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Even in trades where part of the work is done in factories, the existence of reckless competition among unorganized out-workers can be utilized by unprincipled employers to destroy attempts at effective combination among their factory hands.
It was a sort of Court of the Young Lions, where herd-boys, out-workers of the daily-wage sort, turnip-singlers, Irish harvesters, Stranryan "strappers" and "lifters," crow-boys, and all the miscellany of a Galloway farm about the end of the Napoleonic wars ate from wooden platters, with only their own horn spoon and pocket-knife to aid their nimble fingers.
It will be obvious that the class of fur-sewers who, as we saw, earned while in full work from 4s. to 7s. in the winter months, and the lower grades of brush-makers and match-makers, to say nothing of the casual "out-workers," who often take for a whole week's work 3s. or 2s. 6d., cannot, and do not, live upon these earnings.
So long as "out-work" continues to be largely practised and unrestrained, competition sharpened by the action of married women and other irregular and "bounty-fed" labour, must keep down the price of women's work, not only for the out-workers themselves, but also for the factory workers.
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