Part 3 (1/2)

-- 8. The Jew as an Industrial Compet.i.tor.--Looking at these foreigners as individuals, there is much to be said in their favour. They do not introduce a lower morality into the quarters where they settle, as the Chinese are said to do; nor are they quarrelsome and law-breaking, like the low-cla.s.s Italians who swarm into America. Their habits, so far as cleanliness is concerned, are perhaps not desirable, but the standard of the native population of Whitechapel is not sensitively high. For the most part, and this is true especially of the Jews, they are steady, industrious, quiet, sober, thrifty, quick to learn, and tolerably honest. From the point of view of the old Political Economy, they are the very people to be encouraged, for they turn out the largest quant.i.ty of wealth at the lowest cost of production. If it is the chief end for a nation to acc.u.mulate the largest possible stock of material wealth, it is evident that these are the very people we require to enable us to achieve our object.

But if we consider it is sound national policy to pay regard to the welfare of all cla.s.ses engaged in producing this wealth, we may regard this foreign immigration in quite another light. The very virtues just enumerated are the chief faults we have to find with the foreign Jew.

Just because he is willing and able to work so hard for so little pay, willing to undertake any kind of work out of which he can make a living, because he can surpa.s.s in skill, industry, and adaptability the native Londoner, the foreign Jew is such a terrible compet.i.tor. He is the nearest approach to the ideal ”economic” man, the ”fittest” person to survive in trade compet.i.tion. Admirable in domestic morality, and an orderly citizen, he is almost void of social morality. No compunction or consideration for his fellow-worker will keep him from underselling and overreaching them; he acquires a thorough mastery of all the dishonourable tricks of trade which are difficult to restrain by law; the superior calculating intellect, which is a national heritage, is used unsparingly to enable him to take advantage of every weakness, folly, and vice of the society in which he lives.

-- 9. Effect of Foreign Compet.i.tion.--One other quality he has in common with the ma.s.s of poor foreigners who compete in the London labour market--he can live on less than the Englishman. What Mrs Webb says of the Polish Jew, is in large measure true of all cheap foreign labour--”As industrial compet.i.tor, the Polish Jew is fettered by no definite standard of life; it rises and falls with his opportunities; he is not depressed by penury, and he is not demoralized by gain.” The fatal significance of this is evident. We have seen that notwithstanding a general rise in the standard of comfort of the ma.s.s of labourers, there still remains in all our cities a body of labouring men and women engaged in doing ill-paid and irregular work for wages which keep them always on the verge of starvation. Now consider what it means for these people to have brought into their midst a number of compet.i.tors who can live even more cheaply than they can live, and who will consent to toil from morning to night for whatever they can get. These new-comers are obviously able, in their eagerness for work, to drive down the rate of wages even below what represents starvation-point for the native worker.

The insistence of the poorer working-cla.s.ses, under the stimulus of new- felt wants, the growing enlightenment of public opinion, have slowly and gradually won, even for the poorer workers in English cities, some small advance in material comfort, some slight expansion in the meaning of the term ”necessaries of life.” Turn a few s.h.i.+ploads of Polish Jews upon any of these districts, and they will and must in the struggle for life destroy the whole of this. Remember it is not merely the struggle of too many workers competing on equal terms for an insufficient quant.i.ty of work. That is terrible enough. But when the struggle is between those accustomed to a higher, and those accustomed to a lower, standard of life, the latter can obviously oust the former, and take their work.

Just as a base currency drives out of circulation a pure currency, so does a lower standard of comfort drive out a higher one. This is the vital question regarding foreign immigration which has to be faced.

Nor is it merely a question of the number of these foreigners. The inflow of a comparatively small number into a neighbourhood where much of the work is low-skilled and irregular, will often produce an effect which seems quite out of proportion to the actual number of the invaders. Where work is slack and difficult to get, a very small addition of low-living foreigners will cause a perceptible fall in the entire wages of the neighbourhood in the employments which their compet.i.tion affects. It is true that the Jew does not remain a low- skilled labourer for starvation wages. Beginning at the bottom of the ladder, he rises by his industry and skill, until he gets into the rank of skilled workers, or more frequently becomes a sub-contractor, or a small shopkeeper. It might appear that as he thus rose, the effect of his compet.i.tion in the low skilled labour market would disappear. And this would be so were it not for the persistent arrival of new-comers to take the place of those who rise. It is the continuity in the flow of foreign emigration which const.i.tutes the real danger.

Economic considerations do not justify us in expecting any speedy check upon this flow. The growing means of communication among nations, the cheapening of transport, the breaking down of international prejudices, must, if they are left free to operate, induce the labourer to seek the best market for his labour, and thus tend to equalize the condition of labour in the various communities, raising the level of the lower paid and lower lived at the expense of the higher paid and higher lived.

-- 10. The Water-tight Compartment Theory.--One point remains to be mentioned. It is sometimes urged that the foreign Jews who come to our sh.o.r.es do not injure our low skilled workers to any considerable extent, because they do not often enter native trades, but introduce new trades which would not have existed at all were it not for their presence. They work, it is said, in water-tight compartments, competing among themselves, but not directly competing with English workers. Now if it were the case that these foreigners really introduced new branches of production designed to stimulate and supply new wants this contention would have much weight. The Flemings who in Edward III.'s reign introduced the finer kinds of weaving into England, and the Huguenot refugees who established new branches of the silk, gla.s.s, and paper manufactures, conferred a direct service upon English commerce, and their presence in the labour market was probably an indirect service to the English workers. But this is not the case with the modern Jew immigrants. They have not stimulated or supplied new wants. It is not even correct to say that most of them do not directly compete with native labour. It is true that certain branches of the cheap clothing trade have been their creation. The cheap coat trade, which they almost monopolize, seems due to their presence. But even here they have established no new _kind_ of trade. To their cheap labour perhaps is due in some cases the large export trade in cheap clothing, but even then it is doubtful whether the work would not otherwise have been done by machinery under healthier conditions, and have furnished work and wages for English workers. During the last decade they have been entering more and more into direct compet.i.tion with British labour in the cabinet- making, shoemaking, baking, hair-dressing, and domestic service occupations. Lastly, they enter into direct compet.i.tion of the worst form with English female labour, which is driven in these very clothing trades to accept work and wages which are even too low to tempt the Jews of Whitechapel. The constant infiltration of cheap immigrant labour is in large measure responsible for the existence of the ”sweating workshops,” and the survival of low forms of industrial development which form a factor in the problem of poverty.

Chapter IV.

”The Sweating System.”

-- 1. Origin of the Term ”Sweating.”--Having gained insight into some of the leading industrial forces of the age, we can approach more hopefully the study of that aspect of City poverty, commonly known as the ”Sweating System.”

The first thing is to get a definite meaning to the term. Since the examination of experts before the recent ”Lords' Committee” elicited more than twenty widely divergent definitions of this ”Sweating System,”

some care is required at the outset of our inquiry. The common use of the term ”Sweating System” is itself responsible for much ambiguity, for the term ”system” presupposes a more or less distinct form of organization of industry identified with the evils of sweating. Now as it should be one of the objects of inquiry to ascertain whether there exists any one such definite form, it will be better at the outset to confine ourselves to the question, ”What is Sweating?”

As an industrial term the word seems to have been first used among journeymen tailors. The tailoring houses which once executed all orders on their own premises, by degrees came to recognize the convenience of giving out work to tailors who would work at their own homes. The long hours which the home workers were induced to work in order to increase their pay, caused the term ”Sweater” to be applied to them by the men who worked for fixed hours on the tailors' premises, and who found their work pa.s.sing more and more into the hands of the home workers. Thus we learn that originally it was long hours and not low wages which const.i.tuted ”sweating.” School-boy slang still uses the word in this same sense. Moreover, the first sweater was one who ”sweated” himself, not others. But soon when more and more tailoring work was ”put out,”

the home worker, finding he could undertake more than he could execute, employed his family and also outsiders to help him. This makes the second stage in the evolution of the term; the sweater now ”sweated”

others as well as himself, and he figured as a ”middleman” between the tailoring firm which employed him, and the a.s.sistants whom he employed for fixed wages. Other clothing trades have pa.s.sed through the same process of development, and have produced a sub-contracting middleman.

The term ”sweater” has thus by the outside world, and sometimes by the workers themselves, come to be generally applied to sub-contractors in small City trades. But the fact of the special application has not prevented the growth of a wider signification of ”sweating” and ”sweater.” As the long hours worked in the tailors' garrets were attended with other evils--a low rate of wages, unsanitary conditions, irregularity of employment, and occasional tyranny in all the forms which attend industrial authority--all these evils became attached to the notion of sweating. The word has thus grown into a generic term to express this disease of City poverty from its purely industrial side.

Though ”long hours” was the gist of the original complaint, low wages have come to be recognized as equally belonging to the essence of ”sweating.” In some cases, indeed, low wages have become the leading idea, so that employers are cla.s.sed as sweaters who pay low wages, without consideration of hours or other conditions of employment. Trade Unions, for example, use the term ”sweating” specifically to express the conduct of employers who pay less than the ”standard” rate of wages. The abominable sanitary condition of many of the small workshops, or private dwellings of workers, is to many reformers the most essential element in sweating.

-- 2. Present Applications of the Name.--When the connotation of the term ”sweating” had become extended so as to include along with excessive hours of labour, low wages, unsanitary conditions of work, and other evils, which commonly belong to the method of sub-contract employment, it was only natural that the same word should come to be applied to the same evils when they were found outside the sub-contract system. For though it has been, and still is, true, that where the method of sub- contract is used the workers are frequently ”sweated,” and though to the popular mind the sub-contractor still figures as the typical sweater, it is not right to regard ”sub-contract” as the real cause of sweating. For it is found--

Firstly, that in some trades sub-contract is used without the evils of sweating being present. Mr. Burnett, labour correspondent to the Board of Trade, in his evidence before the Lords' Committee, maintains that where Trade Unions are strong, as in the engineering trade, sub-contract is sometimes employed under conditions which are entirely ”un.o.bjectionable.” So too in the building trades, sub-contract is not always attended by ”sweating.”

Secondly, much of the worst ”sweating” is found where the element of sub-contract is entirely wanting, and where there is no trace of a ravenous middleman. This will be found especially in women's employments. Miss Potter, after a close investigation of this point, arrives at the conclusion that ”undoubtedly the worst paid work is made under the direction of East End retail slop-shops, or for tally-men--a business from which contact, even in the equivocal form of wholesale trading, has been eliminated.”[20] The term ”sweating” must be deemed as applicable to the case of the women employed in the large steam- laundries, who on Friday and Sat.u.r.day work for fifteen or sixteen hours a day, to the overworked and under-paid waitresses in restaurants and shops, to the men who, as Mr. Burleigh testified, ”are employed in some of the wealthiest houses of business, and received for an average working week of ninety-five hours, board, lodging, and 15 a year,” as it is to the tailoress who works fourteen hours a day for Whitechapel sub-contractors.

The terms ”sweating” and ”sweating System,” then, after originating in a narrow application to the practice of over-work under sub-contractors in the lower branches of the tailoring trade, has expanded into a large generic term, to express the condition of all overworked, ill-paid, badly-housed workers in our cities. It sums up the industrial or economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched ”f.a.g end” where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his wage of 1s. 2d. per diem, and of the lowest cla.s.s of each manufacturing trade in East and Central London. It is true of the relatively unskilled labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who on 25s. a week or less has to support a wife and children and an appearance of respectability; the usher, who grinds out low-cla.s.s instruction through the whole tedious day for less than the wage of a plain cook; the condition of these and many other kinds of low-cla.s.s brain-workers is only a shade less pitiable than the ”sweating” of manual labourers, and the causes, as we shall see, are much the same. If our investigation of ”sweating” is chiefly confined to the condition of the manual labourer, it is only because the malady there touches more directly and obviously the prime conditions of physical life, not because the nature of the industrial disease is different.

-- 3. Leading ”Sweating” Trades.--It is next desirable to have some clear knowledge of the particular trades in which the worst forms of ”sweating” are found, and the extent to which it prevails in each. The following brief summary is in a large measure drawn from evidence furnished to the recent Lords' Committee on the Sweating System. Since the sweating in women's industries is so important a subject as to demand a separate treatment, the facts stated here will chiefly apply to male industries.

Tailoring.--In the tailoring trade the best kind of clothes are still made by highly-skilled and well-paid workmen, but the bulk of the cheap clothing is in the hands of ”sweaters,” who are sometimes skilled tailors, sometimes not, and who superintend the work of cheap unskilled hands. In London the coat trade should be distinguished from the vest and trousers trade. The coat-making trade in East London is a closely- defined district, with an area of one square mile, including the whole of Whitechapel and parts of two adjoining parishes. The trade is almost entirely in the hands of Jews, who number from thirty to forty thousand persons. Recent investigations disclosed 906 workshops, which, in the quality and conditions of the work done in them, may be graded according to the number of hands employed. The larger workshops, employing from ten to twenty-five hands or more, generally pay fair wages, and are free from symptoms of sweating. But in the small workshops, which form about 80 per cent of the whole number, the common evils of the sweating system a.s.sert themselves--overcrowding, bad sanitation, and excessive hours of labour. Thirteen and fourteen hours are the nominal day's work for men; and those workshops which do not escape the Factory Inspector a.s.sign a nominal factory day for women; but ”among the imperfectly taught workers in the slop and stock trade, and more especially in the domestic workshops, under-pressers, plain machinists, and fellers are in many instances expected to 'convenience' their masters, i.e. to work for twelve or fifteen hours in return for ten or thirteen hours' wage.”[21]

The better cla.s.s workers, who require some skill, get comparatively high wages even in the smaller workshops, though the work is irregular; but the general hands engaged in making 1s. coats, generally women, get a maximum of _1s. 6d._, and a minimum which is indefinitely below 1s. for a twelve hours' day. This low-cla.s.s work is also hopeless. The raw hand, or ”greener” as he is called, will often work through his apprentices.h.i.+p for nominal wages; but he has the prospect of becoming a machinist, and earning from 6s. to 10s. a day, or of becoming in his turn a sweater.

The general hand has no such hope. The lowest kind of coat-making, however, is refused by the Jew contractor, and falls to Gentile women.

These women also undertake most of the low-cla.s.s vest and trousers making, generally take their work direct from a wholesale house, and execute it at home, or in small workshops. The price for this work is miserably low, partly by reason of the compet.i.tion of provincial factories, partly for reasons to be discussed in a later chapter. Women will work for twelve or fifteen hours a day throughout the week as ”trousers finishers,” for a net-earning of as little as 4s. or 5s. Such is the condition of inferior unskilled labour in the tailoring trade. It should however be understood that in ”tailoring,” as in other ”sweating”

trades, the lowest figures quoted must be received with caution. The wages of a ”greener,” a beginner or apprentice, should not be taken as evidence of a low wage in the trade, for though it is a lamentable thing that the learner should have to live upon the value of his prentice work, it is evident that under no commercial condition could he support himself in comfort during this period. It is the normal starvation wage of the low-cla.s.s experienced hand which is the true measure of ”sweating” in these trades. Two facts serve to give prominence to the growth of ”sweating” in the tailoring trades. During the last few years there has been a fall of some 30 per cent, in the prices paid for the same cla.s.s of work. During the same period the irregularity of work has increased. Even in fairly large shops the work for ordinary labour only averages some three days in the week, while we must reckon two and a half days for unskilled workers in smaller workshops, or working at home.

Among provincial towns Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds show a rapid growth of sweating in the clothing trade. In each case the evil is imputed to ”an influx of foreigners, chiefly Jews.” In each town the same conditions appear--irregular work and wages, unsanitary conditions, over-crowding, evasion of inspection. The growth in Leeds is remarkable.

”There are now ninety-seven Jewish workshops in the city, whereas five years ago there were scarcely a dozen. The number of Jews engaged in the tailoring trade is about three thousand. The whole Jewish population of Leeds is about five thousand.”[22]