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