Sweat-Shop

a private room, house, or tenement, not a factory, in which piecework is carried on. The term is used most frequently in connection with the manufacture of ready-made clothing, but a sweatshop is any private room, not a factory, in which piecework is done, and sweating applies not only to tailoring but to any kind of work brought home to be done by the piece. Some account may be read, under the heading FACTORY SYSTEM, of the evils that grew up in towns following the change from the domestic to the factory system of spinning and weaving. The sweating system is a return, in a way, to the domestic system, under city--not rural--conditions. A concrete example will illustrate the working of the sweating system. A New York wholesaler desires, let us say, 20,000 suits of a given style such as is designed to sell at retail for $10 the suit. He makes his wants known and invites bids. He enters into a contract with the lowest bidder. Or the manufacturer solicits a contract to supply suits according to sample. He puts his price down to make the sale. In either case the contractor buys material at wholesale and, instead of manufacturing in a factory in the daylight, he farms out his work. To a cutter or group of cutters he issues material and pays by the piece for cutting out vests; to others he gives the cutting of trousers, coats, etc. The cut garments are brought to the contractor, who reissues them, with the addition of buttons, buckles, thread, etc., to be sewed at so much the garment. He does not go about soliciting laborors; he simply offers piecework at starvation wages, and the poor come for the work, carry it to their homes, such as they are, and return the complete garment for inspection.

We are accustomed to dwell upon the plenty that prevails in this country without realizing that our large cities contain enough misery to out-Europe Europe itself. The throngs that file through the offices of these contractors tell the story. Cutters as colorless as vegetation grown in a cellar, worthy men laboring literally day and night to support a family, inebriates starting up after a day of stupid debauch, widows sewing when they ought to be asleep to pay rent and keep their children from the poorhouse, the aged, the needy, not dozens,--thousands and thousands of them,--stand in line and exchange their bundle of completed work for huge bundles of material and a little coin. The hectoring, brow-beating, "fining," and threats of refusal to give out more, not to say the language addressed to women and young girls, have been represented by investigators in terms that make human slavery seem decent, humane, and desirable. As to prices paid, Mr. Henry White, secretary of the United Garment Workers, states that the cost of making a $10 suit is $1.45, distributed: 15 cents to the cutter, 70 cents to the coatmaker, 30 cents to the vest maker, and 30 cents for making the trousers. For a suit sold at retail for $20 double these prices are paid, save that 5 cents is clipped from the cutter's pay and a second nickel from the vest maker's, leaving the price for cutting and making a $20 suit $2.80.

Sweating prevails in the large cities, we may say, of the world. London is considered a center of the system. Low earnings prevail. Two cents an hour is not an infrequent, in fact it is almost the average, earning of a vast population. Two old people are cited as together earning 87 cents a week. A widow with four children works twelve hours a day and earns $2 a week when she can get full work. Women and children in Birmingham--this in 1907--sew hooks and eyes to cards at 28 cents per gross of cards, earning, at the utmost, fifty cents to a dollar a week. We are under the impression that plenty prevails in this country. We have read so long of European poverty and hunger and distress that we are not aware of the tremendous effort that has been put forth abroad to remedy wrongs, and we are in danger of forgetting that there are centers of population at home where conditions resemble those of Europe. A few extracts from a recent report reveal conditions which prevail in the large cities of our own United States of America:

In New York a woman was found who earned $70 by twenty weeks' work, which was the entire income for the support of herself, mother, aged fifty-seven years, and sister, aged thirty-two years.

The family (Philadelphia) consisted of a man, wife', and five children, who worked cooked, ate, and slept in two small rooms. The people looked as tho they had not washed themselves for a year. The boys' coats that they were making were piled upon a dirty bed. The dirt could absolutely have been shoveled out of the rooms. Potato parings, garbage, and filth of all kinds were strewn about the floor, and the odor that prevailed was so foul that one of the agents was made sick.

A journeyman tailor of Chicago testified before the Industrial Commission that he knew many men who worked, during the busy season, six days and three nights in the same week, and that he had repeatedly seen men work thirty-six hours without any interruption or sleep or hardly any time to take their meals.

It is absolutely impossible to know the number of hours per week which one person might devote to the work, in the busy season--a woman will frequently not have more than five hours' rest in the twenty-four. The hours are regulated solely by the amount of work on hand or by the physical strength of the worker--Sundays and holidays, in sickness and health, work they must. The amount received varies with the kind of work, from a cent and a half an hour to ten cents--very rarely more. The little children, according to their ages, earn from 50 cents to $2 per week. During December the average monthly income of 49 new families was $13.24; the average rent was $8.57, leaving the sum of $4.67 to buy food, fuel, and clothing for the average family of five.

The sweat-shop clothing industry of America employs over 5,000,000 persons, to say nothing of other lines. Over half of the ready-made clothing of American men, women, and children is made in sweatshops. Says Miss Sumner:

It is an erroneous idea to suppose that sweatshop clothing is necessarily poor in quality. On the contrary, overalls and working men's garments are usually manufactured in large factories under good conditions, while some of the worst conditions are found in the custom trade and in the manufacture of beautiful and expensive garments. It was again and again stated before the Industrial Commission that no man in buying a custom-made suit of the best and most fashionable tailor could have any assurance that it was not made in a sweat-shop. The same thing may be said of all classes of women's ready-made clothing.

The leading states have enacted laws and appointed inspectors to enforce them, but the difficulty lies in enforcing laws that take the very crust from the needy. On this point Dr. Annie S. Daniel says:

We have laws which if enforced would obliterate every sweat-room, great and small, in New York. To enforce these laws would require an army of inspectors working day and night. . . . I have a list of tenements licensed by the Labor Bureau in my neighborhood. I have been in thirty-eight of these houses; the license was posted in twelve. In one of these licensed houses I have attended a case of measles; there are two families in the apartment; the notice of the contagious disease was posted on the door; two women were finishing trousers within; one day I found the sick child lying on a bundle of the trousers; this is a common occurrence. There is also a clause forbidding the employment of any but members of the family; not only is this not obeyed, but the work is carried to other apartments and even to other houses. The old law placed the responsibility of manufacturing on the worker and the manufacturers. The new law takes the responsibility off the worker and puts it on the landlord. On Jan. 9th, according to the daily papers, a raid was made by twenty-two inspectors in Elizabeth Street. The people were duly frightened, much of the work was hidden, and to my personal knowledge in the evening was being done in inside bedrooms, with doors locked. Fresh work I saw carried in and finished in about the same way that the people would have made counterfeit money. The next day and since, it is being done openly, outlooks being posted in different parts of the house who will give the alarm in their own language, and work will be again hidden should another inspection be made. Is there any remedy? I believe that a law absolutely forbidding any manufacturer to have any part of his work done in a tenement-house could be enforced.