Edmund Reid

We have seen the sweater engaging his hands in the slave market. Let
us follow them to the den. But first it will be as well to remove a false
impression with regard to the sweater himself. He is not always the wealthy
spider sucking the life-blood from the flies he has caught in his web. He is
not a gorgeous Hebrew with diamond rings and a big cigar. He is frequently
a worker also, a man sweating because he is himself sweated. His one
advantage is that he generally knows the whole of his trade. That is to say
he can, if he is a tailor, make the whole of a garment; if he is a bootmaker,
a complete pair of boots. The foreigners who come to be sweated generally
make one part only of the article they work at. They learn that one portion
of the process and no other. In this they differ from an Englishman, who, if
he does tailoring, is a tailor. The foreign tailors represent not trained labour
but unskilled labour; very few of them could make a complete article.
There are, according to a witness before the House of Lords Committee,
twenty-five subdivisions of labour in the sweating trade in making a suit of
clothes.
There are more than two thousand sweaters in the East of London.
Some have workshops, others use their own dwelling rooms. Let us enter
a "dwelling" workshop. It is a room nine feet square. In it fourteen people
are at work. There is a coke fire, and seven or eight gas jets are burning.
Ventilation there is none. The sweater is at work himself. Hollow-eyed, gaunt-visaged men and women are toiling
in various ways. Some have a sewing machine, others are doing handwork. It is evening when we enter. The poor
wretches have been at work since six o'clock in the morning. They will go on probably till midnight, for it is the
season, and the sweater has his hands full. The wages these poor foreigners can earn by their ceaseless toil
will perhaps be eighteen shillings at the week's end. For that they will work on Sunday also. All the gold of the
Rothschilds could not tempt us to stay an hour in this place, for life is sweeter than gold. Let us hurry out into
the air.
Here is another den. In this boot-making is going on. The men are mostly "greeners" who have been hired in
the slave market. It is a double room knocked into one. In this ten men, and a man and his wife and six children
work and sleep.
The Russian "greener" lies on next to nothing. A cup of tea and a herring are frequently all the food he will have
in the twenty-four hours. How can he afford more on the starvation wages he receives from the sweater? Not
long ago a Russian who appeared before the Sweating Committee said he had that week worked from 6.30a.m.
to 2.30a.m. on the following day with only one hour for dinner. He worked harder in London than in Warsaw and
made less. But the emigration agent had painted London as a land of gold and tempted him to invest all he had
in the world in a ticket.
The struggle is sometimes even too terrific for a Russian jew. Recently a young "greener" hanged himself. He
had brought his newly-wedded wife from Russia to London, thinking he would get a living. He learnt boot finishing
and earned 12s to 15s a week. To earn £1 a week twenty-two hours he would have to work twenty-two hours out
of the twenty-four. At the inquest it was proved that he had tried to do this and his brain had given way. In a fit
of madness and despair he hanged himself in the room he occupied with his young wife.
There are various other sweating trades carried on East, and West, such as furriery, shirtmaking, mantle-making,
and dressmaking. In the West tailoring and dressmaking are the sweated trades. Here the work is irregular. Half
the year the men and girls are unemployed, the other half they are working night and day.
English girls are occasionally sweated at the West in the dressmaking and millinery by wealthy Christian
employers. With the blinds drawn and the workrooms apparently closed for the day dressmakers work on long
beyond the hours allowed by the Factory Acts during the season. Sometimes the inspector gets wind of what is
going on and makes a sudden descent on the premises. Then all is consternation. Madame is summoned, and
puts the blame on duchesses who want the dresses in a hurry. The Factory Act applies to these workrooms, and
consequently the condition of things is far better than in the East End dens. There the Factory Inspector can only
enter on a warrant, because the bulk of the dens are in dwelling-houses. The sanitary inspector can enter, but the
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