7. By a reduced rate of pay, as forcing operatives to labour both longer and quicker, in order to make up the same amount of income.
Of several of these modes of work I have already spoken, citing facts as to their pernicious influence upon the greater portion of those trades where they are found to prevail. I have already shown how, by extra supervision—by increased interest in the work—as well as by decreased pay, operatives can be made to do more work than they otherwise would, and so be the cause, unless the market be proportionately extended, of depriving some of their fellow-labourers of their fair share of employment. It now only remains for me to set forth the effect of those modes of employment which have not yet been described, viz., the domestic system, the middleman system, and the contract and lump system, as well as the small-master system of work.
Let me begin with the first of the last-mentioned modes of cheapening labour, viz., the domestic system of work.
I find, by investigation, that in trades where the system of working on the master’s premises has been departed from, and a man is allowed to take his work home, there is invariably a tendency to cheapen labour. These home workers, whenever opportunity offers, will use other men’s ill-paid labour, or else employ the members of their family to enhance their own profits.
The domestic system, moreover, naturally induces over-work and Sunday-work, as well as tends to change journeymen into trading operatives, living on the labour of their fellow-workmen. When the work is executed off the master’s premises, of course there are neither definite hours nor days for labour; and the consequence is, the generality of home workers labour early and late, Sundays as well as week-days, availing themselves at the same time of the co-operation of their wives and children; thus the trade becomes overstocked with workpeople by the introduction of a vast number of new hands into it, as well as by the overwork of the men themselves who thus obtain employment. When I was among the tailors, I received from a journeyman to whom I was referred by the Trades’ Society as the one best able to explain the causes of the decline of that trade, the following lucid account of the evils of this system of labour:—
“The principal cause of the decline of our trade is the employment given to workmen at their own homes, or, in other words, to the ‘sweaters.’ The sweater is the greatest evil in the trade; as the sweating system increases the number of hands to an almost incredible extent—wives, sons, daughters, and extra women, all working ‘long days’—that is, labouring from sixteen to eighteen hours per day, and Sundays as well. By this system two men obtain as much work as would give employment to three or four men working regular hours in the shop. Consequently, the sweater being enabled to get the work done by women and children at a lower price than the regular workman, obtains the greater part of the garments to be made, while men who depend upon the shop for their living are obliged to walk about idle. A greater quantity of work is done under the sweating system at a lower price. I consider that the decline of my trade dates from the change of day-work into piece-work. According to the old system, the journeyman was paid by the day, and consequently must have done his work under the eye of his employer. It is true that work was given out by the master before the change from day-work to piece-work was regularly acknowledged in the trade. But still it was morally impossible for work to be given out and not be paid by the piece. Hence I date the decrease in the wages of the workman from the introduction of piece-work, and giving out garments to be made off the premises of the master. The effect of this was, that the workman making the garment, knowing that the master could not tell whom he got to do his work for him, employed women and children to help him, and paid them little or nothing for their labour. This was the beginning of the sweating system. The workmen gradually became transformed from journeymen into ‘middlemen,’ living by the labour of others. Employers soon began to find that they could get garments made at a less sum than the regular price, and those tradesmen who were anxious to force their trade, by underselling their more honourable neighbours, readily availed themselves of this means of obtaining cheap labour.”
The middleman system of work is so much akin to the domestic system, of which, indeed, it is but a necessary result, that it forms a natural addendum to the above. Of this indirect mode of employing workmen, I said, in the Chronicle, when treating of the timber-porters at the docks:—
“The middleman system is the one crying evil of the day. Whether he goes by the name of ‘sweater,’ ‘chamber-master,’ ‘lumper,’ or contractor, it is this trading operative who is the great means of reducing the wages of his fellow working-men. To make a profit out of the employment of his brother operatives he must, of course, obtain a lower class and, consequently, cheaper labour. Hence it becomes a business with him to hunt out the lowest grades of working men—that is to say, those who are either morally or intellectually inferior in the craft—the drunken, the dishonest, the idle, the vagabond, and the unskilful; these are the instruments that he seeks for, because, these being unable to obtain employment at the regular wages of the sober, honest, industrious, and skilful portion of the trade, he can obtain their labour at a lower rate than what is usually paid. Hence drunkards, tramps, men without character or station, apprentices, children—all suit him. Indeed, the more degraded the labourers, the better they answer his purpose, for the cheaper he can get their work, and consequently the more he can make out of it.
“‘Boy labour or thief labour,’ said a middleman, on a large scale, to me, ‘what do I care, so long as I can get my work done cheap?’ That this seeking out of cheap and inferior labour really takes place, and is a necessary consequence of the middleman system, we have merely to look into the condition of any trade where it is extensively pursued. I have shown, in my account of the tailors’ trade printed in the Chronicle, that the wives of the sweaters not only parade the streets of London on the look-out for youths raw from the country, but that they make periodical trips to the poorest provinces of Ireland, in order to obtain workmen at the lowest possible rate. I have shown, moreover, that foreigners are annually imported from the Continent for the same purpose, and that among the chamber-masters in the shoe trade, the child-market at Bethnal-green, as well as the workhouses, are continually ransacked for the means of obtaining a cheaper kind of labour. All my investigations go to prove, that it is chiefly by means of this middleman system that the wages of the working men are reduced. It is this contractor—this trading operative—who is invariably the prime mover in the reduction of the wages of his fellow-workmen. He uses the most degraded of the class as a means of underselling the worthy and skilful labourers, and of ultimately dragging the better down to the abasement of the worst. He cares not whether the trade to which he belongs is already overstocked with hands, for, be those hands as many as they may, and the ordinary wages of his craft down to bare subsistence point, it matters not a jot to him; he can live solely by reducing them still lower, and so he immediately sets about drafting or importing a fresh and cheaper stock into the trade. If men cannot subsist on lower prices, then he takes apprentices, or hires children; if women of chastity cannot afford to labour at the price he gives, then he has recourse to prostitutes; or if workmen of character and worth refuse to work at less than the ordinary rate, then he seeks out the moral refuse of the trade—those whom none else will employ; or else he flies, to find labour meet for his purpose, to the workhouse and the gaol. Backed by this cheap and refuse labour, he offers his work at lower prices, and so keeps on reducing and reducing the wages of his brethren, until all sink in poverty, wretchedness, and vice. Go where we will, look into whatever poorly-paid craft we please, we shall find this trading operative, this middleman or contractor, at the bottom of the degradation.”