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.