A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work?

Sweated Labour and the Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation in Britain

Sheila Blackburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754632641
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317188285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The nature of sweating and the origins of low pay legislation are of fundamental social, economic and moral importance. Although difficult to define, sweating, according to a select committee established to investigate the issue, was characterised by long hours, poor working conditions and above all by low pay. By the beginning of the twentieth century the government estimated that up to a third of the British workforce could be classed as sweated labour, and for the first time in a century began to think about introducing legislation to address the problem. Whilst historians have written much on unemployment, poverty relief and other such related social and industrial issues, relatively little work has been done on the causes, extent and character of sweated labour. That work which has been done has tended to focus on the tailoring trades in London and Leeds, and fails to give a broad overview of the phenomenon and how it developed and changed over time. In contrast, this volume adopts a broad national and long-run approach, providing a more holistic understanding of the subject. Rejecting the argument that sweating was merely a London or gender related problem, it paints a picture of a widespread and constantly shifting pattern of sweated labour across the country, that was to eventually persuade the government to introduce legislation in the form of the 1909 Trades Board Act. It was this act, intended to combat sweated labour, which was to form the cornerstone of low pay legislation, and the barrier to the introduction of a minimum wage, for the next 90 years.

PART I
Sweating Revealed, 1843–1890

Chapter 1
The ‘Discovery’ of Sweated Labour, 1843–1850

Although a concept of sweating was not unknown in pre-industrial Britain, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it became recognised as a serious social issue.¹ Richard Dugard Grainger, in his 1843 report for the Children’s Employment Commission, uncovered the especially gross exploitation of girl apprentices in millinery and dressmaking.² He calculated that these trades employed 15,000 in London alone, of whom the vast majority were less than twenty-five years old. While outdoor learners were expected to work at no expense to their employer, indoor apprentices paid a premium and were given a room and board, often in overcrowded lodgings.³ Some of the residential learners complained that they were denied meals and heating, and that they were cast outdoors to roam the streets on their Sundays off. When apprentices gave evidence regarding long hours, they were dismissed or threatened by their employers. Even the wages of journeywomen with considerable skill were found to be excessively low.

Consumption, heart palpitations, spinal disorders, ocular problems, emaciation and pulmonary disease formed a few items in the long catalogue of maladies complained of by the principal victims, which were verified by expert medical witnesses.⁴ The latter included Sir James Clerk, physician to the Queen. Grainger’s investigations provided positive evidence that fashionable junkets and other ‘high’ society functions such as weddings and funerals, resulted in young girls having to sew through the night to meet the last minute rush of orders. Mr Tyrell, surgeon to the London Ophthalmic Hospital, gave evidence concerning a fair, delicate girl aged seventeen and apprenticed as a dressmaker. She had completely lost her sight through overwork. He stated:

She had been compelled to remain without changing her dress for nine days and nights consecutively … during this period she had been permitted only occasionally to rest on a mattress placed on the floor for an hour or two at a time … her meals were placed at her side, cut up, so that as little time as possible should be spent in their consumption ….⁵

One milliner and dressmaker, Harriet Baker, declared she received no more than four hour’s rest in twenty during one three month period. On the occasion of the national mourning for William IV, she toiled without sleep from early on Thursday until ten thirty on the Sunday morning – a total of sixty-eight and half-hours.⁶ Grainger concluded: ‘there is no class of persons in this country, living by their labour, whose happiness, health, and lives are so unscrupulously sacrificed as those of the young dress-makers.’⁷

Grainger’s report was much discussed in the press. The Pictorial Times quoted extensively from it in a sensational leading article, ‘Slaves of the needle’. The feature also carried dramatic illustrations contrasting the sufferings of the needlewomen with the pampered lives of their female customers.⁸ The Times, in a less melodramatic vein, congratulated Grainger and his associates for garnering information on ‘this painful subject’ from ‘the mouths of the employers and of the employed’, for:

Hitherto these sufferings have been considered mere matters of rumour, incapable of being substantiated by direct and tangible proof; now we have them placed before us in a statistical form, of which the authenticity is vouched for by the Factory Commissioners ….⁹

Referring to milliners as ‘young blossoms’ being forced ‘to perish prematurely on their stem’, the paper urged ‘fair countrywomen’ to oppose ‘the inhuman system’ by the boycotting of unscrupulous employers’ goods.¹⁰

While stories of such hardship were widely circulated, the conscience of the nation, as the distinguished medical journal, the Lancet, pointed out, was only fully awakened by the publication of Thomas Hood’s, Song of the Shirt.¹¹ The poem appeared anonymously in the 1843 Christmas edition of the satirical magazine, Punch.¹² Three publishers had rejected the poem in rapid succession. Hood apologetically submitted it to the editor, Mark Lemon, because he believed it was too painful for a comic journal. Lemon published it despite opposition from his staff.¹³ Hood described a lone, Christian female clothed in ‘unwomanly rags’ whom, despite labouring day and night in a barely furnished and leaky garret, earned insufficient wages to keep body and soul together. To while away the lonely monotony of her long hours (her only company is her shadow), she sings in a ‘dolorous pitch’, the Song of the Shirt. Pathetically, she utters her longing to evade her misfortune, to stroll in the countryside for ‘only one short hour’. But, no ‘blessed leisure for love or hope’ is possible. Even weeping would impede her stitching. Death, she laments, would be a welcome release from her tribulations. Hood poignantly pointed out that this unfortunate creature was sewing her own shroud as well as a shirt.

As with nearly all of Hood’s social protest writings, the poem was based on a real incident – the case of a Lambeth widow named Biddell who, desperate to buy ‘dry bread’ for her two starving infants, pawned the garments she had been sewing. Having been forced to leave a deposit of two pounds for the safe return of the materials entrusted to her, the woman had been plunged into debt. Engels commented on the ‘shameful barbarism’ of this custom whereby impoverished women had no option but to pawn the garments only to redeem them at a loss.¹⁴ Biddell (her first name was not given) was subsequently prosecuted by her employer, Henry Moses of Tower Hill.¹⁵ She blamed overwork and near starvation for not fulfilling her contact.¹⁶ Moses’ foreman caused a furore when he insisted that at seven pence a pair and supplying her own needle and thread, the widow, could make a ‘good’ living had she been honest and industrious. When pressed, he replied that she could earn seven shillings a week. As the widow pointed out, this would mean working day and night including Sundays.¹⁷

In court it was claimed that she lived in one room, which was ‘the very picture of wretchedness’. It was devoid of furniture and quite unfit for human habitation.¹⁸ Biddell was spared the house of correction. But when she and her children were despatched to the workhouse, her employer was publicly excoriated and subjected to a great deal of racial stereotyping. Branding Moses worse than a cannibal who ‘slays his victim before he commences his revolting feast’, Punch fulminated:

Seven shillings a week! One penny – not the value of the pestiferous cigar which Moses’ man puffs in the faces of passers’ by, from the threshold of his master’s door – one penny only, for an hour’s ceaseless labour at tasks that if long pursued will shut out the blessed light of heaven, and make the sweet air a torture to the ulcerated lungs of the poor living wretch who devotes herself to such self-sacrifice … and yet this jackanapes … dares to call such a pittance a good living for a mother and her two infants. We would that Moses and his class were doomed to walk the streets of London arrayed in their choicest ‘slops’ (blood-stained as the shirt of Nessus, but without its avenging qualities,) branded SEVEN PENCE, that men might know how they gained their sleekness!¹⁹

The Times commented that Henry Moses ‘like SHYLOCK, “will have his bond”…’, and that: ‘The … Jews are revenging on the poor of a professedly Christian country the wrongs which their forefathers sustained at the hands of ours ….’²⁰

Moses complained about being ‘intemperately singled out for vituperation’ and that he had been maligned for the ‘persuasion to which I belong’. He pointed out that, of forty wholesale slopsellers and shirt manufacturers in London, ‘there are not more than three of the Jewish community’, and that his rates were higher than many of the most respectable outfitting warehouses. When he blamed competition from workhouse labour for lowering prices, The Times admonished him further for not seeing that ‘being innocent, and being less guilty than others, are two different things’.²¹ It added: ‘We only used the word “Jew” to which Mr. Moses somewhat indignantly refers, not as a term of reproach to the people, but in the other of its two significations, in which it forms a component part of the language.’²²

Commenting on Biddell’s case, and a similar one heard the same day, The Times averred that: ‘“A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work”, is one of the Chartists’ rallying cries, and one in which, provided we are not excluded from construing it is implying “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages”, we can heartily join.’²³ It concluded th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Currency Conversion Table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Sweating Revealed, 1843–1890
• Part II: The Search for an Effective Solution
• Part III: The Minimum Wage in Practice
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index