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That the sweating system in New York degrades the men and women employed in the sweatshops, may be inferred from the fact that men and women to the number of twelve have been found sleeping together in one of these workrooms.
In a year and a half a good assistant should be earning from ten to twelve dollars a week, and in two or three years her weekly wages are likely to be fourteen or sixteen dollars. If she takes some responsibility in managing the work and workrooms, she may earn as much as seventeen or eighteen dollars a week. In some establishments tips are allowed.
The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. These centres sprang up where the tools were most easily and cheaply obtained, and where lay the coal-beds and the iron ore to be worked over into machinery.
After tea, when all the gases were lighted, WORK went more briskly. There was the big evening post to get off. The hose came up warm and newly pressed from the workrooms. Paul had made out the invoices. Now he had the packing up and addressing to do, then he had to weigh his stock of parcels on the scales.
In the evening we went again to Saifula Baba's and visited the workrooms, where we were much astonished by the quickness with which the people worked the intricate shawl patterns with a simple needle, and no copy to guide them.
Almost immediately a svelte, black-gowned figure appeared in the doorway; she wore her hair oval about her face, like a Mona Lisa, and her hands were long and the dusky white of ivory. "Mr. Arnheim, I want to introduce you to a designer we've got since you went away. Mr. Arnheim Miss Sternberger." The whir of sewing-machines from the workrooms cut the silence.
Cellar dwellings are unknown, too, in Birmingham, though a few cellars are misused as workrooms. They are nearly all disgustingly filthy and ill-smelling, the refuge of beggars, thieves, tramps, and prostitutes, who eat, drink, smoke, and sleep here without the slightest regard to comfort or decency in an atmosphere endurable to these degraded beings only."
In the model city we have in our mind's eye, these dangers are met by the simple provision of workmen's offices or workrooms. In convenient parts of the town there are blocks of buildings, designed mainly after the manner of the houses, in which each workman can have a work-room on payment of a moderate sum per week.
For, though the rising manufacture first attained importance by transforming tools into machines, workrooms into factories, and consequently, the toiling lower middle-class into the toiling proletariat, and the former large merchants into manufacturers, though the lower middle-class was thus early crushed out, and the population reduced to the two opposing elements, workers and capitalists, this happened outside of the domain of manufacture proper, in the province of handicraft and retail trade as well.
That the anxious care for his papers and workrooms never ended but with his life, was proved by his frequent whispered inquiries if they were locked and the key safe; of which I took care to assure him that they were, and the key in Lady Herschel's hands.
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