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Updated: May 10, 2025
Whether it would be possible to successfully crush the whole system of industrial "out-work" may be open to question; but it is certain that so long as, and in proportion as "out-work" is permitted, attempts on the part of women to raise their industrial condition by combination will be weak and unsuccessful.
A large proportion of the work throughout the trade is out-work, and therefore escapes the operation of the Factory Act. The competition among small employers is greatly accentuated by the existence of a form of middleman known as the "factor," who is an agent who gets his profit by playing off one small manufacturer against another, keeping down prices, and consequently wages, to a minimum.
Not only is this irregular work worse paid than regular factory work, but its existence helps to keep up the pernicious system of "out-work" under which "sweating" thrives. The commercial competition of to-day positively trades upon the maternity of women-workers.
Good-breeding is the middle point between those two odious extremes. Ceremony is the superstition of good-breeding, as well as of religion: but yet, being an out-work to both, should not be absolutely demolished. It is always, to a certain degree, to be complied with, though despised by those who think, because admired and respected by those who do not.
Four dogs a brace of setters of the light active breed, one of which will out-work a brace of the large, lumpy, heavy-headed dogs, one red, the other white and liver, both with black noses, their legs and sterns beautifully feathered, and their hair, glossy and smooth as silk, showing their excellent condition and a brace of short-legged, bony, liver-colored spaniels with their heads thrust one above the other, over or through the railings, and their tails waving with impatient joy occupied the after portion of the wagon.
"His axe would flash and bite into a sugar-tree or sycamore, and down it would come. If you heard him fellin' trees in a clearin', you would say there was three men at work by the way the trees fell." Standing six feet four, he could out-lift, out-work, and out-wrestle any man he came in contact with.
But there is another force required to give any full effect to such extensions of the Factory Act as will crush private workshops, and either directly or indirectly prohibit out-work.
As we have seen that the worst evils of "sweating" are associated with a lower order of industrial organization, any cause which assisted to destroy the small workshop and the out-work system, would be a benefit.
Nor is it possible to see how the system of "out-work" can be repressed or even restricted by any other force than legislation.
When the dwelling-room is also the work-room, it is impossible to enforce by any machinery of law, close limitation of hours of labour. Something may be done to extend the arm of the law over small workshops; but the worst form of out-work, that voluntarily undertaken by women in their own homes, cannot be thus put down.
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