CHAPTER 10.—PRO™™ "NN OF HOME WORK-ERS
 THROU. TMUM WAGE
WEATING of home workers was a general evil throughout
S Europe until minimum wage legislation restricted it in Great
Britain and, to a lesser extent, on the Continent. Women have
been most affected but not exclusively. The evil is greatest in the
slums of big cities, such as those in Great Britain, but home industries
in country districts also, struggling against the competition of
machine work in factories (on the Continent more than in Great
Britain), show the typical evils of home work—low earnings, long
hours to make up for these low earnings, and lack of supervision of
hygienic conditions, such as is provided for workshops by factory
legislation. Home workers have not the same facilities for meeting
fellow workers, discussing their common fate, and forming tradeunions
 as factory workers have. Female home workers, to a large
extent housewives or widows and (on the Continent of Europe)
unmarried mothers, find it difficult on account of these home ties to
20 to the factory. They are generally timid and afraid to ask for
higher piecework rates than are paid them. As the supply of this
kind of labor is large the employers can keep the rates down; frequently
 they are compelled to do so, as handwork or work with
primitive machinery in the homes is less productive than perfected
machine labor in the modern factories with which it has to compete.
Men also, clinging desperately to the home work done by their
fathers, frequently accept wages much below those paid similar
workers in the workshop. (The typical case of the hand weavers of
Silesia has been immortalized by the dramatic play, “ The Weavers,”
by Gerhart Hauptmann.)
The case of dying home industries presents peculiar conditions
which have parallels in other continents, for instance, in India; but
no parallels exist in younger countries, starting industrial life with
modern methods, such as Australia, Canada, or the United States.
It is hardly likely that this problem will be solved otherwise than by
the gradual replacement of technically defective home industries by
modern factories.
Matters are different as regards the more general problem of the
sweating of isolated home workers, who are mostly women occupied
in various trades, generally in the large cities. In Victoria since
[896 remedies have been found. (See p. 11.) Since the first news
of this achievement reached Europe, endeavors to proceed along
similar lines, establishing wage boards empowered to fix minimum
wages for home workers, have taken place in many countries.
When the International Institute for the Exchange of Social Experience
 was established in Paris in 1907 the propagation of the
minimum wage legislation of Victoria was one of the foremost re-