The Causes of Underpayment

Black argued that instead of being caused by any of the factors discussed above, sweating was the consequence of an industrial system reigned by the principle of free competition. Wages in a state of unlimited competition were determined not by the intrinsic value of the work performed, she explained, but by the relative need of the worker to sell and the employer to buy labour.⁷³² Where sellers of labour were many and potential buyers few, she specified, the work would be paid for at a low rate, however excellently done, while where sellers were few and would-be buyers many, the work would be valued highly, however ill performed. At present, in Great Britain, workers in search of a job greatly exceeded the number of employers in search of labour. “Consequently, the wages of the manual worker are low in proportion to the cost of livelihood, and the individual worker is absolutely powerless by himself to increase them”⁷³³, Black wrote.

727 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.75

728 Black, Clementina and Adele Meyer, Makers of our Clothes: a case for trade boards. Being the results of a year's investigation into the work of women in London in the tailoring, dressmaking, and underclothing trades, 1909, p.153

729 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.22

730 Black, Clementina, Legislative Proposals, 1908, p.196

731 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XI

732 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.152

733 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.153

Black told of her experiences with women in search of employment at the factory doors. The foreman inquiring of one what wage she took would dismiss her immediately almost regardless of the amount she asked for and go on to the next person in line offering sixpence less than the afore-mentioned wage. “At seven and sixpence, perhaps, she gets taken on”, Black described the process of lowering wages; “and when, presently, the slack time comes again, the girls weeded out, to be first discharged, are those who have been receiving eight shillings ever since their engagement in the previous season.”⁷³⁴ Seven shillings and sixpence a week now became the usual wage until, in the next season, new workers would be taken on for another sixpence or shilling less. The tendency of wages in the underpaid trades was definitely downwards. Black gave the example of one middle-woman, the contractor hiring temporary hands in the process of subcontracting, in the shirt-making trade who in 1909 paid 5s for work for which she used to pay 10s or 11s twenty years ago and who in addition now also charged the workers for the cotton used⁷³⁵.

But poverty was not only the consequence, but also one of the main causes of underpayment, Black explained. “Wherever that unrestricted competition prevails”, she said, “the ultimate price of any industrial process comes to be the lowest rate at which any worker will consent to perform the process.”⁷³⁶ Many workers were so badly off that they had no choice in the matter of wages. Hunger often forced them to accept any payment on offer. It was a fight for bread in which the sweater played off the dire misery of one against the deeper misery of another. ”For in this morass there is no minimum”, Black pointed out, “the excess of labour is so great and the demand for food so urgent that the tendency is constantly downward.”⁷³⁷ Destitution forced workers to underbid each other against their own long-term interests to a point below the sustenance line.

The downward spiral of poverty and sweating was reinforced by the fact that lowered wages forced families to bring more and more of their members into employment. Black reported that children were pressed into industrial employment at an ever younger age. Homeworkers sent their sons and daughters to carry produce to the employer's premises or to fetch new materials in order not to lose valuable working time. In some trades like paper bag making or match box making which required little skill and force, children worked alongside their parents to increase the family income to the bare minimum necessary for subsistence. A recent enquiry at a school in Hackney had shown that a quarter of the girl students worked in matchbox making, steel covering, baby shoe making or basket weaving before and after school.⁷³⁸ Sons often held jobs as delivery boys for milk, groceries or

734 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.147

735 Black, Clementina and Adele Meyer, Makers of our Clothes: a case for trade boards. Being the results of a year's investigation into the work of women in London in the tailoring, dressmaking, and underclothing trades, 1909, p.80

736 Black, Clementina, Legislative Proposals, 1908, p.191

737 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XIII

738 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.109

newspapers or in street trading. While their contribution constituted an invaluable and essential help for individual families, it served to aggravate the problem of sweating. “They, too, become competitors with healthy industry”, Black wrote of the children, “and by increasing the family output actually serve to still further lower the starvation wages.”⁷³⁹ Thus, by and by, mother and children working together came to receive no more than the mother used to be paid when working on her own.

Supporters of Manchester liberalism and laissez faire tended to justify their economic model by invoking the principle of individual liberty. They propagated, and with some justification as Black conceded, to leave the employer and the employed to make their own bargains and considered any intervention on the part of for instance the state to be an infringement on Mill's treatise On Liberty⁷⁴⁰. They believed that economic contracts fell under Mill's principle that society had no concern with the conduct of individuals as long as that conduct did no harm to others. Black agreed with their reasoning under the proviso that both partners in the bargain were free to take their own decisions and make their own terms. But sweating harmed individual liberty in at least two respects.

First, it existed only because it built on the powerlessness of the very poor and exploited the fact that the hungry had no choice in conditions of employment. At least one partner in the bargain could thus not be described as free to take his or her own decisions. Secondly, by agreeing to underpayment and overwork, the sweated not only harmed themselves, but their fellow-workers.

“Every woman who consents to work twelve hours a day tends to enforce a twelve hours day upon every other working woman”⁷⁴¹, Black described the mechanism. The complicated methods of modern industry, she believed, formed a network of interrelations in which no industrial action could be really single and merely self-regarding. In the highly organised factory system of Britain, the individual could not for him- or herself obtain conditions which differed from those of his or her fellow workers. Conditions of work and rates of pay were determined for all workers by the weakest among their number, the man or woman whose needs were the most pressing and who would agree to work for the lowest rates and under the worst conditions. “[A]ll observation shows that the unskilled and unprotected worker not only may be, but in the long run inevitably is, driven to work very long hours for a rate of pay which just secures subsistence, or even, where there are many partly supported competitors, falls below the subsistence line”⁷⁴², she stated. Under a regime of individual bargaining, many wage-earners were thus not only unfree to make their own terms in a contract, but were also unable to avoid injuring their fellow workers.

739 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XIII

740 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, 1859

741 Black, Clementina, Some Current Objections to Factory Legislation for Women, 1902, p.193

742 Black, Clementina, Some Current Objections to Factory Legislation for Women, 1902, p.195

5. Alternative Models of Economic Organisation and Existing Checks Against