Sweated industry and the minimum wage

CHAPTER I
EXISTING CHECKS

How it is that some workers are not “sweated”—Non-competitive systems—Co-operation—Public services—Trade unions—Who is to blame for strikes?—How trade unions promote trade—Limits of their success—Factory Acts—How restriction raises wages—An example—How restriction drives the employer into better ways—Limit of legal restrictions in Great Britain.

If it be true that unlimited competition tends to reduce the wage earner to the lowest possible rate of subsistence, how does it happen, some reader may enquire, that under our present competitive system all wage earners are not, in fact, at that low level, but that, on the contrary, there are occupations in which wages tend steadily to rise.

The answer is that the course of competition among ourselves is not unchecked, and that, wherever concerted human action has interposed a check, the downward course of wages has been stayed. Nor, indeed, is the competitive system, though the most widely prevalent, the only system in existence among us.

A very considerable proportion of the trade of these islands is carried on not upon a competitive but upon a co-operative basis. The actual sales of goods made by industrial co-operative societies in the year 1904 amounted to £90,681,406,^[69] and this total was “exclusive of the sums (amounting to £11,874,643 in 1904) representing the value of the goods produced by the productive departments of the wholesale and retail societies and transferred to their distributive departments.” The membership of the various societies included in 1904 no less than 2,103,113 persons, an appreciable fraction of the population.

The great movement known as Industrial Co-operation has two forms: (a) Associations of Consumers; (b) Labour Copartnerships.

The theory of Associations of Consumers is simple in the extreme. It consists in the elimination and reduction of intermediate profits, and the purchase by the retail customer of goods as nearly as possible at prime cost. The method employed is to sell at the usual market price and to return the surplus in the form of a percentage upon the total of purchases—which percentage is usually called a dividend. The fund from which such payments are paid is “the fund commonly known as profit,” and commonly retained under that name by the individual employer. Some writers have pointed out that this fund is in truth not profit but only savings. “‘Wealth is not created, it is only economised by distribution’; but in co-operative distribution it is economised to such effect that, for the workers at any rate, it has appeared to create wealth where none existed nor could exist for them under the old system of competitive trading.”^[70] The “fund commonly called profit” is in fact “the margin between the prime cost of an article and the price paid for it over the counter by the individual customer.” The appropriation of this margin, or of a considerable part of it, to the customer is a feature not only of stores belonging to working class members but also of such undertakings as the Civil Service or the Army and Navy Stores. In these instances, however, the method adopted is to diminish the selling price; and this slight difference of procedure has led to a wide difference of results. The ordinary customer of the middle class stores feels himself, for the most part, but a purchaser at an exceptionally good and cheap shop; the customer at a store that follows the plan of the original Rochdale Pioneers feels himself the member of a community and the inheritor of a tradition. The fund, being collected in the hands of the society at large, is recognised more clearly as the property of all members alike; its destination is regulated by the governing body whom those members elect; and it forms a continual object lesson in political economy.

In these cases, it is clear to all persons who understand the processes, that competition has been checked. The margin no longer goes into an employer’s pocket but returns to the customer; and since the working classes are the largest customers, most of it returns to them. In nearly all instances, however, a part of the fund is retained for public uses; few, indeed, are the societies that contribute nothing towards educational or federal purposes.

The other group of co-operators views its members not as consumers but as producers, and by this very fact narrows its range, since every human being is a consumer, but not all of us are, or can be, in the strict sense, producers. There must be clerks, distributors of all kinds, policemen, organisers. The work of such persons is necessary and useful, but it does not produce, like that of the weaver or the engineer, an immediate and apparent increase in the wealth of the world. In theory, the early associations of producers were workers who combined themselves into self governed workshops and divided the profits of their labours. But this ideal is applicable only to industries demanding but a small outlay of capital, and such industries are always growing fewer. “The ideal ... was modified; individual sympathisers outside the workshop were admitted as members ... so too were societies of consumers. Thus, in place of the old self governing workshop, the modern copartnership workshop developed.” Associations of this type have been rapidly growing in the last ten or twelve years, and during the last two or three have spread amazingly in Ireland. All sorts of industries are represented: baking, weaving (of cotton, wool and silk), spinning, building, printing, quarrying, dairying, sick nursing, typewriting, cab-driving and bookbinding among them; there are societies that make wearing apparel of various sorts, pianos, harness, nails, mineral waters, photographs, brushes, watches, cutlery, padlocks and bricks. “Desborough, with its two important productive societies and its flourishing store which owns much of the land and has built most of the houses, is almost a co-operative community.”

Of the great English and Scotch Wholesale Societies made up of federations of societies, of the annual conferences, the annual festivals, the Women’s Co-operative Guild—that greatest and most interesting of working women’s associations—it is not my business here to speak in detail. Readers who desire to become acquainted with co-operation as it exists to-day should procure Industrial Co-operation.^[71]

It must be enough to say that in the ocean of commercial competition, co-operation lies like a fertile island inhabited by workers who are putting into their own pockets the profits of their buying and selling, and very often also of their labour.

Nor is industrial co-operation the only part of the nation’s business carried on, in part at least, upon non-competitive principles. The whole civil service of any country, the army, navy, hospitals, museums, prisons, endowed schools and municipal undertakings of all kinds are examples of enterprises established on a non-competitive basis, although often influenced as regards internal management by competitive methods. In many of these cases, the payment of workers is fixed otherwise than by competition. Military and naval officers are not asked what is the lowest figure at which they will consent to serve their country; nor do we find in advertisements for town clerks or borough surveyors that preference will be given to candidates willing to accept a reduction of salary.

Even in the wider labour market, competition has not entirely a free course. It is checked by trade organisations, by Factory Acts and by Sanitary Acts. It is even checked in some slight degree by an uneasy feeling that it is not decent to let people work for us in return for obviously inadequate payment.

The avowed aim of trade unions is to check freedom of competition, with the object of obtaining or maintaining for the workers a high level of pay and of comfort. Their attempted method has been, almost invariably, the establishment not of a fixed wage but of a minimum wage. A misconception upon this point is so deeply engrained in the mind of the ordinary middle class Briton that I entirely despair of being believed when I make this statement. If I should live to celebrate a hundredth birthday, I should expect still to hear in the last year of my life the words: “What I really can’t bear about trade unions is that they insist upon all men being paid alike.” Let it be repeated, once again, however vainly, that trade unions do not so insist. I have never known, nor heard of, any trade union that objected to any of its members getting paid as much above the minimum rate as they possibly could. What the union does forbid is the taking of wages below the minimum; and the reason of this prohibition will be clear to any person who has read the chapter: “How Underpayment Comes.”

The means employed by trade unions for securing a minimum wage is the combined refusal of all members to work at any lower rate. In trades of skill, as distinguished from trades of mere practice—trades that is to say which possess in some degree a natural monopoly—unions have often attained considerable success; and wherever they have done so, poverty has been in a measure checked. Not only have the members of the union themselves been comparatively well paid, but the fact of their being so has helped to raise the level around them. Thus, since national poverty is the greatest enemy of trade, the unions have almost invariably, and indeed inevitably, been promoters of trade and prosperity.

At this point the question “How about strikes?” becomes almost physically audible. Certainly, a strike, during its continuance, hinders trade and prosperity in exactly the same way as warfare does. It is in fact warfare on a lesser scale and—in our country—with restrictions upon the weapons that may be employed; and war is always an evil, though sometimes the lesser of two evils. In a strike, as in greater wars, responsibility rests upon both parties, but seldom in equal degrees. The apportionment of blame must largely depend upon the cause in which each is fighting. The employer, in nine cases out of ten, is fighting for cheap labour; the union primarily for access to amenities of life which the employer enjoys already. In nine cases out of ten, therefore, the union is really fighting the battle of the whole nation, while the employer is fighting against it. Mr Schoenhof, a grave State official, sent by his own government to examine economic questions in Europe, declares of the acts of British trade unions that: “economically these acts speak of a high degree of wisdom. On the other hand the attempts of the employing classes to depress the rate of wages show frequently an entire misapprehension of the principles under which production is conducted. Most of the strife would disappear if it were more fully recognised that a high rate of wages has all the time been the powerful lever to reaching the low cost of production which practically rules to-day in the industries of the United States.”^[72]

If therefore that combatant is to be held most responsible who is fighting in the worse cause, it is not the trade unionist but the employer, who, on the whole, is chiefly to be blamed for the occurrence of strikes.

There may, indeed, have been cases—I believe there has, in our own day and country, been at least one—in which a union has followed a mistaken course, has restricted output, and so lessened the volume of trade, and to that degree injured the country. In so far as unions have occasionally done this, they have been blind to the larger issues; but not so blind, even thus, as those employers who thought to cheapen production by lowering wages. Poverty, always and everywhere, hinders production; the wise employer desires to see more money in the pockets of working class purchasers, and the wise statesman more money in the pockets of working class taxpayers. Some day, when the history of Great Britain comes to be seen in the truer perspective of retrospect, it will be the leaders of trade unionism and the promoters of Factory Acts who will stand out among the real makers of this nation’s wealth.

But trade unions have seldom been really successful among unskilled workers—precisely those who, having no natural monopoly, are most liable to the pressure of economic competition and most likely to be underpaid. Women workers, too, have always been difficult to organise; not primarily, as is sometimes supposed, because they are women; but partly because women, in our present social state, expect to leave the labour market upon marriage, and therefore are comparatively indifferent about earning high wages; and partly because women have, as a rule, less of companionship with one another and of common social life out of working hours than men, and therefore less opportunity of that “talking over” of affairs out of which concerted action grows. Home workers are, of course, especially isolated; and the successful organisation of a union among unskilled female home workers would be an industrial miracle not looked for by the most sanguine toiler in the industrial field.

Co-operation and trade unionism have both been, in the main, working class movements, and both are examples of that curious inarticulate instinct for right collective action which seems to be inherent in the English democracy. From an assembly of average English artisans—I say, English, not British—you will not get logically reasoned statements; you will very seldom get a clear exposition of principles; but you will, very generally, get that main line of conduct which true principles and sound logic would dictate.

Not all the checks, however, in the course of free competition have come from the workers. The direct interposition of the law was invoked and secured by men whose personal concern in the question was only that of fellow citizens. These men were actuated by a horror of the sufferings undergone by the poorest workers; they felt that moral order was outraged and the nation disgraced by the existing industrial conditions. Restriction of hours was the first check imposed by British law, which has shrunk hitherto from directly fixing a rate of wages.^[73]

But since prolonged hours of labour are in fact but a form of diminished wages, the law has, as it were despite itself, led to a real, and often also to a nominal, rise of wages. The way in which this comes about was exemplified with singular completeness in a case that occurred some years ago in London. The managers of a girl’s club, enquiring into the non-attendance of a certain member of the club, learned that her employer was giving every day to her and to her fellow workers a considerable number of articles to be made at home after the closing of the work room and to be brought in next morning. In order to complete this task, she was often, she declared, obliged to work till two in the morning. The articles were accessories of dress, and were paid for, by the dozen, at such a rate that the girls (there were seven of them) earned each about seven shillings a week, or about 1s. 2d. a day for a working day of from 14 to 16 hours. The ladies of the club reported the case to the Women’s Industrial Council, the members of which knew—as the girls did not—that the Factory Act forbade such employment at home after a working day on the employer’s premises. Now this, it will be seen, was just the kind of case in which, to people who have but little industrial experience, the interference of the law seems harsh, and its strict enforcement disastrous. If, working 14 to 16 hours a day, these poor girls earned but 1s. 2d., how cruel to let them work but 10 hours, and so earn but ninepence or tenpence! The Women’s Industrial Council, however, ruthlessly reported the facts to the Factory inspectors; and one evening, shortly afterwards, a lady inspector appeared at the workshop door just as the girls were leaving. Each girl carried a parcel. The inspector enquired the contents, and on learning them, turned the girls back and made each leave behind her the work which should have occupied her until after midnight. She herself interviewed the employer and no doubt expounded to him the provisions of the Act. Next morning—or possibly a day or two later—this ingenious gentleman presented to his employees a statement for their signature which declared that they carried home work to be done, not by themselves but by their relatives. They all signed; girls who work part of the night as well as all day and who receive but seven shillings a week are not persons likely to have spirit for much resistance. But they told the club leaders, and the club leaders told the Women’s Industrial Council, and the Industrial Council hastened to tell the Factory inspectors. Again the lady inspector appeared and met the girls coming out with parcels. Again she bade them return the work, and again she went in and saw their employer. What she said to him can only be surmised; for neither Factory inspectors nor employers report these things to the outer world. Whatever it may have been, it was effectual. No more work was given out to be carried home and the girls were thenceforward able to spend their evenings, if they chose, at the club and their nights in sleep. But, at the week’s end, every girl had done much less work, and being paid at the usual piece work rate, received considerably less than her weekly average. Thereupon, they represented to their employer their hard case. The inspector had forbidden them to work at night, and they could not live upon the proceeds of their work by day. Would he therefore be pleased to raise their pay; otherwise, they would be obliged to seek work elsewhere. The employer did raise their wages, paying them at a rate per dozen which, while still but a very few pence, was yet somewhere between 40 and 45 per cent. higher than he had paid before. Nor was this all. Finding that seven girls were now unable to accomplish all his work, he enlarged his workshop and took on six more. There were now therefore thirteen girls at work instead of seven, and all thirteen were receiving wages a shade higher for ten hours’ work than the seven had received for about fifteen hours. Nor did the retail selling price of the goods advance by so much as the fraction of a penny. In such ways as this do legal checks tend to impede the course of free competition and to prevent the extremity of underpayment.

It is not, however, only by preventing undue hours of labour but also by insisting upon reasonable sanitary conditions that the law promotes better wages and improved trade. An employer who can no longer either overwork or overcrowd his “hands” is driven to seek other channels of saving. He demands some method of getting more work done in an hour, and finds it worth his while to pay for the best possible machinery. All sorts of improved processes are introduced, some of which may demand increased skill and attention from the workers. The workers as soon as they have leisure enough to think, and health enough to develop initiative, begin to insist upon better payment, and because they are better paid are able to respond to demands for better work. The improved methods of production, where introduced, lead to an increase of production which renders possible a lowering of selling price, while the rise in wages at the same time increases the buying power of the workers. Trade expands and finds a ready outlet.^[74]

The profits of the manufacturer, in these circumstances, are greatly increased, no longer at the cost of increased hardship to the workers but with advantage to the whole community. Thus the law has already, in various ways, interfered with the free course of competition, and its interference has been beneficial all round. The grounds of its intervention have always been moral; legislators and constituents alike have felt that certain evils must be suppressed at whatever loss of profits or of trade. But the results have been, not only morally but also economically, of immense national benefit. Slowly the great truth is emerging into recognition that the enforcement of good conditions and good payment for the workers of a nation is not only the humane but also the profitable policy. Slowly, step by step, in that piecemeal, groping and wasteful manner which seems to be a part of the English nature, and which, while so maddening to some of us who happen to possess an infusion of more logical but hotter blood, yet, on the whole, works out so well in practice, the British law goes forward, setting check after check in the path of unlimited competition. Almost every step has been taken amid outcries of opposition and prophecies of ruin. At every advance, the “practical man” has assured the government of the day, beforehand, that his particular trade would be destroyed, and, afterwards, that he had lost nothing.

In spite of all these steps and all these consequences, the vast majority of English people still believe themselves to be living under a régime of pure competition and are ready to declare such a régime not only beneficial but inevitable. In fact, however, modern life, even in our own small islands, comprises not one régime only but many. Every stage, from a modified feudalism up to an almost undiluted socialism, is represented by existing conditions in Great Britain. Some stages are dwindling; some are growing; and it is well within the power of concerted human action to determine which shall grow and which shall dwindle.

As far as we have gone, our law has directly stopped many gross forms of overwork and oppression. The home worker it has helped, if at all, only in so far as it has enforced certain provisions as to housing and sanitation. Indirectly, the Factory Acts have served to raise wages by forming a basis of minimum comfort upon which trade union organisation could be built. In Great Britain, the law has never yet intervened, directly and of set purpose, to raise wages. In parts indeed of Greater Britain the law has directly so intervened; but the history of that intervention belongs to another chapter.

Emigration—Valuable to the individual—Useless for the community—Assumed improvidence of early marriage—Drunkenness cause of individual poverty, not of general poverty—The amazing thrift of working people—Dangers of thrift—Observations of a sagacious Scotchman—Consumers’ Leagues—Why impracticable as remedy for underpayment—Fields in which a Consumers’ League may be of use.

The evils described in the first part of this volume are no new ones; they have been familiar for many years to many persons; a variety of remedies have been suggested and in many cases attempted. Of these remedies, only those are in any degree effectual which act as checks upon competition. One group of proposed remedies is founded upon the assumption that the country is overpopulated. This assumption, is, however, disproved by the fact (which is unquestioned) that notwithstanding the presence among us of a large class of rich non-producers, the national income has increased at a greater rate than the population of the country. Still, there are persons who believe that England has too many people and who, therefore, very logically, desire to reduce the number.

Some reformers of this way of thinking desire to see fewer births; others desire the removal, to parts of the world where population is still sparse, of those persons who, in this country, are seen to be vainly struggling for remunerative employment. Emigration has, no doubt, in many individual cases, meant a change from indigence to prosperity; but, as a remedy for general indigence, it has the fatal flaw that every worker removed is also a consumer removed, and that every consumer removed means the loss of a customer and, therefore, to that extent, a diminution of trade. The supply of labour is, indeed, lessened, but the demand for labour’s product, and thus for labour itself, is lessened too. It would be better for British trade if the emigrant could be made prosperous at home instead of being sent to seek prosperity in exile. It is, however, true that most emigrants go to British colonies, and that these colonies need them. For these reasons, emigration is, no doubt, useful, but as a remedy for general poverty at home it must always remain delusive. Moreover, so long as the immigration of foreigners is permitted, the emigration of British subjects is in effect little more than a game of “General Post.”

Another school of reformers holds the poor themselves responsible for their own poverty. “Why do they marry so young?” “Why do they drink?” “Why don’t they save?” These questions are heard at every turn; and persons who do not know the life of the poor regard them as unanswerable.

To take first the question of early marriages, a point upon which the better off are apt to judge with singular unfairness of their poorer brethren. The market value of the middle class man is probably highest after 40, certainly after 30. The market value of the average workman, on the other hand, decreases after 40, if not earlier, and, in a vast number of cases, is as high at 22 as it will ever be. Therefore, while the middle class man is in a financial sense, prudent in deferring marriage till 30 or thereabouts, the workman would be foolish indeed to delay the birth of his eldest children until within ten years or so of his own decline in market value. The workman who desires, like the middle class man, that the infancy and schooltime of his children shall coincide with his own period of greatest prosperity should marry—as in fact he does—between the ages of 20 and 24. Then, by the time that the father begins to experience increasing difficulty in getting well paid employment—or perhaps employment at all—the elder children will at least be of an age to earn for themselves. It should be remembered, too, that workpeople as a class die younger than people who are better off, so that a bricklayer, married at 20, and a barrister, married at 30, have about even chances of seeing the manhood of their elder sons—another reason why the former is wise to marry early, if at all. Early marriages, then, whether improvident or no in the case of middle class brides and bridegrooms, are not improvident in the case of working people—unless indeed it be contended that it is improvident for working people to marry at all—a contention fraught with rather alarming possibilities to the future of the race.

To the question: “Why do they drink?” the answer is not quite so simple. One may begin by remarking that there are a great many total abstainers among wage earners; one may also remark that, if drinking were as universal among wage earners as, let us say, the wearing of boots, even the lowest rate of wages would stand at a figure allowing for the purchase of drink. Economically, it is because the majority of wage earners do not drink to excess that the excessive drinker finds himself at a disadvantage. Of course, he is at a disadvantage also in various other respects, but these do not enter into the economic argument. That intemperate drinking may conduce to poverty is undeniable; but that poverty also often conduces to intemperance is no less true. Of the two kinds of drunkenness that exist among wage earners one is largely in the nature of an escape from fatigue and from despair. Of the other—the outbreak at intervals of the able, energetic and often comparatively prosperous man, I do not pretend to have fathomed the mystery; but it seems likely that the monotony of modern working life and the lack of abundant personal interests may be among the contributory causes. It may also be noted that to carouse at intervals was a deeply rooted habit among our Northern ancestors, who admired a man potent in drinking as they admired a man powerful in fight. It is at least conceivable that the energetic, capable man who “breaks out” every month or two is a survival of the old type; and it certainly seems to be the case that his type does not occur among purely Latin races. Be this as it may, experience shows convincingly that, on the whole, in this country, any and every class of workers grows by degrees more sober as its hours of work are shortened and its wages raised. Individuals of the class may still drink heavily, but the average of sobriety steadily rises with improved conditions. Moreover, in spite of the temptations presented by poverty, a steady rise in the sobriety of this country is shown by the excise returns. If poverty spreads and deepens—as I fear it does—the cause cannot be found in an increase of drunkenness; for the consumption of drink per head grows yearly less and less. Temperance is doubtless advantageous in many ways to those who practise it; but, like efficiency, it possesses a money value only while it fails to be universal. If every man were temperate, no employer would make a point of retaining his temperate “hands” when reducing his establishment.

To the question: “Why do not working people save?” truth requires the paradoxical reply that they do save, and that they cannot afford to do so. As a class, working people save a larger proportion of their income than any other class of the community. The shares in Industrial Co-operative Societies amounted in 1904 to £27,739,123; the Reserve and Insurance funds of the same societies to £2,677,420. The great Friendly and Provident Societies are supported almost wholly by working class contributors; and, in addition to these, the majority of Trade Unions are also provident Societies.^[75]

Of the thirty families whose household expenditure has been tabulated in Vol. I. of Mr Booth’s Life and Labour (East London), only five spent nothing upon insurance or club money; and in one household this item ran up to 11½ per cent. of the whole expenditure. Considering that the weekly income, as estimated, ranged from about 10s. 3½d. to about 33s. 7d. and that the households consisted seldom of less than four, and in one case of eight persons, these contributions are by no means trifling. Yet it is probable that not two families out of the thirty were able to make anything like an adequate provision for old age. It hardly, indeed, requires demonstration that a person earning just enough to support life can only make an adequate provision for his old age by laying by 100 per cent. of his income. Upon 10s. a week, or less, the saving of money becomes something very near to a slow form of suicide. Moreover, at the risk of horrifying every middle class reader, I must frankly declare that, in my opinion, a worker does more wisely to abstain from all forms of thrift beyond participation in his trade union and his co-operative society. His union will help to keep up his wages; his co-operative society will increase their purchasing power; the return upon both these investments is immediate and certain: but anything more is apt to cost too dear. It is now a good many years since an old Scotchman of great intelligence and judgment, the secretary of his trade union, a member of the municipal council, and justly respected by his fellow townsmen of various ranks, gave me his opinion on this subject. He related to me how, as a young man, he had accompanied a benevolent gentleman to a lecture upon thrift, and how, as they afterwards walked away, the gentleman waxed eloquent upon the duty of every man to lay by. But my old friend, canny even at five-and-twenty or so, replied that he was a married man with two children, that his earnings were two pounds a week, that, if he spent less, either his children must go short of what was necessary to make them strong, healthy and well trained, or he himself must go short of what was necessary to maintain his efficiency; and that, in his belief, the best form of thrift for a man in his position was to maintain the highest standard of living which his small total income would secure. In his case the plan had fully succeeded. He was, I suppose, well over sixty, as hale, as active and as much interested in the progress of the world as any man of thirty, and a most valuable citizen. His children had both grown up healthy, capable and industrious; both were skilled workers, regularly employed and in receipt of good wages. But supposing—and his trade was one reputed unhealthy—that the father had died, leaving a widow and young children unprovided for? We may note that his risk of doing so was lessened by his being better fed and better clothed than his more sparing neighbour. Still, death is liable to seize even the best nourished and the most fitly clothed; he might have died long before his children had completed their excellent education or become capable of self support. Even in that case, however, would these orphans, in whom a foundation had been laid of good health and good teaching, have been really worse off than if, with a poorer endowment of personal advantages, they had inherited the money pittance—so sadly inadequate at best—that their father might have scraped together in his few years of life? For how miserably small is the provision that can, even with the utmost exercise of parsimony, be made out of a family income of two pounds a week! In their inevitably inadequate efforts to make such provision, workers too often deny themselves the absolute essentials of healthy living. To abstain from buying new shoes in order to save the price for one’s old age, and then to die of pneumonia, induced by want of sound shoes, is but a doubtful form of thrift, both for oneself and one’s nation. The interests of the nation, especially, are certainly better served by the maintenance among working class families of the highest attainable standard of life than by the accumulation of very small individual provision for possible orphans or possible old age. Even two pounds a week will not suffice (except in remote country districts—where no man earns so much) to provide really very good food, clothing and housing for four persons; and the working class family does not often consist of no more than four. The present cost of thrift, as thrift is generally understood, is too heavy and the future return too light; and the wise man is not he who saves his money, but he who spends it to the best advantage.

The supposed remedies hitherto touched upon have been measures demanding the agency of the wage earner himself; but there is another scheme, particularly attractive to the inexperienced reformer, in which the consumer is to be the active person. When men and women who are not themselves underpaid come face to face with the evil of underpayment, it is natural enough for them to resolve that henceforth the articles purchased by themselves shall be articles the makers of which have been adequately paid. From this individual resolve it is but one step to an association of persons all thus resolved, and banded together for the purposes of investigation and exclusive dealing. Such an association is a “Consumers’ League,” the aim of which is “to check unlimited competition not at the point of manufacture but at the point of sale.” Such associations, the first of which was formed, I believe, in consequence of a suggestion made by myself, many years ago, in Longman’s Magazine, are likely to reappear at a time like the present when many consciences are disturbed by recognition of the fact that a considerable proportion of British workers are scandalously underpaid. It seems desirable, therefore, to point out how and why a Consumers’ League must inevitably fail in its aims.

The complexities of modern commerce are such that it is absolutely impossible for any group of purchasers, however large and however earnest, to attain that accurate knowledge of myriads of facts which would be necessary; or, even, supposing such knowledge to have been once obtained, to keep abreast of the unceasing changes. Let us take the comparatively elementary problem of the large retail drapery shops. It appears to be the general practice in such establishments for each separate department to be under separate management, and for the head of each department to have a free hand, subject to the one condition of producing a certain percentage of profit. The ability to manage successfully and develop a large branch of trade is not, as may well be believed, very common, and one part of the payment that it demands is freedom to do its work in its own way. Thus it is not uncommon for one department of a large business to be conducted in a spirit of justice and consideration, while another is marked by the total lack of such a spirit. For instance, there was at one time, in a certain firm, a manager of the mourning department who was among the best employers in the London trade; but at the same time, the man in charge of the workshop in which certain garments were made up or altered, was a cutter-down of wages, rude and bullying in his behaviour to the workers and entirely inconsiderate of their comfort. What reply, in a case like this, can be given to a lady who asks: “Can I safely go to X’s shop?” How, if she is furnished with the information just given, can she discriminate, or how, even if she did, can she or her informant be sure of the continuance of these conditions? Six months later, the one manager may have taken a better post, and the other have been dismissed. The new man at the workshop may be an enlightened organiser, who introduces improved machinery and methods, knows the value of contented and well fed workers, and raises wages; while the new man at the mourning department may have been trained in the ways of “a driving trade,” and may believe good management to consist in harrying his employees, in nibbling at their wages and in “cribbing” their leisure. If we multiply these facts by the number of shops or departments touched by the weekly purchases of any well-to-do customer, we shall begin to have some conception of the scale upon which a Consumers’ League would have to conduct its investigations.

Moreover, all this is only on the uppermost plane. Few of these retailers manufacture the goods sold. In regard to every single article it becomes necessary to trace every step of production and transmission. A pair of shoes cannot be satisfactorily guaranteed until we have discovered the wages and conditions of employment not only of every person who has worked upon the actual shoe, but also of the tanner, the thread weaver and winder, the maker of eyelets, the spinner and weaver of the shoe-lace and the various operatives engaged upon the little metal tag at the shoe-lace’s end. Nor is the matter finished even then. At every stage of its evolution, a shoe requires the services of clerks, bookkeepers, office-boys, warehousemen, packers, boxmakers, carmen, railway servants &c., and each new service introduces other material and other service—paper, ink, ledgers, harness, stable fittings, cardboard, string, glue, iron, coal—the series is endless. Yet compared with a woman’s completed gown, or a man’s suit of clothes, how simple a product is a pair of shoes. The fact is that even the most apparently 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 for ever, but is in continual process of change.

At the present stage, then, of our commercial development it appears absolutely impossible for a Consumers’ League to fulfil its aims. If labour were thoroughly organised in every branch, so that a strong trade union existed in every trade, capable of giving information upon every point, then indeed a Consumers’ League might become truly efficient, but it would become proportionately superfluous.^[76]

The cure of underpayment needs to be applied at the point of payment; and the establishment of a legal minimum wage is the most direct method of application.

But although a Consumers’ League can never hope to counteract the results of unlimited competition, it may, as the National Consumers’ League of America shows, exert a valuable influence upon public opinion, and may succeed in remedying certain industrial scandals. The Report of that body for the year 1905–6 (up to March 6, 1906) is a most interesting pamphlet, full of details that show how useful may be the work, as industrial detectives and agitators, of a group of citizens, banded together for the purpose of exposing and abolishing oppressive and insanitary conditions of labour. In a country where public feeling is not yet nearly ready for the enactment of a minimum wage, the formation of a Consumers’ League may possibly be the best step forward. An effectual remedy it cannot be; but it undoubtedly affords means of education, both for its members and for the community at large. In our own country, however, where the evils are already more or less generally recognised, and where an increasing number of persons are already beginning to hope for a minimum wage, the Consumers’ League marks a stage that has been left behind.

We see, then, that emigration, though it may help the individual, can but affect the trade of the country injuriously; that temperance, while eminently desirable on other grounds, is only of any economic value because it is still not universal; that effectual thrift is absolutely impossible for the underpaid, and that the exercise of even an illusory thrift can only be achieved by a sacrifice of things essential to good health. We see, furthermore, that a Consumers’ League may be a valuable social agency, but can never hope to be an economic remedy for underpayment. Having looked up all these turnings and found all of them blind alleys, we now proceed to examine a road along which younger sisters of ours have travelled already, and at the end of which a ray of hope seems to be shining. But before entering upon this examination we will pause to consider the lesson of facts as presented in the history of our own cotton trade.

The pessimist view—False assumption on which it rests—Cotton trade not natural to Britain—Climate—Temperature—Fallacy of inherited skill—Cotton workers as they were—Advancing legal restrictions—Rise of wages—Amazing development and prosperity of the British trade—Change in the mills—Change in the workers—Change in the employers—The case of Bristol—The verdict of Mr Schoenhof.

Many people who would gladly see working people better paid, honestly believe that a general rise in wages is not commercially possible. Any attempt at giving a fair wage all round would, they declare, so diminish trade as to throw out of work an additional number of persons whose added competition would inevitably reduce the average wage to below its original level: or who, if their competition were effectually barred by the existence of a legal minimum wage, would be left without employment, in a state more wretched than before. It may be remarked that this view involves an admission that we live under commercial conditions which render dishonesty not only the best, but actually the only possible, policy. Such a belief would appear to furnish an unanswerable argument in favour of the destruction of such commercial conditions, and it is difficult to understand how any human being can hold it and not become a convinced revolutionist. Yet, strange to say, it is from the mouth of upholders of things as existing, that this doctrine is most frequently heard. In some quarters, indeed, there would seem to be actual hostility to the idea of bettering the workman’s lot, an inclination to grudge him any greater share than he now possesses of the comforts and conveniences of modern life. This attitude—to some extent, it must be supposed, a feudal survival—indicates a very ugly spirit of class selfishness which may possibly be dangerous, and is certainly ignorant. Dull, indeed, must be the man or woman upon whom modern conditions of life do not impress the closeness of human interdependence. Never, since the beginnings of history, has the daily life of every man been so wonderfully interwoven with that of all his fellows: never was there a time when the deeds of each were so much a part of his neighbour’s pains or pleasures. Consider for a single moment how changed would be one’s own life, if there were no longer in Great Britain any person very poor, very dirty or very ill mannered, if, in short, no one fell below the standard of that skilled artisan class which is not only the most solidly virtuous, but also, in essentials, the most truly courteous section of our society. Is there one of us, however selfish, however callous, from whose daily existence a burden would not be lifted?

Yes, the pessimist will say, the change would be delightful, but it is not possible. That very interdependence of which you speak makes the whole world but one market, and renders it impossible for any one country to raise wages while other countries keep theirs low. This alleged impossibility rests, it will be observed, upon the assumption that higher wages conduce to higher selling prices, an assumption which experience shows to be fallacious. And since it is always more convincing, especially, perhaps, to the British mind, to narrate what has happened than to declare what must happen, the purposes of my argument will be best served by a brief account of the English cotton trade.

Before entering upon this, let me point out how very remarkable a phenomenon it is that there should exist an English cotton trade at all. We cannot grow the required material: every ounce of raw cotton has to be imported at a price, imported too from a great distance, and owing to its bulky nature, at comparatively a high heavy cost. Originally the possession of coal, iron and a seaboard gave advantages to England: the factory system developed early with us, and we manufactured cotton, as we manufactured other goods, because our energies were turned towards manufacture in general. But the same influences which caused mechanical production to begin here have caused it to arise elsewhere, and the natural development of industry must, one would suppose, eventually carry the manufacture of cotton to regions where cotton can be grown, especially if they happen also to possess the means of motive power. The Southern States of America, where cotton grows, where coal and water power are plentiful, and where population is no longer sparse, would seem to be marked out by nature as the home of the cotton industry. And in fact mills are rapidly rising in that region. Not only so, but the workers in them are employed for much longer hours and paid at a far lower rate per hour than English cotton workers. Readers of the chapter upon child labour, in Part I. of this volume, will be aware that children are working, both by day and by night, in these mills, whereas no child may work full time in any English mill, nor any child or woman at night. Yet these Southern mills, with every advantage of position, with cheap labour, and comparatively cheap land, have not succeeded, and are not succeeding, in winning from the English their immense preponderance in the markets of the world. This undeniable fact is explained in some quarters as being due to our much abused English climate, which is said to provide exactly the degree of temperature and humidity most favourable to the manipulation of cotton yarn. That a very dry atmosphere will not suit some processes of the trade seems to be generally acknowledged, and if England were the only damp country in the world, or even the dampest, we might perhaps regard ourselves as possessing a sort of monopoly advantage. If, however, there be any one state of the atmosphere more favourable than any other for the manufacture of cotton, then it is quite impossible that our notoriously variable climate can always present it. Moreover, it seems to be the case that for some processes at least, a combination of dampness with great heat is desirable: and this combination, natural to some countries, is actually forbidden by the English law. Countries possessing a climate at once hot and damp must, it would seem, have a natural advantage over us, and here again, the Southern States are favoured by nature.

Another explanation sometimes put forward is that the English workers, among whom the manufacture was first established, possess a hereditary skill of manipulation. The physiological possibility of such inheritance seems to be questionable: and, considering the great changes undergone by the machinery employed, the existence of it would be, at least, very surprising. Moreover, this supposed hereditary dexterity would require to have grown up in strangely few generations, since, in 1830 or so, the cotton workers of England are described as being deplorably poor workers, degenerate, physically and morally. Their condition, at that time and for a good many years afterwards, was appalling. A more horrible picture than that presented in Mr P. Gaskell’s “Manufacturing Population of England,” published in 1833, can hardly be conceived. These cotton operatives were, in short, as unpromising in physique, in character and in industrial efficiency as any group of casual, irregularly employed labourers that could be selected to-day from the ranks of unorganised industry: as ill paid, as wretched and as much oppressed as any sweated home worker in a slum garret.

By slow degrees, from that first Act which, in 1802, made some faint attempt at shortening the hours of the unhappy parish apprentices, the law has gone on, steadily diminishing hours of work. From 1854 onward, the working week for women in textile trades became one of 60 hours. Within a few years later, these hours were reduced to 56½; and now, the legal week in the textile trades is one of 55½ hours. At all these stages, the regulations, though nominally affecting only women, have, in practice, decided the hours of men also. Thus, the British textile worker is employed for fewer hours than any foreign competitor. Wages, though not high for the individual, are, owing to the fact that nearly all its members work in the trade, high for the family. Rates of pay have steadily risen; the average nominal wage of 24s. 9d. for men in 1881—itself an immense advance upon the starvation rates of the thirties—had risen, in 1902, to 27s. 3d. For later years I cannot cite figures, but the amazing prosperity of the trade during the last year or two can hardly have failed to affect wages favourably.^[77]

Moreover, these rises have coincided with a fall in the price of food so marked that the increase in average real wages, between 1881 and 1902, is reckoned to be more than 36%.

The number of persons employed has also steadily grown, and the returns of the Chief Inspector of Factories show that in 1901 the industry gave occupation to 513,000 persons. The increase in the number of spindles and of looms, however, has been far greater than the increase in the number of hands. Machinery has made vast strides and becomes daily swifter and more economical of labour; so that the total growth of the trade, since the days of employers who vowed that a ten-hour day would ruin them, almost passes calculation. Moreover, the development of the industry tends more and more towards those branches which demand most skill. Our exports increase more largely in fabrics than in yarn, and most of all in coloured fabrics, the prices of which are rising. We are in short “specialising in the more expensive and difficult work.” We are producing those really exquisite coloured cotton stuffs which under various fancy names have, during the last few years, made summer dresses so attractive, and which are well worth the comparatively high price at which they are bought.

On p. 61 of the pamphlet written by Professor S. J. Chapman for the Free Trade League^[78] may be found a most interesting table of the comparative increase, all over the world, in the number of spindles, between the years 1870 and 1903. We find that “about a fifth of the total increase in the world’s spindles in a third of a century has fallen to the United Kingdom. The whole of Europe, taken together in a period of industrial awakening, cannot boast a growth of cotton spindles more than twice as great as that which has taken place in this country alone, though in 1870 Europe was almost at the beginning of her cotton spinning, and has since then been fostering it.... In 1870 the American nation had a fifth as many spindles as the United Kingdom, and to-day she does not possess half as many as the United Kingdom.” And this in spite of the fact that the population of the United States is so much larger than ours.

Another table (on p. 66) deals with exports of manufactured cotton goods, and compares the average annual exports, from 1891 to 1902, of Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The absolute increase of British exports in the year 1901–2 was £8,170,000; that of Germany, £4,100,000; and that of the United States, £325,000. All the remaining countries together totalled an increase of only £13,450,000, as against Britain’s £8,170,000. The increase in German exports, which comes nearest to our own, is but slightly more than half of it. “Of the total trade (exporting) done by the chief Western trading nations, Great Britain accounts for 62·5%; Germany stands next with 12%.” Moreover, these figures, reaching only to 1902, take no account of the vast prosperity of the cotton trade in Great Britain since: a prosperity of which some indication is given in the Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories for 1905. From Oldham, Mr Crabtree reports that “About 20 new mills have been erected or are in course of erection for the cotton spinning trade alone. These will contain about 2,000,000 spindles.” (p. 147.) Mr Verney reports that “in the Rochdale district alone three new mills containing 220,000 spindles started in 1905, and at the end of the year there were nine more in course of construction to be equipped with 770,000 spindles. The total number of new mills which have commenced to run in 1905 and which are in course of erection throughout Lancashire is no less than 57, with 5,000,000 spindles. The signification of these figures may be better appreciated when it is remembered that in the whole of France there are but 6,000,000 spindles, and in Germany less than 9,000,000.” (p. 147.) On the same page the following declaration, by Mr W. Tattersall, is quoted from “The Cotton Trade Circular”: “The year’s trading has been the most prosperous in the history of Lancashire.”

On the whole, the story of the British cotton trade—a trade, be it remembered, the very existence of which is surprising—is the story of one of the most amazing developments in industrial history. Raw material that can only be grown in distant countries is brought, naturally enough, at first, to a land of coal and iron, the cradle of the factory system. By and by, other countries, including some in which the raw material can be produced, begin, in their turn, to adopt the factory system and to manufacture cotton. What would naturally follow? Surely, the absorption of the English trade by the foreign competitor whom nature favours. Moreover, Britain, already handicapped by nature, had further handicapped herself by restricting hours of work and by imposing high and expensive standards of sanitation and safety. Yet what is seen to occur? England’s trade goes on steadily expanding, year by year; wages rise, both nominally and, to a greater degree, really; and in the course of last year (1905) not only was all the available adult labour employed, but it was not possible to get enough of it, so that there was actually some increase in half time labour, which previously had steadily declined.

Nor is the contrast less if we consider the mills themselves or the men and women connected with them. In the first third of the last century, the mills were, in general, dirty, ill ventilated, ill provided with sanitary accommodation, frequently overcrowded, the machinery unguarded and the temperature unregulated, so that the operatives suffered from extremes both of heat and of cold. At the present day, there must be a certain cubic space for every worker, there must be proper sanitary accommodation, moderate temperature and—most important of all, perhaps, in this industry—there must be proper ventilation for carrying off the dust and fluff by which the lungs of so many cotton operatives have been injured. The old mills were full of overworked, underpaid children, stunted, wizened, and, if their contemporaries are to be credited, precociously vicious; children who dropped asleep at their looms, and had to be dragged, crying with sleepiness, from their beds to begin work again in the morning, while another relay of little serfs were actually waiting to enter the beds left vacant. The mills ran till late at night, sometimes all night long. Diseases of many kinds, especially phthisis and spinal deformities were rife; while drunkenness and immorality seem to have been rampant. The masters, many of whom were self made men, of little education, vowed that their profits were not large, and that any restriction of the hours of labour would inevitably land them in the Bankruptcy Court. The operatives, however, persisted in clamouring for relief; parliament granted it; and strange to say, instead of being ruined, the trade grew better and better. The workers, seizing their chance, developed strong trade unions that included both men and women, and thus secured themselves against the disastrous results of free competition. Their union helped them to gain better wages; the law helped them to health and to leisure. In less than three generations, the cotton workers of North Western England have become intelligent, independent citizens. They are no longer oppressed, no longer illiterate and no longer vicious. Free libraries and co-operative stores grow and flourish, and the old English passion for music, still dormant in the South, is well awake in the large cotton towns of the North. In industrial efficiency the English spinners and weavers of cotton have no rivals. As the Tariff Commission reported, “Nearly every mill started abroad with English machinery requires a certain amount of British workpeople and overlookers to start it and to train up native labour.” (Sec. 205.) This increase of skill, dependent very largely upon an improved standard of life, has rendered possible a vast improvement in methods of production, with the usual consequence of a greatly enlarged output. The masters, from whom the increasing stringency of the law has demanded an ever rising standard of capacity, are men of a better class than their predecessors, and among the most enlightened of British employers.

Meanwhile, in other countries, many of the evils which Lancashire has left behind, still prevail. Children toil to-day in certain American mills, as they toiled once in ours; in many European countries, hours are still injuriously long and wages inadequate to the demands of a civilised life. Yet employers of this cheap labour cannot produce so profitably as Lancashire can. “On the general efficiency of British labour as compared with that of any foreign country witnesses are practically unanimous,” says the Report of the Tariff Commission. (Sec. 89.) In short, the English cotton manufacturer produces more cheaply and more profitably, upon the whole, than any competitor, and in the highest branches of the trade, can hardly be approached. The reasons of this pre-eminence are that the good conditions enforced by law and the comparatively high wage enforced by the trade unions combine to create for him the most efficient body of cotton workers in the world. Once more, the facts of industrial history proclaim the truth that efficiency is not the cause but the product of fair wages, healthy surroundings and reasonable leisure.

Do not let us be deceived into supposing that, apart from these factors, there is any peculiarity in the cotton trade to account for these developments. If there were, we should behold the ill paid and overworked cotton workers of the Southern States, many of whom are of the same race as ourselves, producing fabrics as good as ours, at the same speed, and equal profit. Indeed, we need not go so far as America for our object lesson. The South West of our own country may provide it. Bristol, no less than the more northerly parts of the island, had its cotton mills. The same advantages were presented: the port open to the Atlantic, the moist westerly climate, the plentiful supply of labour. The same factory law applies, the same hours and conditions are enforced; the employers, of late years at any rate, have been men of capital and of intelligence. One factor only has been absent: the powerful organisation of workers. Because of its absence, wages have fallen to the level of unskilled trades in the district. Men do not work in the cotton trade in Bristol, nor adult women. The employees are girls, earning the low wage of a Bristol factory girl. Of profits there have, for years, been practically none. No employer can afford to make improvements in methods of production; and at the present moment it is, I believe, an open secret that the one remaining mill is only kept open because its owner is unwilling to turn away the hands.^[79] But for the strong trade unions of the northern operatives, the whole of England’s cotton trade at the present day might be in the position of Bristol’s cotton trade, and the Lancashire worker might be toiling for as many hours and as small a wage as his German competitor. To the organisation of the workers, English labour owes that comparatively fortunate position which is, as Mr Schoenhof, years ago, perceived, “the only vantage ground which England possesses and which secures to her the safe and indisputable rulership of the commerce of the world.”^[80]

In this particular industry of cotton, other nations, as he points out, whose labour is ill paid and whose hours of work are long, are trying to defend themselves by a high protective tariff “against the results of England’s high pay and short hours.”... “Yet it is all machine work driven by steam power and conducted in factories under the best intellectual management which the countries afford. But how world wide the difference in the results!”^[81]

World wide indeed—not as to national trade only, but as to national happiness.