" As the long hours worked in the tailors' garrets were
attended with other evils--a low rate of wages, unsanitary conditions,
irregularity of employment, and occasional tyranny in all the forms
which attend industrial authority--all these evils became attached to
the notion of sweating. The word has thus grown into a generic term to
express this disease of City poverty from its purely industrial side.
Though "long hours" was the gist of the original complaint, low wages
have come to be recognized as equally belonging to the essence of
"sweating." In some cases, indeed, low wages have become the leading
idea, so that employers are classed as sweaters who pay low wages,
without consideration of hours or other conditions of employment. Trade
Unions, for example, use the term "sweating" specifically to express the
conduct of employers who pay less than the "standard" rate of wages. The
abominable sanitary condition of many of the small workshops, or private
dwellings of workers, is to many reformers the most essential element in
sweating.
Sec. 2. Present Applications of the Name.--When the connotation of the term
"sweating" had become extended so as to include along with excessive
hours of labour, low wages, unsanitary conditions of work, and other
evils, which commonly belong to the method of sub-contract employment,
it was only natural that the same word should come to be applied to the
same evils when they were found outside the sub-contract system.
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