Chapter XII: Part 12

Even at this they cannot all get employment. Although the plea made for Capitalism by the professors of The Manchester School was that at least it would always provide the workers with employment at a living wage, it has never either kept that promise or justified that plea. The employers have had to confess that they need what is called “a reserve army of unemployed”, so that they can always pick up “hands” when trade is good and throw them back into the street when it is bad. Throwing them back into the street means forcing them to spend the few shillings they may have been able to put by while employed, selling or pawning their clothes and furniture, and finally going on the rates as paupers. The ratepayers naturally object very strongly to having to support the employer’s workmen whenever he does not happen to want them; consequently, when the Capitalist system developed on a large scale, the ratepayers made Poor Law relief such a disgraceful, cruel, and degrading business that decent working class families would suffer any extremity rather than resort to it. We said to the unemployed father of a starving family, “We must feed you and your children if you are destitute, because the Statute of Elizabeth obliges us to; but you must bring your daughters and sons into the workhouse with you to live with drunkards, prostitutes, tramps, idiots, epileptics, old criminals, the very dregs and refuse of human society at its worst, and having done that you will never be able to hold up your head again among your fellows”. The man naturally said “Thank you: I had rather see my children dead”, and starved it out as best he could until trade revived, and the employers had another job for him. And to get that job he would accept the barest wages the family could support life on. If his children could earn a little in a factory he would snatch at wages that were just enough, when the children’s earnings were thrown in, to support them all; and in this way he did not benefit in the long run by letting his children go out to work, as it ended in their earnings being used to beat down his own wages; so that, though he at first sent his children into the factories to get a little extra money, he was at last forced to do it to make up his own wages to subsistence point; and when the law stepped in to rescue the children from their slavery, he opposed the law because he did not see how he could live unless his children earned something instead of going to school.

48

WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET

The effect of the system on women was worse in some respects than on men. As no industrial employer would employ a woman if he could get a man for the same money, women who wished to get any industrial employment could do so only by offering to do it for less than men. This was possible, because even when the man’s wage was a starvation wage it was the starvation wage of a family, not of a single person. Out of it the man had to pay for the subsistence of his wife and children, without whom the Capitalist system would soon have come to an end for want of any young workers to replace the old ones. Therefore even when the men’s wages were down to the lowest point at which their wives and children could be kept alive, a single woman could take less without being any worse off than her married neighbors and their children. In this way it became a matter of course that women should be paid less than men; and when any female rebel claimed to be paid as much as a man for the same work (“Equal wages for equal work”), the employer shut her up with two arguments: first, “If you dont take the lower wage there are plenty of others who will”, and, second, “If I have to pay a man’s wages I will get a man to do the work”.

The most important and indispensable work of women, that of bearing and rearing children, and keeping house for them, was never paid for directly to the woman but always through the man; and so many foolish people came to forget that it was work at all, and spoke of Man as The Breadwinner. This was nonsense. From first to last the woman’s work in the home was vitally necessary to the existence of society, whilst millions of men were engaged in wasteful or positively michievous work, the only excuse for which was that it enabled them to support their useful and necessary wives. But the men, partly through conceit, partly through thoughtlessness, and very largely because they were afraid that their wives might, if their value were recognized, become unruly and claim to be the heads of the household, set up a convention that women earned nothing and men everything, and refused to give their wives any legal claim on the housekeeping money. By law everything a woman possessed became the property of her husband when she married: a state of things that led to such monstrous abuses that the propertied class set up an elaborate legal system of marriage settlements, the effect of which was to hand over the woman’s property to some person or persons yet unborn before her marriage; so that though she could have an income from the property during her life, it was no longer her property, and therefore her husband could not make ducks and drakes of it. Later on the middle classes made Parliament protect their women by The Married Women’s Property Acts under which we still live; and these Acts, owing to the confusion of people’s minds on the subject, overshot the mark and produced a good deal of injustice to men. That, however, is another part of the story: the point to be grasped here is that under the Capitalist system women found themselves worse off than men because, as Capitalism made a slave of the man, and then, by paying the woman through him, made her his slave, she became the slave of a slave, which is the worst sort of slavery.

This suits certain employers very well, because it enables them to sweat other employers without being found out. And this is how it is done. A laborer finds himself bringing up a family of daughters on a wage of twenty-nine shillings a week in the country (it was thirteen in the nineteenth century) or, in or near a city, of from thirty (formerly eighteen) to seventy, subject to deductions for spells of unemployment. Now in a household scraping along on thirty shillings a week another five shillings a week makes an enormous difference: far more, I repeat, than another five hundred pounds makes to a millionaire. An addition of fifteen shillings or a pound a week raises the family of a laborer to the money level of that of a skilled workman. How were such tempting additions possible? Simply by the big girls going out to work at five shillings a week each, and continuing to live at home with their fathers. One girl meant another five shillings, two meant another ten shillings, three another fifteen shillings. Under such circumstances huge factories sprang up employing hundreds of girls at wages of from four-and-sixpence to seven-and-sixpence a week, the great majority getting five. These were called starvation wages; but the girls were much better fed and jollier and healthier than women who had to support themselves altogether. Some of the largest fortunes made in business: for example in the match industry, were made out of the five shilling girl living with, and of course partly on, her father, or as a lodger on somebody else’s father, a girl lodger being as good as a daughter in this respect. Thus the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters of his labor at the father’s expense. If the father worked in, say, a brewery, the match manufacturer was getting three-quarters of his labor at the expense of the brewer. In this way one trade lives by sweating another trade; and factory girls getting wages that would hardly support a prize cat are plump and jolly and willing and vigorous and rowdy, whilst older women, many of them widows with young children, are told that if they are not satisfied with the same wages there are plenty of strong girls who will be glad to get them.

It was not merely the daughters but the wives of working men who brought down women’s wages in this way. In the cities young women, married to young men, and not yet burdened with many children or with more than a room or two to keep tidy at home (and they were often not too particular about tidiness), or having no children, used to be quite willing to go out as charwomen for an hour a day for five shillings a week, plus such little perquisites and jobs of washing as might be incidental to this employment. As such a charwoman had nothing to do at home, and was not at all disposed to go on to a second job when she had secured the five shillings that made all the difference between pinching and prodigality to her and her husband, the hour easily stretched to half a day. The five shillings have now become ten or so; but as they buy no more, the situation is not altered.

In this way the labor market is infested with subsidized wives and daughters willing to work for pocket money on which no independent solitary woman or widow can possibly subsist. The effect is to make marriage compulsory as a woman’s profession: she has to take anything she can get in the way of a husband rather than face penury as a single woman. Some women get married easily; but others, less attractive or amiable, are driven to every possible trick and stratagem to entrap some man into marriage; and that sort of trickery is not good for a woman’s self-respect, and does not lead to happy marriages when the men realize that they have been “made a convenience of”.

This is bad enough; but there are lower depths still. It may not be respectable to live on a man’s wages without marrying him; but it is possible. If a man says to a destitute woman “I will not take you until death do us part, for better for worse, in sickness and in health and so forth; nor will I give you my name and the status of my legal wife; but if you would like to be my wife illegally until tomorrow morning, here is sixpence and a drink for you, or, as the case may be, a shilling, or a pound, or ten pounds, or a hundred pounds, or a villa with a pearl necklace and a sable mantle and a motor car”, he will not always meet with a refusal. It is easy to ask a woman to be virtuous; but it is not reasonable if the penalty of virtue be starvation, and the reward of vice immediate relief. If you offer a pretty girl twopence halfpenny an hour in a match factory, with a chance of contracting necrosis of the jawbone from phosphorus poisoning on the one hand, and on the other a jolly and pampered time under the protection of a wealthy bachelor, which was what the Victorian employers did and what employers still do all over the world when they are not stopped by resolutely socialistic laws, you are loading the dice in favor of the devil so monstrously as not only to make it certain that he will win, but raising the question whether the girl does not owe it to her own self-respect and desire for wider knowledge and experience, more cultivated society, and greater grace and elegance of life, to sell herself to a gentleman for pleasure rather than to an employer for profit. To warn her that her beauty will not last for ever only reminds her that if she takes reasonable care of her beauty it will last long past the age at which women, “too old at twenty-four”, find the factory closed to them, and their places filled by younger girls. She has actually less security of respectable employment than of illicit employment; for the women who sell labor are often out of work through periods of bad trade and consequent unemployment; but the women who sell pleasure, if they are in other respects well conducted and not positively repulsive, are seldom at a loss for a customer. The cases which are held up as terrible warnings of how a woman may fall to the lowest depths of degradation by listening to such arguments are pious inventions, supported by examples of women who through drink, drugs, and general depravity or weakness of character would have fallen equally if they had been respectably married or had lived in the strictest celibacy. The incidental risks of venereal diseases are unfortunately not avoidable by respectable matrimony: more women are infected by their husbands than by their lovers. If a woman accepts Capitalist morality, and does what pays her best, she will take what district visitors call (when poor women are concerned) the wages of sin rather than the wages of sweated labor.

There are cases, too, where the wedding ring may be a drawback instead of a makeweight. Illicit unions are so common under the Capitalist system that the Government has had to deal with them; and the law at present is that if an unmarried woman bears a child she can compel its father to pay her seven-and-sixpence a week for its support until it is sixteen, at which age it can begin to help to support her. Meanwhile the child belongs to her instead of to the father (it would belong to him if they were married); and she is free from any obligation to keep his house or do any ordinary drudgery for him. Rather than be brought into court he will pay without demur; and when he is goodnatured and not too poor he will often pay her more than he is legally obliged to. The effect of this is that a careful, discreet, sensible, pleasant sort of woman who has not scrupled to bear five illegitimate children may find herself with a legally guaranteed steady income of thirty-seven-and-sixpence a week in addition to what she can earn by respectable work. Compared to a widow with five legitimate children she was on velvet until the Government, after centuries of blind neglect, began to pension widows.

In short, Capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money, whether in or out of marriage; and against this bribe there stands nothing beyond the traditional respectability which Capitalism ruthlessly destroys by poverty, except religion and the inborn sense of honor which has its citadel in the soul and can hold out (sometimes) against all circumstances.

It is useless to pretend that religion and tradition and honor always win the day. It is now a century and a half since the poet Oliver Goldsmith warned us that “Honor sinks where commerce long prevails”; and the economic pressure by which Capitalism tempts women grew fiercer after his time. We have just seen how in the case of the parents sending their children out to work in their infancy to add a little to the family income, they found that their wages fell until what they and the children between them could earn was no more than they had been able to earn by themselves before, so that in order to live they now had to send their children to work whether they liked it or not. In the same way the women who occasionally picked up a little extra money illicitly, presently found themselves driven to snatch at employment by offering to take lower wages and depending on the other resource to make them up to subsistence point. Then the women who stood on their honor were offered those reduced wages, and, when they said they could not live on them, were told as usual that others could, and that they could do what the others did.

In certain occupations prostitution thus became practically compulsory, the alternative being starvation. Hood’s woman clad in unwomanly rags, who sang the Song of the Shirt, represents either the woman who would starve rather than sell her person or the woman neither young enough nor agreeable enough to earn even the few pence she could hope for from the men within her reach. The occupations in which prostitution is almost a matter of course are by no means the sensationally abject and miserable ones. It is rather in the employments in which well-dressed and goodlooking but unskilled women are employed to attract the public, that wages are paid on which they cannot possibly keep up the appearance expected from them. Girls with thirty shillings a week come to their work in expensive motor cars, and wear strings of pearls which, if not genuine, are at least the best imitations. If one of them asks how she can dress as she is expected to on thirty shillings a week she is either met with the old retort, “If you wont take it there are plenty who will”, or else told quite frankly that she is very lucky to get thirty shillings in addition to such a splendid advertisement and show-case for her attractions as the stage or the restaurant, the counter or the showroom, afford her. You must not, however, infer from this that all theatres, restaurants, showrooms and so forth exploit prostitution in this way. Most of them have permanent staffs of efficient respectable women, and could not be conducted in any other way. Neither must it be inferred that the young gentlemen who provide the motor cars and furs and jewels are always allowed to succeed in their expensive courtship. Sir Arthur Pinero’s play Mind the Paint is instructively true to life on this point. But such relations are not made edifying by the plea that the gentlemen are bilked. It is safe to assume that when women are employed, not to do any specially skilled work, but to attract custom to the place by their sex, their youth, their good looks and their smart dressing, employers of a certain type will underpay them, and by their competition finally compel more scrupulous employers to do the same or be undersold and driven out of the business. Now these are extremities to which men cannot be reduced. It is true that smart ladies can and do hire dancing partners at fifty francs an evening on the Riviera; but this quite innocent transaction does not mean that Capitalism can as yet say to a man, “If your wages are not enough to live on, go out into the streets and sell pleasures as others do”. When the man deals in that commodity he does so as a buyer, not as a seller. Thus it is the woman, not the man, who suffers the last extremity of the Capitalist system; and this is why so many conscientious women are devoting their lives to the replacement of Capitalism by Socialism.

But let not anyone imagine that men escape prostitution under Capitalism. If they do not sell their bodies they sell their souls. The barrister who in court strives “to make the worse appear the better cause” has been held up as a stock example of the dishonesty of misrepresenting for money. Nothing could be more unjust. It is agreed, and necessarily agreed, that the best way of learning the truth about anything is not to listen to a vain attempt at an impartial and disinterested statement, but to hear everything that can possibly be said for it, and then everything that can possibly be said against it, by skilled pleaders on behalf of the interested parties on both sides. A barrister is bound to do his utmost to obtain a verdict for a client whom he privately believes to be in the wrong, just as a doctor is bound to do his utmost to save the life of a patient whose death would, in his private opinion, be a good riddance. The barrister is an innocent figure who is used to distract our attention from the writer and publisher of lying advertisements which pretend to prove the worse the better article, the shopman who sells it by assuring the customer that it is the best, the agents of drugging and drink, the clerk making out dishonest accounts, the adulterator and giver of short weight, the journalist writing for Socialist papers when he is a convinced Liberal, or for Tory papers when he is an Anarchist, the professional politician working for his party right or wrong, the doctor paying useless visits and prescribing bogus medicines to hypochondriacs who need only Abernethy’s advice, “Live on sixpence a day, and earn it”, the solicitor using the law as an instrument for the oppression of the poor by the rich, the mercenary soldier fighting for a country which he regards as the worst enemy of his own, and the citizens of all classes who have to be obsequious to the rich and insolent to the poor. These are only a few examples of the male prostitutions, so repeatedly and vehemently denounced by the prophets in the Bible as whoredoms and idolatries, which are daily imposed on men by Capitalism.

We see, then, that when the reproach of prostitution is raised neither woman nor man dares cast the first stone; for both have been equally stained with it under Capitalism. It may even be urged by special pleaders on behalf of women that the prostitution of the mind is more mischievous, and is a deeper betrayal of the divine purpose of our powers, than the prostitution of the body, the sale of which does not necessarily involve its misuse. As a matter of fact nobody has ever blamed Nell Gwynne for selling her body as Judas Iscariot for selling his soul. But whatever satisfaction the pot may have in calling the kettle blacker than itself the two blacks do not make a white. And the abstract identity of male and female prostitution only brings out more strongly the physical difference, which no abstract argument can balance. The violation of one’s person is a quite peculiar sort of outrage. Anyone who does not draw a line between it and offences to the mind ignores the plain facts of human sensitiveness. For instance, landlords have had the power to force Dissenters to send their children to Church schools, and have used it. They have also had a special power over women to anticipate a husband’s privilege, and have either used it or forced the woman to buy them off. Can a woman feel about the one case as about the other? A man cannot. The quality of the two wrongs is quite different. The remedy for the one could wait until after the next general election. The other does not bear thinking of for a moment. Yet there it is.

49

TRADE UNION CAPITALISM

Now we must go into the history of the resistance offered by the proletariat to the capitalists. It was evident, to begin with, that no woman or man could do anything against the employers single-handed. The stock retort, “If you will not take the wage offered, and do the work put upon you, there are plenty who will”, checkmated the destitute solitary bargainer for a decent living wage and a reasonable day’s work. The first necessity for effective resistance was that the employees should form some sort of union and stand together. In many cases this was impossible, because the employees did not know oneanother, and had no opportunities of coming together and agreeing on a joint course of action. For instance, domestic servants could not form unions. They were in private kitchens all over the country, more or less imprisoned in them, and working singly, or at most in groups of two or three, except in the houses of the very rich, where the groups might be as large as thirty or forty. Or take agricultural laborers. It is very difficult to organize them into unions, and still more difficult to keep their unions together for any length of time. They live too far apart. The same thing is true more or less of almost every kind of labor except labor in factories and mines or on railways.

In some callings there are such differences of pay and social position that even if all their members could be brought together they would not mix. Thus on the stage an actor may be a highly accomplished gentleman with a title, who plays Hamlet, or a lady who is an aristocrat and a Dame of the British Empire, and plays Portia: both of them receiving weekly salaries counted in hundreds of pounds. With them are working every night actors and actresses who never utter a word, because, if they did, their speech would betray the fact that, far from being the court lords and ladies they are dressed up to look like, they are not earning as much as the carpenters who shift the scenes. It is even possible for an acrobat or clown to be more highly paid than Hamlet, and yet in private life be so illiterate, and have such shocking table manners, that the titled Hamlet could endure neither his conversation nor his company at dinner. For this reason a union of actors is difficult: a class split is inevitable. Union is possible only in trades where the members work together in large bodies; live in the same neighborhoods; belong all to the same social class; and earn about the same money. The miners in the coalfields, the cotton spinners in the factory towns of Lancashire, the metal smelters and fitters in the Midlands, were the first to form enduring and powerful unions. The bricklayers, masons, carpenters, and joiners who come together in the building trades were also early in the field with attempts at unionism. Under the stress of some intolerable oppression they would combine to make the employers see their situation in some particular point; and when they had carried that point, or were defeated, the union would dissolve until another emergency arose. Then they began to subscribe to form little insurance funds against unemployment, which obliged them to keep the union together; and in this way the unions grew from momentary rebellions into permanent Trade Unions of the kind we know.

We now have to consider what a union of proletarians can do to defend their livelihood from the continual encroachments of Capitalism. First, when the union is sufficiently complete, it enables them to face the employer without any risk of being told that if they will not submit to his terms others will. If nearly all the bricklayers in a town form a union, and each pays into it week by week a small contribution until they have a little fund to fall back on, then, if their employers attempt to reduce their wages, they can, by refusing to work and living on their fund, bring the employers’ business to a dead stop for weeks or months, according to the size of the fund. This is called a strike. They can strike not only against a reduction of wages but for an increase, or for a reduction of their working hours, or for anything that may be in dispute between them and the employers. Their success will depend on the state of the employers’ business. The employers can practically always wait if they choose until the strike fund is exhausted, and thus starve the strikers into submission. But if trade is so flourishing at the moment, and the employers consequently in such a hurry to get on with their profit making, that they would lose more by an interruption to their business than by giving the strikers what they demand, then the employers will give in.

But the employers will bide their time for a counterstrike. When trade gets slack again, and they have little or nothing to lose by shutting up their works for a while, they reduce the wage, and lock out all the workers who will not submit to the reduction. This is why an employers’ strike is called a lock-out. The newspapers use the word strike for strikes and lock-outs indiscriminately, because their readers blame the workers instead of the employers for a strike; but some of the greatest so-called strikes should have been called lock-outs. A boom in trade always produces a series of strikes which are generally successful. A falling-off in trade produces a series of lock-outs; and they, too, are generally successful, the one series undoing the work of the other in a dreary see-saw. After the war we went through a gigantic boom followed by a disastrous slump, with strikes and lock-outs all complete. Your own experience of these civil wars of strike and lock-out must have left you convinced that they are public disasters which would have no sort of sense in a well ordered community. But let that pass for the moment. We have not yet finished our study of primitive Trade Unionism, nor seen what it led to besides saving up for a strike and then “downing tools”.

The first necessity of the situation was that everybody in the trade should join the union, as outsiders could be used by employers to break the strike by taking on the work that the strikers refused. Consequently a fierce hatred of the men who would not join the unions grew up. They were called scabs and blacklegs, and boycotted in every possible way by the unionists. But vituperation and boycotting were not sufficient to deter the scabs. The unions, when they declared a strike, stationed bodies of strikers at the gates of the works to persuade the scabs not to enter. No Intelligent Woman will need to be told that unless there was a strong force of police on the spot the persuasion was so vigorous that the scabs felt lucky when they survived it without broken bones. At last there came a time in Sheffield and Manchester when scabs working at furnaces found bombs there that blew them to pieces; when machinery and tools were tampered with so as to make them dangerous to those who used them (this was called rattening); and when factory chimneys were shattered by explosives like fulminate of mercury, so risky to handle that only very ignorant and desperate men would venture on their use. This was stopped less by punishing the perpetrators than by forcing the employers to relax the provocation. For instance, the Sheffield sawgrinders died prematurely, and suffered miserably during their lifetimes, because the air they breathed was half steel dust. It was quite easy to prevent this by using vacuum cleaners (as we call them) to suck away the deadly dust; but the employers would not fit them, because, as they cost extra capital on which there was no extra profit, an employer who fitted them could be undersold by those who did not. At that time a Sheffield steel worker of fifty (when he was lucky enough to reach that age) looked like a weedy and very unhealthy lad of seventeen. In the face of such murderous conditions, persisted in for a hundred years, the burst of outrage on the part of the victims seems trifling enough. At last the Government had to come to the rescue and force all the employers to fit suction fans. Sheffielders’ lungs are now no worse than most people’s, and better than those of many who are not so carefully protected by the law.

But accepting a lower wage than that demanded by the union was not the only way in which an employee could drag down his fellows. In many trades it was not much use fixing the wage the worker was to receive unless the quantity of work he gave for it was also fixed. You must be tired by this time of the silly joking of the Capitalist newspapers about bricklayers who are not allowed by their unions to lay more than three bricks a day. A bricklayer has clearly as much right to charge a day’s wages for laying three bricks as his employer has to sell the house when it is built for the biggest price he can get for it. Those who condemn either of them are condemning the Capitalist system, like good Bolshevists. The three-brick joke is only a comic exaggeration of what actually occurs. The employers, to find out how much work can be got out of a man, pick out an exceptionally quick and indefatigable man called a slogger, and try to impose what he can do in a day on all the rest. The unions naturally retort by forbidding any of their members to lay a brick more than he must do if he is to be worth employing at all. This practice of deliberately doing the least they dare instead of the most they can is the ca’canny of which the employers complain so much, though they all do the same thing themselves under the more respectable name of “restricting output” and selling in the dearest market. It is the principle on which the Capitalist system is avowedly founded.

Thus Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! You may ask why this does not end in a deadlock. The answer is it is producing deadlocks twice a day or thereabouts. The King’s speeches in opening Parliament now contain regularly an appeal to the workers and employers to be good boys and not paralyze the industry of the nation by the clash of their quite irreconcilable interests. The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles. The mass of the nation has been humbly and ignorantly taking what the employers offer and working as well as it can, either believing that it is doing its duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call it, or not thinking about the matter at all, but suffering its lot as something that cannot be helped, like the weather. Even late in the nineteenth century, when there were fourteen million wage workers, only a million and a half of them were in trade unions, which meant that only a million and a half of them were selling their labor on systematic Capitalist business principles. Today nearly four and a half millions of them are converts to Capitalism, and duly enrolled in militant unions. Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called trade disputes, are fought; and the number of days of work lost to the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty, and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they can out of their labor exactly as they find the landlord doing with his land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to a standstill until either Property drives Labor by main force into undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labor gains the upper hand, and the long series of changes by which the mastery of the situation has already passed from the landlord-capitalist to the individual employer, from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialists in general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized Labor. The battle for this supremacy is joined; and here we are in the thick of it, our country ravaged by strikes and lock-outs, a huge army of unemployed billeted upon us, the ladies and gentlemen declaring that it is all the fault of the workers, and the workers either declaring that it is all the fault of the ladies and gentlemen, or else, more sensibly, concluding that it is the fault of the Capitalist system, and taking to Socialism not so much because they understand it as because it promises a way out.

When this open war was first declared, the employers used their command of Parliament to have it punished as a crime. The unions were classed as conspiracies; and anybody who joined one was held to be a conspirator and punished accordingly. This did not prevent the unions: it only “drove them underground”: that is, made secret societies of them, and thereby put them into the hands of more determined and less law-abiding leaders. The Government at last found it impossible to go on with such coercion; for the few cases in which the law could be carried out had the effect of martyrdoms, producing noisy popular agitations, and stimulating Trade Unionism instead of suppressing it.

Then the employers tried what they could do for themselves. They refused to employ unionists. This was no use: they could not get enough non-unionist labor to go on with: and the unionists whom they had to employ refused to work with non-unionists. Then the employers refused to “recognize” the unions, which meant that they refused to negotiate questions of wages with the secretaries of the unions, and insisted on dealing with their employees directly and individually, one at a time. This also failed. Making a separate bargain with each employee is easy enough in the case of a woman engaging a domestic servant or an oldfashioned merchant engaging a clerk or warehouseman; but when men have to be taken on by the hundred, and sometimes by the thousand, separate bargaining is impossible. The big employers who talked about it at first really meant that there was to be no bargaining at all. The men were to come in and just take what they were told were the wages of the firm, and not presume to argue. The moment the formation of the unions enabled the men to bargain, the big employers, to save their own time, had to insist on its being done with a single representative of the men who was experienced in bargaining and qualified to discuss business: that is, with the secretary of the Trade Union; so that all the fuss ended in the unions being not only recognized by the big employers, but looked on as a necessary part of their industry. Finally the unions were legalized; and here, as in the case of the Married Women’s Property Acts, the change from outlawry to legal protection went a little beyond the mark, in its reaction against previous injustice, and gave the Trade Unions privileges and immunities which are not enjoyed by ordinary societies. The employers then found that they also must act together in dealing with the Trade Unions. Accordingly, they formed unions of their own, called Employers’ Federations. The war of Capital with Labor is now a war of Trade Unions with Employers’ Federations. Their battles, or rather blockades, are lock-outs and strikes, lasting, like modern military battles, for months.

Though some of the battles are about victimization (that is, discharging an employee for actively advocating Trade Unionism, or refusing to reinstate a prominent striker when the strike is over), all the disputes in which ground is won or lost are about wages or hours of work. You must understand that there are two sorts of wages: time wages and piecework wages. Time wages are paid for the employee’s time by the month, week, day, or hour, no matter how much or how little work may be done during those periods. Piecework wages are paid according to the work done: so much for each piece of work turned out.

Now you would suppose that the employees would be unanimously in favor of time wages, and the employers of piecework wages: indeed this was roughly so in early days. But the introduction of machinery altered the case. Piecework wages are really only time wages paid in such a way as to prevent the employee from slacking. He has to keep hard at it to earn the wage; but the amount of the wage is arrived at by considering whether what he can make in an hour or a day or a week at piecework will enable him to live in the way he is accustomed to live, or, as it is called, to maintain his standard of subsistence. Now suppose a machine is invented by which he can turn out twice as many pieces in a day as before. He will then find that he has earned as much in the week by Wednesday evening as he had previously earned by Saturday. What will he do? You may think, if you are a very energetic lady, that he will put in the whole week as usual, and rejoice his wife by bringing home twice as much money. But that is not what a man is like. He prefers a shillingsworth of leisure to another shillingsworth of bread and cheese or a new hat for his wife. What he actually does is to bring her just what he brought her before, and have a holiday on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, leaving his employer with no labor to go on with, and perhaps with the most pressing contracts to be finished by a certain date. To force him to remain at work the whole week the employer has to “cut the rate”: that is, to reduce the piecework wage by half. Then the fat is in the fire: the Trade Union resists the reduction fiercely, and threatens that if the employees are to have no benefit from the new machine they will refuse to work it. There was a time when the introduction of machines led to riots and the wrecking of newly equipped factories by furious mobs of handworkers. When the mobs were replaced by Trade Unions the introduction of new machines was often followed by strikes and lock-outs. But when the heated personal disputes of hot-headed employers with resentful employees gave way to cool negotiations between experienced secretaries of Employers’ Federations and equally experienced secretaries of Trade Unions, who had settled similar difficulties many times before, it became an established practice to readjust the piecework wage so as to allow the employee to share the benefit of the machine with the employer. The only question was how much each could claim.

On time wages the employee gets no benefit from the introduction of a machine. The product of his labor may be multiplied a hundred times; but he remains as poor as before. That is why in many industries the employees insist on piecework wages, and the employers would be only too glad to pay time wages: all the more because, when machinery comes into play, the machine works the man instead of the man working the machine, and slacking becomes either impossible or easy to detect.

But it often happens that neither the time wage worker nor the piece wage worker has any say in the matter at all, for the very simple reason that the introduction of the machine enables the employer to “slack the lot” and replace them by girls who are only machine minders. And we have already seen what the effect of women’s and girls’ labor has on wages. Besides, Trade Unionism is weaker among women than among men, because, as most women regard industrial employment as merely a temporary expedient to keep them going until they get married, they will not take the duty of combination as seriously as the men, who know that they will be industrial employees all their lives. In the Lancashire weaving industry, where women do not retire from the factory when they marry, the women’s unions are as strong as the men’s.

In the long run the reserves of the employer are so much greater than those of the employees that though John Stuart Mill’s statement in the middle of last century that the wage workers had not benefited by the introduction of machinery is no longer quite true, yet they have gained so little in comparison with the prodigiously greater national output from the machines, that it is putting it very mildly to say that they have not only not gained but lost ground heavily relatively to the capitalists.

50

DIVIDE AND GOVERN

The weakness of Trade Unionism was that the concessions wrung from the employers when trade was good were taken back again when trade was bad, because, as the employers commanded the main national store of spare money, they could always stop working without starving for longer than their employees. The Trade Unions soon had to face the fact that unless they could get the concessions fixed and enforced by law, they were certain to lose by the lock-outs all they gained by the strikes. At the same time they saw that Parliament had put a permanent stop to the sweating of very young children in factories; and though, as I have explained, their members had been driven by poverty to object to this reform, nevertheless it convinced them that Parliament, if it liked, could fix any reform so firmly that the employers could not go back on it. They wanted a permanent reduction in the then monstrous length of the factory working day. The cry for a reduction to eight hours was set up. At first it seemed an unattainable ideal; and it is still very far from being completely attained. But a ten hours day for women and children and young persons seemed reasonable and possible. As to the men, they were told they were grown-up independent Britons, and that it would be an outrage on British liberty to prevent an Englishman from working as long as he liked. But when the women and young children go home the factory engine is stopped, because its work cannot go on without them. When the engine stops the men may as well go home too, as their work cannot go on without the engine. So the men got the factory hours shortened by law “behind the petticoats of the women”.

And how did the employees, who had no votes at that time, induce Parliament, in which there were only landlords, capitalists, and employers, to pass these benevolent Acts of Parliament for the protection of the employees against the employers?

If I were to reply that they were acts of pure conscience, nobody nowadays would believe me, because Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. But even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly virtuous at the expense of others. The Intelligent Woman must guard herself against imagining that the property owners and employers in Parliament a hundred years ago had read this book, and therefore understood that their interests were the same, though their occupations and habits and social positions were so very different. The country gentlemen despised the employers as vulgar tradesmen, and made them feel it. The employers, knowing that any fool might be a peer or a country gentleman if he had the luck to be born in a country house, whilst success in business needed business ability, were determined to destroy the privileges of the landed aristocracy. This had been done in France in 1789 by a revolution; and it was by threatening a similar revolution that the English employers, in 1832, forced the King and the peerage, after a long popular agitation, to pass into law the famous Reform Bill which practically transferred the command of Parliament in England from the hereditary landed aristocracy to the industrial employers.

You know what a popular agitation means. It means a little reasoning and a great deal of abuse of the other side. Before 1832 the employers did not confine themselves to pointing out the absurdity of allowing a couple of cottages owned by a county aristocrat to send a member to Parliament when the city of Birmingham was not represented there. Most people thought it quite natural that great folk should have great privileges, and cared nothing about Birmingham, which they had heard of only as a dirty place where most of the bad pennies (Brummagem buttons) came from. The employers therefore stirred up public feeling against the landed gentry by exposing all their misdeeds: their driving of whole populations out of the country to make room for sheep or deer; their ruthless enforcement of the Game Laws, under which men were transported with the worst felons for poaching a few hares or pheasants; the horrible condition of the laborers’ cottages on their estates; the miserable wages they paid: their bigoted persecution of Nonconformists not only by refusing to allow any places of worship except those of the Church of England to be built on their estates, but by nominating to the Church livings such clergymen as could be depended on to teach the children in the village schools that all Dissenters were disgraced in this world and damned in the next; their equally bigoted boycotting of any shopkeeper who dared to vote against their candidates at elections; with all the other tyrannies which in those days made it a common saying, even among men of business, that “the displeasure of a lord is a sentence of death”. By harping on these grievances the employers at last embittered public opinion against the squires to such a pitch that the fear of a repetition in England of the French Revolution broke down the opposition to the Reform Bill. The employers, after propitiating King William IV by paying his debts, were able to force Parliament to pass the Bill; and that event inaugurated the purseproud reign of the English middle class under Queen Victoria.

Naturally the squires were not disposed to take this defeat lying down. They revenged themselves by taking up Lord Shaftesbury’s agitation for the Factory Acts, and shewing that the employer’s little finger was thicker than the country gentleman’s loins; that the condition of the factory employees was worse than that of the slaves on the American and West Indian plantations; that the worst cottages of the worst landlords had at least fresher air than the overcrowded slums of the manufacturing towns; that if the employers did not care whether their “hands” were Church of England or Methodist, neither did they care whether they were Methodists or Atheists, because they had no God but Mammon; that if they did not persecute politically it was only because the hands had no votes; that they persecuted industrially as hard as they could by imprisoning Trade Unionists; and that the personal and often kindly relations between the peasantry and the landlords, the training in good manners and decent housekeeping traditions learnt by the women in domestic service in the country houses, the kindnesses shewn to the old and sick on the great estates, were all lost in the squalor and misery, the brutality and blasphemy, the incestuous overcrowding, and the terrible dirt epidemics in the mining and factory populations where English life was what the employer’s greed had made it.

All this, though quite true, was merely the pot again calling the kettle black; for the country gentlemen did not refuse the dividends made for them by the employers in the mines and factories, nor refuse to let factories and slums be built all over their estates in Lancashire; nor did the employers, when they had made fortunes, hesitate to buy country estates and “found families” to be brought up in the strictest county traditions, nor to disparage trade as vulgar when the generation that remembered what their grandfathers were had died out. But the quarrel between them explains how it was that when Parliament consisted exclusively of landlords and capitalist employers or their nominees, and the proletariat had no votes, yet the Factory Acts got passed. The Acts were the revenge of the squires for the Reform Act.