these Southern mills, with every advantage of position,
with cheap labour, and comparatively cheap land, have not succeeded, and
are not succeeding, in winning from the English their immense
preponderance in the markets of the world. This undeniable fact is
explained in some quarters as being due to our much abused English
climate, which is said to provide exactly the degree of temperature and
humidity most favourable to the manipulation of cotton yarn. That a very
dry atmosphere will not suit some processes of the trade seems to be
generally acknowledged, and if England were the only damp country in the
world, or even the dampest, we might perhaps regard ourselves as
possessing a sort of monopoly advantage. If, however, there be any one
state of the atmosphere more favourable than any other for the
manufacture of cotton, then it is quite impossible that our notoriously
variable climate can always present it. Moreover, it seems to be the
case that for some processes at least, a combination of dampness with
great heat is desirable: and this combination, natural to some
countries, is actually forbidden by the English law. Countries
possessing a climate at once hot and damp must, it would seem, have a
natural advantage over us, and here again, the Southern States are
favoured by nature.
Another explanation sometimes put forward is that the English workers,
among whom the manufacture was first established, possess a hereditary
skill of manipulation. The physiological possibility of such inheritance
seems to be questionable: and, considering the great changes undergone
by the machinery employed, the existence of it would be, at least, very
surprising. Moreover, this supposed hereditary dexterity would require
to have grown up in strangely few generations, since, in 1830 or so, the
cotton workers of England are described as being deplorably poor
workers, degenerate, physically and morally. Their condition, at that
time and for a good many years afterwards, was appalling. A more
horrible picture than that presented in Mr P. Gaskell’s “Manufacturing
Population of England,” published in 1833, can hardly be conceived.
These cotton operatives were, in short, as unpromising in physique, in
character and in industrial efficiency as any group of casual,
irregularly employed labourers that could be selected to-day from the
ranks of unorganised industry: as ill paid, as wretched and as much
oppressed as any sweated home worker in a slum garret.
By slow degrees, from that first Act which, in 1802, made some faint
attempt at shortening the hours of the unhappy parish apprentices, the
law has gone on, steadily diminishing hours of work. From 1854 onward,
the working week for women in textile trades became one of 60 hours.
Within a few years later, these hours were reduced to 56½; and now, the
legal week in the textile trades is one of 55½ hours. At all these
stages, the regulations, though nominally affecting only women, have, in
practice, decided the hours of men also. Thus, the British textile
worker is employed for fewer hours than any foreign competitor. Wages,
though not high for the individual, are, owing to the fact that nearly
all its members work in the trade, high for the family. Rates of pay
have steadily risen; the average nominal wage of 24s. 9d. for men in
1881—itself an immense advance upon the starvation rates of the
thirties—had risen, in 1902, to 27s. 3d. For later years I cannot cite
figures, but the amazing prosperity of the trade during the last year or
two can hardly have failed to affect wages favourably.[77]
Moreover, these rises have coincided with a fall in the price of food so
marked that the increase in average real wages, between 1881 and 1902,
is reckoned to be more than 36%.
The number of persons employed has also steadily grown, and the returns
of the Chief Inspector of Factories show that in 1901 the industry gave
occupation to 513,000 persons. The increase in the number of spindles
and of looms, however, has been far greater than the increase in the
number of hands. Machinery has made vast strides and becomes daily
swifter and more economical of labour; so that the total growth of the
trade, since the days of employers who vowed that a ten-hour day would
ruin them, almost passes calculation. Moreover, the development of the
industry tends more and more towards those branches which demand most
skill. Our exports increase more largely in fabrics than in yarn, and
most of all in coloured fabrics, the prices of which are rising. We are
in short “specialising in the more expensive and difficult work.” We are
producing those really exquisite coloured cotton stuffs which under
various fancy names have, during the last few years, made summer dresses
so attractive, and which are well worth the comparatively high price at
which they are bought.
On p. 61 of the pamphlet written by Professor S. J. Chapman for the Free
Trade League[78] may be found a most interesting table of the
comparative increase, all over the world, in the number of spindles,
between the years 1870 and 1903. We find that “about a fifth of the
total increase in the world’s spindles in a third of a century has
fallen to the United Kingdom. The whole of Europe, taken together in a
period of industrial awakening, cannot boast a growth of cotton spindles
more than twice as great as that which has taken place in this country
alone, though in 1870 Europe was almost at the beginning of her cotton
spinning, and has since then been fostering it.... In 1870 the American
nation had a fifth as many spindles as the United Kingdom, and to-day
she does not possess half as many as the United Kingdom.” And this in
spite of the fact that the population of the United States is so much
larger than ours.
Another table (on p. 66) deals with exports of manufactured cotton
goods, and compares the average annual exports, from 1891 to 1902, of
Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, the United States, and
the United Kingdom. The absolute increase of British exports in the year
1901–2 was £8,170,000; that of Germany, £4,100,000; and that of the
United States, £325,000. All the remaining countries together totalled
an increase of only £13,450,000, as against Britain’s £8,170,000. The
increase in German exports, which comes nearest to our own, is but
slightly more than half of it. “Of the total trade (exporting) done by
the chief Western trading nations, Great Britain accounts for 62·5%;
Germany stands next with 12%.” Moreover, these figures, reaching only to
1902, take no account of the vast prosperity of the cotton trade in
Great Britain since: a prosperity of which some indication is given in
the Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for 1905. From Oldham, Mr
Crabtree reports that “About 20 new mills have been erected or are in
course of erection for the cotton spinning trade alone. These will
contain about 2,000,000 spindles.” (p. 147.) Mr Verney reports that “in
the Rochdale district alone three new mills containing 220,000 spindles
started in 1905, and at the end of the year there were nine more in
course of construction to be equipped with 770,000 spindles. The total
number of new mills which have commenced to run in 1905 and which are in
course of erection throughout Lancashire is no less than 57, with
5,000,000 spindles. The signification of these figures may be better
appreciated when it is remembered that in the whole of France there are
but 6,000,000 spindles, and in Germany less than 9,000,000.” (p. 147.)
On the same page the following declaration, by Mr W. Tattersall, is
quoted from “The Cotton Trade Circular”: “The year’s trading has been
the most prosperous in the history of Lancashire.”
On the whole, the story of the British cotton trade—a trade, be it
remembered, the very existence of which is surprising—is the story of
one of the most amazing developments in industrial history. Raw material
that can only be grown in distant countries is brought, naturally
enough, at first, to a land of coal and iron, the cradle of the factory
system. By and by, other countries, including some in which the raw
material can be produced, begin, in their turn, to adopt the factory
system and to manufacture cotton. What would naturally follow? Surely,
the absorption of the English trade by the foreign competitor whom
nature favours. Moreover, Britain, already handicapped by nature, had
further handicapped herself by restricting hours of work and by imposing
high and expensive standards of sanitation and safety. Yet what is seen
to occur? England’s trade goes on steadily expanding, year by year;
wages rise, both nominally and, to a greater degree, really; and in the
course of last year (1905) not only was all the available adult labour
employed, but it was not possible to get enough of it, so that there was
actually some increase in half time labour, which previously had
steadily declined.
Nor is the contrast less if we consider the mills themselves or the men
and women connected with them. In the first third of the last century,
the mills were, in general, dirty, ill ventilated, ill provided with
sanitary accommodation, frequently overcrowded, the machinery unguarded
and the temperature unregulated, so that the operatives suffered from
extremes both of heat and of cold. At the present day, there must be a
certain cubic space for every worker, there must be proper sanitary
accommodation, moderate temperature and—most important of all, perhaps,
in this industry—there must be proper ventilation for carrying off the
dust and fluff by which the lungs of so many cotton operatives have been
injured. The old mills were full of overworked, underpaid children,
stunted, wizened, and, if their contemporaries are to be credited,
precociously vicious; children who dropped asleep at their looms, and
had to be dragged, crying with sleepiness, from their beds to begin work
again in the morning, while another relay of little serfs were actually
waiting to enter the beds left vacant. The mills ran till late at night,
sometimes all night long. Diseases of many kinds, especially phthisis
and spinal deformities were rife; while drunkenness and immorality seem
to have been rampant. The masters, many of whom were self made men, of
little education, vowed that their profits were not large, and that any
restriction of the hours of labour would inevitably land them in the
Bankruptcy Court. The operatives, however, persisted in clamouring for
relief; parliament granted it; and strange to say, instead of being
ruined, the trade grew better and better. The workers, seizing their
chance, developed strong trade unions that included both men and women,
and thus secured themselves against the disastrous results of free
competition. Their union helped them to gain better wages; the law
helped them to health and to leisure. In less than three generations,
the cotton workers of North Western England have become intelligent,
independent citizens. They are no longer oppressed, no longer illiterate
and no longer vicious. Free libraries and co-operative stores grow and
flourish, and the old English passion for music, still dormant in the
South, is well awake in the large cotton towns of the North. In
industrial efficiency the English spinners and weavers of cotton have no
rivals. As the Tariff Commission reported, “Nearly every mill started
abroad with English machinery requires a certain amount of British
workpeople and overlookers to start it and to train up native labour.”
(Sec. 205.) This increase of skill, dependent very largely upon an
improved standard of life, has rendered possible a vast improvement in
methods of production, with the usual consequence of a greatly enlarged
output. The masters, from whom the increasing stringency of the law has
demanded an ever rising standard of capacity, are men of a better class
than their predecessors, and among the most enlightened of British
employers.
Meanwhile, in other countries, many of the evils which Lancashire has
left behind, still prevail. Children toil to-day in certain American
mills, as they toiled once in ours; in many European countries, hours
are still injuriously long and wages inadequate to the demands of a
civilised life. Yet employers of this cheap labour cannot produce so
profitably as Lancashire can. “On the general efficiency of British
labour as compared with that of any foreign country witnesses are
practically unanimous,” says the Report of the Tariff Commission. (Sec.
89.) In short, the English cotton manufacturer produces more cheaply and
more profitably, upon the whole, than any competitor, and in the highest
branches of the trade, can hardly be approached. The reasons of this
pre-eminence are that the good conditions enforced by law and the
comparatively high wage enforced by the trade unions combine to create
for him the most efficient body of cotton workers in the world. Once
more, the facts of industrial history proclaim the truth that efficiency
is not the cause but the product of fair wages, healthy surroundings and
reasonable leisure.
Do not let us be deceived into supposing that, apart from these factors,
there is any peculiarity in the cotton trade to account for these
developments. If there were, we should behold the ill paid and
overworked cotton workers of the Southern States, many of whom are of
the same race as ourselves, producing fabrics as good as ours, at the
same speed, and equal profit. Indeed, we need not go so far as America
for our object lesson. The South West of our own country may provide it.
Bristol, no less than the more northerly parts of the island, had its
cotton mills. The same advantages were presented: the port open to the
Atlantic, the moist westerly climate, the plentiful supply of labour.
The same factory law applies, the same hours and conditions are
enforced; the employers, of late years at any rate, have been men of
capital and of intelligence. One factor only has been absent: the
powerful organisation of workers. Because of its absence, wages have
fallen to the level of unskilled trades in the district. Men do not work
in the cotton trade in Bristol, nor adult women. The employees are
girls, earning the low wage of a Bristol factory girl. Of profits there
have, for years, been practically none. No employer can afford to make
improvements in methods of production; and at the present moment it is,
I believe, an open secret that the one remaining mill is only kept open
because its owner is unwilling to turn away the hands.[79] But for the
strong trade unions of the northern operatives, the whole of England’s
cotton trade at the present day might be in the position of Bristol’s
cotton trade, and the Lancashire worker might be toiling for as many
hours and as small a wage as his German competitor. To the organisation
of the workers, English labour owes that comparatively fortunate
position which is, as Mr Schoenhof, years ago, perceived, “the only
vantage ground which England possesses and which secures to her the safe
and indisputable rulership of the commerce of the world.”[80]
In this particular industry of cotton, other nations, as he points out,
whose labour is ill paid and whose hours of work are long, are trying to
defend themselves by a high protective tariff “against the results of
England’s high pay and short hours.”... “Yet it is all machine work
driven by steam power and conducted in factories under the best
intellectual management which the countries afford. But how world wide
the difference in the results!”[81]
World wide indeed—not as to national trade only, but as to national
happiness.
CHAPTER IV
THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE
Sweating not unknown in the colonies—Instances published by _Otago
Daily Times_—Underpaid workers in 1895—Epidemic of strikes—State
arbitration proposed in New Zealand—Conciliation Boards and Court
of Arbitration—Details of New Zealand law—Objections raised by
critics in England—Difference in position of British and of New
Zealand trade unions—New Zealand freed from strikes—The question
of the poorest workers—Wellington match makers—Tailoresses under
an agreement and tailoresses under an award—The under rate
worker—Victoria and Wage Boards—Campaign of the _Age_—Factory Act
of 1896—Details of Wage Board scheme—The first six Boards—Boards
in 1905—Several instances of the “determinations” of Wage
Boards—Effect on home work—The case of New South Wales—Summing up.
The evils of underpayment, being the invariable result of unlimited
competition, inevitably show themselves in any country where trade has
come into existence. The oversea colonies of Britain are not
overcrowded, are naturally rich, and ought to be free from evils
accumulated during an old civilisation. Yet, thirty years ago, instances
of underpayment, exactly on all fours with those exhibited in the
Queen’s Hall in the summer of 1906, were to be found in New Zealand, in
South Australia and in Victoria.
There, as here, newspapers called attention to the facts, and aroused
the public conscience. In January 1889, the _Otago Daily Times_, “a
journal distinguished amongst its fellows for caution and restraint of
language,” published a series of articles about underpaid labour in
Dunedin. “One woman deposed that she might make 3s. 6d. on a good day
but it would be by stitching from half past eight in the morning until
eleven at night.”[82]
“Yet she counted her lot at that time almost happy, for she had lately
escaped from a factory where, do what she would, she could not earn more
than eighteenpence daily by working until all hours of the night.”
Another woman reported that she “finished cotton shirts at 1s. 6d. a
dozen”[83] and that she could “get through a dozen and a half in the
factory between nine o’clock and six in the evening; then she carried a
dozen more home and sat up sewing by lamplight until they were
finished.... On one of these evenings she had a stroke of good luck; she
was allowed to take away a dozen flannels as well as her dozen shirts.
Both bundles were done when she went to bed—at three o’clock in the
morning—and by that night’s work she earned a whole shilling.” (p. 30.)
Individual and combined action followed these revelations. A union of
tailoresses was formed and an effective factory law passed. Wages,
however, continued upon a downward course, and in 1895 “there were in
the colony 591 factory girls who were getting no pay for their work, and
175 who were paid half a crown a week or less.” (p. 34.) Such facts as
these were enough to show to thoughtful observers that, unless special
measures were introduced, the evils of European countries would grow
with the growth of the colonies. Another series of events helped to
focus attention upon labour problems. This was the epidemic of unusually
wide-spread and bitter strikes which ran through the various colonies in
the early nineties. Into the details of these it is unnecessary to
enter. It is enough to say that, in at least one instance, associated
workers demanded what they had no right to demand and that, in at least
three instances, associated employers refused even to confer upon the
demands of the workers. The mining companies, for example, declared in a
public manifesto that “The mining companies claim the right to work the
mines as they deem best and cannot refer this right to arbitration.” (p.
95.) Acts of violence were committed; the public was greatly
inconvenienced; much money was lost; and people began to look about for
some legislation that would obviate similar troubles in the future.
This was the opportunity of Mr Reeves, at that time Minister of Labour
in New Zealand. He saw that the path of progress lay along the line of
organisation; and that the field of State Arbitration is not between man
and man, but between association and association. He recognised that
organised society has a right to demand of its different sections that
degree of class organisation which renders possible the application of a
common law. Hitherto, sectional combination had been used principally as
a basis for organised war; in Mr Reeves’s plan, it was to furnish the
basis of an organised peace. Following out the stages by which
industrial disputes develop into strikes, he substituted for each a more
peaceful step. His Bill, respecting the divisions of the colony into
districts, allowed the creation in any district of a local Conciliation
Board, and established a supreme Court of Arbitration. The Conciliation
Boards were to come into existence “if petitioned for,” and were to be
“composed of equal numbers of masters and men, with an impartial
chairman.” (p. 101.) The right of electing representatives to serve on
these Boards was given not to individuals but solely to such bodies of
employers or of workers (men or women) as registered themselves under
the Act. An association of as few as seven workers may, at the present
time, claim registration. When registered, such associations are called
Industrial Unions, and become corporations “with power to hold land, to
sue and be sued, and to recover dues from their members.” (p. 103.)
The functions of a Conciliation Board are as follows: On receiving a
request from any party to an industrial dispute, it calls before it the
other parties concerned, hears, examines and awards. No strike or
lock-out is permitted while the case is under hearing. The Board has
full power to take evidence and to compel attendance. At first, the
awards of the Conciliation Boards had no legal force but, in 1900, the
amended Act made these awards “final and legally binding unless appealed
against within a month.” (p. 127.)
The higher tribunal, the Court of Arbitration, consists of “a president
with two assessors, one selected by associations of employers the other
by federations of trade unions.” (p. 102.) The three members of the
Court are appointed for three years and, unless bankruptcy, crime or
insanity intervenes, cannot be removed except by a vote of both Houses
of Parliament. The Court is not fettered by precedent, settles its own
procedure and may take any evidence that it chooses, “whether strictly
legal evidence or not.” It may hear cases publicly or privately at its
discretion. Its award is given by the majority of the three members, and
they may decide whether the award is to have the force of law or “merely
to be in the nature of good advice.” If it is to have legal force it
must be filed in the Supreme Court and after that any party to it may be
prosecuted for a breach of it. The penalty payable by a single employer
or trade union is limited to £500; and in case of a union’s possessing
insufficient funds to meet the penalty every member is liable up to £10.
The award cannot be appealed against nor quashed by any other tribunal,
nor can the proceedings be carried into any other court. On the other
hand, awards remain in currency only for a fixed period, which need not
be longer than three years at the outside, and at the end of which the
matter may be reopened.
Though only registered unions of masters and of workers can elect the
officials of the Boards and of the Court, yet the jurisdiction of these
tribunals extends to all employers and to all workers whether registered
under the Act or not. In any district where there is a duly registered
body of workers but none of employers the Governor in Council may
nominate the conciliators required to make up a Board.
Such were the general features of the Act that after three years of
endeavour was passed at the end of 1894 and came into force in 1895. It
passed amid steady opposition from employers and with extremely little
support from public opinion. In 1900, after five years’ experience of
its workings, when a consolidated and amended Act was introduced, only
one voice was lifted to attack its general principle. Not from its
neighbours, who are intimate with the workings of it, but from this side
of the ocean have come the attacks to which it has been exposed. It has
been contended, again and again, by English newspapers that the measure
is unduly favourable to trade unions, a contention much strengthened in
appearance by the fact that in various trades awards have been made
requiring employers to give preference to unionists, so long as the
union can supply men qualified and ready to fill vacancies. Such awards,
however, are by no means invariable; each case is tried on its merits,
and the Court is largely guided by the general custom of each trade. It
must be borne in mind also that the position of a New Zealand union is
very different from that of a British union, and that this difference
has been largely brought about by the colonial law, in the interest not
of the union but of public peace and convenience. As Mr Reeves justly
remarks: “In New Zealand the community, mainly for the purpose of self
protection, has deprived trade unionists of the right of striking—of the
sacred right of insurrection to which all workmen rightly or wrongly
believe that they owe most of what lifts them above serfdom. The
Arbitration Act, moreover, deliberately encourages workmen to organise.
When, in obedience to the law, they renounce striking and register as
industrial unions, it does not seem amiss that they should receive some
special consideration. Their exertions and outlay in successfully
conducting arbitration cases benefit non-unionists as well as
themselves, though the non-unionists have done nothing to help them. Nor
need the preference entail any hardship to their employers. Non-unionist
labour is usually valued either because it is cheaper or because it is
more peaceable. But under the Arbitration law non-unionists must get the
same pay as unionists, and unionist strikes are abolished. It is only
the non-unionists (in a trade where there is no award in force) who can
strike, and who—though rarely and then only in petty groups—do. They
are, therefore, to that extent, the more dangerous servants of the two.
Nor, be it noted, does an employer who has only non-union men in his
factory stand clear of the Act. Nor again can he take himself out of it
by discharging his union hands and pleading that he has none in his
employ. If an award has been made dealing with the trade in his
district, he is bound by it as much as his competitors who employ union
labour.”[84]
In short, New Zealand has taken out of the hands of organised labour its
principal weapon and has placed that weapon in the hand of the state.
The right of waging industrial war is, now, in New Zealand denied to
unions either of workers or of employers. To have enforced this denial
without loss to either side and at the same time to have encouraged
organisation is a feat that any British minister may reasonably desire
to emulate.
It is quite certain that, without the Arbitration Act, New Zealand would
not have enjoyed that immunity from labour battles which in fact it has
enjoyed. The use of the Act happened to coincide, as its author points
out, with a revival of trade; and a revival of trade is, as every
experienced trade unionist knows, the period in which strikes may hope
to be successful. “Instead, however, of striking on a rising market, as
the traditional custom of trade unionism has been, the New Zealand
unions were able to arbitrate upon it”—to the saving of much money, much
suffering and much ill feeling.
Other objectors complain that the Arbitration Act does nothing to help
the unorganised—always the most helpless—workers. Those who make this
complaint have failed to appreciate the value of that important
provision according to which a group of as few as seven (originally as
few as five) workers in any industry are allowed to register themselves
as an industrial union. Even in the poorest and most scattered of
English trades it would be an easy matter to collect seven persons who,
_if they knew themselves protected from dismissal_, would be willing to
appeal for improved conditions to a Conciliation Board. So far from
shutting out the unorganised, the Industrial Arbitration law opens to
them a door by which they may share in all the advantages of
organisation without waiting for a preliminary improvement in their
conditions; and, at the same time that it holds out to them a powerful
helping hand, makes them not merely passive recipients of a benefit, but
active agents in their own emancipation.
Would that the same door were open to our poorest workers on this side
of the ocean; that the worser paid of English factory workers could, by
registering some seven of their number, present their case to a court
or, with the support of the court behind them, form such an agreement as
was made with their employers by the Wellington match-factory employees
in November 1902, and brought into court for registration. The schedule
of this agreement contains but five clauses and is a model of brevity
and directness. Clause I. settles the working hours, on the basis of a
45 hours week. Clause II. fixes (in 52 words) the piece work rates of
pay for five different branches of work. Clause III. deals with the
question of union and non-union labour, and requires “the company”
(there was but the one employing company, apparently, in the district)
“when engaging a worker or workers” to “employ a member or members of
the union in preference to non-members, provided there are members of
the union equally qualified with non-members to perform the particular
work required to be done, and ready and willing to undertake it;
provided, further, that any person now employed in this industrial
district in this trade, and any other person desirous of entering the
trade now residing or who may hereafter reside in this industrial
district, may become a member of the union upon payment of an entrance
fee not exceeding 5s., and of subsequent contributions, whether payable
weekly or not, not exceeding 6d. per week, upon the written application
of the persons so desiring to join the union, without ballot or other
election.” Clause IV. requires the executive of the union to keep an
“employment book” containing the names, addresses and employers during
the previous six months of members wanting to be employed; the book to
be “open to the company and its servants without fee or charge during
all working hours on every working day.” Clause V. runs as follows:
“When members of the union and non-members are employed together, there
shall be no distinction between members and non-members, and both shall
work together in harmony and shall receive equal pay for equal
work.”[85]
I have thought it worth while to quote these clauses in some detail
because they are typical and illustrate the safeguards both to the
employer and to the non-union worker by which a preference clause is
generally accompanied. The whole schedule occupies only 46 lines of
print—exactly one page of the volume in which it appears.
We see, by this example, that the Arbitration Act does not exclude
collective bargaining between workers and employers but allows the
registration and enforcement of terms to which the representatives of
both parties have agreed. Thus the field of legitimate activity is still
left open to organisations both of employers and of workers: the Act
merely provides for peaceable and equitable settlement in cases where
the parties fail to settle matters for themselves. An instance occurs in
the history of the tailoresses in which one district was governed by an
agreement, and another by an award. The employers in the latter district
complained that the employers in the former were allowed to compete with
them on unfair terms; and the court having compared the terms of the
agreement with those of the award, found that the agreement was actually
in some instances the higher of the two and that, in the instances where
it was lower, the wages actually paid were double those set down. This
was in 1903. In 1905 the trade was once more in court asking for the
establishment of a weekly wage. The court, acceding to what it declares
to have been a general wish, did fix a weekly wage, but made the award
for a year only, from Jan. 1906 to Jan. 1907. The schedule—rather a long
one—fixes the terms of apprenticeship to each class of work, the wages
of apprentices (5s. a week, rising at fixed intervals by 2s. 6d. at a
time); defines, according to the length of her experience in her special
department, a first-class and a second-class “improver,” a “journey
woman, and an under rate worker,” and fixes minimum rates for all but
the last named. Improvers in coat and vest work are to receive, for
second class hands (girls just out of apprenticeship) a minimum of 17s.;
first class hands (with another year’s experience) one of £1, 0s. 6d.;
journey women are to be paid not less than £1, 5s. 0d.[86] An under rate
wage, for old, infirm or incompetent persons, may be fixed by the worker
concerned and the trade union, by the Chairman of the Conciliation Board
or by any person appointed by the Board. Such settlements of under rate
wages continue for only six months, and opportunity is given to the
union and to the applicant of “calling evidence and adducing arguments”
before the adjudicator. In the four districts to which this award
applies a tailoress, who is a “full hand” and a competent worker, can
now be sure that her week’s work will not be paid at a lower rate than
25s. a week. There is no prohibition of home work; but the home worker
must be paid at the established piece work rates, and an employer paying
less exposes himself to fines up to the sum of £100. Thus, in district
after district, and in trade after trade, a system has been established
which combines the apparently contradictory virtues of uniformity and
elasticity.
The scene of a sitting of the Court of Arbitration can easily be called
up from newspaper descriptions. The room is plain and not large. At the
upper end, between the two arbitrators, sits the judge in wig and gown.
Men and masters, easily distinguishable by differences of dress, manner
and speech, face each other across a table; in the body of the room
reporters and a sprinkling of spectators are gathered to listen. The
matter in hand is stated; then the representative of the men’s union or
of the associated masters sets forth the plea of his clients, no counsel
being employed except by agreement of both parties. The cost and the
duration of proceedings are, no doubt, both lessened by this provision;
and it is said that the unprofessional advocates on the two parts often
show remarkable ability in the conduct of the case.
In Victoria a different method of fixing a minimum wage has been
adopted; the method not of the Conciliation Board and Court of
Arbitration but of the Wage Board. The mechanism of the Wage Boards is
much more easily described and understood than that of the New Zealand
Boards and Court; and it is, no doubt, partly, though not wholly, upon
this account that advocates of the minimum wage are apt to propose the
Victorian rather than the New Zealand model for imitation. Personally,
however, considerable study of both plans has convinced me that the New
Zealand method is, in practice, the less cumbrous, and that it includes
features of great value that are lacking in the Victorian system.
Especially valuable seems to be the singular ease with which its
machinery can be brought to bear upon the poorest workers. Were the law
of New Zealand also the law of England I would myself engage to collect,
within six months, from each of half a dozen underpaid women’s trades
the seven workers necessary to form the required unions, and so to bring
these half dozen trades within the purview of a Conciliation Board. Such
Boards are established upon being asked for by a registered association
of workers (or of employers), whereas the Victorian Wage Boards can only
be established in any trade by a resolution of both Houses of
Parliament; and, on this side of the ocean at least, Parliaments are apt
to require much moving before they can be made to act.
In Melbourne, as in New Zealand, the first impulse towards the legal
fixing of a minimum wage came from a newspaper. That powerful organ, the
_Age_, for many years continued to print articles on the subject of
underpayment and bad conditions of work. A Royal Commission was
appointed and made a Report as early as 1884, but no practical reforms
were attempted. The _Age_ continued its crusade. In 1893 a Board of
Inquiry was appointed and the evidence taken by that body showed the
state of the workers in several trades to be deplorable. In 1895 an
Anti-Sweating League was formed and, finally, in 1896, a new Factory and
Shops Act was passed, of which the most remarkable clauses were those
dealing with the establishment of Wage Boards. Provision was made for
the appointment of special boards “to fix wages and piece work rates for
persons employed either inside or outside factories in making clothing
or wearing apparel or furniture, or in bread making or baking, or in the
business of a butcher or seller of meat.”[87]
Permission was also given by the Act for the appointment of similar
boards in other trades “provided a resolution has been passed by either
House[88] declaring it is expedient to appoint such a Board.”
These Boards consist of not less than four nor more than ten members,
half of whom are elected by employers and half by employees, or, failing
election, are appointed by the Governor in Council.
The methods by which the members of Wage Boards are elected is
extraordinarily cumbrous and could scarcely be imitated in any large
industrial community. The latest regulations for such elections (dated
Feb. 19, 1906) are embodied in no less than 28 clauses. In each
specified trade two electoral rolls must be prepared by the factory
inspectors, the one including names and addresses of all workers, the
other those of all employers. In order to facilitate the compilation of
this trade census, all employers are required to send to the inspectors
lists of the workpeople employed by them. Candidates must be nominated
by 10 employers or by 25 employees; and voting papers are printed
containing the names of all the candidates.
“The Chief Inspector shall cause every voting paper to be posted at
least four days prior to the date of such election to every elector
whose name and address is on the roll of electors for the special
board.” The elector must strike out the names of all but those
candidates for whom he desires to vote and must return the paper by 4
o’clock on the day of election. Imagine such a process as this in one of
our own ill paid trades! The workers in such trades are migratory in the
highest degree; by the time that the addresses of all qualified electors
had been collected, one third of them, at least, would have ceased to be
accurate. This fact alone would lead both to omissions and to
duplications. The clerical labour and postage would be so heavy as to be
a serious national expense; and the magnitude of the enumeration would
render its completion a work of time. I doubt whether a Board to deal
with any larger British trade could possibly be elected in less than a
twelvemonth; and even such expedition as this would demand the
employment of an extensive special staff.
The members of the Board, when it has at last been formed may elect an
outside chairman, and if they fail to do so, the Governor in Council may
appoint one. The Boards may fix “either wage rates or piece work rates,
or both; must also fix the hours for which the rate of wage is fixed and
rate of pay for overtime.” They may also fix the proportions of
apprentices and improvers to be employed; and may “determine that
manufacturers may be allowed to fix piece work rates based on the
minimum wage.... The Chief Inspector may, however, challenge any rate so
paid, and the employer may have to justify it before the Board.” The
power to grant a licence to any aged or infirm worker to work at less
than the established minimum wage rests with the Chief Inspector.
The first Boards were only six in number. Several of these had much
difficulty in arriving at a “Determination.” The Men’s and Boys’
Clothing Board, for instance, occupied nine months in drawing up theirs,
and finally established both time and piece rates. With the idea of
compensating the home worker for incidental expenses and loss of time,
the piece work rates were fixed a shade higher than the time rate—with
the result that employers ceased to send work out. In other instances
where there has been no such difference, the compulsion to pay home
workers at something near a living wage has tended in the same
direction.
Though the number of Boards was steadily enlarged, the legislation
allowing their formation was for some years persistently held as
experimental, and not until 1904, after eight years of experience were
they made a permanent part of the law of Victoria.
There were at the end of 1905—the latest date for which the Report of
the Factory Inspectors is available—38 Boards the determinations of
which were in force. The wages and conditions fixed by these Boards vary
to a remarkable decree, and it is to be regretted that the smallest
advances seem in general to have been granted in the worst paid trades.
In some cases the established minimum for a competent adult worker is
sadly low. For instance the female chocolate coverer of over 21 has a
minimum of only 17s. weekly, while her fellow worker who is under 21 but
over 18 may be paid as little as 14s. a week. The minimum for a youth of
the same age is also 14s. but the adult male chocolate coverer (a person
whom I have never found in England) must be paid not less than 30s.[89]
Worse still is the case of the jam trade in which the minimum for
“females of 18 years and upwards” is but 14s.[90] Such determinations as
these point to a desire on the part of the Board rather to prevent a
further drop of wages than to effect a rise to what may be esteemed a
“living wage.” Still, even to arrest the downward course is a step in
the right direction, and the example of the millinery trade, in which
there is no Board, shows that the jam maker at 14s. is probably better
off than she would be were there no determination at all in her trade.
Miss Cuthbertson reports that in 1901 the average wage for milliners was
11s. 4d. per week per individual. “In 1902 the average fell to 11s. 1d.;
in 1903 to 10s. 4d.; in 1904 to 9s. 10d.;—and possibly this year will
witness a further fall.”[91] Yet the trade steadily grows, the number of
persons employed rising from 758 in 1901 to 1410 in 1904.
Dressmakers, however, who work under a determination, average 12s.
3d.[92] The determination in this trade did not come into force until
September 1904; and in 1903 the average wage of dressmakers in Victoria
was 11s. 11d. These averages, of course, include apprentices and
learners. The established minimum for a competent dressmaker is now 16s.
per week.[93]
This contrast serves to suggest how valuable has been the influence of
the Boards in checking the fall of wages. An average weekly difference
of half a crown between the wages of dressmakers and of milliners would
scarcely have arisen of itself, especially in a comparatively small
industrial community. Some Boards have evidently been timid; and some
have shown—to put the matter mildly—no strong desire to approximate the
wages of women to those of men engaged in very similar work. The
difference between 17s. and 30s. in the case of chocolate coverers may
serve as an instance. On the other hand, the Bootmaking Board and the
Brushmaking Board have courageously enacted that women employed in
certain branches shall have “the same rate as males.” Thus a woman in
the bootmaking trade who is engaged in “making, finishing or clicking
(but not skiving or trimming) insides or outsides or stuff cutting by
hand” must receive a minimum of 40s. a week; while for women in some
other branches of the same industry the minimum is fixed at 20s.[94]
The Brushmaking determination, even bolder, runs thus: “Any females
employed in any of the above classes of work to be paid at the same
rates as males.” These rates vary from a minimum of 21s. a week to one
of 64s.[95]
Even the lowest of these minima would be an advance of at least 25% on
the wages of most home working brushmakers in London. In Victoria the
average throughout the whole trade was, in 1905, £1, 9s. 2d.[96]
Some Boards have been less successful than others. The mingled
ignorance, astuteness and bland mendacity of the Chinese furniture
makers appear to have baffled the Furniture Board, as far as the Chinese
department of the trade is concerned; and as the figures quoted show,
the minimum fixed in some women’s trades is far too low. But, looking at
the Report of the Chief Inspector—a most interesting document—it seems
impossible to doubt that the Boards have, in trade after trade, both
arrested the fall of wages and (not always but often) effected a rise.
No doubt the determinations are sometimes evaded; so, in our own
country, are the Factory Acts sometimes evaded, yet the general
influence for good of the Factory Acts is no longer a matter of doubt.
That neither the Industrial Arbitration Act nor the Wage Boards have by
their action checked the trade of the colonies in which they exist seems
to be established beyond question. The Wage Boards, without any other
prohibitory effort, seem by the mere process of forbidding underpayment
to have imposed a check upon the most unsatisfactory sorts of home work.
As M. Aftalion has pointed out, home work, in large part, subsists
solely on account of its evils. Work given out only because it might be
sweated naturally ceases to be given out when sweating is stopped. On
the other hand, home work of a better kind, the home work that is
harmful neither to the worker nor to the community, is not checked
merely by a provision that it shall be properly paid. While it is very
desirable that no person shall work at home for very poor pay or under
very bad conditions, it is emphatically not desirable that no person
whatever shall be allowed to work at home for money. Miss Thear, one of
the Victorian inspectors, reports a considerable decrease in home work
in the shirt trade, the tasks formerly performed by outdoor hands “and
in some cases by elderly women who are now recipients of the old age
pension” are now being performed in the factories by herring-boning,
button-hole and button sewing machines. “In addition to getting the old
age pension and going to work inside of factories, other means of
employment seem to have opened up for others who were formerly out
workers. Some have boarded-out children to care for, and some are
registered under the Infant Life Protection Act.”[97]
Miss Cuthbertson, on the same page, says: “The tendency in all trades is
to get the work done in factories, where the supervision is closer, and
where, with improved machinery, work can be turned out much more
cheaply.” The minimum wage law has, in fact, hastened the course of that
development upon which most trades, and the clothing trades, perhaps,
especially, had already entered.
Legislation of a similar character to that of the sister colonies has
been established in New South Wales, and the kindness of friends in
Sydney has supplied me with much matter published and unpublished; but,
after careful consideration, I have decided not to attempt any account
of the minimum wage law of New South Wales. The reasons for this
abstention are twofold. In the first place the Act is but five years
old, and its history, therefore, is far less instructive than that of
the legislation in New Zealand and in Victoria. In the second place the
accounts received point some one way and some another, so that it is
difficult to draw from them any plain conclusion. I am well aware that
by passing over the case of New South Wales I expose myself to the
accusation of adducing only the favourable examples and of disregarding
those that have not succeeded. To this it may fairly be replied that
although the New South Wales law has not apparently fully succeeded,
neither has it entirely failed. It is still in a stage of probation, and
therefore of far less value to the student than such laws as have
progressed beyond that stage. Moreover, even if it were true—as most
emphatically it is not—that the Colonial experiments had all completely
failed, it would by no means follow that to devise a successful minimum
wage law was a task beyond the wit of man.
In fact, however, both forms of minimum wage law—the Arbitration Court
and the Wage Boards—have demonstrably helped to raise wages and to
diminish underpayment within their jurisdiction. The Industrial
Arbitration Act, in particular, is a very remarkable piece of
constructive legislation, the full scope of which will probably be more
and more perceptible with the development of the land to which it
belongs. Its balance, its wide applicability, the simplicity and
promptitude of its working deserve to be better comprehended. The Wage
Board, by comparison, lacks originality, flexibility and ease.
Both examples have great value for British students; yet it does not
follow that either, in precisely its Colonial form, is altogether suited
to the industrial needs of Britain. A prejudice against compulsory
arbitration—a prejudice which I venture to think rests in some degree
upon imperfect comprehension of the New Zealand law—is strong among
British trade unionists, and the work of dispelling this would be long
and arduous. On the other hand, the comparative slowness and
cumbrousness of the Wage Board system and the absence of any means by
which the workers can claim the help of the Board are features only too
much in accord with English inertness and officialdom. It seems much to
be desired that, if Wage Boards should come to be created in this
country, the appointment of them should be effected in the same manner
as the appointment of the New Zealand Conciliation Boards: i.e., on the
request of seven or more associated workers; and it is quite imperative
that some simpler and less costly method of choosing the representatives
of labour and of capital, respectively, should be devised. To establish
in this country a system which proved to be almost unworkable or of
which the machinery moved so slowly as to be always in arrear of actual
conditions would tend to promote rather than to abate the evil of
sweating.
CHAPTER V
FOREIGN COMPETITION
High wages and high prices not necessarily connected—Effect of
increased wages in different groups of trades—Trades in which
there is a margin for increase—Varying wages in the same
trade—Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Society’s shirt
factory—Trades in which higher wages would lead to improved
methods—Displacement of workers—Cheapened production—Increased
demand and increased employment—Trades in which higher wages would
lead to higher prices—Foreign legislation against sweating—Effect
of higher wages upon home market—Valuelessness to the country of
very ill paid trades—The two lines along which trade may
develop—The line of cheap labour—Consequences to the British
worker—The line of good work—Summing up.
The foregoing chapters will have been written in vain if they have not
succeeded in showing that there is no necessary connection between high
wages and high selling prices; but that, on the contrary, high wages, in
the great majority of cases, actually conduce to cheap production. Were
this invariably the case, it is obvious that a general rise of wages,
far from encouraging foreign competition, would rather form a barrier
against it. And this, in fact, would be—as it is in some instances
already—the case in many trades.
It may be well briefly to consider the various groups of cases that
would arise in consequence of a general rise in the remuneration of
labour. There exists, in the first place, a considerable group of trades
in which, for similar work in respect of goods sold at the same price,
different employers pay very different rates of wage. A very remarkable
instance is furnished, in one of the worst paid trades, by the shirt
factory of the Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Society. In that
establishment, turning out goods for working class customers, women have
for years received about double the wages of the average home working
shirt maker, they not providing, as does she, the sewing cotton used. In
October 1906 the average wage paid to workers in this factory was 18s.
3d. per week, and their week was one of 44 hours.[98] Yet the factory
pays and has done so for many years.[99]
It is therefore clear that even in the ready made shirt trade it is
possible to pay reasonably good wages, to compete with the “sweater,”
and yet to make a profit. Thus the enforcement of a minimum weekly wage
very near the level of Mr Maxwell’s 18s. 3d. would neither kill the
trade nor stimulate the importation of foreign shirts. It would merely
impose upon other employers that standard of management and methods
which Mr Maxwell has chosen voluntarily to adopt. Those employers who
lacked intelligence or flexibility to carry on a factory on these terms
would, it is true, be driven out of business; but their customers would
not cease to buy nor to be supplied at the old price. The only change
would be that none of us would, any longer, be buying shirts at which
some woman had sewn, as Hood said,
“with a double thread
At once a shirt and a shroud.”
There are other groups of trades in which the history of the cotton
trade would be repeated, that is to say, the employer who found himself
compelled to pay higher wages would at once introduce better
machinery—either in the narrow sense of actual appliances or in the
wider sense of improved organisation and management. Such an employer
would also, as the cotton masters have done, demand better work from his
employees, and would get it. At first there might be a diminution in the
number of hands employed; but if, as almost always happens, the improved
methods led to a considerable reduction in the cost of production and
consequently to a lowered selling price, demand would immediately
increase, and more workers would again be wanted. There is no reason in
the nature of things why a rise of wages and a powerful labour
organisation should not do for the silk trade and the woollen trade of
Britain what they have already done for the cotton trade.
In the first group of these trades, then, no workers would be displaced,
and the conditions of the market would remain unaltered; in the second,
there would, at first, probably be a displacement and afterwards,
probably, a renewed, or even an increased demand for workers.
We come next to a group of trades which may exist, but of the existence
of which I personally am somewhat sceptical. These are the trades in
which there is neither margin of profit nor room for improvements that
might make up for the additional outlay upon heightened wages. In these
trades—if such there be—it is undeniable that if British wages rose
while foreign wages remained stationary the foreigner would be extremely
likely to capture the market.
But there are various matters that must be set down upon the other side
of the account. To begin with, our foreign competitors are themselves
uneasy about the existence of sweating within their borders. It is
almost certain that German legislation directed against this evil will
precede legislation in this country; while in America, as may indeed be
judged by the quotations from recent American books that appear in these
pages, there are many persons much concerned with the problem of
underpaid labour. If our foreign competitors should keep step with
ourselves in the prohibition of extreme underpayment, the balance of
international trade would be in no way disturbed. Nay, if only Germany
should do so, the disturbance to the English market would not be
serious.
Moreover, the payment of high wages to working people has, in itself, a
beneficial effect upon the home market. Some people write and speak as
though money when it once passed into the hands of a wage earner passed
out of existence. But in fact it almost always returns very quickly into
active circulation and thus quickens the national turnover. As a general
rule a workman, when his wages rise, spends his extra money upon
additional comfort for himself and his family; buys more and better
food, more and better clothes, more and better furniture; often he moves
to a better dwelling and almost always he extends his recreations. The
chances are that he will spend something in belonging to a club or a
friendly society. He will not, however, as his enemies are fond of
asserting, generally drink more; it is to the man who lives with his
family in one room, not to the man who has a comfortable parlour, that
the public-house looks so attractive. We may say without much doubt that
these will be his modes of expenditure because we have among us plenty
of well paid artisans, and observation teaches that these are in fact
the ways in which they spend their money. Now, many of these channels of
expenditure are practically not open to foreign competition. Bread for
English eating must be baked in English bakehouses: milk is not yet
imported: the retail shopkeeper, the bricklayer, the omnibus driver and
the railway servant must follow their avocations on the hither side of
the sea. The better paid worker thus, without any premeditation or
patriotic design, tends, by the mere process of buying what he wants, to
set his fellow countrymen working. It is quite possible that the
increase of demand thus created would more than counterbalance the loss
of any trade the retention of which depends upon the continuance of
underpayment. Nor is this all. It is a question whether any trade in
such a condition is either worth keeping or capable of being kept. An
experienced employer who is at the head of a large and successful
enterprise writes to me: “Broadly speaking, I am convinced that an
occupation which does not admit of a decent living wage is an occupation
we are better without and one which in due time will die. I mean that
the requirements of the Factories and Workshops Act must kill it. A
trade which can only live by means of inadequate wages and cheap squalid
unhealthy buildings is doomed.” Such a trade while it still endures is
not really a source of national profit. The workers whose lives it
drains, not being supported by the price paid for their labour, must
come eventually to be partly or wholly supported by other people. They
are, in fact, a national burden, whether the charge is nominally borne
by the State or by private citizens. Poverty, dirt and disease are very
costly to the country in which they prevail; and they are inevitable
results of underpayment.
We may seek the development of our trade along either of two lines—we
may aim either at underselling our competitors or at surpassing them. If
we elect to take the line of cheapness, and also determine to seek that
cheapness by paying very low wages, we must confine ourselves to goods
that demand neither very high skill nor very elaborate machinery. But
these are precisely the sort of goods that can best be produced by
nations upon a lower level than ourselves, by peasants and by dwellers
in genial climates where comparatively little food and clothing and
practically no heating are required. With workers such as these we can
never compete on equal terms, and we should be wiser not to try. We can
never bring down an Englishman to the standards of the Chinaman or of
the Hindoo. But we can, in making the attempt, create among ourselves a
class of helots, degraded labour slaves, living on a level that shocks
our national conscience. To do this is to keep open a sore in our midst
and to run a constant risk of those revolts and disturbances which are
the greatest possible danger and interruption to the regular course of
trade—a greater danger perhaps than that of being undersold by
foreigners. For the long-suffering of the English poor, though amazing,
is not probably quite unlimited. No national life can be stable while
large numbers of the people live in great misery. The best safeguard of
national peace is a general distribution of comfort and independence.
And the safest paths towards this state of security are good education
and good payment for the workers. Low wages lead by a path of
intolerable suffering to an inevitable downfall. On the ascending path
too there may be dangers—but they are the less dangers, and they will be
faced by citizens fitter to meet them.
After all, even Great Britain cannot expect to hold all the trade of the
world. What she may expect, what she can have if she will, is the
commercial leadership of the world. She may show in other departments,
as she has shown in cotton and in iron, that her race can produce the
best workers living, and the best organisers of work; and she can
continue the great lesson which others have learned from her history,
but which she herself does not always remember, the lesson that, other
things being equal, that nation becomes wealthiest which pays its
workers best. Health, skill, intelligence: these are the true bulwarks
of national prosperity; and the price of these is liberal payment for
labour. Nor does the prosperity which rests upon these things injure
those neighbouring nations amid which it develops. Rivalry upon the
up-grade educates and improves all alike; rivalry upon the down-grade
injures and degrades all, but not all alike. In that competition the
nation suffers most whose standards are highest.
To sum up in a few words: in many trades, wages could be raised out of
profits without change of selling price; in some a rise of wages would
lead to improvements of method, to cheapening of production and probably
to a fall of selling price; in some, though probably not in many, a rise
of wages would necessitate a rise of prices; and of these there may be
some (it is not proved that there are) the retention of which absolutely
depends upon the payment of excessively low wages.[100]
In regard to the first two groups, which together cover the greater part
of the industrial field, improved payment at home would certainly give
no advantage to the foreign competitor and might in some cases rather be
disadvantageous to him.
In the other group, a rise of wages would probably, wherever the nature
of the industry admitted of importation, lead to an increase of
importation as against home production.
But in cases where the continuance of a trade actually depends upon
aggravated underpayment the trade is shown, by that very fact, to be
already in a declining state, and unable to support its own cost; and no
trade that is in a declining state and that offers no possibility of
bettered conditions can be regarded as a valuable national asset. On the
other hand, of every additional shilling paid in wages, at least
sixpence is spent in employing British labour, so that if, owing to a
general rise of wages, we were to lose entirely the third and lesser
group of industries, we should still enjoy a greater volume of trade
than before wages were raised.
Thus, when we look it squarely in the face, we perceive that the bogie
of foreign competition is a bogie indeed; and that British workers well
paid would have less ground than British workers ill paid to fear that
their trade would be taken from them.
CHAPTER VI
GAIN TO THE NATION
Desirability of better pay to the underpaid—Report of
Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration—Its hopeful
side—No degenerate class—Physical and mental effects of poverty on
the individual—The better paid artisan—Conclusion.
If, then, without seriously diminishing the trade of the country or the
volume of employment, it is possible gradually to raise the wage of all
ill paid workers to a level that will allow them something like a
civilised existence, how desirable and how urgent is legislation that
will bring about this result. No person, indeed, disputes the
desirability of the change; the only point in question is its
feasibility. To prove that the change is feasible and is impossible to
be effected except by law has been the whole purpose of this volume.
Now, in these last pages, it may be permissible to glance at the immense
gain to the nation that would arise from a general increase in the pay
of such British workers as are now grossly underpaid.
Physically, no person familiar with the poorer quarters of any
industrial district can doubt that such workers are suffering seriously.
The whole report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration is little more than a report of the results of extreme
poverty. Amid the accumulation of melancholy facts, however, is to be
found evidence of a most hopeful kind. In our own country, at least, its
seems to be true that the physical deterioration which comes of poverty
(as distinguished from that which comes of vice) is rather personal than
hereditary, and that the starved child will regain health and normality
amid better conditions; so that even in a single generation any group of
British people suffering from the effects of poverty may be restored to
the average standard of the race if properly fed, properly clothed,
properly housed, not overworked, and allowed plenty of air. The higher
death rate, the inferior physique, the poorer vitality of the ill paid
mark tendencies not inborn but acquired, all of which might and would
disappear with the diminution of poverty and of that ignorance which is
one outcome of poverty, and also, by reaction, one of the contributory
causes of poverty. Degeneracy exists; but not a degenerate class; the
class which we sometimes call degenerate is, as a class, merely starved.
In short all that waste of human life, of human energy and of human
happiness which is going on daily around us and is causing to the
country a daily loss heavier than that of any campaign, is neither
inevitable nor incurable. This misery might be sensibly diminished
within three years, and might be ended within the lifetime of children
already born.
Nor is it the body alone that suffers the deterioration of poverty. The
underfed brain too, remains stunted; and to be constantly hungry is to
be constantly apathetic. Lassitude, inertia, the mental dulness that
knows no pleasure except of the senses, no personal initiative and no
activity save in response to external stimulus, these are the
characteristics of the adult whose childhood has been passed in
overcrowded rooms, whose food has been insufficient, his clothing
inadequate, and to whom no wider horizons have ever been opened. Such an
individual knows nothing of the real joys of life; he is a valueless
citizen, consuming more than he produces, a poor worker, and even when
not personally vicious, an influence rather towards degradation than
towards progress.
But taken early enough and fed, clothed and housed like the children of
the better paid artisan, the same man might have become healthy of body
and alert of mind; a reader of books, a player of outdoor games, a
skilled craftsman taking delight in his good work, a citizen rendering
intelligent public service, a parent of healthy hopeful children,
enjoying and creating prosperity. There are hundreds of such men among
the superior artisans of this country. It has been my lot to know many
of them, and it is my belief that on the whole they and their families
form the happiest, the most valuable and the best conducted portion of
our nation. To bring up into that class those compatriots of theirs and
ours who now, by no fault of their own, suffer not only the privations
but also the degradations of extreme poverty is no impossible feat, and
would be the greatest possible of national services. Happily there are
signs of a growing public desire to remedy the appalling evils vaguely
summarised under the word “sweating,” and of a growing inclination to
seek the remedy along the lines of endeavour marked out by our colonial
brethren.
In the earnest hope that such an endeavour may be made, quickly, yet not
hastily, by the law of Great Britain, and that these chapters may as
soon as possible become out of date, I offer to my fellow countrymen the
conclusions gradually shaped in my own mind by nearly twenty years of
work among industrial problems.
INDEX
Adler: Miss Nettie, 108, 123, 124
Aftalion: A., 2, 255
Alien immigration, 197
America: Children’s work in, 115, 119–122, 128;
“sweating” in, 143;
a living wage in, 149–151;
low cost of production, 184;
cotton trade, 221;
child labour in cotton mills, 226;
southern states, 227
Anti-Sweating league: in Melbourne, 247
Apprentices, parish: Act of, 218
Arbitration Courts in New Zealand, 235, 236
Army and Navy Stores, 176, 177
Australia: wage board in Victoria, 246;
in Melbourne, 247;
minimum wage in Melbourne, 251;
legislation in New South Wales, 257
Babies’ shoe making, 105
Bake houses: boys working in, 109
Ball covering, 15
Bird cage making, 14
Boot finishing, 15
Boot making, 105
Booth: Chas., 6, 65, 148, 155, 201
Bosanquet: Mrs, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159
Box making: children’s work, 106
Brickfields: children working in, 110
Cabmen, 76
Cabs and Omnibuses Bill: report of select committee, 82, 83, 97
Cadbury: Edward, 3
“Case for the Factory Acts: The,” 114
Chapman: Prof. S. J., 220
“Child Labour” (_No. 93, Annals_ _of American Academy_), 119 120–122,
125, 128–130
Children: as home workers, 104;
unpunctual at school through home work, 105;
babies’ shoe making, 105, 108;
dodging educational authorities, 106;
working all night, 106;
match box making, 106, 108;
string bag making, 107;
tooth brush making, 107;
kid belt making, 107;
wood chopping, 107;
wood polishing, 107;
steel covering, 108;
fish basket sewing, 108;
in small laundries, 108;
half timers, 112;
errand boys, 108;
Saturday and evening boys, 108;
barbers’ lather boys, 108;
matching girls, 109;
street trading, 109;
their labour of little use to them later in life, 109;
boys working in bake houses, 109;
in brick-fields, 110;
heavy loads, 110–111;
in textile trades, 110–111, 112;
in the potteries, 114;
general remarks on child labour, 140
Civil Service Stores, 177
Clerks and Bookkeepers, 71, 138
Committee on wage-earning children, 108
Competition, free: its effect upon labour, 166;
checks upon, 195
Confectionery, 29, 32, 110
Consumers: Associations of, 176
Consumers’ League, A: impractibility of, 205–211;
in America, 210;
influence on public opinion, 210
Co-operation: Industrial, 176, 177, 180
Co-operative Stores, 201, 202
Co-operative Union, 180
Cost of labour: recognition of its true cost, 173
Cotton mills: children’s work, 110–111, 112–113
Cotton trade: not natural to Britain, 214–217;
condition of workers in 1830, 217;
prosperity increased under higher wages, 219;
in Bristol, 227
“Cotton Trade Circular,” 222
Cotton workers: educational improvement of, 225
Crabtree: Mr, Inspector of Factories, 221
Cuthbertson: Miss, Inspector of Factories, Victoria, 256
_Daily News_, 59, 60
_Daily News_: Sweated Industries Exhibition, 10, 18, 142, 148
Danger of Fire, 35
Dockers’ Union, 135
Dressmaking, 29, 32
Drink and Poverty: some facts about, 198;
lessened by shorter hours, 200
Early marriages: reason for, among working class, 197
Economy of high wages, 165, 184, 228
Edgworth: Maria, 115
Education: effect of child labour on, 125
Efficiency: remarks on, 158
Emigration, 196, 211
Employers: responsibility for strikes, 184;
duty to pay a fair wage, 187;
in cotton trade, 225;
in Bristol, 227
Errand boys, 108;
Saturday and evening workers, 108;
barbers’ lather boys, 108
Factories: reports of chief inspector, 25, 29, 32, 37, 38, 39, 109–111,
221;
in Australia, 252–254, 256
Factory Acts: beneficial effects, 181, 188, 194, 224, 267;
in Australia, 247;
evasion of, 255
Factory girls: an appreciation of, 134;
manners of, 136;
code of honour, 137
Factory work: general remarks on, 133
Factory workers: their condition compared with home workers, 23, 46
Fair wage, a: what is a fair wage, 161;
pessimist view, 212–214
Fines and deductions, 39, 41, 54
Fish basket sewing, 108
Foreign Competition: effect on a minimum wage, 271
Free Libraries, 225
_Free Trade League_, 220
Gaskell: P, 217
Germany, 143;
cotton trade in, 221;
possibility of legislation to curtail sweating, 264, 265
Gissing: Geo., 72
Glass works in America, 120–121
_Guardian: The_, 210
Half timers, 112
Health: of home workers, 17;
of factory workers, 25;
of shop assistants, 55;
of child workers, 115, 121–125
Heavy loads, 110–111
High wages and cheap production, 260
“Historical Development of the Factory Acts,” 114
Hogg: Mrs, 18, 118
Home Industries for women: report on, 2
Home Office enquiry, 125
Home work: report on, 2;
in Birmingham, 3;
match box making, 3;
shirt making, 10;
paper-bag making, 11;
toy making, 13;
pipe making, 13;
bird cage making, 14;
weaving, 14;
boot finishing, 15, 105;
ball covering, 15;
tooth brush making, 18, 20;
miscellaneous trades, 21
Home workers: Condition of, 17;
general remarks on, 132;
impossibility of organisation, 186
Hours of work: piece work, 16;
long hours in factories, 29, 30, 31;
shop assistants, 53, 58;
in Scotland, 66;
waitresses, 69;
railway men, 77;
omnibus men, 83;
motor omnibus men, 92;
children’s hours of work at home, 108;
in tin works, 110;
work at home after closing hours, 188;
women in textile trades, 218
House of Lords Committee on Early Closing of Shops, 68
Hutchins: Miss B. L., 114
Industrial efficiency: effect of Child Labour on, 130–131;
caused by fair wages, 227
Industrial Unions of New Zealand, 234
Ireland: copartnership in, 179
Ironing, 108
Irwin: Miss, 3, 17, 66, 67, 68, 69
Jackman: Marshall, 124, 125
Jam-making. _See_ Confectionery
Jarvis family: History of, 7
Johnson: Dr, 157
“Juvenile wage earners and their work,” 108, 123
Kelley: Mrs Florence, 120, 125, 129
Kid belt making, 107
Labour and other commodities: difference in essence between, 171
Labour co-partnerships, 176;
in Ireland, 179
Laundries: long hours in, 31
Laundry work, 108
Lead poisoning: risk of, 37
Legislation for a minimum wage: need of, 272
Living wage: estimate of, 149
London County Council: as employer, 100;
contrasted with private companies, 101;
bye-laws relating to child labour, 119, 124;
Medical Officer’s report, 123
_Longman’s Magazine_, 206
MacDonald: J. Ramsay, 65
Manchester physicians’ report on child labour in 1784, 112
“Manufacturing population of England,” 217
Martindale: Miss, Inspector of Factories, 111
Match box making, 3, 7;
child workers, 106
Matching girls, 109
Matheson: M. Cécile, 3
Maxwell: Mr, Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Society, 261, 262
Maxwell: W. B., 72
_Melbourne Age: The_; crusade against sweating, 247
Minimum wage: legislation in New Zealand, 231–246;
in Australia, 246–258;
practicability of legislation in England, 258–259;
effect of a minimum wage, 271
Miscellaneous trades, 21
Mitchell: John, 149–151
Moral aspect of shop assistant’s life, 72
Moral effect of child labour, 127–131
Nail and chain making, 12
National Anti-Sweating League, 261
National aspect of better conditions, 192
National income, 195
National Union of Shop Assistants, etc., 55
New Zealand: state arbitration, 231–239;
industrial unions of, 234;
arbitration court, 235, 236;
wages in, 244
Non-competitive systems, 176
Non-producers, 195
Novels: showing shop assistant’s life, 72
Old age pension: in Australia, 256
Omnibus men: drivers and conductors; licences, 81;
wages, 83;
expenses, 83;
liability for accidents, 85;
drivers and conductors of motor omnibuses;
hours of work, 92;
wages, 92;
breakdowns, 94;
uniform, 98;
spies, 99;
general remarks, 140, 143, 164
“Organised labour,” 151
Ormsby: Sir Lambert, 124
Over population, 195
Packing and filling: cocoa, 25;
tea, 26;
jam, 26;
cartridges, 26
Paper-bag making, 11, 24
Payment, _See_ Wages
Peel: Sir Robert, 114
Physical deterioration, 273
Pipe making, 13
Potteries: children working in, 114
Poverty: investigations into, 148–149;
physical and mental effects on the individual, 273–274
Railway workers: hours, 77;
porters’ wages, 77;
“blacklisting,” 78;
general remarks on, 140, 164
Reeves, W. Pember, 231, 233, 237, 239, 248
Rochdale pioneers, 178
Romilly: Sir Samuel, 113
Rowntree: Seebohm, 148, 149
Ryan: Father, 149, 151
Sanitary Acts: competition checked by, 181, 191, 194
Sanitary conditions: of factories, 33;
shop assistants’ quarters, 58;
high standard in cotton factories, 223
Schoenhof: J., 131, 165, 184, 228
Scottish Council for Women’s Trades, 3, 126
Scottish Wholesale Co-operative Society, 261
Shann: Geo., M.A., 3
Shirt making, 10, 144
Shop assistants: living in, 48;
code of rules, 54;
wages, 60;
“premiums,” 60;
commissions, 62;
condition in Scotland, 66;
general remarks, 138
Small: Prof. Albion, 149
Spiers & Pond, Ltd., 70
Squire, Miss: Inspector of Factories, 35, 36
State arbitration in New Zealand, 231;
success of, 239
Steel covering, 108
Street trading by children, 109
Strikes, 183, 184;
in the colonies, 232
String bag making, 107
“Sweating”: definition of the term, 1;
not confined to cheap goods, 22, 142;
general remarks, 132, 143;
not unknown in the colonies, 230;
a source of weakness to nations, 266–269
Tailoring, 29;
wages in New Zealand, 244
Tariff Commission, 220, 225, 226
Tattersall: Mr W., 222
Temperance, 198, 211
Temperature: extremes of, 40;
in cotton factories, 223–224
Textile trades: Children’s work, 110–111, 112–113
Thear: Miss, Inspector of Factories, Victoria, 256
Thomas: Dr, 123
Thrift among working classes, 201;
not advisable, 202–205
Tooth brush making, 18, 20, 107
Toy making, 12
Trade unions, 182, 184;
mistakes of, 185;
as provident societies, 201, 202;
in cotton trade, 225, 226;
lack of trade organisation in Bristol cotton mills, 227, 228;
in New Zealand, 237
Underpaid worker: cost to the nation, 170–171
Underpayment: how it comes about, 144–160;
not caused by inefficiency, 159
United States: _see_ America
Ventilation, 224
Verney, Mr: Inspector of Factories, 222
Vines, Miss: Inspector of Factories, 31, 37
Wages: match box making, 5, 7;
shirt making, 10, 144–145;
paper-bag making, 12;
toy making, 13;
clay pipe making, 14;
ball covering, 16;
brush making, 20;
miscellaneous trades, 21;
packing and filling, 23, 26, 27, 28;
machinists, 41;
shop assistants, 60;
waitresses, 70;
female clerks and bookkeepers, 71;
railway porters, 77;
omnibus men, 83;
motor omnibus men, 92;
children’s wages for home work, 105–106;
wages, how determined, 152;
what is a fair wage, 161;
articles of dress, 188;
textile workers, 218–219;
tailoresses in New Zealand, 244;
factory wages in Australia, 252–254;
high wages and cheap production, 260–261
Waitresses: in restaurants, 67;
in railway stations, 68;
hours of work, 67, 68;
expenses of, 69;
general remarks on, 138
Washing appliances, 37
Watts: Alderman; of Manchester, 123
Weaving, 14
Webb: Catherine, 176
Webb: Mrs Sydney, 114
Wells: H. G., 72
Whiteley’s, Ltd.: William, 54
Women in the printing trades, 65
_Women’s Co-operative Guild_, 180
“Women’s employment in shops,” 67, 69
_Women’s Industrial Council_, 2, 3, 6, 7, 17, 56, 72, 188, 189
“Women’s work and wages,” 3, 39, 65
Women workers: difficulty of organisation, 185, 186
Wood chopping, 107
Wood polishing, 107
Woodward: S. W., 130
Work done below cost price, 164
Worth: meanings of, 162
Zola: E., 72
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
-----
Footnote 1:
A. Aftalion, “Le developpement de la fabrique et le travail à domicile
dans les industries de l’habillement.” Paris. Librairie du recueil J.
B. Sirey et du Journal du Palais.
Footnote 2:
“Home Industries of Women in London.” Report of an Inquiry in
thirty-five trades.
Footnote 3:
“Women’s Work and Wages.” A phase of life in an industrial city. By
Edward Cadbury, M. Cécile Matheson and George Shann, M.A.
Footnote 4:
Handbook to the Exhibition, p. 139.
Footnote 5:
Mrs F. G. Hogg was one of the most valued members of the Women’s
Industrial Council. Her ability, judgment, perseverance, and devotion
were all admirable, and her early death has left in the memories of
those who worked with her a blank that can never be filled up.
Footnote 6:
Report of the Chief Inspector, 1905, pp. 297–98.
Footnote 7:
A friend has just sent me a note of a similar case, that of a
cartridge filler, who received 1d. for filling 1000 cartridges. She
said that she could fill 25,000 a day, when busy. “But,” adds my
friend, “she is a physical wreck, having worked at this for ten
years.”
Footnote 8:
Report of the Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 50.
Footnote 9:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 99.
Footnote 10:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 300.
Footnote 11:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 302.
Footnote 12:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 290.
Footnote 13:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 34.
Footnote 14:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 292.
Footnote 15:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 293.
Footnote 16:
Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 280.
Footnote 17:
The article from which this is an extract was published (in the _New
Review_) in September 1891; but the practices described, are, I fear,
not yet extinct, though the law is succeeding by degrees in making
them risky.
Footnote 18:
“Life in the Shop.” A series of articles reprinted from the _Daily
Chronicle_, pp. 5 and 6.
Footnote 19:
The National Union of Shop Assistants, Clerks, and Warehousemen, now
growing very powerful, and guided by able, experienced and energetic
officials, has of late done much towards inducing employers to abolish
or diminish some of their fines.
Footnote 20:
A peculiarly shocking example of the abuses that may arise from a
system of fining was lately brought to my knowledge. It is not recent,
and must, I think and hope, be unique. I have found no witness who has
ever heard of a similar instance. Of its truth, however, the source
from which it comes forbids doubt. These are the facts. In a certain
retail shop selling drapery and fancy goods the foreman, whose
business it apparently was to collect fines, was required to make up a
fixed sum of money from this source every week; and being a man with
wife and children, afraid above all things of being left without
employment, was accustomed to inflict sufficient fines to make up this
total. Two girls, whose weekly wage of 11s. he had thus reduced, on
one occasion, to 4s., took to evil courses; and the foreman when dying
(in a hospital) told a lady visitor the circumstances, and said that
he felt himself responsible for the downfall of the girls. The lady
(an experienced worker in a girls’ club) made enquiries, which
confirmed the startling tale. She followed up the girls, reclaimed one
and put her into respectable employment, but failed with the other and
was unable to keep sight of her.
Footnote 21:
These cases are taken from the reports of an investigator employed
some years ago by the Women’s Industrial Council. This lady, who was
an experienced assistant, spent over two years in passing from shop to
shop, remaining long enough in each to obtain complete information as
to wages, conditions, food, rules, etc.
Footnote 22:
_Daily News_, 25th August, 1906. Letter signed “Onesimus.”
Footnote 23:
Women’s Work and Wages, p. 47, note.
Footnote 24:
Edited by J. Ramsay MacDonald. P. S. King & Son.
Footnote 25:
Women’s Employment in Shops. Report of an enquiry conducted for the
National Federal Council of Scotland for Women’s Trades; by Margaret
Irwin, p. 7.
Footnote 26:
Women Shop Assistants. The evidence given by Miss Irwin before the
Select Committee of the House of Lords on Early Closing of Shops, p.
5.
Footnote 27:
Women’s Employment in Shops, p. 6.
Footnote 28:
Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis)
Bill, 1906, p. 5, par. 31.
Footnote 29:
As these terms may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers, it may be
as well to explain that, on a time and a half rate, every penny of the
ordinary wage becomes a penny-halfpenny; and that, on a time and a
quarter rate, every such penny becomes a penny-farthing.
Footnote 30:
Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis)
Bill, 1906, p. 4, par. 19.
Footnote 31:
Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis)
Bill, 1906, p. 4, par. 19.
Footnote 32:
Juvenile wage earners and their work. By Nettie Adler, hon. Sec.
Committee on Wage-Earning children. Progress, July 1906.
Footnote 33:
Report for 1905, p. 52.
Footnote 34:
Report for 1905, p. 52.
Footnote 35:
A “young person” means, according to the Factory Acts, one under 18.
Footnote 36:
Report for 1905, p. 296.
Footnote 37:
The Case for the Factory Acts. Edited by Mrs Sidney Webb. Chapter II.
The Historical Development of the Factory Acts. By Miss B. L.
Hutchins, pp. 80–81.
Footnote 38:
Case for the Factory Acts, pp. 82–3.
Footnote 39:
Bye-laws under the Employment of Children Act have now been passed in
many towns, and the London County Council has at last been permitted
by the Home Office to establish a fairly satisfactory code. Really
satisfactory no code can be which sanctions any employment of children
during school years, but in this department, as in others, the
interposition of the law has done something to check glaring
industrial evils.
Footnote 40:
_Child Labor._ A menace to industry, education and good citizenship
(No. 93 of the Annals of the American Academy of political and social
science. March 1906.) p. 318.
Footnote 41:
_Child Labor_, p. 293.
Footnote 42:
Some ethical gains through legislation. By Florence Kelley, p. 44.
Footnote 43:
_Ibid._, p. 45.
Footnote 44:
_Ibid._, p. 49.
Footnote 45:
Juvenile wage earners. By Nettie Adler, Hon. Sec. Committee on Wage
earning children. _Progress._ July 1906.
Footnote 46:
Minutes of Evidence. Questions 12644, 12758.
Footnote 47:
These facts and more to the same purpose may be found in an article by
Miss Adler in the _Guardian_ of May 9, 1906.
Footnote 48:
Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 86.
Footnote 49:
Pp. 12, 13, 14.
Footnote 50:
Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school children.
Minutes of Evidence, pp. 275, 455, 471.
Footnote 51:
Child Labor, p. 302.
Footnote 52:
Child Labor, p. 275.
Footnote 53:
Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 17.
Footnote 54:
Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 42.
Footnote 55:
Mr S. W. Woodward, of the firm of Woodward and Lathrop, Washington, in
a short paper called: “A Business Man’s View of Child Labour,” writes:
“It may be stated as a safe proposition that for every dollar earned
by a child under 14 years of age tenfold will be taken from their
earning capacity in later life.” Child Labor, p. 362.
Footnote 56:
J. Schoenhof. Economy of High Wages, p. 38.
Footnote 57:
It must not be assumed from the above anecdote that all factory girls
are foul-mouthed. This was by no means true even in the year after the
Dock strike, and is much less true now. But I have no doubt there are
still factories in which the habit of foul speech is a sort of
fashion.
Footnote 58:
Handbook to Sweated Industries Exhibition, p. 23.
Footnote 59:
Poverty. By J. Seebohm Rowntree, p. 229.
Footnote 60:
A Living Wage: Its ethical and economic aspect. Macmillans. New York,
April 1906.
Footnote 61:
_Ibid._, p. 136. I must not be understood as committing myself to
these figures, which apply to America. They are employed here to show
that a large proportion of American wage earners do not receive the
sum considered by experts as affording a “Living Wage.”
Footnote 62:
I have not personally referred to Mr Mitchell’s book, the title of
which is “Organised Labour.” Professor Ryan gives the pages from which
this extract comes: pp. 116, 117.
Footnote 63:
A Living Wage, p. 150.
Footnote 64:
_Ibid._, p. 164.
Footnote 65:
The Strength of the People. By Helen Bosanquet, p. 114.
Footnote 66:
Of course efficiency is valuable for other than financial reasons; but
we are dealing now only with the question of payment.
Footnote 67:
Economy of high wages, p. 392.
Footnote 68:
If, at this point, any reader should pause to ask: “What, then, ought
the Brothers Cheeryble to do? Ought they to leave the selling of
safety pins to some less scrupulous persons? Or ought they to go on
underpaying the cappers?” I reply that the worthy twins should follow
neither of these courses, but should bend their minds to inventing or
getting invented a machine that would cap the pins even more cheaply,
because much more expeditiously, than the hand workers. The reduction
in the cost of production would then allow the payment of decent wages
to the operators. Mechanical operations should be done by machines,
and hand work should be reserved for those which demand individual
variation or peculiar and special perfection. The capping of safety
pins, which falls under neither of these heads, is emphatically an
operation to which the human brain and hand should not be put.
Footnote 69:
Industrial Co-operation. Edited by Catherine Webb, p. 242.
These figures do not include middle class joint stock associations,
such as the Army and Navy Stores.
Footnote 70:
Industrial Co-operation, p. 80.
Footnote 71:
In order to do so readers must address themselves to the Co-operative
Union, 2 Nicholas Croft, High St., Manchester. It is much to be
regretted that so valuable and informing a work should be published in
a manner that almost restricts its influence to persons who are
already convinced co-operators. The outer world of readers who badly
need to understand the facts and meanings of the great co-operative
movement have no opportunity of meeting with the one volume that
compendiously explains the existing conditions.
Footnote 72:
Economy of high wages, p. 63.
Footnote 73:
Of course a minimum rate of wages and sometimes indeed a complete
scale of wages has often been fixed by various local bodies or
departments; but only when such bodies have been, directly or
indirectly, employers of labour. Thus the duty of employers to pay a
fair wage has been recognised, but not, as yet, the duty or the right
of the State to enforce the payment.
Footnote 74:
It may be worth noting here—though the point lies outside the scope of
this chapter—that an expansion of trade when wages do not rise leads
to the extraordinary state known as overproduction, in which producers
complain that they cannot find a market for their wares, at the same
time that hundreds of fellow citizens are seen to be in crying need of
these same wares.
Footnote 75:
Mr Charles Booth’s tables show that in 1889, out of a population of
891,539, in East London, there were no less than 47,225 members of
various Friendly Societies.
Footnote 76:
This explanation of the impracticability of a Consumers’ League is
reprinted, with the alteration of a few words, from the Supplement to
the _Guardian_, the Editor of which has given me leave to reproduce it
in this chapter.
Footnote 77:
A prominent employer writes to me in December 1906 that wages have
since risen 2½ per cent.
Footnote 78:
A Reply to the Report of the Tariff Commission on the Cotton Trade.
Written for the Free Trade League by S. J. Chapman, M.A., Professor of
Political Economy at the University of Manchester.
Footnote 79:
Since writing these lines I have been informed that improved machinery
and management have been introduced, and that the outlook has
consequently improved also. But it is safe to prophesy that unless her
wages should rise very substantially, the Bristol worker will not
reach the standard of the Lancashire worker.
Footnote 80:
Economy of High Wages, p. 66.
Footnote 81:
Economy of High Wages, p. 398.
Footnote 82:
W. Pember Reeves. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. Vol.
ii. p. 29. To this volume I am indebted for the account of all the
facts preceding and accompanying the enactment of the earliest laws
under which a minimum wage could be legally fixed in the colonies. Any
reader desiring fuller details of these most interesting developments
should refer to Mr Reeves’s second volume.
Footnote 83:
It seems from the context that 1s. 6d. was the price paid for making
the dozen shirts throughout, and that the finisher’s share was but a
part of this, since a night’s work, in which she did a dozen shirts
and something more, only brought her one shilling.
Footnote 84:
W. Pember Reeves. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. Vol.
ii. pp. 111–112.
Footnote 85:
Journal of the Department of Labour. New Zealand. Vol. XI. pp.
267–268.
Footnote 86:
Journal of the Department of Labour. New Zealand. Vol. XIV. pp. 70–76.
Footnote 87:
This account of the establishment of the first Wage Boards is derived
from Mr Reeves’s State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, vol.
ii. chap. 1.
Footnote 88:
A resolution of both Houses is now required.
Footnote 89:
Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, work-rooms and shops.
Victoria, 1905, p. 62.
Footnote 90:
Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, p. 68.
Footnote 91:
Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 43.
Footnote 92:
Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 19.
Footnote 93:
_Ibid._, p. 63.
Footnote 94:
Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, p. 58.
Footnote 95:
Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 60.
Footnote 96:
_Ibid._, p. 14.
Footnote 97:
Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 39.
Footnote 98:
See the speech of Mr Maxwell (to whom personally, it may be added,
this excellent state of things is due) on p. 38 of the National
Anti-Sweating League’s Report of a Conference on the Minimum Wage.
Footnote 99:
A very strange instance of divergence of wages in one factory came
under my notice some 15 or 16 years ago. This also was in the shirt
trade. A strike arose in a large factory, and when a register came to
be taken of the wages received by the various women it was
discovered—greatly to the surprise of the workers concerned—that there
was a difference of almost 50 per cent. between the rates paid in one
workroom and those paid in another, both being under the same roof,
and the work being so absolutely identical that the two groups were
frequently engaged upon garments cut by the same stroke from the same
roll of material. The one room was superintended by a forewoman who
resisted any attempt to lower wages, and who, being a valuable
official, was able to impose her wishes; in the other the forewoman
meekly accepted any reductions proposed by the firm. I need hardly add
that the young women who worked in the former room were markedly
superior in appearance, in manners and in intelligence to those
belonging to the latter. Those who worked under the good forewoman
were, indeed, some of the best looking and most agreeable girls with
whom I have ever been brought into contact.
Footnote 100:
There are no doubt plenty of industries of which employers engaged in
them would declare beforehand that wages could not possibly be raised
without the ruining of the trade. But employers in the cotton trade
were of the same opinion and experience has shown that they were
mistaken.
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251 vary to a remarkable decree, and vary to a remarkable degree, and
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● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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