Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/205

   SWEATING SYSTEM, a term loosely used in connexion with oppressive industrial conditions in certain trades. This “system” originated early in the 19th century, when it was known as “the contract system.” Contractors supplying the government with clothing for the army and navy got the work done by giving it out to sub-contractors, who in some cases made the garments or boots themselves, with the assistance of other workmen, and in others sublet their sub-contracts to men who carried them out with similar help. Afterwards this plan was adopted in the manufacture of ready-made clothing for civilian use, and of “bespoke” garments (made to the order of the customer). Previously the practice had been for coats, &c., to be made up by workmen employed on the premises of the master tailor or working together in common workshops, but in either case directly employed by the master tailor. The new plan brought a large number of workpeople possessing little skill and belonging to a very needy class into competition with the regular craftsmen; and in consequence a fall in wages took place, which affected, to a greater or less extent, the whole body of workmen in the tailoring trade. The work was done in overcrowded and insanitary rooms, and the earnings of the workers were extremely low. In 1850 a vigorous agitation against “the sweating system” was commenced, based mainly upon a series of articles in the Morning Chronicle, which were followed by a pamphlet, Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written by Charles Kingsley under the name of “Parson Lot,” and by his novel Alton Locke. Kingsley and his friends, the Christian Socialists, proposed to combat the evils of the sweating system by promoting the formation of co-operative workshops; and several experiments of this nature were made, which, however, met with little success. Except that in 1876-1877 the outcry against the sweating system was renewed (principally on the ground of the risk of infection from garments

made up in insanitary surroundings), the matter attracted little public notice until 1887, when the system again came into prominence in connexion with the immigration of poor foreigners into East London, where large numbers of these people were employed in various trades, especially in the tailoring, boot making, and cabinet-making industries, under conditions generally similar to those complained of in the earlier agitations. In 1888 a select committee of the House of Lords was appointed to inquire into the subject; and after a lengthy investigation—in the course of which evidence was given by 291 witnesses in relation to tailoring, boot-making, furriery, shirt-making, mantle-making, cabinet-making and upholstery, cutlery and hardware manufacture, chain and nail-making, military accoutrements, saddlery and harness-making, and dock labour—this committee presented its final report in April 1890. The committee found themselves unable to assign an exact meaning to the term “sweating,” but enumerated the following conditions as those to which that name was applied: “(1) A rate of wages inadequate to the necessities of the workers or disproportionate to the work done; (2) excessive hours of labour; (3) the insanitary state of the houses in which the work is carried on.” They stated that, “as a rule, the observations made with respect to sweating apply, in the main, to unskilled or only partially skilled workers, as the thoroughly skilled workers can almost always obtain adequate wages.” With regard to the sweating system, the committee declared that this cannot be regarded as responsible for the industrial conditions described; for “the middleman is the consequence, not the cause of the evil; the instrument, not the hand which gives motion to the instrument, which does the mischief. Moreover, the middleman is found to be absent in many cases in which the evils complained of abound.” While, on the one hand, we find, as pointed out by this committee, that “sweating” exists without the presence of the “middleman” (the fact, being that many grossly underpaid workpeople are in the direct employment of large firms), it is, on the other hand, no less true that the “middleman” (i.e. subordinate employer) is common in numerous trades in which there is no trace of any such oppression of the workpeople employed by the sub-contractors as is denoted by the term “sweating.” Thus, for example, in shipbuilding in many cases men work in squads, the leading workmen employing their own helpers; in the cotton trade the mule-minders engage and pay their own piecers, and the weavers their own tenters; in the manufactured-iron trade, in mining, &c., a good deal of work is done under sub-employers employing their own assistants, none of these sub-contractors being alleged to “sweat” their helpers. There is, in short, no system of employment which can properly be called “the sweating system.” At the same time, wherever workers possessing a small degree of skill and deficient in organization are employed under a number of small masters, there “sweating” is likely to obtain.

The common idea that the “sweater” is an unscrupulous tyrant, who fulfils no useful function, and who makes enormous profits, has no counterpart in fact. Whatever may have been the case in earlier days, before the internecine competition of the “middlemen” had time to produce its inevitable effects upon the position of these sub-employers, it may now be considered to be beyond dispute that the small master (“sub-contractor,” “garret master,” “fogger,” &c.) usually works at least as hard as his employés, and that his gains are, as a rule, no more than a fair return for the work which he performs—work which in many instances consists in doing some difficult part of the job, and in all cases in organizing the labour engaged. So far as concerns the “manufacturer,” by whom the “sweater” is employed, and who is clearly the causa causans of “the sweating system,” for him the practice of getting his work done in outside workshops is undoubtedly convenient, especially in localities where rent is high, because he is saved the expense of providing accommodation for those who do his work. He is also free from restrictions as to the subdivision of labour and the employment of a certain class of workpeople which the sentiment of the regular factory workers would impose upon him. The regular tailor, for example, thinks that no one who has not, by a lengthy period of tuition,