The New Era Of Homebased Work

Directions And Policies

Kathleen Christensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000303872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the causes and consequences of paid white-collar work in the home, including work that is professional, managerial, clerical, technical, and sales. It is directed to audiences concerned with both the policy issues and the research challenges reused by working at home.

Part I
Trends and Patterns in Home-Based Work

1
Homework in the Past, Its Meaning for the Future

Eileen Boris

A historical perspective provides a framework for understanding home-based work—the complexity of the homework issue, why homework regulation has been difficult, how homework has met the needs of working class families, and how it incorporated workers into the labor force on terms that reinforced occupational segmentation by sex. In particular, analysis of the historical record reveals the conditions under which current regulations have emerged. A study of the past will help us understand how the present situation came into being and suggest actions that we can take to shape future developments.

Home-based work, defined as gainful employment within the confines of the home, developed in the United States as an integral part of the industrialization process. Even though the putting-out of work marked only an intermediary stage in the growth of textile factories, outwork grew along with the shift from a family-labor system to a wage-labor system in shoemaking, clothing, and a host of other industries that both met the trade with the South and expanded urban consumer needs in the 1830s and 1840s. In New England, while some daughters headed to the mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell, others remained at home in their agricultural villages, supplementing the family income and earning money for their dowries well into the 1880s by braiding straw and palm-leaf hats, sewing shoes and garments, and even weaving on handlooms.¹

As early as the 1820s, however, in port cities like New York and Boston, merchant tailors were expanding production by sending out work to seamstresses in their homes. These women cared for children under crowded urban conditions and stretched the often inadequate wages that men earned; their other options for wage earning were limited both by family labor and the lack of other forms of “women’s work.”

The “core” of this labor force consisted of widows and deserted wives, though single women and those still married increasingly were drawn into the system as its demand for labor expanded. As historian Christine Stansell has concluded, “If employers in some settings utilized outwork only until they overcame the barriers to women working outside the home, New York employers capitalized upon and profited from those very obstacles. Through the outside system, the immobility and apparent marginality of women workers became institutionalized and formalized in urban industrial capitalism.”²

Initially, sewing women made an entire shirt, but their meager average earnings of $1.20 a week barely covered the cost of rent. Many were forced to turn to charity, which, ironically, further lowered the price paid by the garment contractors who knew that such women had other sources of sustenance. Yet, the manufacturers, beset by competition, could not have paid more even if they wanted to.³

From its origins in the “slop” shops of the 1820s, producing rough clothes for seamen and slaves, the clothing industry suffered from the very entrepreneurial conditions that promised upward mobility to immigrants and other workingmen. Beset by competition, low start-up costs, undercapitalization, and a highly seasonal and variable product, garment manufacturers resorted to a system of central shops and contractors, run on credit. This organization collapsed prices and led to underpayment, withheld payment, and long hours, all of which were exacerbated by an oversupply of contractors and workers.

The sewing machine, introduced in the 1850s, allowed better capitalized manufacturers to increase efficiency through standardization of production with the consequence that the sewing woman made buttonholes or collars rather than an entire shirt. This division into those who had machines and those who lacked them further encouraged contracting and its resultant cutthroat competition.⁴

By the last quarter of the century, reformers and commentators named this organization of production, the sweating system. As defined by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1892, “Sweating consists of the farming out by competing manufacturers as to competing contractors of the material for garments, which in turn is distributed among competing men and women to be made up.”⁵ Either in small workshops crowded with machines and people, called sweatshops, or at home, the sweating system encouraged the exploitation of workers because the various middlemen, jobbers, or contractors had to get their take even as they underbid each other in costs and time to receive jobs from larger manufacturers. Thus, they tended to reduce piece-rates paid to the actual producers and passed along to them the overhead costs of production—lighting, rental of machines, needles, and thread. Workers also absorbed the costs of mistakes, with contractors refusing to pay for spoiled goods; workers further suffered from the instability of their employers who often closed shop and disappeared before payday. Not limited to clothing, homework flourished in other labor-intensive or handicraft industries in the secondary market of the economy, especially consumer goods such as cigars, artificial flowers, hair brushes, coffee beans, nuts, and lamp-shades.⁶

Although manufacturing processes dominated homework, some clerical work also took place at home. Prior to the invention of the typewriter, “deserving” widows received work to copy at home, especially from government agencies. Although the transformation of clerical work, with the growth of the modern corporation and the mechanization of copying, centralized such labor into offices, some clerical home labor persisted on an ad hoc basis. In the 1920s, for example, an Ohio publishing company gave out envelope addressing to 100 married women who were former employees. But not until the 1940s, when war demands for female labor led to a shortage of typists, did clerical homework grow in the direct mail industry.⁷

In an uncertain market, homework employers gained flexibility. With their workforce scattered in homes, they also lessened the chance of strikes or union organization. (Refusing to take any more work or spoiling work became chief forms of resistance to the system.) Homeworkers also faced uncertainty as to amount of work, when it would be available, when it had to be returned, and even the kind of work they would be given to do. Rush jobs forced homeworkers to recruit children, husbands, relatives, and neighbors to aid them; low piece-rates also compelled them to find more hands, so to increase production and wages.⁸

The underemployment and intermittent work of homeworkers was not unique in the early twentieth century. In an era before unionization or government regulation, the U.S. economy experienced irrationalities and production bottlenecks similar to, if not identical with, the homework system. Much of U.S. manufacturing suffered from seasonality, unpaid layoffs for factory maintenance or stylistic changeover, or irregular rhythms of production. Labor turnover was high due to protests by dissatisfied workers and to structural defects. Factory or office work, 40 hours a week with two weeks’ vacation, is a product of New Deal reforms, the reorganization of capital during that period, and union demands—relatively recent developments.⁹

The homework system, however, maintained characteristics forged in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, one of the foremost of which was relying on a largely female, often immigrant, sometimes rural, workforce that had few other wage-earning options. Even though early labor standards for legislation targeted women and children, mothers benefited least from the initial systematizing of industry because their workplace remained the home.¹⁰

A Social Portrait of Homeworkers

The first homeworkers, as we have seen, were sewing women, both urban and rural, native bom and Irish immigrant, who stitched shirts or bound shoe uppers in the transitional economy of the pre-Civil War period. While mothers and daughters continued to take in outwork in farming and other rural regions during the last third of the nineteenth century, industrial homework in garments, cigarmaking, nut packing, and other hand processes was concentrated in urban tenements among immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Until the turn of the century, women were engaged in homework as part of family manufacturing; that is, male artisans (such as Bohemian cigar makers or Jewish tailors) enlisted the services of their wives and children. But as tailoring and other trades became more divided, some processes remained in workshops, some entered more mechanized and rationalized factories, while the most labor intensive stayed or went into the homes.

By 1912, Italian mothers and their school-age children (too young to get working papers) dominated hand-finishing of pants, assembling of artificial flowers, willowing of feathers, and the performing of at least 100 other different operations that required little machinery. In the Chinese and Japanese sections of Northern California, continuing into the 1920s and 1930s, women made garments and embroidered them. Though the majority of black women in Chicago went out to work, some stayed at home and assembled artificial flowers and lampshades at home during the 1920s.¹¹

Women, whose cultural traditions and/or family responsibilities kept them home, took in homework. These women—most of whom were married—worked because their men held seasonal, casual jobs and made too little to sustain their families. For the most part, homeworking families shared with reformers the assumption that mothers should stay at home with children, but unable to live on the income of husbands, other family members, or “the relief dole,” such women accepted the exploitative conditions of homework for family survival. Among Jewish and Italian immigrants, in particular, mothers sewed in the home while daughters worked at similar jobs in the factory (or in the 1920s and 1930s, entered clerical work). Husbands and sons cut and pressed garments inside the shops, a segmentation of the labor market that reflected not only ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions, but also an occupational segregation by kinship position that narrowed the options for mothers who chose or needed to work.

In the early twentieth century, the vast majority of homeworkers were between the ages of 25 and 45, the prime childbearing and caring years, and nearly half of the women had children under three. Reformers estimated at least a quarter of a million homeworkers in New York City, the center of the home...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: White-Collar Home-Based Work—The Changing U.S. Economy and Family
• Part I Trends and Patterns in Home-Based Work
• Part II Forces Driving Home-Based Work
• Part III What Role Should the Government Play in White-Collar Home-Based Work?
• Conclusion: Directions for the Future
• List of Acronyms
• About the Contributors
• List of Conference Participants
• Index