is sometimes employed under conditions which are entirely
"unobjectionable." So too in the building trades, sub-contract is not
always attended by "sweating."

Secondly, much of the worst "sweating" is found where the element of
sub-contract is entirely wanting, and where there is no trace of a
ravenous middleman. This will be found especially in women's
employments. Miss Potter, after a close investigation of this point,
arrives at the conclusion that "undoubtedly the worst paid work is made
under the direction of East End retail slop-shops, or for tally-men--a
business from which contact, even in the equivocal form of wholesale
trading, has been eliminated."[20] The term "sweating" must be deemed as
applicable to the case of the women employed in the large steam-
laundries, who on Friday and Saturday work for fifteen or sixteen hours
a day, to the overworked and under-paid waitresses in restaurants and
shops, to the men who, as Mr. Burleigh testified, "are employed in some
of the wealthiest houses of business, and received for an average
working week of ninety-five hours, board, lodging, and £15 a year," as
it is to the tailoress who works fourteen hours a day for Whitechapel
sub-contractors.

The terms "sweating" and "sweating System," then, after originating in a
narrow application to the practice of over-work under sub-contractors in
the lower branches of the tailoring trade, has expanded into a large
generic term, to express the condition of all overworked, ill-paid,
badly-housed workers in our cities. It sums up the industrial or
economic aspects of the problem of city poverty. Scarcely any trade in
its lowest grades is free from it; in nearly all we find the wretched
"fag end" where the workers are miserably oppressed. This is true not
only of the poorest manual labour, that of the sandwich-man, with his