Such were the conditions at the beginning of the present century in a number of trades. In the year 1939 while many work ers still received low wages there were no longer "sweated" trades. To this result two main factors have contributed: first the fixing of statutory minimum rates of wages in the "sweated" trades and in those trades in which organisation of employers and workers was insufficient for wages and conditions to be negotiated in the ordinary way; and secondly the constantly increasing economies of factory production. (See TRADE BOARD.) The rapid development of factory organisation and the em ployment of expensive, high-speed machinery on sub-divisional methods of production militated against the giving out of work either to homeworkers or to small sub-contractors. Despite the fact that "outwork" saves the employer considerable overhead charges such as rent, rates, heating and interest on capital sunk in buildings and machinery, it becomes less and less able to compete with the well-equipped and efficiently organised factory. And where there is a trade board it cannot any longer flourish on low wages. It may be that the widespread use of electric power may bring about a revival of the small workshop in those trades which can be carried on with comparatively small and inexpensive machinery. (J. J. M.) The sweating system arose in the United States during the Civil War, when soldiers' wives were given uniforms to make with the then newly invented sewing machines. Its growth was slow until, in the '8os, the vast Russian emigration followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Steam-power had already been applied to sewing machines, and the influx of cheap labour created the American ready-to-wear garment trade and its early con comitant, the sweating system.
Three elements compose the sweating system : (I) A mass of unskilled, unorganized poverty-stricken men, women and children incapable of resisting the economic pressure to compete, women against their husbands and children against their parents. (2) Power-using factories or shops, where materials are prepared for simple processes, which are done in smaller shops or in the homes of the workers, or in both. (3) Transportation to and from the
sweatshops and tenement dwellings, formerly done on foot by heavily laden men, women and children. During the present cen tury automobile trucks and the parcel post have contributed to widen enormously the area within which the sweating system is carried on, and to reduce the crowding of slums adjacent to fac tories engaged in the sweated trades.
As the first simple f oot-power sewing machine brought the sweating system to the soldiers' families, so the ceaseless evolu tion of the power-driven machine, first steam, now electric, has served to concentrate the production of garments in vast sky scrapers near railway stations through which the employees go to their widely dispersed homes. This concentration has, in recent decades, so facilitated labour organization within the garment industry, that the Amalgamated Garment Workers now owns its building, its bank, journal, blocks of modern apartments, and voluntary unemployment insurance fund, the last being carried on co-operatively by employers and employees. They successfully combat both sweating and strikes.
Outside the garment trades, also, the unions have striven cease lessly against sweating. In 1889 the tobacco workers obtained the passage of the New York statute forbidding all manufacture of tobacco in any tenement house. This the Court of Appeals of New York held unconstitutional, so prolonging for two generations homework in tenements.
Beginning in 1912, in Massachusetts, 13 States passed laws creating minimum wage boards or commissions. These the Su preme Court of the United States, in the Sutherland decision, held unconstitutional by a decision of five justices to four, ren dered in April 1923.
There remain now two means of control. Legislation in the name of the public safety may be resorted to, as when a man killed himself and his little son in making fire crackers in his home, for a Fourth of July celebration. So, too, the local health authority could summarily stop a young girl found suffering from an open syphilitic infection of the hands from making, in her home, powder puffs for babies. (F. KE.)