The Commonweal/Volume 1/Number 3/East-End Workers—III

by Lewis Lyons

EAST-END WORKERS.—III.

In writing this article on “sweating,” I speak with authority as a bonâ fide working tailor for eleven years, working in the sweater's den in the East-end of London. I have endeavoured to gather facts to lay them before the public. The community at large is ignorant of the cruelty that takes place in those fever dens, and it is the oppressed worker who alone knows his grievances; but unfortunately, for fear of being discharged from employment, he has to remain silent, and thus the evil of sweating is extensively carried on, which is nothing more nor less than slow murder. I know there are men and women ready to assist in advocating the people's cause. It is my duty as a Socialist to lay before the public their grievances and also to say to what they are subjected.

Dealing with the deplorable condition of the working tailoresses in East London, their wretched pay, their miserable meals, their captivity, approaching to slavery, in places the most dangerous and unhealthy, simply reveals but one aspect of the misery existing in parts of East London, the natural out-growth of the sweating system. Without entering at length in the course of the present article into the many details of the sweating system, it will be most sufficient to indicate the growth of one of the most miserable conditions of things in the East-end of London, and some of the mischief to which it has given rise. “Sweaters,” then, it may be well to mention at the outset, has a technical meaning, as applied to those engaged in the tailoring trade, a class of men who, receiving a certain amount of cloth from the large clothing establishments in the metropolis, for which security is given, agree to work that cloth into garments, or parts of garments, for a certain price. This assertion, however, must be qualified to some extent, for sweaters thus receiving the cloth direct from the establishment are far from being in the majority. A certain amount of small influence is necessary to obtain “orders” or contracts, and the knowledge of this fact has given rise to a class of “middlemen,” who obtaining the cloth from the establishment, hand it over in their turn to the sweaters for a consideration. To these “middlemen” may, in reality, be traced the existence of the evil of low prices and wretched workshops. The sweaters, having to do the work at a less price because of putting as much of the money as possible into their own pockets, screw their workpeople down to the lowest wages possible, and work the “concern” as cheaply as they can. It may be mentioned, too, that the capital required to start a sweating shop is insignificant. The sweater, having received his orders, is immediately favoured with the attentions of an agent from a firm of sewing-machine manufacturers, who supply him with as many machines as he may acquire, at weekly payments of from one shilling to half-a-crown each, easily deducted from the profits he may pocket at the end of each week. His next move is to strike off a few bills or to advertise for “hands,” who are usually forthcoming. With these he strikes a bargain for a daily wage, screwed down to the utmost farthing, and allowing the sweaters a tolerably good profit. A few gas-burners are knocked up; the two wretched rooms of which the dilapidated house can boast are furnished with a few deal tables and chairs. Each rooms is filled with eight or ten persons, mostly girls, to whom, indeed, the sweater is rather partial, since they can do with less wages. The work is given out, the sewing-machine strikes up its rattling noise, and another sweating-shop is started somewhere in the streets right and left of Bethnal Green, Hackney Road and Whitechapel, in Princess Street, Church Street and Spitalfields. But wherever the shop may be, the sanitary conditions are invariably bad. Starting with little of or capital, the sweater cannot afford to make the rooms fit for the use to which they have been put. Consequently eight or ten persons are crowded into a room barely fit for three persons. The work being continued till late at night, three or four gas-jets may be seen flaring in one room; a coke fire may be seen simply burning in the wretched fireplace; sinks are untapped, closets are without water, and altogether the sanitary conditions are abominable. In this matter the inspectors under the Factory Acts are powerless, sanitation remaining exclusively under local authority, whose functions are limited. Moreover, the workpeople, being for the most part foreigners—Dutch, Polish, Russian—who migrating into this country fancy they have arrived at the El Dorado of their hopes, uneducated, and ignorant of the simplest of sanitary laws, do much by their own to complete the wreck and ruin of their own constitution, started by the sweaters, with the result that over 50 per cent. suffer in a short time from heart and lung disease.

LEWIS LYONS.