SWEATING SYSTEM, a term used to describe oppressive industrial conditions in certain trades. This "system" originated early in the 19th century, when it was known as "the contract system." Contractors supplying the government with clothing for the army and navy got the work done by sub-contractors. Afterwards this plan was adopted in the manufacture of ready made clothing for civilian use, and of "bespoke" garments (made to the order of the customer). Previously the practice had been for coats, etc., to be made up by workmen directly employed by the master tailor. The new plan brought workpeople possessing little skill and belonging to a very needy class into competition with the regular craftsmen; and a fall in wages affected the whole body of workmen in the trade.
The work was done in overcrowded and insanitary rooms, and the earnings of the workers were extremely low. In 185o a vigorous agitation against "the sweating system" was commenced, based mainly upon a series of articles in the Morning Chronicle (London), which were followed by a pamphlet, Cheap Clothes and Nasty, written by Charles Kingsley under the name of "Parson Lot," and by his novel Alton Locke. Kingsley and his friends, the Christian Socialists, proposed co-operative workshops; but experi ments met with little success. In 1876-1877 the outcry against the sweating system was renewed (principally on the ground of the risk of infection from garments made up in insanitary sur roundings), and in 1887, attention was drawn to the immigration of poor foreigners into East London, who were employed in tailoring, boot-making and cabinet-making. A select committee of the House of Lords heard 291 witnesses in relation to tailoring, boot-making, furriery, shirt-making, mantle-making, cabinet making and upholstery, cutlery and hardware manufacture, chain and nail-making, military accoutrements, saddlery and harness making and dock labour—reporting in 189o. Sweating involved "(I) A rate of wages inadequate to the necessities of the workers or disproportionate to the work done; (2) excessive hours of labour; (3) the insanitary state of the houses in which the work is carried on." They stated that, "as a rule, the observations made with respect to sweating apply, in the main, to unskilled or only partially skilled workers, as the thoroughly skilled workers can almost always obtain adequate wages."
It would be a mistake to suppose that "sweating" never took place where no "middlemen" were employed. "Sweating" was sometimes to be found in large factories where workers were directly employed.
The plight of the homeworkers, most of whom were women, may be easily imagined. Compelled to work, either to eke out an insufficient family income or to support her own isolated exist ence, but normally unable to leave her home, such a woman had no alternative but to accept wages at the wretched level to which they had sunk as the result of unfettered competition and of the inability of the workers to act collectively.
The position of the worker employed by the small sub-con tractor was little better. On the one hand there was keen com petition amongst the "middlemen," which led them to accept sub contracts at prices which often made it impossible for them to pay more than a meagre wage. On the other hand the sub divisional methods of manufacture which were then beginning to be widely adopted drew into various trades which had previously been closed to them, a large number of comparatively unskilled and inexperienced workers, who knew nothing of the tradition which had maintained organisation and standard rates of wages amongst the skilled workers by whom the work of the trade had previously been done. The organisation of the employees of the small sub-contractors presented insurmountable difficulties. They worked in small, scattered groups; their employers were unstable and their employment erratic.
When, moreover, trade was brisk extremely long hours would be worked in seriously overcrowded workrooms. On the other hand, when trade was slack the sub-contractor, whose overhead charges did not, of course, compare with those of the factory employer, found it perfectly practicable to dismiss as many workers as he could do without—a facility which encouraged inefficient organisation of work in the trades which enjoyed it. The workers toiled during night and day. Work-room, living room and bedroom were often all one. The laws concerned with hours of employment and the conditions, from the point of view of health, were very difficult of enforcement.