sweating-dens

Updated: August 24, 2026

Here were huge steel vaults, in which lay many billions of dollars' worth of securities, the control of the finances of the country; and a block or two in one direction were warehouses and gin-mills, and in another direction cheap lodging-houses and sweating-dens.

Upton Sinclair - The Metropolis

When the worst features of sweating are present, the master sweater is nearly always poor, his profits driven down by competition, so that he barely makes a living. It is, indeed, evident that in many of the worst Whitechapel sweating-dens the master does not on the average make a larger income than the more highly paid of his machinists.

J. A. (John Atkinson) Hobson - Problems of Poverty