Part 3 (1/2)
An English writer gives this definition of the sweating system: ”One whereby the middleman tries to get the largest profit, with the least labor and outlay, out of the maximum labor of his workers.” Another gives three definitions: ”First, one who grinds the face of the poor; second, a man who contributes neither capital, skill, nor speculation, and yet gets a profit; third, a middleman.” Still another describes it as a systematized payment of unfair wages. Away back in the days of Queen Anne the term ”sweater” was given to a certain cla.s.s of street ruffian. The sweaters went about in small bands, and, forming a circle around an inoffensive wayfarer, p.r.i.c.ked him with their swords, and compelled him to dance till he perspired from the exertion. The sweater is still a ruffian, though the street is no longer the scene of action, but, in some attic or tenement-house bedroom, he gathers his victims from the poorest and most helpless of our population.
It is my purpose, first of all this morning, to show you something of the growth and development of the sweat-shop in England. It is reasonable for us to suppose that, if left to itself, it will produce the same general results in this country that it has there. Fortunately we have an abundance of data upon which to form our conclusions.
There are in the Boston Public Library five ponderous volumes containing the evidence taken before a commission, appointed by the English House of Lords, to examine into the sweating system of Great Britain.
I think it is well for American laboring-men to know that this evidence puts beyond question the fact that the sweating business, while it may begin with the clothing trade, by no means ends there. ”The plague of the sweatshop” is not something of interest to the tailors and sewing-women only, but is of equal importance to workers of every cla.s.s. Take the matchbox trade; before the sweating days, the people who worked at it received two and three-fourths pence a gross. Now the large contractors let and sub-let until it is only one and a half pence a gross, and a woman and a family of children have to work all the week to make four or five s.h.i.+llings.
The fur trade in Europe has been largely driven into Whitechapel sweaters' shops. They call the sweater in this business a ”chamber master,” and in these foul chambers, in the midst of ”bad smells, great heat, no ventilation, and fetid refuse,” men and women swelter and die, the men getting ten s.h.i.+llings, and the women about five s.h.i.+llings a week.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PEANUTTER.]
The cabinet and upholstery trade is not exempt. Sub-contracting here, as in clothing, is the first step in sweating. The evidence shows that sweating began in this business as early as 1855, but has rapidly increased under pauper immigration from Italy and Russia since 1880.
Much of the work is crowded into garrets and cellars, where there are no sanitary arrangements. So universally is this so, that the sweater in this business is called a ”garret master.” Wages have been brought down, from forty to fifty s.h.i.+llings a week, to from eighteen to twenty s.h.i.+llings.
The boot and shoe trade has had the same history. Large numbers of foreigners are employed in this work. The workers are kept in ignorance of the language and under surveillance, so as to be taken advantage of.
They are not instructed in the more skilled work, and, to use the words of one of the witnesses, ”are too crushed to resist.” They are compelled to work from eighteen to twenty hours a day. Wages in these sweat-shops are from ten to fifteen s.h.i.+llings a week.
In Sheffield, the great cutlery manufacturing city, the same system is prevailing, and a woman whose business was awl-blade grinding, a strong woman of forty-five years of age, testified that she could only make six and a half s.h.i.+llings per week.
Military harness and accoutrements are also made by the sweaters. Many workmen earn only three pence an hour, and complain that they cannot live on it. The nail trade is in the same condition. A man and wife working together make thirteen s.h.i.+llings a week. Women's earnings average from three s.h.i.+llings and a half to six s.h.i.+llings per week.
Large numbers of women are only able to earn three s.h.i.+llings a week at this business. Boys and girls are paid, in a sweater's chain-shop, one-half penny per hour.
A witness from Glasgow testified in regard to the clothing shops of that city: ”It is a rule among the sweaters to give the men some money, a s.h.i.+lling, every night, to keep them alive till the next day. Some of the men at the end of the week are actually in debt instead of having anything coming to them. When in debt, they do not, as a rule, come back, but go to another sweater. The men never actually get any wages, but are in debt from one year's end till another. All independence is taken out of the men; they are always in the sweater's power.”
A witness from Leeds says: ”Wages are driven to a starvation level, and workmen at piece-work compelled to excessive hours. If the employers find a good workman, who is earning good wages by piece-work, they try to reduce prices. Time work is healthier, but no one would believe how the men are driven in shops where time-work exists.”
Another gentleman, testifying about his investigations in Glasgow, tells of a place he visited, where a sweater had between forty and fifty women employed in an old boiler shed, a disused part of an engineer's shop; the women had to get to it by three wooden ladders, and had to go through a joiner's shop in order to enter the workroom.
There was no sanitary accommodation for these women anywhere. It is a common practice for sweaters to take on learners, that is to say, to employ young girls for a certain time to learn the machine part of the work; but they get no wages for say five or six weeks or so, or two months, and after that time, if competent, they receive two or three s.h.i.+llings per week. But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch.
The practical slavery to which the laboring-people, by the sweating system, have been degraded, is ill.u.s.trated on almost every page of the evidence. One witness testifies: ”They do almost as they like with their victims. The people are afraid to give evidence against them. The sweater is a law unto himself. One woman I came across says she has not been paid for her work done some three years ago, on some trivial pretext which the sweater made. Another deducted a whole week's work from a woman's wages because she was ten minutes late, and so aggravated the people in the neighborhood that they smashed his windows, showing the state of things between the sweater and his people.”
As one would naturally expect, moral degradation keeps pace with the outrage upon the rights of the laborer. It is claimed that the Jewesses, who have always had the most unblemished character of any women in the world, are being ruined in the sweat-shops of London, where they are herded together with all cla.s.ses of men in a way which renders morality and decency next to impossible. One witness bears this terrible testimony: ”The sweating system, in which you have young girls working with men of all nationalities, and of all degrees of intelligence, conduces to their being later on, and they are mostly, to my certain knowledge, prost.i.tutes. Most of the young English girls whom we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been, tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect.”
So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law, Mr. Wm. Thompson, has written a novel ent.i.tled, ”The Sweater's Victim,”
which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the ”plague of the sweat-shop.”
It is easy to say, ”Oh, well, these horrible things you are telling us about belong to the Old World!” I would to G.o.d they did belong to the Old World alone, but the horrible truth is, that this vicious system is like a banyan-tree that has run its roots under the sea, and is coming up, and blossoming, and flouris.h.i.+ng in all our great American cities.
Listen to this description of the slaves of the sweat-shop in New York, given by the _New York Herald_: ”In the lower portion of the great east side of this city, are hundreds of tall, ill-appearing tenement houses, in which thousands of half-starved, sunken-eyed men and women are crowded into small, foul, over-heated rooms, working day and night for just enough to keep body and soul together. Scattered among the workers are dirty children, and sometimes cats and dogs. Everything in these places has to stand aside for work. It is work, work, work, day and night, year in and year out. In these over-crowded rooms the air is poisoned with the heat from the stoves, the steam from the cooking, and the fumes of oil and gas. Very few of the toilers can speak English.
They are the most wretched-looking, miserably-paid cla.s.s of workers in America. They are foreigners, and come chiefly from Russia and Poland.
No suns.h.i.+ne enters into their lives. Their existence is one hard, deep, grinding toil. They have no hope of brighter days to come. As they have worked for years, so they expect to work in the future. But the sweater does not care. He has his contracts with the manufacturers. Every day great bundles of clothing are dumped into these dens, and then the slaves are driven at full speed to make them up. Compet.i.tion is keen, but the sweater makes money.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: INSIDE A SWEAT-SHOP.]
The Journeymen Tailors' National Union, in its fifth annual report, describes in detail one of these New York sweat-shops, similar to those which the recent commission, appointed by the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, found to be the manufactories of enormous quant.i.ties of clothing for Boston firms: ”On the first floor, which was occupied by two families, was a contractor, or 'sweater,' who made overcoats. In the front room, 8x16 ft., eight full-grown men were at work, some on sewing-machines, a man pressing, and others finis.h.i.+ng. They were hollow-cheeked and cadaverous. Trousers and unders.h.i.+rts were their only apparel. In the rear room, 9x14, were six other men, almost identical in appearance with those in the front. All were working as if for dear life.
”This place was simply indescribable in its filthiness. The only household furniture discernible (for the contractor and his family lived in the rooms), were a bedstead and a child's crib in one of the two dark, so-called bedrooms. Bedding and overcoats were piled up together. The floors were four inches deep with dirt and cotton battings and sc.r.a.ps of linings. The ceilings and woodwork looked as though they had not seen a brush since the house was built years ago.