White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor

by Louis Albert Banks

A witness from Leeds says: "Wages are driven to a starvation level, and workmen at piece-work compelled to excessive hours. If the employers find a good workman, who is earning good wages by piece-work, they try to reduce prices. Time work is healthier, but no one would believe how the men are driven in shops where time-work exists."

Another gentleman, testifying about his investigations in Glasgow, tells of a place he visited, where a sweater had between forty and fifty women employed in an old boiler shed, a disused part of an engineer's shop; the women had to get to it by three wooden ladders, and had to go through a joiner's shop in order to enter the workroom. There was no sanitary accommodation for these women anywhere. It is a common practice for sweaters to take on learners, that is to say, to employ young girls for a certain time to learn the machine part of the work; but they get no wages for say five or six weeks or so, or two months, and after that time, if competent, they receive two or three shillings per week. But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch.

The practical slavery to which the laboring-people, by the sweating system, have been degraded, is illustrated on almost every page of the evidence. One witness testifies: "They do almost as they like with their victims. The people are afraid to give evidence against them. The sweater is a law unto himself. One woman I came across says she has not been paid for her work done some three years ago, on some trivial pretext which the sweater made. Another deducted a whole week's work from a woman's wages because she was ten minutes late, and so aggravated the people in the neighborhood that they smashed his windows, showing the state of things between the sweater and his people."

As one would naturally expect, moral degradation keeps pace with the outrage upon the rights of the laborer. It is claimed that the Jewesses, who have always had the most unblemished character of any women in the world, are being ruined in the sweat-shops of London, where they are herded together with all classes of men in a way which renders morality and decency next to impossible. One witness bears this terrible testimony: "The sweating system, in which you have young girls working with men of all nationalities, and of all degrees of intelligence, conduces to their being later on, and they are mostly, to my certain knowledge, prostitutes. Most of the young English girls whom we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been, tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect."

So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law, Mr. Wm. Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim," which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the sweat-shop."

It is easy to say, "Oh, well, these horrible things you are telling us about belong to the Old World!" I would to God they did belong to the Old World alone, but the horrible truth is, that this vicious system is like a banyan-tree that has run its roots under the sea, and is coming up, and blossoming, and flourishing in all our great American cities. Listen to this description of the slaves of the sweat-shop in New York, given by the New York Herald: "In the lower portion of the great east side of this city, are hundreds of tall, ill-appearing tenement houses, in which thousands of half-starved, sunken-eyed men and women are crowded into small, foul, over-heated rooms, working day and night for just enough to keep body and soul together. Scattered among the workers are dirty children, and sometimes cats and dogs. Everything in these places has to stand aside for work. It is work, work, work, day and night, year in and year out. In these over-crowded rooms the air is poisoned with the heat from the stoves, the steam from the cooking, and the fumes of oil and gas. Very few of the toilers can speak English. They are the most wretched-looking, miserably-paid class of workers in America. They are foreigners, and come chiefly from Russia and Poland. No sunshine enters into their lives. Their existence is one hard, deep, grinding toil. They have no hope of brighter days to come. As they have worked for years, so they expect to work in the future. But the sweater does not care. He has his contracts with the manufacturers. Every day great bundles of clothing are dumped into these dens, and then the slaves are driven at full speed to make them up. Competition is keen, but the sweater makes money."

[Illustration: INSIDE A SWEAT-SHOP.]

The Journeymen Tailors' National Union, in its fifth annual report, describes in detail one of these New York sweat-shops, similar to those which the recent commission, appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, found to be the manufactories of enormous quantities of clothing for Boston firms: "On the first floor, which was occupied by two families, was a contractor, or 'sweater,' who made overcoats. In the front room, 8x16 ft., eight full-grown men were at work, some on sewing-machines, a man pressing, and others finishing. They were hollow-cheeked and cadaverous. Trousers and undershirts were their only apparel. In the rear room, 9x14, were six other men, almost identical in appearance with those in the front. All were working as if for dear life.

"This place was simply indescribable in its filthiness. The only household furniture discernible (for the contractor and his family lived in the rooms), were a bedstead and a child's crib in one of the two dark, so-called bedrooms. Bedding and overcoats were piled up together. The floors were four inches deep with dirt and cotton battings and scraps of linings. The ceilings and woodwork looked as though they had not seen a brush since the house was built years ago. Water from the floor above had leaked through the ceiling, but it seemed to make no difference. One stove was used by the pressers and the cook. It did not appear that there was any regular meal hour. There was a table littered with dirty dishes, morsels of food, and scraps of coats. One man was seated, eating out of a dish with his fingers, without the aid of spoon, knife, or fork. As soon as he had finished, he merely wiped his hands on some cotton batting, and proceeded with his work. The poor creatures were haggard and apparently stupid." What wonder?

Dr. George C. Stiebling, of New York, who accompanied the recent Boston investigating committee, says, in an affidavit made after a careful investigation, that the New York sweatshops "in which clothing is manufactured, and which serve at the same time as dwelling-rooms for the bosses, their families, and boarders, are overcrowded, ill-ventilated, over-heated, full of dirt, filth, vermin and stench, and that, consequently, they are in a most unwholesome, health-destroying and disease-breeding condition." The doctor, speaking of one particular case, says: "On the fourth floor I found four very small rooms, occupied by five sewing-machines, twenty-four working hands, and the family of the boss consisting of himself, wife, and five living children. The mother reported to affiant that, within the last few years, six of her children had died of various diseases here in the same place." Relying upon these and other facts, which he relates, the Doctor declares it to be his deliberate conclusion, as a medical man, that "the dust, filth, and dirt, accumulated in the 'sweating dens' he has visited and examined, contain the germs of the prevailing infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, scarlatina, measles, erysipelas, and smallpox, and that the clothing manufactured in these shops is impregnated with such germs, and consequently may transmit and spread the aforesaid diseases to persons who handle and wear it."