Problems of Poverty - John A. Hobson
Sec. 8. The Jew as an Industrial Competitor.--Looking at these foreigners
as individuals, there is much to be said in their favour. They do not
introduce a lower morality into the quarters where they settle, as the
Chinese are said to do; nor are they quarrelsome and law-breaking, like
the low-class Italians who swarm into America. Their habits, so far as
cleanliness is concerned, are perhaps not desirable, but the standard of
the native population of Whitechapel is not sensitively high. For the
most part, and this is true especially of the Jews, they are steady,
industrious, quiet, sober, thrifty, quick to learn, and tolerably
honest. From the point of view of the old Political Economy, they are
the very people to be encouraged, for they turn out the largest quantity
of wealth at the lowest cost of production. If it is the chief end for a
nation to accumulate the largest possible stock of material wealth, it
is evident that these are the very people we require to enable us to
achieve our object.
But if we consider it is sound national policy to pay regard to the
welfare of all classes engaged in producing this wealth, we may regard
this foreign immigration in quite another light. The very virtues just
enumerated are the chief faults we have to find with the foreign Jew.
Just because he is willing and able to work so hard for so little pay,
willing to undertake any kind of work out of which he can make a living,
because he can surpass in skill, industry, and adaptability the native
Londoner, the foreign Jew is such a terrible competitor. He is the
nearest approach to the ideal "economic" man, the "fittest" person to
survive in trade competition. Admirable in domestic morality, and an
orderly citizen, he is almost void of social morality. No compunction or
consideration for his fellow-worker will keep him from underselling and
overreaching them; he acquires a thorough mastery of all the
dishonourable tricks of trade which are difficult to restrain by law;
the superior calculating intellect, which is a national heritage, is
used unsparingly to enable him to take advantage of every weakness,
folly, and vice of the society in which he lives.
Sec. 9. Effect of Foreign Competition.--One other quality he has in common
with the mass of poor foreigners who compete in the London labour
market--he can live on less than the Englishman. What Mrs Webb says of
the Polish Jew, is in large measure true of all cheap foreign
labour--"As industrial competitor, the Polish Jew is fettered by no
definite standard of life; it rises and falls with his opportunities; he
is not depressed by penury, and he is not demoralized by gain." The
fatal significance of this is evident. We have seen that notwithstanding
a general rise in the standard of comfort of the mass of labourers,
there still remains in all our cities a body of labouring men and women
engaged in doing ill-paid and irregular work for wages which keep them
always on the verge of starvation. Now consider what it means for these
people to have brought into their midst a number of competitors who can
live even more cheaply than they can live, and who will consent to toil
from morning to night for whatever they can get. These new-comers are
obviously able, in their eagerness for work, to drive down the rate of
wages even below what represents starvation-point for the native worker.
The insistence of the poorer working-classes, under the stimulus of new-
felt wants, the growing enlightenment of public opinion, have slowly and
gradually won, even for the poorer workers in English cities, some small
advance in material comfort, some slight expansion in the meaning of the
term "necessaries of life." Turn a few shiploads of Polish Jews upon any
of these districts, and they will and must in the struggle for life
destroy the whole of this. Remember it is not merely the struggle of too
many workers competing on equal terms for an insufficient quantity of
work. That is terrible enough. But when the struggle is between those
accustomed to a higher, and those accustomed to a lower, standard of
life, the latter can obviously oust the former, and take their work.
Just as a base currency drives out of circulation a pure currency, so
does a lower standard of comfort drive out a higher one. This is the
vital question regarding foreign immigration which has to be faced.
Nor is it merely a question of the number of these foreigners. The
inflow of a comparatively small number into a neighbourhood where much
of the work is low-skilled and irregular, will often produce an effect
which seems quite out of proportion to the actual number of the
invaders. Where work is slack and difficult to get, a very small
addition of low-living foreigners will cause a perceptible fall in the
entire wages of the neighbourhood in the employments which their
competition affects. It is true that the Jew does not remain a low-
skilled labourer for starvation wages. Beginning at the bottom of the
ladder, he rises by his industry and skill, until he gets into the rank
of skilled workers, or more frequently becomes a sub-contractor, or a
small shopkeeper. It might appear that as he thus rose, the effect of
his competition in the low skilled labour market would disappear. And
this would be so were it not for the persistent arrival of new-comers to
take the place of those who rise. It is the continuity in the flow of
foreign emigration which constitutes the real danger.
Economic considerations do not justify us in expecting any speedy check
upon this flow. The growing means of communication among nations, the
cheapening of transport, the breaking down of international prejudices,
must, if they are left free to operate, induce the labourer to seek the
best market for his labour, and thus tend to equalize the condition of
labour in the various communities, raising the level of the lower paid
and lower lived at the expense of the higher paid and higher lived.
Sec. 10. The Water-tight Compartment Theory.--One point remains to be
mentioned. It is sometimes urged that the foreign Jews who come to our
shores do not injure our low skilled workers to any considerable extent,
because they do not often enter native trades, but introduce new trades
which would not have existed at all were it not for their presence. They
work, it is said, in water-tight compartments, competing among
themselves, but not directly competing with English workers. Now if it
were the case that these foreigners really introduced new branches of
production designed to stimulate and supply new wants this contention
would have much weight. The Flemings who in Edward III.'s reign
introduced the finer kinds of weaving into England, and the Huguenot
refugees who established new branches of the silk, glass, and paper
manufactures, conferred a direct service upon English commerce, and
their presence in the labour market was probably an indirect service to
the English workers. But this is not the case with the modern Jew
immigrants. They have not stimulated or supplied new wants. It is not
even correct to say that most of them do not directly compete with
native labour. It is true that certain branches of the cheap clothing
trade have been their creation. The cheap coat trade, which they almost
monopolize, seems due to their presence. But even here they have
established no new _kind_ of trade. To their cheap labour perhaps is due
in some cases the large export trade in cheap clothing, but even then it
is doubtful whether the work would not otherwise have been done by
machinery under healthier conditions, and have furnished work and wages
for English workers. During the last decade they have been entering more
and more into direct competition with British labour in the cabinet-
making, shoemaking, baking, hair-dressing, and domestic service
occupations. Lastly, they enter into direct competition of the worst
form with English female labour, which is driven in these very clothing
trades to accept work and wages which are even too low to tempt the Jews
of Whitechapel. The constant infiltration of cheap immigrant labour is
in large measure responsible for the existence of the "sweating
workshops," and the survival of low forms of industrial development
which form a factor in the problem of poverty.
Chapter IV.
"The Sweating System."
Sec. 1. Origin of the Term "Sweating."--Having gained insight into some of
the leading industrial forces of the age, we can approach more hopefully
the study of that aspect of City poverty, commonly known as the
"Sweating System."
The first thing is to get a definite meaning to the term. Since the
examination of experts before the recent "Lords' Committee" elicited
more than twenty widely divergent definitions of this "Sweating System,"
some care is required at the outset of our inquiry. The common use of
the term "Sweating System" is itself responsible for much ambiguity, for
the term "system" presupposes a more or less distinct form of
organization of industry identified with the evils of sweating. Now as
it should be one of the objects of inquiry to ascertain whether there
exists any one such definite form, it will be better at the outset to
confine ourselves to the question, "What is Sweating?"
As an industrial term the word seems to have been first used among
journeymen tailors. The tailoring houses which once executed all orders
on their own premises, by degrees came to recognize the convenience of
giving out work to tailors who would work at their own homes. The long
hours which the home workers were induced to work in order to increase
their pay, caused the term "Sweater" to be applied to them by the men
who worked for fixed hours on the tailors' premises, and who found their
work passing more and more into the hands of the home workers. Thus we
learn that originally it was long hours and not low wages which
constituted "sweating." School-boy slang still uses the word in this
same sense. Moreover, the first sweater was one who "sweated" himself,
not others. But soon when more and more tailoring work was "put out,"
the home worker, finding he could undertake more than he could execute,
employed his family and also outsiders to help him. This makes the
second stage in the evolution of the term; the sweater now "sweated"
others as well as himself, and he figured as a "middleman" between the
tailoring firm which employed him, and the assistants whom he employed
for fixed wages. Other clothing trades have passed through the same
process of development, and have produced a sub-contracting middleman.
The term "sweater" has thus by the outside world, and sometimes by the
workers themselves, come to be generally applied to sub-contractors in
small City trades. But the fact of the special application has not
prevented the growth of a wider signification of "sweating" and
"sweater." As the long hours worked in the tailors' garrets were
attended with other evils--a low rate of wages, unsanitary conditions,
irregularity of employment, and occasional tyranny in all the forms
which attend industrial authority--all these evils became attached to
the notion of sweating. The word has thus grown into a generic term to
express this disease of City poverty from its purely industrial side.
Though "long hours" was the gist of the original complaint, low wages
have come to be recognized as equally belonging to the essence of
"sweating." In some cases, indeed, low wages have become the leading
idea, so that employers are classed as sweaters who pay low wages,
without consideration of hours or other conditions of employment. Trade
Unions, for example, use the term "sweating" specifically to express the
conduct of employers who pay less than the "standard" rate of wages. The
abominable sanitary condition of many of the small workshops, or private
dwellings of workers, is to many reformers the most essential element in
sweating.
Sec. 2. Present Applications of the Name.--When the connotation of the term
"sweating" had become extended so as to include along with excessive
hours of labour, low wages, unsanitary conditions of work, and other
evils, which commonly belong to the method of sub-contract employment,
it was only natural that the same word should come to be applied to the
same evils when they were found outside the sub-contract system. For
though it has been, and still is, true, that where the method of sub-
contract is used the workers are frequently "sweated," and though to the
popular mind the sub-contractor still figures as the typical sweater, it
is not right to regard "sub-contract" as the real cause of sweating. For
it is found--
Firstly, that in some trades sub-contract is used without the evils of
sweating being present. Mr. Burnett, labour correspondent to the Board
of Trade, in his evidence before the Lords' Committee, maintains that
where Trade Unions are strong, as in the engineering trade, sub-contract
is sometimes employed under conditions which are entirely
"unobjectionable." So too in the building trades, sub-contract is not
always attended by "sweating."
Secondly, much of the worst "sweating" is found where the element of
sub-contract is entirely wanting, and where there is no trace of a
ravenous middleman. This will be found especially in women's
employments. Miss Potter, after a close investigation of this point,
arrives at the conclusion that "undoubtedly the worst paid work is made
under the direction of East End retail slop-shops, or for tally-men--a
business from which contact, even in the equivocal form of wholesale
trading, has been eliminated."[20] The term "sweating" must be deemed as
applicable to the case of the women employed in the large steam-
laundries, who on Friday and Saturday work for fifteen or sixteen hours
a day, to the overworked and under-paid waitresses in restaurants and
shops, to the men who, as Mr. Burleigh testified, "are employed in some
of the wealthiest houses of business, and received for an average
working week of ninety-five hours, board, lodging, and L15 a year," as
it is to the tailoress who works fourteen hours a day for Whitechapel
sub-contractors.
The terms "sweating" and "sweating System," then, after originating in a
narrow application to the practice of over-work under sub-contractors in
the lower branches of the tailoring trade, has expanded into a large
generic term, to express the condition of all overworked, ill-paid,
badly-housed workers in our cities. It sums up the industrial or
economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in
its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched
"fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not
only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his
wage of 1s. 2d. per diem, and of the lowest class of each manufacturing
trade in East and Central London. It is true of the relatively unskilled
labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who on
25s. a week or less has to support a wife and children and an appearance
of respectability; the usher, who grinds out low-class instruction
through the whole tedious day for less than the wage of a plain cook;
the condition of these and many other kinds of low-class brain-workers
is only a shade less pitiable than the "sweating" of manual labourers,
and the causes, as we shall see, are much the same. If our investigation
of "sweating" is chiefly confined to the condition of the manual
labourer, it is only because the malady there touches more directly and
obviously the prime conditions of physical life, not because the nature
of the industrial disease is different.
Sec. 3. Leading "Sweating" Trades.--It is next desirable to have some clear
knowledge of the particular trades in which the worst forms of
"sweating" are found, and the extent to which it prevails in each. The
following brief summary is in a large measure drawn from evidence
furnished to the recent Lords' Committee on the Sweating System. Since
the sweating in women's industries is so important a subject as to
demand a separate treatment, the facts stated here will chiefly apply to
male industries.
Tailoring.--In the tailoring trade the best kind of clothes are still
made by highly-skilled and well-paid workmen, but the bulk of the cheap
clothing is in the hands of "sweaters," who are sometimes skilled
tailors, sometimes not, and who superintend the work of cheap unskilled
hands. In London the coat trade should be distinguished from the vest
and trousers trade. The coat-making trade in East London is a closely-
defined district, with an area of one square mile, including the whole
of Whitechapel and parts of two adjoining parishes. The trade is almost
entirely in the hands of Jews, who number from thirty to forty thousand
persons. Recent investigations disclosed 906 workshops, which, in the
quality and conditions of the work done in them, may be graded according
to the number of hands employed. The larger workshops, employing from
ten to twenty-five hands or more, generally pay fair wages, and are free
from symptoms of sweating. But in the small workshops, which form about
80 per cent of the whole number, the common evils of the sweating system
assert themselves--overcrowding, bad sanitation, and excessive hours of
labour. Thirteen and fourteen hours are the nominal day's work for men;
and those workshops which do not escape the Factory Inspector assign a
nominal factory day for women; but "among the imperfectly taught workers
in the slop and stock trade, and more especially in the domestic
workshops, under-pressers, plain machinists, and fellers are in many
instances expected to 'convenience' their masters, i.e. to work for
twelve or fifteen hours in return for ten or thirteen hours' wage."[21]
The better class workers, who require some skill, get comparatively high
wages even in the smaller workshops, though the work is irregular; but
the general hands engaged in making 1s. coats, generally women, get a
maximum of _1s. 6d._, and a minimum which is indefinitely below 1s. for
a twelve hours' day. This low-class work is also hopeless. The raw hand,
or "greener" as he is called, will often work through his apprenticeship
for nominal wages; but he has the prospect of becoming a machinist, and
earning from 6s. to 10s. a day, or of becoming in his turn a sweater.
The general hand has no such hope. The lowest kind of coat-making,
however, is refused by the Jew contractor, and falls to Gentile women.
These women also undertake most of the low-class vest and trousers
making, generally take their work direct from a wholesale house, and
execute it at home, or in small workshops. The price for this work is
miserably low, partly by reason of the competition of provincial
factories, partly for reasons to be discussed in a later chapter. Women
will work for twelve or fifteen hours a day throughout the week as
"trousers finishers," for a net-earning of as little as 4s. or 5s. Such
is the condition of inferior unskilled labour in the tailoring trade. It
should however be understood that in "tailoring," as in other "sweating"
trades, the lowest figures quoted must be received with caution. The
wages of a "greener," a beginner or apprentice, should not be taken as
evidence of a low wage in the trade, for though it is a lamentable thing
that the learner should have to live upon the value of his prentice
work, it is evident that under no commercial condition could he support
himself in comfort during this period. It is the normal starvation wage
of the low-class experienced hand which is the true measure of
"sweating" in these trades. Two facts serve to give prominence to the
growth of "sweating" in the tailoring trades. During the last few years
there has been a fall of some 30 per cent, in the prices paid for the
same class of work. During the same period the irregularity of work has
increased. Even in fairly large shops the work for ordinary labour only
averages some three days in the week, while we must reckon two and a
half days for unskilled workers in smaller workshops, or working at
home.
Among provincial towns Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds show a rapid
growth of sweating in the clothing trade. In each case the evil is
imputed to "an influx of foreigners, chiefly Jews." In each town the
same conditions appear--irregular work and wages, unsanitary conditions,
over-crowding, evasion of inspection. The growth in Leeds is remarkable.
"There are now ninety-seven Jewish workshops in the city, whereas five
years ago there were scarcely a dozen. The number of Jews engaged in the
tailoring trade is about three thousand. The whole Jewish population of
Leeds is about five thousand."[22]
Boot-making.--The hand-sewn trade, which constitutes the upper stratum
of this industry, is executed for the most part by skilled workers, who
get good wages for somewhat irregular employment. There are several
strong trade organizations, and though the hours are long, extending
occasionally to thirteen or fourteen hours, the worst forms of sweating
are not found. So too in the upper branches of machine-sewn boots, the
skilled hands get fairly high wages. But the lower grades of machine-
made boots, and the "sew-rounds," i.e. fancy shoes and slippers, which
form a large part of the industry in London, present some of the worst
features of the "sweating system." The "sweating master" plays a large
part here. "In a busy week a comparatively competent 'sweater' may earn
from 18s. to 25s. less skilful hands may get 15s. or 16s. but boys and
newly-arrived foreigners take 10s., 8s., 7s., or less; while the
masters, after paying all expenses, would, according to their own
estimates, make not less than 30s., and must, in many cases, net much
higher sums. Owing, however, to the irregularity of their employment,
the average weekly earnings of both masters and men throughout the year
fall very greatly below the amount which they can earn when in full
work."[23] For the lowest kinds of work an ordinary male hand appears to
be able to earn not more than 15s. per week. A slow worker, it is said,
would earn an average of some 10s. to 12s. per week. The hours of labour
for sweating work appear to be from fifteen to eighteen per diem, and
"greeners" not infrequently work eighteen to twenty hours a day. Women,
who are largely used in making "felt and carpet uppers," cannot, if they
work their hardest, make more than 1s. 3d. a day. In the lowest class of
work wages fall even lower. Mr. Schloss gives the wages of five men
working in a small workshop, whose average is less than 11s. a week.
These wages do not of course represent skilled work at all. Machinery
has taken over all the skilled work, and left a dull laborious monotony
of operations which a very few weeks' practice enable a completely
unskilled worker to undertake. Probably the bulk of the cheapest work is
executed by foreigners, although from figures taken in 1887, of four
typical London parishes, it appeared that only 16 per cent, of the whole
trade were foreigners. In the lower classes of goods a considerable fall
of price has occurred during the fast few years, and perhaps the most
degraded conditions of male labour are to be found in the boot trade. A
large proportion of the work throughout the trade is out-work, and
therefore escapes the operation of the Factory Act. The competition
among small employers is greatly accentuated by the existence of a form
of middleman known as the "factor," who is an agent who gets his profit
by playing off one small manufacturer against another, keeping down
prices, and consequently wages, to a minimum. A large number of the
small producers are extremely poor, and owing to the System which
enables them to obtain material from leather-merchants on short credit,
are constantly obliged to sell at a disadvantage to meet their bills.
The "factor," as a speculator, takes advantage of this to accumulate
large stocks at low prices, and throwing them on the market in large
quantities when wholesale prices rise, causes much irregularity in the
trade.
The following quotation from the Report of the Lords' Committee sums up
the chief industrial forces which are at work, and likewise illustrates
the confusion of causes with symptoms, and casual concomitants, which
marks the "common sense" investigations of intricate social phenomena.
"It will be seen from the foregoing epitome of the evidence, that
sweating in the boot trade is mainly traced by the witnesses to the
introduction of machinery, and a more complete system of subdivision of
labour, coupled with immigration from abroad and foreign competition.
Some witnesses have traced it in a great measure, if not principally, to
the action of factors; some to excessive competition among small masters
as well as men; others have accused the Trades Unions of a course of
action which has defeated the end they have in view, namely, effectual
combination, by driving work, owing to their arbitrary conduct, out of
the factory into the house of the worker, and of handicapping England in
the race with foreign countries, by setting their faces against the use
of the best machinery."[24]