Sec. 6.  Irregularity of work.—­One more aspect of city poverty demands a word.  Low wages are responsible in large measure for the evils with which we have dealt.  In the life of the lower grades of labour there is a worse thing than low wages—­that is irregular employment.  The causes of such irregularity, partly inherent in the nature of the work, partly the results of trade fluctuations, will appear later.  In gauging poverty we are only concerned with the fact.  This irregularity of work is not in its first aspect so much a deficiency of work, but rather a maladjustment While on the one hand we see large classes of workers who are habitually overworked, men and women, tailors or shirt-makers in Whitechapel, ’bus men, shop-assistants, even railway-servants, toiling twelve, fourteen, fifteen, or even in some cases eighteen hours a day, we see at the same time and in the same place numbers of men and women seeking work and finding none.  Thus are linked together the twin maladies of over-work and the unemployed.  It is possible that among the comfortable classes there are still to be found those who believe that the unemployed consist only of the wilfully idle and worthless residuum parading a false grievance to secure sympathy and pecuniary aid, and who hold that if a man really wants to work he can always do so.  This idle theory is contradicted by abundant facts.  The official figures published by the Board of Trade gives the average percentage of unemployed in the Trade Unions of the skilled trades as follows.  To the general average we have appended for comparison the average for the shipbuilding and boiler-making trades, so as to illustrate the violence of the oscillations in a fluctuating trade:—­

        General per cent.  Ship-building, etc.

1884 7.15 20.8 1885 8.55 22.2 1886 9.55 21.6 1887 7.15 16.7 1888 4.15 7.3 1889 2.05 2.0 1890 2.10 3.4 1891 3.40 5.7 1892 6.20 10.9 1893 7.70 17.0 1894 7.70 16.2 1895 6.05 13.0 1896 3.50 9.5 1897 3.65 8.6 1898 3.15 4.7 1899 2.40 2.1 1900 2.85 2.3 1901 3.80 3.6 1902 4.60 8.3 1903 5.30 11.7

These figures make it quite evident that the permanent causes of irregular employment, e.g., weather in the building and riverside trades, season in the dressmaking and confectionery trades, and the other factors of leakage and displacement which throw out of work from time to time numbers of workers, are, taken in the aggregate, responsible only for a small proportion of the unemployment in the staple trades of the country.