Burleigh testified, "are employed in some
of the wealthiest houses of business, and received for an average
working week of ninety-five hours, board, lodging, and L15 a year," as
it is to the tailoress who works fourteen hours a day for Whitechapel
sub-contractors.
The terms "sweating" and "sweating System," then, after originating in a
narrow application to the practice of over-work under sub-contractors in
the lower branches of the tailoring trade, has expanded into a large
generic term, to express the condition of all overworked, ill-paid,
badly-housed workers in our cities. It sums up the industrial or
economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in
its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched
"fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not
only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his
wage of 1s. 2d. per diem, and of the lowest class of each manufacturing
trade in East and Central London. It is true of the relatively unskilled
labour in every form of employment; the miserable writing-clerk, who on
25s. a week or less has to support a wife and children and an appearance
of respectability; the usher, who grinds out low-class instruction
through the whole tedious day for less than the wage of a plain cook;
the condition of these and many other kinds of low-class brain-workers
is only a shade less pitiable than the "sweating" of manual labourers,
and the causes, as we shall see, are much the same.
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