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Updated: May 10, 2025
A large number of the trades, especially where women are employed, are trades where the elements of "season" and fashion enter in. But even those which, like tailoring, shirtmaking, shoemaking, furniture and upholstery, would seem less subject to periodic or purely capricious changes, are liable in fact to grave and frequent fluctuations of the market.
Whether the measure reached its second reading or not I do not know. It was a Bill for the establishment of Wages Boards in certain industries employing great numbers of workpeople, such as tailoring, shirtmaking, and so on. The industries selected were those in which the employés, though numerous, are hopelessly disorganised and unable to make a bargain for themselves.
Good sempstresses are to be hired in every village; and in London, with its famishing thirty thousand, not at all, or hardly, Is not No-government beautiful in human business? To such length has the Leave-alone principle carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of shirtmaking.
Every man who let out a tenement-house in workmen's dwellings was to be haled before the law and punished if a tailor on his premises did his work at home, if a widow took in shirtmaking to keep her children. Pass, for the justice or the expediency of such a law in itself. But who but a madman ever supposed you could get it carried out! What if the landlords refused or neglected their part?
A band of women workers were prepared to associate for the mutual benefit of the operatives in the shirtmaking and clothing trades. Under the title of the South Australian Co-operative Clothing Company, Limited, they proposed to take over and carry on a small private factory, owned by one of themselves, which had found it difficult to compete against large firms working with the latest machinery.
To whom, for the present, I answer only, "Not 'emancipation, it would seem, my friends; not the cutting loose of human ties, something far the reverse of that!" Many things have been written about shirtmaking; but here perhaps is the saddest thing of all, not written anywhere till now, that I know of.
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