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.  The average employment in sweating trades is roughly estimated at three or four days in the week.  There are two busy seasons lasting some six weeks each, when these miserable creatures are habitually overworked.  “The remaining nine months,” says Mr. Burnett, “do not average more than half time, especially among the lower grade workers.”

This gives us one clue to the ability of the small workshop to survive—­ its superior flexibility from the point of view of the employer.

“High organization makes for regularity; low organization lends itself to the opposite.  A large factory cannot stop at all without serious loss; a full-sized workshop will make great efforts to keep going; but the man who employs only two or three others in his own house can, if work fails, send them all adrift to pick up a living as best they can."[26]

Since a smaller sweating-master can set up business on some L2 capital, and does not expect to make much more profit as employer than as workman, he is able to change from one capacity to the other with great facility.

2.  The high rent for large business premises, especially in London, makes for the small workshop or home-work system.  The payment of rent is thus avoided by the business firm which is the real employer, and thrown upon the sub-contractor or the workers themselves, to be by them in their turn generally evaded by using the dwelling-room for a workshop.  Thus one of the most glaring evils of the sweating system is seen to form a distinct economic advantage in the workshop, as compared with the large factory.  The element of rent is practically eliminated as an industrial charge.

3.  The evasion of the restrictions of the Factory Act must be regarded as another economic advantage.  Excessive hours of labour when convenient, overcrowding in order to avoid rent, absence of proper sanitary conditions, are essential to the cheapest forms of production under present conditions.  It does not pay either the employing firm or the sub-contractor to consider the health or even the life of the workers, provided that the state of the labour market is such that they can easily replace spent lives.

4.  The inability to combine for their mutual protection and advantage of scattered employes working in small bodies, living apart, and unacquainted even with the existence of one another, is another “cheapness” of the workshop system.