Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/618

 604 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

a few foot-power machines, a low table or two, and a few chairs. His staff consists of operators or machine sewers, hand-workers, and pressers. His hand-workers sometimes do all the finishing, but more often he employs home finishers, women who come from the neighboring tenements to take the work into their homes for the last touches. These finishers make bids for the work just as the contractors do, and are pitted one against another in the same way. The only difference is that they are poorer, more ignorant, and more helpless, and so are more at the contractors' mercy than the contractors are at the mercy of the manufacturers.

A merchant tailor has in the same shop with himself one or more "bushelmen," who repair garments, and one cutter who cuts all the garments. Besides these, there are usually several "journeymen" tailors in his employ, who come to the shops for garments and make them up in their own homes, unless a "back- shop" is provided a room near by where the tailors work together, although on separate garments.

Although the sweating system, in one or another of its forms, has been in existence almost as long as the poor have been mak- ing clothing for the rich, yet the recognition of the existence of the system has come only within the last twenty or thirty years. No magazine articles are indexed by Poole prior to 1887. Like most industrial problems, it received serious attention first in England. Massachusetts seems to have been the first of the United States to detect the sweating system. The cutters found that their work was being sent to New York to be cut and made, and was then brought back to Boston. 1 Hitherto the contract system had prevailed and wages had been generally good, but the influx of Russians into New York was causing a revolution in the manufacture of clothing. These foreigners must find something to do. They were not skilled workers and had no trades, but the division of labor in the garment industry made that a possible field. The contractors devised an apprentice sys- tem whereby the newcomers spent one or more months at work without pay, learning the trade. They were then able, by working

1 See H. R. Report, No. 2309.