White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy PoorBanks, Louis Albert
History
White Slaves; or, the Oppression of the Worthy Poor
Banks, Louis Albert
Poor -- Massachusetts -- Boston; Sweatshops; Working class -- Massachusetts -- Boston
Another gentleman, testifying about his investigations in Glasgow,
tells of a place he visited, where a sweater had between forty and
fifty women employed in an old boiler shed, a disused part of an
engineer's shop; the women had to get to it by three wooden ladders,
and had to go through a joiner's shop in order to enter the workroom.
There was no sanitary accommodation for these women anywhere. It is a
common practice for sweaters to take on learners, that is to say, to
employ young girls for a certain time to learn the machine part of the
work; but they get no wages for say five or six weeks or so, or two
months, and after that time, if competent, they receive two or three
shillings per week. But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season
is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch.
The practical slavery to which the laboring-people, by the sweating
system, have been degraded, is illustrated on almost every page of the
evidence. One witness testifies: "They do almost as they like with
their victims. The people are afraid to give evidence against them. The
sweater is a law unto himself. One woman I came across says she has not
been paid for her work done some three years ago, on some trivial
pretext which the sweater made. Another deducted a whole week's work
from a woman's wages because she was ten minutes late, and so
aggravated the people in the neighborhood that they smashed his
windows, showing the state of things between the sweater and his
people."
As one would naturally expect, moral degradation keeps pace with the
outrage upon the rights of the laborer. It is claimed that the
Jewesses, who have always had the most unblemished character of any
women in the world, are being ruined in the sweat-shops of London,
where they are herded together with all classes of men in a way which
renders morality and decency next to impossible. One witness bears this
terrible testimony: "The sweating system, in which you have young girls
working with men of all nationalities, and of all degrees of
intelligence, conduces to their being later on, and they are mostly, to
my certain knowledge, prostitutes. Most of the young English girls whom
we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been,
tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect."
So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality
in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law,
Mr. Wm. Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim,"
which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the
sweat-shop."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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