It is not only
that hours are shorter and wages improved, and the health and safety
of the worker guarded, and work spread more evenly over the entire
year, but the harassing dread of the cut without notice, and of
wholesale, uncalled-for dismissals is removed. Thus is an element
of certainty and a sense of method and order introduced. Above all,
home-work is abolished.
In an unstandardized trade there can be no certainty as to wages and
hours, while there is a constant tendency to level down under the
pressure of unchecked competition from both above and below. There is
too frequent breaking of factory laws and ignoring of the city's fire
and health ordinances, because the unorganized workers dare not, on
peril of losing their jobs, insist that laws and ordinances were made
to be kept and not broken. Also, in any trade where a profit can be
made by giving out work, as in the sewing trades, we find, unless this
is prevented by organization or legislation, an enormous amount of
home-work, ill-paid and injurious to all, cutting down the wages
of the factory hands, and involving the wholesale exploitation of
children.
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