Trade worker

“ The minutest system of subdivided labor now rules here as in all trades. When a coat is in question, it is no longer the master-tailor, journeyman and apprentices who prepare it, but a legion of cutters, basters, machinists, pressers, fellers, button-hole, and [Pg 36] general workers, who find the learning of any one alone of the branches an easy matter, and so rush into the trade, the fiercest and most incessant competition being the instant result. ”

“ But the apprenticed journeyman in the skilled handicrafts belonged, until comparatively modern times, to the same social grade as his employer, and was indeed usually the son of a master in the same or an analogous trade. ”

“ This peculiar situation is caused by the highly specialized character of American industry. In no country has division of labor and machinery been carried as far as here. By division of labor the skilled trades have been split up into simple operations, each of which in itself requires little or no skill, and the boy who starts in as a beginner is kept at one operation so that he does not learn a trade. The old-time journeyman tailor was a skilled mechanic who measured his customer, cut the cloth and trimmings, basted, sewed, and pressed the suit. ”

“ Workers in these trades were considered as laborers, but their wages were high and their positions relatively secure. They learned their jobs by doing them. The older trades of a similar character, such as tallow melters and chandlers, wax chandlers, fellmongers, and the tanners, employed journeymen.
There were buildings for boiling and distilling turpentine, for casting brass or iron, and for making glass for chemical works for sale.
The skilled artisan who works at home and either makes goods for a master or sells to the trade verges into the shop keeping class. ”

“ So long as industry was carried on mainly by small masters, each employing but one or two journeymen, the period of any energetic man's service as a hired wage-earner cannot normally have exceeded a few years. ... Under such a system of industry the journeymen would possess the same prospects of economic advancement that hindered the growth of stable combinations in the ordinary handicrafts, and in this fact may lie the explanation of the striking absence of evidence of any Trade Unionism in the building trades right down to the end of the eighteenth century. ”

“ Many trades can be carried on only in particular states of weather, and seasons of the year; and if the workmen who are employed in these cannot easily find employment in others during the time they are thrown out of work, their wages must be proportionally raised. A journeyman weaver, shoemaker, or tailor may reckon, unless trade is dull, upon obtaining constant employment ”

“ The Miners’ Agents can [Pg 581] seldom travel beyond the analogous problems of their own industry. Such a Trade Official, if he has any leisure and energy left at the end of his exhausting day’s work, broods over larger problems, still special to his own industry. ”

“ In America, apprentices, if there are any now, only work six months or a year, and really learn the trade, if they learn it at all, after they go to work as journeymen. Labor is too valuable in this country for a man to spend seven years in learning a trade: besides, one who has worked six months at a trade becomes valuable to his employer. ”

“ In an industrial establishment which employs say from 500 to 1000 workmen, there will be found in many cases at least twenty to thirty different trades. The workmen in each of these trades have had their knowledge handed down to them by word of mouth, through the many years in which their trade has been developed from the primitive condition, in which our far-distant ancestors each one practiced the rudiments of many different trades, to the present state of great and growing subdivision of labor, in which each man specializes upon some comparatively small class of work. ”

“ In the fancy trade the number is greater, as the boys’ labour is more readily available, but in this trade the greatest number of apprentices is employed by such warehousemen as are manufacturers, as some at the east end are—or rather by the men that they constantly keep at work. ”

“ The reduction in the numbers of those employed is easily accounted for, the trade suffers as all manual labour must do from the factory products made with labour and time-saving machinery; Hand workers find it difficult to stand such competetion. ”

“ Such a workman plies his handiwork at his own house, teaching his sons the secrets of his trade. He is the necessary coadjutor of the machine-owner, and has no need to resort to the brutal methods of Molly Maguires and trades-unions to get a fair reward for his labor. Let demagogues rant about our danger from competition with the pauper labor of Europe! ”

“ SIR,—We beg respectfully to draw your attention to a matter, which is of a nature to cause unpleasantness between you and the Trades. We allude to your bringing a workman in from another town to do work that we are informed can be done on the premises by your own hands.
“We assure you it would be more to your interest to work in harmony with the smiths and the handle-makers in your employ, and the trade generally. ”

“ An American workman will "give equal attention simultaneously to three, four, or six machines or tools, while the British workman is compelled by his trade union to limit his attention to one, so that employment may be given to half a dozen men." ”

“ There appears to us to be a subtle distinction between the economic position of workers who hire themselves out to the individual consumer direct, and those who, like the typical Trade Unionist of to-day, serve an employer who stands between them and the actual consumers, and who hires their labour in order to make out of it such a profit as will provide him with his interest on capital and “wages of management.” ”

“ The fact that the earliest durable combinations of wage-earners in England precede the factory system by a whole century, and occur in trades carried on exclusively by hand labour, reminds us that the creation of a class of lifelong wage-servants came about in more than one way. ”

“ The lords of trade have their hundreds and thousands of humble subordinates over whom they rule, often with a rod of iron. They may be turned away from work and wages at any moment, by any whim of the selfish employer. ”

“ The word is made necessary by the fact that there are some trades, largely consisting of those whose hand-tools are not heavier than a pencil or more difficult to operate than a typewriter or an adding machine, which are not yet well organized in trade-unions. The usual apprenticeship for these trades is long and expensive. ”

“ The working people have been called upon to make enormous sacrifices during the period of depressed trade, and have been unable to withstand all the encroachments of the employers upon Trade Union standards of wages and working conditions. ”

“ There are honourable exceptions to these rapacious traders; there are merchants in the strict meaning of that term who enter into the business in a little different spirit, who pay their seamen the best wage, and give their captains every inducement to do well. But the same holds good of these as of the others—that but for the extent of their Ordinary trade relationships and the syndicates they can form, they would have nothing whatever to do with the traffic in human beings ”

“ On all these matters the consumers, on the one hand, and the directors of industry on the other, are permanently disqualified from acting as arbiters. In our chapter on ' The Higgling of the Market' we described how, in the elaborate division of labour which characterises the modern industrial system, thousands of workers co-operate in the bringing to market of a single commodity ; and no consumer, even if he desired it, could possibly ascertain or judge of the conditions of employment in all these varied trades. Thus, the consumers of all classes are not only biassed in favour of low prices ”

“ In the days of the typical handicraft system the petty trade runs along with the handicraft industry, in such a way that every master craftsman is more or less of a trader, disposing of his goods or services in plenary discretion, and even the apprentices and journeymen similarly bargain for their terms of work and at times for the disposal of their product; while the professional itinerant trader is a member of this industrial community on much the same footing as the craftsmen proper. ”

“ We are under no disadvantage in any foreign market, except that we pay our workmen and workwomen better wages than are paid elsewhere—better abstractly, better relatively to the cost of the necessaries of life. I do not doubt that a very largely increased foreign trade is accessible to us without bartering for it either our home market for such products of the farm and shop as our own people can supply or the wages of our working people. ”

“ And though the immediate employer of each section of workpeople knows the hours that they work and the wages that they receive, he is precluded by the stream of competitive pressure, transmitted through the retail shopkeeper and the wholesale trader, from effectively resisting the promptings of his own self-interest towards a constant cheapening of labour. ”

“ Especially in the ship- building ports have these gentlemen placed at our disposal their experience in collective negotiation with the different sections of labour, and the private statistics compiled by their associations. But of all the employing class we have found the working managers and foremen, who have them- selves often been workmen, the best informed and most suggestive critics of Trade Union organisation and methods. ”

“ The rapidly changing processes and widening markets of English industry seemed to demand the sweeping away of all restrictions on the supply and employment of labour, a process which involved the levelling of all classes of wage-earners to their " natural wages." ”

“ It is undoubtedly the duty of every one of the Company's servants to encourage a spirit of industry among {83} the natives, and to use every means in their power to induce them to procure furrs and other commodities for trade, by assuring them of a ready purchase and good payment for every thing [124] they bring to the Factory: and I can truly say, that this has ever been the grand object of my attention. ”

“ Workmen also strike against men of their own class, for the purpose of excluding them from their special calling. One of the principal objects of trades-unions is to keep up wages at the expense of the lower paid and unassociated working people. They endeavour to prevent poorer men learning their trade, and thus keep the supply of labour below the demand. ”

“ The impartial student will notice that whilst the purely trade society has been persistently adhered to by certain important industries, such as the Coal-miners and the Cotton-spinners, other trades, like the Engineers and the Ironfounders, have remained equally constant to the trade friendly society ”

“ The Rise of Trade Unions.—One of the most manifest effects of the introduction of the factory system was the intensification of the distinction between employers and employees. When a large number of laborers were gathered together in one establishment, all in a similar position one to the other and with common interests as to wages, hours of labor, and other conditions of their work, the fact that they were one homogeneous class could hardly escape their recognition. ”

“ The objections of employers to any regulation of wages is partly economic, as they fear injury to trade, a fear not sustained by Australian experience, or by the experience of employers in trades in this country, in which wages have been raised and are largely controlled by strong labor organizations. ”

“ It is only natural that trade-union organization should have progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the most highly developed. The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions become specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided up into a hundred processes. These are the conditions, and this the environment under which the workers most frequently organize. The operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the operatives are more readily grouped and classified. ”

“ It is among the living and vigorous forces of the present that we must look for help. I shall content myself by mentioning one of these forces, namely Trade Societies. It seems a pity that these societies should confine their operations merely to the limited object of forcing up wages. That object is, of course, a perfectly laudable and legitimate one, but it is surely not the supreme and only end for which a Trade Society should exist. A Trade Society would do well to teach its members how to spend as well as how to earn. ”

“ If the trade is one in which the journeymen frequently travel in search of work, we note the slow elaboration of systematic arrangements for the relief of these 'tramps' by their fellow-workers in each town through which they pass, and the inevitable passage of this far-extending tramping society into a national Trade Union. ”

“ There were, about twenty years ago, a numerous body of tradesmen, who were employers, though not workmen to the general public, known as “trade-working masters.” These men, of whom there are still a few, confined their business solely to supplying the trade. They supplied the greater establishments where there were showrooms with a cheaper article than the proprietors of those greater establishments might be able to have had manufactured on their own premises. They worked not on speculation, but to order, and were themselves employers. ”

“ The employers successfully petitioned Parliament in 1777 for a repeal of the old limitation of apprentices and a renewed prohibition of combination. [45]
More definite evidence is afforded by the development of the tailoring trade. In tailoring for rich customers the master craftsmen appear at the very beginning of the eighteenth century to have been recruited from the comparatively small number of journeymen who acquired the specially skilled part of the business—namely, the cutting-out. ”