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The Sweated Needle, or How the Minimum Wage Was Born in the Clothing Trades
In Brief
- In the clothing trades, wages sank lower than anywhere else because the needle demanded almost no skill: the work drew in women with no other resource, and each newcomer undercut the rest.
- Neither the buyer's conscience nor the good employer could lift those wages alone: a dearer shirt would only draw more hands into the trade, and a manufacturer who paid well still had to compete with sweat-shop prices.
- Defenders of a legal minimum wage turned its main cost into an argument: a trade that cannot pay a living wage is parasitic, already kept alive by charity and poor relief, and its disappearance only makes visible a cost society was already bearing.
- The objection never refuted was the mobility of work. When New York garment workers won their strikes, orders went to other cities; and where the law followed the work, it did so by licensing outwork and banning homework.
Main authors
In 1865, a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly recorded a collapse. The price paid for making a shirt had been cut by half. Pleated shirt fronts crowded with seams were sewn “for a few cents per dozen,” and a woman doing cheap slop-shop work full time could hardly earn more than a dollar a week [1]. Watching the sewing-women suddenly reduced to idleness, the writer confessed to not understanding how they would live [1]. That bewilderment frames a long argument. What is labour worth when almost anyone can perform it? And can a society decide that its price will not fall below a certain line?
The answer that eventually prevailed was the legal minimum wage, and much of the case for it was made over the sweated garment. Its advocates won a principle of unusual severity: a trade that cannot pay its workers enough to live on is no asset to the community, and if it disappears under a wage law, society merely stops paying for it in hidden ways [2]. Their opponents pressed a point less moral than practical: a wage law can be voted, but it cannot oblige anyone to hire at that wage [3]. And work moves: in New York, an observer who still called for strongly enforced legislation found that orders left for other cities even after the garment strikes had won [4]. The principle was won. The objection was never refuted, only pursued—by a law forced to follow the work out of the factory and into the home.
The Needle, Refuge of the Unskilled
The clothing trades sat at the bottom of the labour market because they asked almost nothing of those who entered them. Jane Addams judged in 1895 that no trades were so overcrowded as the sewing trades, for the needle had always been “the refuge of the unskilled woman” [5]. Wages throughout the manufacture of clothing, she noted, were lower than in any other trade [5]. The organisation of the work made matters worse. To suit workers with little skill or training, production had been subdivided so finely that almost no skill was required once the garment left the cutter [5]. The division of labour, elsewhere a source of productivity, here became a source of interchangeability: every worker could be replaced by the next woman at the door.
Sweating was less a wage level than a way of shifting costs onto the person who sewed. Peter Kropotkin describes large ready-made clothing workshops in England where hundreds of women paid for the sewing machine, the gas and the gas-heated irons, while being paid by the piece [6]. Testimony before the Sweating Committee showed that the full price of a slightly spoiled garment was deducted from their already low earnings [6]. The worker thus carried the employer's equipment, energy and risk. In Victoria, investigators of the clothing industry drew the decisive line elsewhere. Factory hands had little to complain of in wages, but among outworkers competition had pushed pay to the lowest level compatible with continued existence, and women worked twelve to fourteen hours a day for ten or twelve shillings a week [7]. In Victoria at least, the boundary ran not between trades, but between the factory floor and the home.
The low wage was not the misfortune of a marginal few. Surveying the clothing industry in five American cities, J. Elliot Ross found 37% of employees paid at a rate below an individual living wage of $6.00 [8]. Measured against a family living wage of $11.00, 62% of the men fell short [8]. The figures are damning. What separated these workers from others was not effort but organisation. A text of 1889 sets the printers, who held up their wages through solidarity despite the arrival of new machinery, against the garment-workers, “the sweaters' victims,” who remained on the verge of pauperism however endless their toil [9]. The needle trades were defenceless because they were unorganised, and unorganised because anyone could enter them.
In such a market, wages fall without anyone deciding to lower them. Addams tells of a Russian girl who took a place in a Chicago clothing factory at twenty cents a day, without knowing that she was undercutting the wages of an already ill-paid industry [10]. She rented a room for a dollar a week and ate only what a friend in the same lodging house shared from her own scanty fare [10]. No employer needed to be cruel; the newcomer's desperation did the work. Yet the same passage points to a way out. In the clothing industry, trade unionism had already established a minimum wage limit for thousands of women [10]. A floor was therefore conceivable. The question was who would build it where no union could reach.
Why Conscience Could Not Buy a Clean Shirt
The first remedy that came to mind was the buyer's conscience, and it collided with the logic of supply. Charles Knight argued that the evils of low wages in shirt-making would not have been relieved even by a universal agreement to buy only shirts priced high enough to pay the makers better [11]. Higher wages, he reasoned, would infallibly have drawn more women and children into the trade [11]. In an occupation with no barrier to entry, every gain is dissolved by newcomers. That shadow would fall across every later scheme, legal ones included.
The system also had its apologists, who presented the middleman as the condition of the work itself. In White Slaves, Louis Albert Banks sets out this reasoning in its starkest form. The sweater, it runs, earns what he makes; without him, reaching the worker would cost the manufacturer more, so the manufacturer would pay less for each garment [12]. Abolish the sweater, and no one would distribute the work, so that no work would be left to do [12]. The argument is a fatalist's, but it contains a real claim. The intermediary is not an accident of the trade; he is the channel through which the work reaches those who do it.
Others shifted the blame from the middleman to the market as a whole. Henry A. Atkinson observed that a manufacturer cannot pay good wages unless he sells at a decent profit; force him to compete with the sweat-shop, and you drive him out of business while subsidising the sweat-shop [13]. The consumer, hunting for the best bargains, becomes one of the “thoughtless partners of the exploiters” [13]. The economist Frank A. Fetter reads the same scene differently. Behind the sweat-shop shirt he sees the problem of the inefficient worker; progress, for him, comes from labour's effort to raise its efficiency and move into better-paid callings, and from the purchaser's wish to buy the best quality he can [14].
The sharpest objection to a legal floor was not that it was unjust, but that it was impossible. John Rae put the difficulty precisely: the objection came less from any want of justice in the claim than from the “want of power in the State to realize it” [3]. A law could fix a minimum tomorrow, but it could not compel employers to engage workers at that rate, unless the state paid the minimum out of its own funds [3]. Rae was no friend of starvation wages. If an Act of Parliament could wipe them out, he declared, it should be passed the next day; but to starve for want of the strength to work is bad, and to starve for want of work is worse [15]. The whole later debate lies in that remark. The wage the law protects may be the job it destroys.
Blease and the Parasitic Trade
The defenders of the minimum wage answered this objection by accepting the loss it predicted. In 1913, Walter Lyon Blease, a historian of English Liberalism, conceded that the Minimum Wage Acts imposed a direct charge upon industry, and that some trades might be extinguished by it [2]. If so, he argued, it would only be because those trades were parasitic: they did not support themselves but “suck nourishment from society” through outdoor relief, charity, petty larceny or prostitution [2]. The reversal is radical. A shirt that seemed cheap was in fact subsidised by poor relief and the street, and the law would merely make definite a cost that had remained unknown [2].
This principle rested on an analogy that made it look less novel than it was. Cecil Chesterton saw no essential difference between fixing maximum hours by law and fixing minimum wages: it mattered as much to the community that its citizens not be underpaid as that they not be overworked [16]. Those soaked in the Liberal tradition of free contract, he acknowledged, would see the measure as odious tyranny, yet only state authority could reach the unskilled trades where sweating was rankest [16]. Proudhon had traced the same chain from the other end. A law limiting children's hours in factories, he observed, does not force the manufacturer to pay the child or the father more; in the name of health, it diminishes the subsistence of the poor [17]. The next step would be to fix minimum wages, which would force the master to accept his workman as an associate and so interfere with freedom [17]. The analogy that reassured reformers led Proudhon further: from the factory law to the minimum wage, and from the minimum wage to the workman as the master's associate.
Courts and textbooks completed the shift by recasting sweating as a fault of competition rather than a private bargain. Writing for the court in West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish, Charles Evans Hughes held that a legislature could act against the sweating system, which paid workers too little to meet the bare cost of living and turned their very helplessness into the occasion of a most injurious competition [18]. The underpaid worker was no longer only a victim. He was a source of unfair pressure on every competitor. An American textbook by Thames Williamson records the argument in its plainest form: no industry is socially desirable if it cannot pay a living wage, since poverty, ill-health and vice follow when wages fall below a certain minimum [19]. Seen this way, the minimum wage protected not only the weakest worker but also the employer who paid fairly.
That victory had a price, and the price was moderation. Blease stressed that as long as Parliament refrained from fixing wages itself and only built machinery to set them according to the conditions of each trade, the Acts merely created by law what trade unionism created by voluntary effort, and that the higher wages would mean increased efficiency, production of wealth and purchasing power [20]. Winston Churchill counted less on penalties and inspection than on rallying to the Trade Board the best employers, most of whom already paid as much as the probable minimum or more [21]. Mrs. Pember Reeves drew the consequence. Any scientific scheme had to weigh the conditions of each trade and locality, and the minimum reached in the worst-paid trades, though an advance, might be insufficient to keep even a single adult in real efficiency and comfort [22]. The legal floor was born modest, by design as much as by necessity.
The principle did not abolish the problem; it moved it onto the worker whom the trade could no longer employ. Durant Drake, writing on ethics, thought employers would suffer no real hardship, since equal standards throughout an industry would pass higher costs into prices [23]. But he granted that the minimum should not exceed the productive power of labour, and that the inefficient workers it threw out of employment must be looked after through free vocational education and state employment [23]. Hilaire Belloc followed the reasoning to a darker end. To support such a man for nothing would put “a premium upon incapacity and sloth”; he must be made to work, and kept at work even below the minimum, lest his presence as a free labourer imperil the whole scheme [24]. Rae's objection returns here in another form. The floor protects those above it by managing those it leaves below.
Victoria's Permits and the Orders That Left New York
The objection the defenders never answered was the mobility of work. Sue Ainslie Clark, studying the budgets of New York working girls, recorded a bitter paradox. The great garment strikes in the city had won their victories, yet trade orders had gone to other cities in such numbers that neither the spirit of the shirt-waist makers nor the cloak makers' agreement could provide enough employment [4]. Her verdict was just as sober: trade organisation was one way out, but legislation is ineffectual without conscientious inspection and powerful enforcement [4]. A gain won at one point on the map could be paid for by work vanishing from it.
The reformers' reply was to make the law follow the work wherever it went. Victoria, as William Johnson Galloway described it in 1899, had one of the most severe Factories Acts ever enacted [25]. Boards fixed rates of pay in trades such as clothing, furniture, boot-making and white work, and no one could work outside a factory without a permit from the chief inspector [25]. The logic reached its limit in a single case: one Chinese worker in the furniture trade “is by law a factory,” inspected and treated as such [25]. Galloway also noted, in the vocabulary of his day, that the competition of the alien races was most severely restrained [25]. Here the protection of wages and the exclusion of rivals became hard to tell apart.
Closing off the home became a condition of the floor itself. In Gemsco v. Walling, Wiley Blount Rutledge reasoned that if the prohibition bearing on homework could not be made, “the floor for the entire industry falls” [26]. The freedom of homeworkers and their employers would destroy the right of a much larger number of factory workers to the minimum wage [26]. Yet gathering the work into factories was no cure in itself. Jane Addams, in 1916, placed the lowest ebb of American garment workers not in the sweat shop, largely eliminated by factory inspectors, but in the hastily organised factories that followed [27]. Workers divided by language and by long habits of home work had grown too secretive to tell one another what they earned [27]. The factory did tend to pay more, as B. L. Hutchins found in dressmaking, in the French clothing trade and in Italy [28]; but concentration alone did not make workers a force.
The last frontier was the nation. Rae held that an international compulsory minimum wage was impossible, since even a national one was [15]. Theodore Roosevelt, arguing for the tariff rather than for a wage law, tied wages to the border in another way. The high standard of living of American wage-workers, he argued, could only be kept by a protective tariff covering at least the difference between labour costs at home and abroad [29]. In a case on cotton mills, American wage rules show the objection absorbed into the law itself. The minimum to be fixed was the highest that would not substantially curtail employment nor give any group in the industry a competitive advantage [30]. The objection had not been refuted. It had become the measure of the law.
The legal minimum wage grew out of a precise scandal. In the clothing trades, work that anyone could learn drew in women with no other resource, and competition among the desperate drove pay below what it costs to live [5, 10]. Neither the buyer's conscience nor the goodwill of the best employers could reverse the slide, since any improvement drew in new hands and every decent manufacturer faced the sweat-shop's prices [11, 13]. The reformers won by changing the question. A trade that pays less than a living wage, they argued, is already kept alive by charity, poor relief and worse; letting it die only makes visible a cost society was paying in the dark [2].
What they never answered was the plainer objection that work moves, and that a law has edges: orders left New York for other cities even after the garment strikes had won, the floor for a whole industry fell if homework could not be prohibited, and Rae held an international minimum as impossible as a national one [4, 26, 15]. Each reply widened the law rather than dispelling the doubt—permits for work outside the factory, bans on homework, a minimum calibrated to the jobs it must not destroy [25, 26, 30]. The legal floor was thus never a fixed price but a frontier under constant patrol. The law could set the price of sewing a shirt; it could never decide where the shirt would be sewn.
