“The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we have this comfort—that the day of the old individualist, anarchical order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the people.”
It was in the middle of the next morning that I chanced to meet, in the thick of a sweat-shop region of the West Side, an old acquaintance of the Socialist meetings. “The Unionist” I shall call him, for he had much to do with organizing the workers in sweat-shops into labor-unions. A victim of the sweaters himself, earning his living at a sewing-machine in a densely crowded shop, he yet managed to get about among the other victims and further their organization. More than once he had taken me with him on his rounds, and I had grown familiar with the sight of rooms, in all the poorer sections of the city where the rent is relatively low, turned into factories on a small scale for the manufacture of ready-made garments.
And this idea of miniature factories is really the key to the situation. The industry of ready-made clothing is an enormous one, involving millions of dollars of invested capital, and competition among the merchants is very keen. The difference of a fraction of a cent in the cost of production, by the piece, of a given garment may mean the difference between profit and loss in the whole output. Cheapness of production is, therefore, of the first necessity.
Merchants of the greatest executive ability and highest efficiency are able to secure the maximum of cheap production through the legitimate factory system. Men of less business ability, in order to compete successfully, avoid the factory system of production and make use of the sweat-shops instead. The sweat-shop is, therefore, in a single word, an evasion, under the stress of competition, of the factory system of production.
AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.
There are few industries which could profit any longer by this system as opposed to that of the factory, but the manufacture of ready-made clothing is an exception; and, in it, the less fit to survive are sure to take advantage of the sweat-shops, until they have been driven out of the business altogether by those whose superior abilities enable them to undersell the product of the shops with the product of legitimate factories.
The manufacturer who makes use of the factory system at once subjects himself to certain regulations. His work-rooms must show a certain cubic area to every operative employed; certain sanitary provisions must be regarded; children under a certain age must not be set to work, and a prescribed number of hours must be accepted as the limit of the working day.
But the manufacture of ready-made clothing lends itself to an easy escape from all this. Instead of having his work done in a factory, subject to wholesome but costly restrictions, a merchant may give it out to the lowest bidders among the sweaters. These men take it to their homes, and secure there the services of their wives and children, and employ the families of their neighbors. Thousands of rooms are thus closely packed with workers who have underbid one another in the struggle for existence, until, in the cheapest quarters available, without regard to light and air, and decent sanitation, the work is hurried forward at feverish haste by human wretches whose utmost toil through excessive hours can often earn them little more than the means of bare subsistence.