The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

"Concerning the hours of labour in this trade, I had the following minute particulars from a garret-master who was a chair-maker:—

"'I work from six every morning to nine at night; some work till ten. My breakfast at eight stops me for ten minutes. I can breakfast in less time, but it's a rest. My dinner takes me say twenty minutes at the outside; and my tea eight minutes. All the rest of the time I'm slaving at my bench. How many minutes' rest is that, sir? Thirty-eight; well, say three-quarters of an hour, and that allows a few sucks at a pipe when I rest; but I can smoke and work too. I have only one room to work and eat in, or I should lose more time. Altogether, I labour fourteen and a quarter hours every day, and I must work on Sundays—at least forty Sundays in the year. One may as well work as sit fretting. But on Sundays I only work till it's dusk, or till five or six in summer. When it's dusk I take a walk. I'm not well dressed enough for a Sunday walk when it's light, and I can't wear my apron on that day very well to hide patches. But there's eight hours that I reckon I take up every week, one with another, in dancing about to the slaughterers. I'm satisfied that I work very nearly 100 hours a week the year through; deducting the time taken up by the slaughterers, and buying stuff—say eight hours a week—it gives more than ninety hours a week for my work, and there's hundreds labour as hard as I do, just for a crust.'

"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 eighteen hours' work per day, or one hundred and eight 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 mantuamakers, 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."

Mr. Mayhew states it as a plain, unerring law, that "over-work makes under-pay, and under-pay makes over-work." True; but under-pay in the first place gave rise to prolonged hours of toil; and in spite of all laws that may be enacted, as long as a miserable pittance is paid to labourers, and that, too, devoured by taxes, supporting an aristocracy in luxury, so long will the workman be compelled to slave for a subsistence.

The "strapping" system, which demands an undue quantity of work from a journeyman in the course of a day, is extensively maintained in London. Mr. Mayhew met with a miserable victim of this system of slavery, who appeared almost exhausted with excessive toil. The poor fellow said—

"'I work in what is called a strapping-shop, and have worked at nothing else for these many years past in London. I call "strapping" doing as much work as a human being or a horse possibly can in a day, and that without any hanging upon the collar, but with the foreman's eyes constantly fixed upon you, from six o'clock in the morning to six o'clock at night. The shop in which I work is for all the world like a prison; the silent system is as strictly carried out there as in a model jail. If a man was to ask any common question of his neighbour, except it was connected with his trade, he would be discharged there and then. If a journeyman makes the least mistake he is packed off just the same. A man working at such places is almost always in fear; for the most trifling things he's thrown out of work in an instant. And then the quantity of work that one is forced to get through is positively awful; if he can't do a plenty of it he don't stop long where I am. No one would think it was possible to get so much out of blood and bones. No slaves work like we do. At some of the strapping shops the foreman keeps continually walking about with his eyes on all the men at once. At others the foreman is perched high up, so that he can have the whole of the men under his eye together. I suppose since I knew the trade that a man does four times the work that he did formerly. I know a man that's done four pairs of sashes in a day, and one is considered to be a good day's labour. What's worse than all, the men are every one striving one against the other. Each is trying to get through the work quicker than his neighbours. Four or five men are set the same job, so that they may be all pitted against one another, and then away they go, every one striving his hardest for fear that the others should get finished first. They are all tearing along, from the first thing in the morning to the last at night, as hard as they can go, and when the time comes to knock off they are ready to drop. It was hours after I got home last night before I could get a wink of sleep; the soles of my feet were on fire, and my arms ached to that degree that I could hardly lift my hand to my head. Often, too, when we get up of a morning, we are more tired than when we went to bed, for we can't sleep many a night; but we musn't let our employers know it, or else they'd be certain we couldn't do enough for them, and we'd get the sack. So, tired as we may be, we are obliged to look lively, somehow or other, at the shop of a morning. If we're not beside our bench the very moment the bell's done ringing, our time's docked—they won't give us a single minute out of the hour. If I was working for a fair master, I should do nearly one-third, and sometimes a half, less work than I am now forced to get through; and, even to manage that much, I shouldn't be idle a second of my time. It's quite a mystery to me how they do contrive to get so much work out of the men. But they are very clever people. They know how to have the most out of a man, better than any one in the world. They are all picked men in the shop—regular "strappers," and no mistake. The most of them are five foot ten, and fine broad-shouldered, strong-backed fellows too—if they weren't they wouldn't have them. Bless you, they make no words with the men, they sack them if they're not strong enough to do all they want; and they can pretty soon tell, the very first shaving a man strikes in the shop, what a chap is made of. Some men are done up at such work—quite old men and gray, with spectacles on, by the time they are forty. I have seen fine strong men, of thirty-six, come in there, and be bent double in two or three years. They are most all countrymen at the strapping shops. If they see a great strapping fellow, who they think has got some stuff about him that will come out, they will give him a job directly. We are used for all the world like cab or omnibus-horses. Directly they've had all the work out of us, we are turned off, and I am sure, after my day's work is over, my feelings must be very much the same as one of the London cab-horses. As for Sunday, it is literally a day of rest with us, for the greater part of us lay a-bed all day, and even that will hardly take the aches and pains out of our bones and muscles. When I'm done and flung by, of course I must starve.'"

It may be said that, exhausting as this labour certainly is, it is not slavery; for the workman has a will of his own, and need not work if he does not choose to do it. Besides, he is not held by law; he may leave the shop; he may seek some other land. These circumstances make his case very different from the negro slave of America. True, but the difference is in favour of the negro slave. The London workman has only the alternative—such labour as has been described, the workhouse, or starvation. The negro slave seldom has such grinding toil, is provided for whether he performs it or not, and can look forward to an old age of comfort and repose. The London workman may leave his shop, but he will be either consigned to the prison of a workhouse or starved. He might leave the country, if he could obtain the necessary funds.

Family work, or the conjoint labour of a workman's wife and children, is one of the results of the wretchedly rewarded slavery in the various trades. Mr Mayhew gives the following statement of a "fancy cabinet" worker upon this subject:—

"The most on us has got large families; we put the children to work as soon as we can. My little girl began about six, but about eight or nine is the usual age. 'Oh, poor little things,' said the wife, 'they are obliged to begin the very minute they can use their fingers at all.' The most of the cabinet-makers of the East end have from five to six in family, and they are generally all at work for them. The small masters mostly marry when they are turned of twenty. You see our trade's coming to such a pass, that unless a man has children to help him he can't live at all. I've worked more than a month together, and the longest night's rest I've had has been an hour and a quarter; ay, and I've been up three nights a week besides. I've had my children lying ill, and been obliged to wait on them into the bargain. You see we couldn't live if it wasn't for the labour of our children, though it makes 'em—poor little things!—old people long afore they are growed up.'