The Costs to the Community and the Need for Collective Interference

a) The Economic and Social Damages Done to the Community Through Underpayment

Black believed that the fight against sweating lay in the interests of the entire community. Sweating touched the life of every member of society. Black called it an organic disease of the body politic.

The Sweated Industries Exhibition, she elaborated, had made it clear that underpayment “was an evil not simply affecting some obscure lives in the mean streets of our cities, but an evil that wasted the whole industrial physique – a running sore that affected the entire fabric of society, a morass exhaling a miasma that poisoned the healthy elements of industry”⁷⁵⁴. Black warned that no nation could hope to remain at the forefront of industrial development and economic growth who had at the bottom of its social pyramid this stagnant pool of wretchedness⁷⁵⁵. The sweated reacted upon the entire community. They constituted a menace to the health and prosperity of the entire nation and a drain upon the resources of society in the interest only of the people who exploited them.

Sweating harmed the community in various ways. First of all, Black explained that the practice of underpaying cost the tax payer very real money. At the community’s expense sweating provided a reserve of incredibly cheap labour to individual employers. Many of the workers received wages well below the subsistence line; they could not live on their wages alone. It was the community which had to step in to provide support via the Poor Law where the worker's income did not suffice to feed, house and clothe him- or herself or their families. Sweating, Black impressed on her readers, meant the maintenance out of the rates of a vast mass of low class labour which enabled the sweater to compete successfully with high class labour⁷⁵⁶. Black stressed that in neighbourhoods

753 Black, Clementina, Legislative Proposals, 1908, p.194

754 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.X

755 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XXVI

756 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XII

where wages tended to be low, poor rates were generally high. By supporting workers through the Poor Law, the community really only supported the sweater into whose pockets went the gain derived from selling the output of his workshop at a price much higher than what it had cost to produce it.

Secondly, besides costing the localities money through the increased burden on the Poor Law, Black held that sweating also stood in the way of development of industry and economic growth. The effect was threefold. For one, Black believed, the existence of this vast pool of cheap labour took away the need for employers to invest in modernisation. Sweaters “set the slum to compete with the workshop, the man or more often the woman and child to compete with the machine”⁷⁵⁷. Labour could be had so cheaply that it paid better to use it in abundance in uneconomic production processes than to invest in new machinery or improved methods of production⁷⁵⁸. The example of factory legislation among the cotton workers of Lancashire showed that if a minimum standard of sanitary conditions and rates of pay and a maximum number of hours were imposed, the employer was forced to extract the same value of produce from his hands in less time and for higher pay and was thus driven to look for alternative channels of saving such as providing the best machinery available⁷⁵⁹. For the consumer, Black envisaged products of better quality and at cheaper selling prices from innovations in the methods of production⁷⁶⁰.

The second way in which sweating stood in the way of the development of industry and of economic growth was by lowering the quality and efficiency of the British workforce. Black impressed upon her readers that the worker by being paid below the subsistence level would eventually fall into disrepair and contribute less than his or her full share to the general wealth.⁷⁶¹

“His existence is not an addition to, but a deduction from, the total general happiness”, Black scolded, “the rather that underpayment is a burden not only to its victim but also to the onlooker.”⁷⁶² Thirdly, Black argued, sweating led directly to a lowered standard of consumption and thereby hindered economic expansion. She contended that the working classes formed the bedrock of commerce in Great Britain. Their condition reacted immediately upon society. Underpaid labour had no resources to spend and used less than their necessary share of clothes, furniture, or food.

Well-paid labour, on the other hand, Black predicted, would immediately redirect their income into the general trade cycle adding comforts such as additional clothes, shoes or better tenements to their very modest standard of living. “The better paid worker, without premeditation or patriotic design,

757 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.X

758 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.XXIII

759 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.191; see also p.263

760 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.191

761 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.18

762 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.171

tends, by the mere process of buying what he wants, to set his fellow countrymen working”⁷⁶³, she believed. According to her reasoning, a rise in wages meant a rise in the volume of national trade and general prosperity and an almost automatic safeguard against foreign competition. The interests of the nation, she believed, were thus best served by the maintenance among working class families of the highest attainable standard of life⁷⁶⁴. Without using the terminology, her reasoning once again chimed in with Alden's and Robertson's arguments on a theory of underconsumption.

Thus sweating meant economic loss to the community, either in a very direct way through extra burdens on the Poor Law, or through standing in the way of industrial growth and economic development. But on top of these immediate losses Black warned her readers that sweating also brought in its wake an incalculable amount of follow-up expenses. Black pointed particularly to the harm done to children who were forced into industrial employment far too soon. Black emphasised the physical damage inflicted on growing children who spent several hours a day toiling at machines, lifting heavy weights or bending over minuscule match-boxes, baby shoes or toys.

Remembering a visit to a factory in Lancashire in her capacity as secretary of the WPPL in the 1880s she wrote: “It was pitiful to see the twisted little figures of the children doing their best to accomplish more than they were physically fit for.”⁷⁶⁵ Children who had to work for their upkeep unusually often suffered from heart conditions, anaemia, spiral deformities, eye infections, or simply from sheer exhaustion. The Interdepartmental Committee on the Employment of School Children established in its report in 1901 an abnormally high death rate among pupils in industrial employment. Those who survived into adulthood, Black warned, would inevitably be physically damaged. They would from early injury, illness and overwork possibly become unfit to earn their own living well before their time and become a burden on the public purse, Black concluded.

But the damage done was not only physical. Educationally, children employed out of school hours tended to be several months behind their peers. Apart from doing lasting bodily harm, working out of school hours weakened their “powers of sustained attention and vigorous mental work in school”⁷⁶⁶. The Interdepartmental Committee estimated the number of school children in industrial employment at about 200.000, the majority of whom would not get a satisfactory education. Black condemned the fact that they would have no chance to learn the skills necessary for an independent self-sustaining life, let alone be able to acquire the knowledge and mental powers required to contribute to industrial innovation or the cultural growth of the nation. “The deterioration of national education from this cause alone”, Black stated, “must be by no means trifling.”⁷⁶⁷

763 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.267

764 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.204

765 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.111

766 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.126

767 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.127

School children in industrial employment, Black warned, did not usually acquire any sort of technical skill or industrial training through their labour. Nor did they generally graduate to more skilled and better paid employment in adult life. Her inquiries had shown Black that children in early employment often stuck to menial jobs requiring no special knowledge in adult life, often in sweated trades like matchbox making or the dressmaking industries, as they could not afford to take time off for training. Also Black pointed to the moral injury inflicted on children in, for instance, street vending which brought them into early contact with alcohol, vandalism, crime and prostitution and which often rendered them unfit for industrial employment in the future⁷⁶⁸.

Setting children to work at an early age was most injurious to the community, Black summed up her argument on the follow-up costs of sweating. “To look at this matter from its lowest plane”, she impressed on her readers, “it is false economy to let the children of the nation begin industrial work at less than fourteen.”⁷⁶⁹ These children who constituted the citizens of the next generation were physically, mentally and morally damaged. They could not be expected to uphold and extend Britain’s economic, military and cultural hegemony.

Black urged her readers to work towards social reform and to put in place provisions which would allow these children to grow into healthy, efficient and resourceful workers and citizens. The physical and mental degeneracy of the lowest strata of the working classes, she argued, was a result not of vice and ill-will, but of early malnutrition, illness and overwork and of the accompanying evils of hopelessness and apathy. The higher death rate, the inferior physique and the poorer vitality of the ill-paid marked tendencies not inborn but acquired, Black held, all of which would disappear with the diminution of poverty and of the ignorance which was an outcome as well as a cause of that poverty.

“Degeneracy exists”, Black conceded, “but not a degenerate class; the class which we sometimes call degenerate is, as a class, merely starved.”⁷⁷⁰ She believed it possible to diminish their misery within the very short span of three years and even predicted a total recovery within the lifetime of children already born if the problem of underpayment was attacked in a serious and effective way⁷⁷¹. Taken at an early age and housed, fed and clothed like the children of the better-off artisan, Black predicted, these children would “become healthy of body and alert of mind; a reader of books, a player of outdoor games, a skilled craftsman taking delight in his own good work, a citizen rending intelligent public service, a parent of healthy, hopeful children, enjoying and creating prosperity.”⁷⁷²

768 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.128f

769 Black, Clementina, Legislative Proposals, 1908, p.205

770 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.274

771 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.274

772 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.275

b) The Need for Collective Interference

Throughout her career as a labour activist, Black never gave up her belief in voluntarism. Individual action by employers, producers and workers all contributed to a successful struggle against sweating. But knowledge of the modern system of industrial production had taught Black that private initiatives could in themselves never be enough⁷⁷³. The complexities of modern commerce made it impossible for any individual or group, however well intentioned, to attain knowledge of the myriads of facts which would be needed to tackle problems such as underpayment or overwork at their roots. “The fact is”, Black pointed to the interrelations of modern society, “that even the most simple of commercial acts is but one link in a network that spreads over the whole field of life and labour; and the fabric of that network is not woven once and forever, but is in a continual process of change.”⁷⁷⁴ The evil of sweating was too widespread and too remote in its operations to be touched by any small-scale voluntary action. Black pressed for institutional interference and legal reform to attack the problem of underpayment.

Black held that only the state as the powerful agent of the community could protect the sweated against the rapacity of their oppressors and safeguard individual liberty. She strongly believed that in doing so, the community preserved its own well-being and integrity. Legal action against sweating, Black argued, was not a question of pity, but one of necessity, a duty towards the common good. When individuals were too weak or too dependent to represent their own interests, she reasoned, the community had to step in on their behalf to put a halt to behaviour endangering society's set-up and values. State interference in the social and economic sphere, Black argued, was not a breech of, but a safeguard to the principle of individual liberty. The means at the disposal of society to stop dangerous conduct in social interaction and to protect the common good was the law,

“the organised will (...) of the whole community”⁷⁷⁵.

Sweating in Black's eyes was an economic problem caused by unlimited competition. Any legal interference to be successful thus had to aim at checking the above evil⁷⁷⁶. ”The law that free competition in labour leads to starvation wages is a law of the same kind as the law that a dose of prussic acid leads to death”, Black believed. She drew the conclusion that in both cases, to avoid the result, one must avoid the cause: “persons who are not desirous of committing suicide must abstain from prussic acid; persons who desire to see underpayment vanish must resist free competition of

773 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.206

774 Black, Clementina, Sweated industry and the minimum wage, 1907, p.209

775 Black, Clementina, Legislative Proposals, 1908, p.195

776 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.9

labour.”⁷⁷⁷ In Black's eyes, the cure against sweating needed to be applied at the point of payment and the introduction of a legal minimum wage appeared the most direct and effective method of application⁷⁷⁸. Other countries had successfully introduced measures to impose a minimum wage, she reported. She proposed to look to, for instance, New Zealand and Australia for inspiration and guidance in the matter.