It is true that the Factory Inspectors represent each separate branch
of a given industry as a special establishment. Thus, if an employer
or a society owns a spinning mill, a weaving factory, and a special
building for dressing and finishing, the three are represented as
separate factories. But this is precisely what is wanted for giving
us an exact idea about the degree of concentration of a given
industry. Besides, it is also known that, for instance, in the
cotton industry, in the neighbourhood of Manchester, the spinning,
the weaving, the dressing and so on belong very often to different
employers, who send to each other the stuffs at different degrees of
fabrication; those factories which combine under the same management
all the three or four consecutive phases of the manufacture are an
exception.
But it is especially in the division of the non-textile industries
that we find an enormous development of small factories. The
2,755,460 workpeople who are employed in all the non-textile
branches, with the exception of mining, are scattered in 79,059
factories, each of which has only an average of thirty-five workers.
Moreover, the Factory Inspectors had on their lists 676,776
workpeople employed in 88,814 workshops (without mechanical power),
which makes an average of eight persons only per workshop. These last
figures are, however, as we saw, below the real ones, as another
sixty thousand workshops occupying half a million more workpeople
were not yet tabulated.
Such averages as _ninety-three and thirty-five workpeople per
factory, and eight per workshop_, distributed over 178,756 industrial
establishments, destroy already the legend according to which the big
factories have already absorbed most of the small ones. The figures
show, on the contrary, what an immense number of small factories
and workshops resist the absorption by the big factories, and how
they multiply by the side of the great industry in various branches,
especially those of recent origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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