Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/646

 632 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

that very few people hold the sensible view of the old lady who refused to have her sleeves made smaller because, as she said, she was not ashamed to let people know that she had some clothes last year. This devotion to fashion makes it necessary for the tailor to sit at his bench all night long, and for the con- tractor to keep his employes at work from 6 or 7 in the morn- ing until 9 or 10 o'clock at night, or else to employ 25 or 50 per cent, more workers. This explains in part the long hours of the home finisher.

In the ready-made clothing trade the garments are made up in the spring for the following fall, and in the fall for the next spring, and the seasonal difficulty still comes in, but rests to a smaller degree on fashion than does the custom trade. The seasonal character accounts in large measure for the fact that only half of the shops visited had steady work and this for many of them only during the past year and that in the knee- pants shops the busy season, with athirteen-hour day, was only four months long, while the rest of the year there was work only for two or three days in the week.

Another cause is that these are to some extent unskilled trades, because of the minute division of labor. A tailor makes an entire garment himself; but in the ordinary contractor's shop one person does the basting, one of the operators sews the first straight seams, another takes the more difficult part, while the rest of the work is divided among several handworkers, the button-sewers, and the home finishers. Most parts of the work one can learn easily in a day, or in a week or two at the outside. It is not difficult, then, to find workers, people who have no trade and no pride of trade or skill ; and the unskilled trades are almost always overcrowded. This leads to competition among the workers for the work that is to be done. If one asks for higher wages, a contractor's ready answer is : " Go, if you please ; I can find someone else who will gladly work for less."

Again, the easy adaptation of labor to the fluctuations of trade is largely responsible for the persistence of the sweating system. Suppose that a contractor's normal output a week is 700 vests, and that to make that number he employs six men