1. A. Aftalion, “Le developpement de la fabrique et le travail à domicile dans les industries de l’habillement.” Paris. Librairie du recueil J. B. Sirey et du Journal du Palais.

2. “Home Industries of Women in London.” Report of an Inquiry in thirty-five trades.

3. “Women’s Work and Wages.” A phase of life in an industrial city. By Edward Cadbury, M. Cécile Matheson and George Shann, M.A.

4. Handbook to the Exhibition, p. 139.

5. Mrs F. G. Hogg was one of the most valued members of the Women’s Industrial Council. Her ability, judgment, perseverance, and devotion were all admirable, and her early death has left in the memories of those who worked with her a blank that can never be filled up.

6. Report of the Chief Inspector, 1905, pp. 297–98.

7. A friend has just sent me a note of a similar case, that of a cartridge filler, who received 1d. for filling 1000 cartridges. She said that she could fill 25,000 a day, when busy. “But,” adds my friend, “she is a physical wreck, having worked at this for ten years.”

8. Report of the Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 50.

9. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 99.

10. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 300.

11. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 302.

12. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 290.

13. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 34.

14. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 292.

15. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 293.

16. Report of Chief Inspector, 1905, p. 280.

17. The article from which this is an extract was published (in the New Review) in September 1891; but the practices described, are, I fear, not yet extinct, though the law is succeeding by degrees in making them risky.

18. “Life in the Shop.” A series of articles reprinted from the Daily Chronicle, pp. 5 and 6.

19. The National Union of Shop Assistants, Clerks, and Warehousemen, now growing very powerful, and guided by able, experienced and energetic officials, has of late done much towards inducing employers to abolish or diminish some of their fines.

20. A peculiarly shocking example of the abuses that may arise from a system of fining was lately brought to my knowledge. It is not recent, and must, I think and hope, be unique. I have found no witness who has ever heard of a similar instance. Of its truth, however, the source from which it comes forbids doubt. These are the facts. In a certain retail shop selling drapery and fancy goods the foreman, whose business it apparently was to collect fines, was required to make up a fixed sum of money from this source every week; and being a man with wife and children, afraid above all things of being left without employment, was accustomed to inflict sufficient fines to make up this total. Two girls, whose weekly wage of 11s. he had thus reduced, on one occasion, to 4s., took to evil courses; and the foreman when dying (in a hospital) told a lady visitor the circumstances, and said that he felt himself responsible for the downfall of the girls. The lady (an experienced worker in a girls’ club) made enquiries, which confirmed the startling tale. She followed up the girls, reclaimed one and put her into respectable employment, but failed with the other and was unable to keep sight of her.

21. These cases are taken from the reports of an investigator employed some years ago by the Women’s Industrial Council. This lady, who was an experienced assistant, spent over two years in passing from shop to shop, remaining long enough in each to obtain complete information as to wages, conditions, food, rules, etc.

22. Daily News, 25th August, 1906. Letter signed “Onesimus.”

23. Women’s Work and Wages, p. 47, note.

24. Edited by J. Ramsay MacDonald. P. S. King & Son.

25. Women’s Employment in Shops. Report of an enquiry conducted for the National Federal Council of Scotland for Women’s Trades; by Margaret Irwin, p. 7.

26. Women Shop Assistants. The evidence given by Miss Irwin before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Early Closing of Shops, p. 5.

27. Women’s Employment in Shops, p. 6.

28. Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis) Bill, 1906, p. 5, par. 31.

29. As these terms may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers, it may be as well to explain that, on a time and a half rate, every penny of the ordinary wage becomes a penny-halfpenny; and that, on a time and a quarter rate, every such penny becomes a penny-farthing.

30. Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis) Bill, 1906, p. 4, par. 19.

31. Report of Select Committee on the Cabs and Omnibuses (Metropolis) Bill, 1906, p. 4, par. 19.

32. Juvenile wage earners and their work. By Nettie Adler, hon. Sec. Committee on Wage-Earning children. Progress, July 1906.

33. Report for 1905, p. 52.

34. Report for 1905, p. 52.

35. A “young person” means, according to the Factory Acts, one under 18.

36. Report for 1905, p. 296.

37. The Case for the Factory Acts. Edited by Mrs Sidney Webb. Chapter II. The Historical Development of the Factory Acts. By Miss B. L. Hutchins, pp. 80–81.

38. Case for the Factory Acts, pp. 82–3.

39. Bye-laws under the Employment of Children Act have now been passed in many towns, and the London County Council has at last been permitted by the Home Office to establish a fairly satisfactory code. Really satisfactory no code can be which sanctions any employment of children during school years, but in this department, as in others, the interposition of the law has done something to check glaring industrial evils.

40. Child Labor. A menace to industry, education and good citizenship (No. 93 of the Annals of the American Academy of political and social science. March 1906.) p. 318.

41. Child Labor, p. 293.

42. Some ethical gains through legislation. By Florence Kelley, p. 44.

43. Ibid., p. 45.

44. Ibid., p. 49.

45. Juvenile wage earners. By Nettie Adler, Hon. Sec. Committee on Wage earning children. Progress. July 1906.

46. Minutes of Evidence. Questions 12644, 12758.

47. These facts and more to the same purpose may be found in an article by Miss Adler in the Guardian of May 9, 1906.

48. Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 86.

49. Pp. 12, 13, 14.

50. Inter-Departmental Committee on the employment of school children. Minutes of Evidence, pp. 275, 455, 471.

51. Child Labor, p. 302.

52. Child Labor, p. 275.

53. Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 17.

54. Some ethical gains through legislation, p. 42.

55. Mr S. W. Woodward, of the firm of Woodward and Lathrop, Washington, in a short paper called: “A Business Man’s View of Child Labour,” writes: “It may be stated as a safe proposition that for every dollar earned by a child under 14 years of age tenfold will be taken from their earning capacity in later life.” Child Labor, p. 362.

56. J. Schoenhof. Economy of High Wages, p. 38.

57. It must not be assumed from the above anecdote that all factory girls are foul-mouthed. This was by no means true even in the year after the Dock strike, and is much less true now. But I have no doubt there are still factories in which the habit of foul speech is a sort of fashion.

58. Handbook to Sweated Industries Exhibition, p. 23.

59. Poverty. By J. Seebohm Rowntree, p. 229.

60. A Living Wage: Its ethical and economic aspect. Macmillans. New York, April 1906.

61. Ibid., p. 136. I must not be understood as committing myself to these figures, which apply to America. They are employed here to show that a large proportion of American wage earners do not receive the sum considered by experts as affording a “Living Wage.”

62. I have not personally referred to Mr Mitchell’s book, the title of which is “Organised Labour.” Professor Ryan gives the pages from which this extract comes: pp. 116, 117.

63. A Living Wage, p. 150.

64. Ibid., p. 164.

65. The Strength of the People. By Helen Bosanquet, p. 114.

66. Of course efficiency is valuable for other than financial reasons; but we are dealing now only with the question of payment.

67. Economy of high wages, p. 392.

68. If, at this point, any reader should pause to ask: “What, then, ought the Brothers Cheeryble to do? Ought they to leave the selling of safety pins to some less scrupulous persons? Or ought they to go on underpaying the cappers?” I reply that the worthy twins should follow neither of these courses, but should bend their minds to inventing or getting invented a machine that would cap the pins even more cheaply, because much more expeditiously, than the hand workers. The reduction in the cost of production would then allow the payment of decent wages to the operators. Mechanical operations should be done by machines, and hand work should be reserved for those which demand individual variation or peculiar and special perfection. The capping of safety pins, which falls under neither of these heads, is emphatically an operation to which the human brain and hand should not be put.

69. Industrial Co-operation. Edited by Catherine Webb, p. 242.

These figures do not include middle class joint stock associations, such as the Army and Navy Stores.

70. Industrial Co-operation, p. 80.

71. In order to do so readers must address themselves to the Co-operative Union, 2 Nicholas Croft, High St., Manchester. It is much to be regretted that so valuable and informing a work should be published in a manner that almost restricts its influence to persons who are already convinced co-operators. The outer world of readers who badly need to understand the facts and meanings of the great co-operative movement have no opportunity of meeting with the one volume that compendiously explains the existing conditions.

72. Economy of high wages, p. 63.

73. Of course a minimum rate of wages and sometimes indeed a complete scale of wages has often been fixed by various local bodies or departments; but only when such bodies have been, directly or indirectly, employers of labour. Thus the duty of employers to pay a fair wage has been recognised, but not, as yet, the duty or the right of the State to enforce the payment.

74. It may be worth noting here—though the point lies outside the scope of this chapter—that an expansion of trade when wages do not rise leads to the extraordinary state known as overproduction, in which producers complain that they cannot find a market for their wares, at the same time that hundreds of fellow citizens are seen to be in crying need of these same wares.

75. Mr Charles Booth’s tables show that in 1889, out of a population of 891,539, in East London, there were no less than 47,225 members of various Friendly Societies.

76. This explanation of the impracticability of a Consumers’ League is reprinted, with the alteration of a few words, from the Supplement to the Guardian, the Editor of which has given me leave to reproduce it in this chapter.

77. A prominent employer writes to me in December 1906 that wages have since risen 2½ per cent.

78. A Reply to the Report of the Tariff Commission on the Cotton Trade. Written for the Free Trade League by S. J. Chapman, M.A., Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester.

79. Since writing these lines I have been informed that improved machinery and management have been introduced, and that the outlook has consequently improved also. But it is safe to prophesy that unless her wages should rise very substantially, the Bristol worker will not reach the standard of the Lancashire worker.

80. Economy of High Wages, p. 66.

81. Economy of High Wages, p. 398.

82. W. Pember Reeves. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. Vol. ii. p. 29. To this volume I am indebted for the account of all the facts preceding and accompanying the enactment of the earliest laws under which a minimum wage could be legally fixed in the colonies. Any reader desiring fuller details of these most interesting developments should refer to Mr Reeves’s second volume.

83. It seems from the context that 1s. 6d. was the price paid for making the dozen shirts throughout, and that the finisher’s share was but a part of this, since a night’s work, in which she did a dozen shirts and something more, only brought her one shilling.

84. W. Pember Reeves. State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand. Vol. ii. pp. 111–112.

85. Journal of the Department of Labour. New Zealand. Vol. XI. pp. 267–268.

86. Journal of the Department of Labour. New Zealand. Vol. XIV. pp. 70–76.

87. This account of the establishment of the first Wage Boards is derived from Mr Reeves’s State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, vol. ii. chap. 1.

88. A resolution of both Houses is now required.

89. Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, work-rooms and shops. Victoria, 1905, p. 62.

90. Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, p. 68.

91. Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 43.

92. Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 19.

93. Ibid., p. 63.

94. Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, p. 58.

95. Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 60.

96. Ibid., p. 14.

97. Report of Chief Inspector of Factories. Victoria, 1905, p. 39.

98. See the speech of Mr Maxwell (to whom personally, it may be added, this excellent state of things is due) on p. 38 of the National Anti-Sweating League’s Report of a Conference on the Minimum Wage.

99. A very strange instance of divergence of wages in one factory came under my notice some 15 or 16 years ago. This also was in the shirt trade. A strike arose in a large factory, and when a register came to be taken of the wages received by the various women it was discovered—greatly to the surprise of the workers concerned—that there was a difference of almost 50 per cent. between the rates paid in one workroom and those paid in another, both being under the same roof, and the work being so absolutely identical that the two groups were frequently engaged upon garments cut by the same stroke from the same roll of material. The one room was superintended by a forewoman who resisted any attempt to lower wages, and who, being a valuable official, was able to impose her wishes; in the other the forewoman meekly accepted any reductions proposed by the firm. I need hardly add that the young women who worked in the former room were markedly superior in appearance, in manners and in intelligence to those belonging to the latter. Those who worked under the good forewoman were, indeed, some of the best looking and most agreeable girls with whom I have ever been brought into contact.

100. There are no doubt plenty of industries of which employers engaged in them would declare beforehand that wages could not possibly be raised without the ruining of the trade. But employers in the cotton trade were of the same opinion and experience has shown that they were mistaken.