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POLITICAL  ECONOMY

To  the  extremely  low-paid  occupations
attention  has  been  frequently  and  authoritatively ­
  directed,  but  it  is  only  of  late  that  an
experimental  handling  of  the  problem  of
“  sweating,”  as  it  is  called,  has  been  attempted.
A  brief  survey  of  this  abuse  will  shew,  as  the
scientific  mind  would  expect,  that  its  thorough
cure  is  bound  up  with  its  causes,  and  that  in
the  search  for  its  causes  economic  analysis  is
an  undoubted  aid.  The  theory  of  wages
expounded  in  Chapter  VII.  of  this  work
lays  it  down  that  wages  tend  to  equal  the
marginal  worth  of  labour.  Then,  seemingly,
a  search  for  the  causes  of  sweating  should
reveal  that  in  certain  circumstances  labour
tends  for  some  reason  to  get  substantially  less
than  its  marginal  worth,  which  may  be  very
low  in  addition,  or  that  it  is  incapable  of
raising  its  wage  without  help,  either  by  improving ­
  in  efficiency  or  by  moving  to  trades
where  the  recompense  for  work  is  on  a  more
generous  scale.  Actually  it  will  be  found
that  some  or  all  these  disabilities,  exist  in
the  sweated  trades,  particularly  among  outworkers, ­
  and  most  of  the  worst  paid  people
are  out-workers.
Many  out-workers  are  very  inefficient
because  they  have  never  been  trained.
And  their  work  is  very  unskilled  as  a  rule,