“Somewhere festering at the basis, round the foundations of the great mansion of England’s economic supremacy, are to be discovered the workers of the 'sweated trades'. At intervals of ten, fifteen, or twenty years the dredger is let down to scrape up samples of the material of the ocean floor: in Royal Commissions, Committees of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. It is always there, whatever tides and tempests trouble the surface far above: a settled mass of congested poverty shivering through life upon a margin below which life ceases to exist.” (C.F.G. Masterman, "The Condition of England", 1909)
What is “sweating”? Many people have set about describing the life of a sweated worker: the poverty, the exploitation, the danger, the long hours, the abuse, intimidation and insanitary conditions. However, sweated labour can be defined quite simply as, "the employment of workers for long hours in poor conditions”, for low pay.
The public awareness of sweated labour originated around the middle of the nineteenth century, and was centred on the tailoring industry. In 1843 Thomas Hood’s poem, “Song of the Shirt”, was published in the satirical magazine, “Punch”. The story of a seamstress, forced to work long hours sewing shirts for starvation wages, captured the public imagination and tripled the magazine's circulation.
In 1848 a series of letters on sweating by Henry Mayhew was published in the "Morning Chronicle" and reproduced in other newspapers with illustrations. Again the focus was on the tailoring industry. However, Mayhew’s principle concern was with the effect, as he saw it, of unskilled, “dishonourable” and frequently “fallen” women undermining the trade of skilled male artisans.
In his defence, he did attempt to provide a new explanation for sweating and evolved a theory that “overwork leads to low pay” and conversely, that “low pay leads to overwork”. It was also his view that the middlemen were as much the victims of sweating as the sweated, as they had been forced into their roles as small capitalists by circumstance of poverty. Such foresight would not be seen again for more than fifty years.
Charles Kingsley, a Christian Socialist, was the next to contribute to the debate. Having been stimulated by Mayhew’s letters, Kingsley produced a pamphlet entitled “Cheap Clothes and Nasty” in which he detailed the manufacture of clothing by those carrying fatal diseases. It went on to describe how contaminated clothes were purchased by the unwitting, many of whom subsequently contracted typhus or smallpox. Such was the effect of this pamphlet that when copies were left on the table of the Guards' Club at Eton, the young officers began to order their coats from the co-operative workrooms set up by the Working Tailors' Association, an organisation started by Kingsley and fellow Christian Socialists, Frederick Maurice and John Ludlow.
Kingsley firmly placed the blame for this situation at the door of, firstly, Jewish entrepreneurs and, secondly, the government for allowing contractors to sub-contract out government work to sweatshops. Kingsley's argument was an example of the anti-Semitism prevalent at the time, when immigrants from Eastern Europe were seeking refuge in Britain. He also failed to recognise that sweating existed in many trades that were not employed on Government work. His pamphlet relied on sensationalism, rather than fact, and did little to shed light on the plight of the sweated.
The pamphlet's success, however, led to the publication of a book, "Alton Locke" (1850), which was a subtler, dramatised version of “Cheap Clothes and Nasty”. Whilst providing an impassioned account of the lives of the sweated, it also contained bigoted judgements on any who did not share Kingsley’s Anglican faith, in particular “fallen” women, Catholics and Jews. The result was to leave many with an image of the sweater as a rapacious middleman, frequently Jewish, to be despised and blamed. Ultimately Kingsley was more Christian than Socialist, as is evidenced by his advice to the sweated workers in 1856: “Emigrate, but never strike….I see little before the Englishman but to abide and endure”.
Eventually, Kingsley’s work was overshadowed by the success of the mid-Victorian economy and the cult of progress. As the medical journal the “Lancet” was later to remark, “….as the Chartist movement died out, and the depression and distress of the forties were forgotten, so the old grievances disappeared, drowned in a sea of prosperity”.
During the early years of the “Great Depression” (1873-1896) the “Lancet” had also commissioned a report on the spreading of infectious diseases through garments made in insanitary sweatshops. Its approach had much in common with Kingsley, associating sweating with subcontracting and avaricious middlemen. It provided compelling evidence about the dangers to the public of sweated labour. One case, in particular, referred to Sir Robert Peel's daughter, whose death was attributed to her riding habit, which had been made in the room of a fever patient. The “Lancet” report had little impact, however.
By the 1880s public interest in the subject was renewed by Andrew Mearns’s “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” (1883). This dealt with the living conditions of the sweated, and described the way their lives were being dragged down by their environment. Defrauded by slum landlords, forced to live with the worst criminal elements, and suffering the nauseating odours of their home-working, this environment, he claimed, led to “unspeakable immoral practices”. Mearns was a Congregationalist, Protestant, non-conformist and stressed, not the poverty of the sweated, but the possibility that they may become godless and depraved.
The “Lancet” also published a report on living conditions in the slums of London that was principally concerned with the influx of impoverished foreigners. Increased numbers made greater demands both on housing and on workshop premises. The timing was unfortunate as the local authorities had embarked on a programme of slum clearance, thereby exacerbating the problem. The “Lancet” chose to ignore this fact, and instead stated “…we found all the difficulties attached to the question of the housing of the poor are aggravated by the special habits of this peculiar people”. The report even alleged that they possessed their own “strange debris”.
The concern generated by the “Lancet” report resulted in the Board of Trade sending their labour correspondent, John Burnett, to East London to investigate sweating in the tailoring trade. Burnett subsequently investigated many other trades and his reports were placed before the House of Lords Select Committee on the Sweating System, a committee that went on to investigate twenty-seven trades.
There is little doubt that Burnett’s work helped to bring the issue of sweating to the forefront of political concern. However, in terms of providing an explanation for the cause of sweating, it was sadly lacking. Burnett, like others before him, placed the blame firmly at the door of the immigrants. In the case of the tailors, he was quite clear that it was the Jews who were to blame, using language that today we would find not just offensive, but illegal.
Burnett was equally scathing about the role of women in the workplace, often blaming them for being prepared to work for lower wages, thereby denying work to a man. This was his explanation for sweating in the chain, and other, trades. Burnett was a union man, and like many of his kind in that period, his agenda was concerned with keeping women out of the workplace altogether.
The Women’s Industrial Council (W.I.C.), formed in 1894 by a group of middle-class socialist feminists, also believed that women were their own worst enemies in that they were prepared to undercut each other, thus lowering wages. The W.I.C. was keen to end home-working, as it was harder to organise joint action on pay and conditions in the home environment than in a factory. They chose to ignore the sweating that existed in factories. The W.I.C. advocated a minimum wage, which they believed would deprive home-working of its economic advantage, thereby driving industry away from the home and into the factories.
However, many socialists were coming to the conclusion that the root cause of sweating was, quite simply, the oversupply of labour and lack of trade union organisation. The Liberal Party election victory in 1906 saw the arrival of key figures such as Percy Alden and Leo Chiozza Money, who were sympathetic to the suffering of the sweated. Money recognised that sweating “extends throughout almost the whole of the trades and industries of the United Kingdom”. The subsequent setting up of the Select Committee on Home-working provided an opportunity for enlightened socialists, such as Mary Macarthur, to point out that sweating was neither a result of home-working nor due to an influx of alien labour. Their explanation for the causes of sweating was that too many people were competing for the same work, and that many groups of workers, either for reasons of poverty or fear of retribution, were denied access to a trade union.
The only solution, they argued, was the setting of a minimum wage, which would level the playing field for home and factory work. It would also provide sufficient money for workers to afford trade union membership, making it possible for them to take advantage of the strength of organised labour in the fight against poor conditions.
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| Updated: | Wed 23 Apr 2008 - 1 |
| Interpretation written by | Louis Howe |
| Author's organisation | Curatorial |
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