Sweated labor

“ As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether ”

“ Has the nineteenth century, with its progress and its boast, no possibility of such work from any hand of man, and if not, where has the spirit that made it vanished, and what hope may men share of its return? Not one, if the day's work must mean labor in its most exhausting form; for many women, fourteen to sixteen hours at the sewing machine, the nerve-force supplied by rank tea, and the bit of bread eaten with it, the exhausted bodies falling at last on whatever may do duty for bed, with no hope that the rising sun will [Pg 11] bring release from trial or any gleam of a better day. ”

“ This subdivision of labor makes it possible to train and employ almost at once the thousands of new arrivals, and out of the employment of these new arrivals and the conditions resulting from their ever increasing competition arise the sweat shop and its evils. The sweating system produces a condition of affairs in which the operative performs the maximum amount of work for the maximum wage, the length of his working day only limited by his endurance, and, even when he extends himself to the limit, in many cases he can earn scarcely enough to keep him from starvation. ”

“ It bade fair to be a bitter winter for the poor, for everything was high, and unskilled labor was poorly paid. Sickness and death were abroad, and lurked in the milk supply, the food supply, the unsanitary tenements about the alley ”

“ Those who have still preserved courage and energy go back to their work—but the examples are very rare. The others, impelled by misery, and by habits of indolence, fall into the lowest depths.
And yet we must pity, rather than blame them, for the first and virtual cause of their fall has been the insufficient remuneration of labor and sudden reduction of pay.
Another deplorable consequence of this inorganization is the disgust which workmen feel for their employment, in addition to the insufficiency of their wages. ”

“ To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of manna. ”

“ Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour: life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread. I rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first time after five hours of steady work. The pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last hours' painful effort.
I get into my clothes—skirt, jacket and hat, all impregnated now with factory and tenement odours, and stumble downstairs and out into the street. I have earned fifty cents to-day—but then, I am green! ”

“ Business some years ago awoke to the realization of the fact that its indiscriminate handling of the entire labor problem was causing a tremendous economic waste, not alone to the employee and to society, but to itself. ”

“ The Great Problem of how to provide with suitable occupations those who, though perfectly willing to labor, were by unjust social conditions precluded from earning bread for themselves and those dependent on them, had reached the acute phase where the proverbial worm is said to turn—and it had turned with a vengeance! ”

“ The whole atmosphere of the country in which they are born associates degradation and slavery with useful labor; and the only standard of gentility is ability to live without work. What branch of useful labor opens a way to its sons? ”

“ Such is the release from labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only thing that makes all this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly and entirely useless, and does not good to any one in creation; this alone makes it genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a housekeeper. ”

“ We are already speaking half in the other world. It was not an evil dream to shatter the servitude of labor—the dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo. Work was too hard. Life was too hard. ”

“ The hours of labor are too long, and should be shortened. I recommend a universal movement to cease work at five o'clock Saturday afternoon, as a beginning. There should be a greater participation in the profits of labor by the industrious and intelligent laborer. In the present arrangements of labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of wage slavery—capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior, labor inferior. ”

“ Our material wants are more urgent, more irresistible; they press more constantly upon us than any other; and those whom they fail to rouse to exertion are, as a rule, hopelessly given over to indolence and sloth. In the stimulus of these lower needs, then, is found the impulse which drives men to labor; and without labor welfare is not possible. ”

“ The sweating system has carried its bad effects into the homes of the very poor, for the younger members of the family can help to manufacture clothing, paper boxes, embroidery, and artificial flowers, and in spite of the law, such labor goes on far into the night in congested, ill-ventilated tenements. Children cannot work in this way day after day for long hours without serious physical deterioration. ”

“ They miss some of the snug conveniences and petty comforts which belong to an old, highly-finished, and over-populous state of society; where the ranks of useful labor are crowded, and many earn a painful and servile subsistence, by studying the very caprices of appetite and self-indulgence. ”

“ For the first three weeks of my life as a factory girl I saw among my companions only one vast class of slaves, miserable drudges, doomed to dirt, ugliness and overwork from birth until death. My own physical sufferings were acute. My heart was torn with pity. I revolted against a society whose material demands were satisfied at the cost of minds and bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on human lives. ”

“ The Unemployable (From “The Workers”)
By Walter A. Wyckoff
(A professor in Princeton University who went out and lived for long periods as a laborer, in order to know the facts of industry at first hand)
Many of the men were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were in need of added hands were obliged to turn men away because of physical incapacity. ”

“ If you accept dividends or profit from sweated labour, you must accept responsibility for sweated conditions, and for the misery, the ill-health, the immorality and the degradation which spring from them. ”

“ Indeed, the conjunction of several of these causes is necessary to explain the extent and the nature of the casualization and mobility of labor in this country. Unemployment and seasonal work disorganize the routine of life of the individual worker and destroy regular habits of work but at the same time thousands of boys and men moved by wanderlust are eager to escape the monotony of stable and settled existence. ”

“ With the progressive division of labor, work has become more and more mechanical. A definite share of overfatigue and its sequels, especially neurasthenia, must be ascribed to this monotony—to the absence of spontaneity or joy in work. ”

“ The need for her physical labor having gone, and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity. ”

“ The workman growls, not at the hard labor, or poor pay, but over the pennies another is coining out of his sweat, and on the first opportunity turns sweater himself, and takes his revenge by driving an even closer bargain than his rival tyrant, thus reducing his profits. ”

“ That the economic subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence ”

“ On the other hand, look at him, who "eats his bread in the sweat of his brow," look at the laborer who works for wages. If he is skillful, industrious and strong, and if he is lucky enough to find employment, he may even be able to save a little. But the large majority of laborers cannot even think of that, in spite of all hardships they undergo, When they have to stop work, they are as poor as when they began it. ”

“ Her experience was to the effect that it is only by the sweated farthing that in these days of cut-throat competition shops which sell things made by hand or by the sewing-machine can pay their expenses, that the sweater is himself sweated, and that the workwoman, starving under the sweating system, mistrusts any other and is an element of danger in the very workroom which is founded for her emancipation. ”

“ The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. ”

“ A further cause of the perpetuation of the system is the position of the poor, their poverty, and their necessity to buy cheap goods. The Webbs have said that "sweating itself creates the conditions of sweating." 2 It is most certainly true that those who make sweated goods are among those who buy them. ”

“ But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours' drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try to make out of a red-blooded young man or woman a mere machine. Gambling, drunkenness, prostitution, and all sorts of pathological vices flourish largely as a reaction from the dullness and monotony of the day's work. We are paying this heavy penalty for our increase of material efficiency at the expense of normal human living. ”

“ Come with me and I will show you where men and women work from morning till night, from week to week, from year to year, at the full stretch of their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet are poor—aye, destitute—have for their wages a crust of bread and rags. I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, using the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted, and fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the broken drudges filter through the poor-house or the prison to a felon’s or a pauper’s grave! ”

“ The unemployed artisan, the casual labourer, and the casual labourer's wife and children, the sweated worker, the infirm worker, the worker's widow, the under-fed child, the untrained, undisciplined, and exploited boy labourer—it is upon these subjects that our minds should dwell in the early days of 1909. ”

“ And the poor man loved the great’— In that day professional labor agitators will lose their vocations, the workingman who never works will be without influence among his fellows, and the brotherhoods of beer and brawling which infest the purlieus of our larger cities, and clamor for bread or blood—meaning always somebody else’s bread or somebody else’s blood—will find occasion to disband. ”

“ Every period of depression, with its increased body of unemployed labor seeking work, will act to hasten and accentuate the depression of wages, until there is no warrant even for holding that wages will, on an average, be kept up to the subsistence minimum. ”

“ More especially is this true of unemployment. When the artisan or labourer is in work, he will find leisure to interest himself in various social gospels, study the exhortation of the street corners, inquire the meaning of capital value and class war and the exploitation of the working man. When he is out of work, he is naturally filled with but one impulse, which passes quickly from a terror into an obsession—an impulse to obtain work again. That impulse operates even amongst the men who remain in the factory. ”

“ The production of sweated goods, from the human point of view, is not production at all, but waste. If the employer takes from the workers week by week more than his wages restore to them, he gradually reduces them to the state of industrial parasites. The wages of the sweated worker are either being supplemented by the wages of relatives and the gifts of charitable associations, or else her standard of living is so low that she is continually losing her vitality and tending to become a charge upon the community in a hospital or a poorhouse. ”

“ Honest labor, continued through reasonable hours, paid at a rate which assures a wholesome support, is ennobling; but overwork, that is hopeless of comfortable reward, is degrading in the extreme. On the continent of Europe, where men and women work in the factories for fourteen and sixteen hours in a day, the laborers are reduced simply to machines. ”

“ And nevertheless, in spite of the over-production of goods, in spite of the adulterations in manufacturing, the laborers encumber the market in countless numbers imploring: Work! Work! Their superabundance ought to compel them to bridle their passion; on the contrary it carries it to the point of paroxysm. Let a chance for work present itself, thither they rush; then they demand twelve, fourteen hours to glut their appetite for work, and the next day they are again thrown out on the pavement with no more [Pg 44] food for their vice. ”