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.