It published a series of articles on the conditions under which women and girls worked in Dunedin. Other newspapers, notably the “Lyttelton Times,” took the crusade in hand, with the result that a deplorable state of affairs was disclosed in all the principal centres. Many manufacturers had been unable to make both ends meet, and they had been forced into a position in which they had to cut down wages to the lowest possible minimum. This action was specially noticeable in regard to women’s work.
The sweating system, in short, had seized hold of the colony like a plague. It was in its most aggravated form. Large numbers of women were paid wages that hardly kept body and soul together. A woman made shirts at 4½d. a piece and found the cotton, the buttons, and other requisites. She could not make more than three shirts a day, and, even to do that, she would have to work at night. Her daily earnings, therefore, amounted to 1s. or 1s. 4d. Private workmen had to compete with establishments where children were employed as apprentices. These children received no wages at all for a time, and then were paid merely a nominal sum, about 2s. 6d. a week.
Large manufacturing establishments, making frantic efforts to right themselves, introduced the “cutting” system, and wholesale houses followed on the same lines. Women workers aided the “cutters” by competing bitterly for the work, as it was the only means they had of keeping off absolute starvation. Their husbands or brothers could get no work, and they were compelled to do what they could, no matter how small their contribution to the household funds might be. Women who had been taught in their youth to use their needle and were deft with it went out and begged for work, and in many cases they offered to do it under the prices which the warehousemen and manufacturers had brought down.
A few years previously, the price for making crimean shirts was 16s. a dozen, with cotton and buttons supplied by the house. In 1889, the same work was done for 6s. a dozen and the workers had to find both cotton and buttons. The wages for making men’s flannel shirts fell from 9s. 6d. a dozen to about 4s. 6d. A great deal of the work in the clothing trade
