London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

The East-end turners generally, I was informed, when inquiring into the state of that trade, labour at the lathe from six o’clock in the morning till eleven and twelve at night, being 18 hours’ work per day, or 108 hours per week. They allow themselves two hours for their meals. It takes them, upon an average, two hours more every day fetching and carrying their work home. Some of the East-end men work on Sundays, and not a few either, said my informant. “Sometimes I have worked hard,” said one man, “from six one morning till four the next, and scarcely had any time to take my meals in the bargain. I have been almost suffocated with the dust flying down my throat after working so many hours upon such heavy work too, and sweating so much. It makes a man drink where he would not.”

This system of over-work exists in the “slop” part of almost every business—indeed, it is the principal means by which the cheap trade is maintained. Let me cite from my letters in the Chronicle some more of my experience on this subject. As regards the London mantua-makers, I said:—“The workwomen for good shops that give fair, or tolerably fair wages, and expect good work, can make six average-sized mantles in a week, working from ten to twelve hours a day; but the slop-workers, by toiling from thirteen to sixteen hours a day, will make nine such sized mantles in a week. In a season of twelve weeks 1000 workers for the slop-houses and warehouses would at this rate make 108,000 mantles, or 36,000 more than workers for the fair trade. Or, to put it in another light, these slop-women, by being compelled, in order to live, to work such over-hours as inflict lasting injury on the health, supplant, by their over-work and over-hours, the labour of 500 hands, working the regular hours.”

The following are the words of a chamber-master, working for the cheap shoe trade:—

“From people being obliged to work twice the hours they once did work, or that in reason they ought to work, a glut of hands is the consequence, and the masters are led to make reductions in the wages. They take advantage of our poverty and lower the wages, so as to undersell each other, and command business. My daughters have to work fifteen hours a day that we may make a bare living. They seem to have no spirit and no animation in them; in fact, such very hard work takes the youth out of them. They have no time to enjoy their youth, and, with all their work, they can’t present the respectable appearance they ought.” “I” (interposed my informant’s wife) “often feel a faintness and oppression from my hard work, as if my blood did not circulate.”

The better class of artizans denounce the system of Sunday working as the most iniquitous of all the impositions. They object to it, not only on moral and religious grounds, but economically also. “Every 600 men employed on the Sabbath,” say they, “deprive 100 individuals of a week’s work. Every six men who labour seven days in the week must necessarily throw one other man out of employ for a whole week. The seventh man is thus deprived of his fair share of work by the overtoiling of the other six.” This Sunday working is a necessary consequence of the cheap slop-trade. The workmen cannot keep their families by their six days’ labour, and therefore they not only, under that system, get less wages and do more work, but by their extra labour throw so many more hands out of employment.

Here then, in the over-work of many of the trade, we find a vast cause of surplus hands, and, consequently, of casual labour; and that the work in these trades has not proportionately increased is proven by the fact of the existence of a superfluity of workmen.

Let us now turn our attention to the second of the causes above cited, viz., the causing of men to work quicker, and so to accomplish more in the same time. There are several means of attaining this end; it may be brought about either (a) by making the workman’s gains depend directly on the quantity of work executed by him, as by the substitution of piece-work for day-work; (b) by the omission of certain details or parts necessary for the perfection of the work; (c) by decreasing the workman’s pay, and so increasing the necessity for him to execute a greater quantity of work in order to obtain the same income; (d) increasing the supervision, and encouraging a spirit of emulation among the workpeople; (e) by dividing the labour into a number of simple and minute processes, and so increasing the expertness of the labourers; (f) by the invention of some new tool or machine for expediting the operations of the workman.

I shall give a brief illustration of each of these causes seriatim, showing how they tend to produce a surplusage of hands in the trades to which they are severally applied. And first, as to making the workman’s gains depend directly on the quantity of work executed by him.

Of course there are but two direct modes of paying for labour—either by the day or by the piece. Over-work by day-work is effected by means of what is called the “strapping system” (as described in the Morning Chronicle in my letter upon the carpenters and joiners), where a whole shop are set to race over their work in silence one with another, each striving to outdo the rest, from the knowledge that anything short of extraordinary exertion will be sure to be punished with dismissal. Over-work by piece-work, on the other hand, is almost a necessary consequence of that mode of payment—for where men are paid by the quantity they do, of course it becomes the interest of a workman to do more than he otherwise would.

“Almost all who work by the day, or for a fixed salary, that is to say, those who labour for the gain of others, not for their own, have,” it has been well remarked, “no interest in doing more than the smallest quantity of work that will pass as a fulfilment of the mere terms of their engagement. Owing to the insufficient interest which day labourers have in the result of their labour, there is a natural tendency in such labour to be extremely inefficient—a tendency only to be overcome by vigilant superintendence on the part of the persons who are interested in the result. The ‘master’s eye’ is notoriously the only security to be relied on. But superintend them as you will, day labourers are so much inferior to those who work by the piece, that, as was before said, the latter system is practised in all industrial occupations where the work admits of being put out in definite portions, without involving the necessity of too troublesome a surveillance to guard against inferiority (or scamping) in the execution.” But if the labourer at piece-work is made to produce a greater quantity than at day-work, and this solely by connecting his own interest with that of his employer, how much more largely must the productiveness of workmen be increased when labouring wholly on their own account! Accordingly it has been invariably found that whenever the operative unites in himself the double function of capitalist and labourer, as the “garret-master” in the cabinet trade, and the “chamber-master” in the shoe trade, making up his own materials or working on his own property, his productiveness, single-handed, is considerably greater than can be attained even under the large system of production, where all the arts and appliances of which extensive capital can avail itself are brought into operation.