Machinery and Women’s Labour.—We have seen that in the textile trades men and women do the same kind of work, and are almost equally skilled. Where their labour is organised they can also in some districts command the same rate of payment; but it is certainly true that in most trades which have opened their doors to women, the idea on the employer’s part has been to secure a supply of cheaper labour than could be obtained if men alone were to be relied upon, and to break down the male monopoly. While this may not form a conscious and distinct motive on the part of employers, it is obvious that the intense sub-division and specialisation of manufacturing processes has made it possible as time has gone on to dispense more and more with trained and skilled labour, and to call in women and children who, with a little practice, could soon adapt themselves to the work. The more labour has become impersonal, the more the machine has produced both the muscular energy and the manual skill which were once purely human in their origin, the simpler has the labour question become from the manufacturer’s point of view. “If,” he says to himself, “my machine, on which I have laid out so much capital, and which represents the ingenuity and the experiments of long years of labour, can perform all the movements of the human body a thousand times more swiftly and surely; if my machine does the working and the thinking, it is not likely that I am going to pay the people who watch and tend it as though they did all the work.” It is in those industrial departments where the human processes are most mechanical and lend themselves after a short training to almost automatic performance, that the field of women’s labour under the factory system for the most part lies. All those who are at all conversant with the movements of industry and mechanical invention will be able to call to mind examples in point. Of course the same process is taking place where men only are employed. The skilled artizan has become less of a necessity as the skilled machine becomes more common; and, on the other hand, the unskilled labourer, the man who does the rough lifting, hewing, and carrying work is becoming more of a mechanic, as the mechanical stone-breaker, the steam navvy, the grain elevator, and other contrivances of the kind, come into use. Now, while we have these two sets of forces at work, one superseding the muscular energy, and the other the manual skill and the mental training, the bearing of these tendencies upon women’s employment cannot be overlooked. It seems only reasonable to suppose that the demand for women’s labour in connection with mechanical industry will become greater and greater as the work becomes simpler and lighter; whilst masculine labour, in so far as it stands for special aptitude and skill, is likely to find itself in less request, and may have to submit to accepting a lower standard of remuneration fixed by women. The movement of labour in the United States, as well as in this country, tends to confirm this view.

The Sweating System.—Attention, perhaps, has been too much fixed upon certain incidents of the evolution of industry which, though important, are, as it were, branch lines, to have fully grasped the real economical trend of events. Amongst these is what is known as the sweating system. But the sweating system is, after all, but a kind of guerilla warfare carried on upon the flanks of the main engagement. You find it at its height in certain exceptional communities like London, where the cost of rent is so heavy as to make it more economical for the employer to let the worker pay the rent instead of himself. Again, the accumulation of human beings in a great centre like London is so vast that the purchaser of labour is in a position to compete with machinery without standing to lose. This is why the human pressure becomes so intolerable. It is a race in which the individual has to compete against organisation and machinery—usually under the most depressing conditions—in which the worker, without receiving any equivalent, carries a large responsibility, which, under organised industry, is discharged by the employer. It is only necessary to compare some great clothing factory where the sewing machines are driven by machinery, and work goes on in a well-lighted and airy building for a fixed number of hours daily at a fixed scale of payment, with the dirty and cramped rooms in Whitechapel or Stepney, which are rendered comfortless as a home by being turned into a workshop, in which a ruinous price is paid for the sewing machine bought on the hire system, and where there are no regular hours of work, but alternations of high pressure and protracted idleness, and finally where the rate of payment is a matter for constant haggling between the unfortunate worker and the middleman who gives out the clothes from the City warehouse to be made up—you have only to compare these two methods of industry to realise the real nature of the struggle, and the intolerable pressure to which the victim of high rents, abnormal density of population, and correspondingly low standard of equipment is subjected.

The conclusions to be drawn from this brief survey seem to me to be not unimportant. In the first place, it is because labour has become so much lighter, and trades so much more easily learned, that the demand for women’s labour has grown so immensely of late years; in the second place, machinery, the great leveller, is tending to abolish rapidly such differences as have existed between men’s and women’s labour; and, in the third place, that whether legislation or organisation be attempted in the interests of the workers, it must embrace men and women alike.

Basis of Men’s and Women’s Wages.—But another condition which faces one at every turn of the labour market, goes so far to differentiate the work of men and women, that it may seem to make all the levelling influences which we have just considered of no account. In the case of men wages are based upon the cost of living. They approximate to a man’s standard of existence and that of his family for the time being. With the woman worker, on the other hand, though there are exceptions, the rule is that her wages are of a supplementary character. If she can add something to the nett weekly takings of the family, that is the chief point. The daughter, who is apprenticed to the dressmaker or milliner, or who begins life as a half-timer in the mills, is not working for her living in the same way as the man who has to provide himself with an independence; and it is obvious that this factor, modified as it is by all the variations of the standard of family living in different parts of the country, must be at the bottom of much that is confusing, arbitrary, and inexplicable in the women’s labour movement. For instance, cases are constantly to be found of a different scale of payment for men and women for the same work. Thus, in the French-polishing, printing, and many other trades, women are paid on a lower scale at piece-work than men. We find that the average value of a woman’s work is 9s. or 10s. a week, while that of a man is two or three times as high. It is not that she does half or one-third as much work, or that it is to that extent inferior in quality to men’s work: the reason, I think, must in very many cases be looked for from the domestic side. A woman considers what it will be worth while to add to the family revenue, rather than what her work is really worth. This fact more than anything else accounts for the immense difficulties of introducing order and humanity into the field of woman’s labour; for, obviously, if the woman worker is to acquire any form of economic independence she must be able to earn such a rate of wages as will enable her to maintain a decent standard of subsistence. But this is rendered impossible so long as the effective remuneration of women’s work is decided by conditions other than those which properly attach to the work. With some girls working for pocket-money, others literally exploited by their parents, and regarded as a mere means of bringing grist to the mill; others again working to lay by something to get married on, and a further great section of wives toiling to add something to their husbands’ wages; it is only too clear that the economic independence of women, which the advocates of laisser faire in women’s labour hope to bring about, is very, very far from being accomplished.

These conditions make it extremely unsafe to attempt generalizations as to the wages earned by women in the various industries. There are, however, certain fairly well-defined groups of trades, having wage features in common, at which it will be interesting to glance. I will take first the trades—very few in number—where women are organized. Chief of these is the cotton industry; and here we find that where men and women do the same work they receive, with a few unimportant exceptions, the same wages. The payment for weavers, men or women, is fixed according to the length and character of the piece of material, and the looms are calculated to earn a certain sum for a full day’s work according to their size and speed. The earnings, therefore, vary with the time worked; but it is quite a common thing for a woman weaver to earn 24s. a week all the year round. With spinners the case is different. The mule spinners are men, and earn about 35s. a week. The wages of ring and throstle spinners—women—rarely come to more than 14s. or 15s. This kind of spinning has, in some cases, displaced mule spinning, but only to a slight extent, as it is not available for all varieties of material. The women and girls in the cardroom departments earn about 18s. and 20s., warpers about the same, and winders rather less. These rates may be compared with those in the Yorkshire textile trade, where the workers’ organization is less powerful, and consequently, in many cases, women are paid at a considerably lower rate than men for similar work. This is markedly the case with the Huddersfield weavers; also with the wool-combers at Bradford, where women earn 12s. for work at which men make 18s. The Yorkshire weavers’ wages are in some cases as low as 8s. or 9s. a week, and seldom average more than 18s. A common plan is to calculate all wages on a “women’s scale,” and pay the men so much extra for the piece. The women in the Yorkshire textile trade, on the whole, do not appear to be in any better position than the ordinary class of unorganized female factory workers. In the West of England cloth districts wages are even lower than in Yorkshire; for a weaver earns only from 7s. to 14s. a week, taking the wages all the year round. For a great mass of other factory workers these figures would represent the usual earnings. Among this class are jam makers, bookbinders, mineral-water operatives, bottle-washers, and confectioners. Confectioners generally begin at 3s. 6d. a week, and the average is about 8s. But in some trades, or branches of trades, the earnings are still lower. The silk throwsters of Macclesfield, for instance, and the Essex crape weavers, make about 6s. a week, and the tobacco operatives 6s. or 7s. On the other hand, skilled cigar makers can earn from 18s. to 30s. a week. And again, some of the Birmingham trades are less badly paid. The button makers, for example, earn 10s. to 15s. a week, and in the hosiery, boot and shoe, and lace trades, the wages for the more skilled parts of the work are fairly good, as women’s wages go, in times of full work; though when the factories are working short time only 3s. or 4s. a week may be the average. These last trades, which have their chief seats in Leicester and Nottingham, all suffer from the competition of underpaid labour in the neighbouring districts. The hosiery seamer in the factory earns from 11s. to 16s. a week full time; but a home-worker at the same business may work hard all the week and only make 2s. 6d. or 3s. Perhaps the worst paid group of trades is that in which home-work is the leading feature, such as shirtmaking, mantle-making, tailoring, matchbox-making. The earnings are not only low but uncertain, and it is impossible to make any generalization as to their amount. There are certain skilled occupations, such as dressmaking and millinery, in which a superior worker can earn what are, for women, good wages. A dressmaker will commonly make from 10s. to £1, and a milliner about the same; but it must be remembered that there are women and girls employed in the minor branches of such trades whose wages are much less, and in provincial towns the superior workers too are paid on a lower scale. Finally, there are the women employed in very toilsome, disagreeable, or dangerous trades, and these are by no means highly paid when the nature of their work is considered. Laundresses, in the washing branch of the trade, get 2s. 6d. or 2s. 9d. a day, and ironers 3s. to 3s. 6d., and in all branches of the laundry trade employment is intermittent. Women are employed in tinplate works, ironworks, and brickworks, for 7s. 6d. a week, or little more, and white-lead workers’ wages are often only 2s. a day.

§ Difference between Men’s and Women’s wages artificially kept up.—To sum up, then, the points we have been considering;—whilst there are strong forces at work tending to abolish the distinctions between men’s and women’s work and the industrial disabilities to which women have been subject, such as lack of training and muscular strength, these very distinctions are still kept up by the different method of appraising the work performed. Even though a woman’s work may be as good and as rapid as a man’s, we have seen that her scale of payment is frequently far inferior to his. She may be working on the same kind of machine, speeded at the same pace, turning out the same commodity, and yet a heavy penalty is laid on her simply because she is a woman. The experience gained in the cotton trade, however, seems to shew that in an industry where machinery is largely employed, and where the trade organization includes both men and women, the economic disadvantages under which women labour tend to disappear.

It would seem, therefore, clearly to be in the true interest of workmen to promote such legislation and such methods of organization as will afford to women the same vantage-ground as men. A good deal of nonsense is talked and written about men’s unions trampling on women’s labour. It is not to women’s labour as such that the unions are opposed; but they know from long experience that labour, whether it be men’s or women’s, that yields to the slightest pressure, and whose remuneration is subject to no given standard of living or efficiency, is the greatest danger that they could have to meet. To blame men for their action in trying to apply to women’s labour the conditions which they have found absolutely essential to their own well-being, is really to deny their own organizations any validity. It seems to me very certain that by resisting the levelling down which would follow any surrender of the standard of living as the minimum gauge of wages the men’s unions have been fighting not only against the degradation of labour generally, but for a better status for women’s labour.