HOUSE INDUSTRY. A form of industrial organization in which the workman labors at home for a manufacturer or contractor. It is to he eontrasted, on the one hand, with the artisan organization of industry in which the master craftsman was his business manager and produced for the needs of a local market, and. on the other, with the factory organization with it groups of workmen cooperating under a common direetion and division of labor. Ilk torieally it forms a transition from the former to the latter. It was the outgrowth of a widen ing market fur goods. and marked a change in the mercantile organization of industry which kept pave with and in many cases outstripped its technical progress. As a dominant form of organization it marked especially the closing years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries, and while it still lingers in backward regions. and even grows up anew under peculiarly favorable circumstances, it is in the main a thing of the past.
The characteristics 14 the system are the isola tion of the worker's production by the erode proeesses of hand labor, and the marketing of the product by third persons. The workman may in the first instance supply his materials, but the need of uniformity in the product soon brings it about that the hitter are supplied to him and lie is paid at piece rates for the work he does upon them.
Such an organization can compete with fac tories only when the technical processes of pro duction remain comparatively primitive. hen complicated machinery and minute subdivision of labor is introduced into factory work, house industry is doomed. It has under such circum stances kept up for a time an unequal struggle in which long hours of labor and the assistance of the. entire family marked the labor in the
homes. Bad as were the conditions in the fac tories of England in the early part of the last. eentury, their misery was exceeded by that of the poor hand workers with whom the factories competed.
The counterpart. of house industry in Great. Britain and America is found in sweating system. This is confined to the garment trade, in which the mercantile transformation was later 11 in other lines of industry, and in which the relative some of hand labor as com pared with use of machines is very large. The textile industries and the manufacture of hoots and ,d1OeS both passe) through this stage. While spinning-machines and po•er-looms were yet primitive, the hand workers were able to main tain themselves for a while by working for others. In New England the factory system had its beginnings in the domestic occupations of the people. Throughout northeastern Massachusetts may still be sera about the farms ruins of small workshops where during the winter the farmers made shoes for the merchants of Lynn and Bos ton. Elsewhere in the State, straw for the manu facture of hats was plaited by the women on thin farms, and by men, in the winter-time. In Sweden and thissia Snell occupation among the rural population is quite frequent. In Central Europe house industry is far more extensive. The hilly region of Central Germany, from the Thuringian to the Silesian mountains, is it S peculiar home. See SWEATING SYSTEM.