This gives us one clue to the ability of the small workshop to survive--
its superior flexibility from the point of view of the employer.

"High organization makes for regularity; low organization lends itself
to the opposite. A large factory cannot stop at all without serious
loss; a full-sized workshop will make great efforts to keep going; but
the man who employs only two or three others in his own house can, if
work fails, send them all adrift to pick up a living as best they
can."[26]

Since a smaller sweating-master can set up business on some L2 capital,
and does not expect to make much more profit as employer than as
workman, he is able to change from one capacity to the other with great
facility.

2. The high rent for large business premises, especially in London,
makes for the small workshop or home-work system. The payment of rent is
thus avoided by the business firm which is the real employer, and thrown
upon the sub-contractor or the workers themselves, to be by them in
their turn generally evaded by using the dwelling-room for a workshop.
Thus one of the most glaring evils of the sweating system is seen to
form a distinct economic advantage in the workshop, as compared with the
large factory. The element of rent is practically eliminated as an
industrial charge.

3. The evasion of the restrictions of the Factory Act must be regarded
as another economic advantage. Excessive hours of labour when
convenient, overcrowding in order to avoid rent, absence of proper
sanitary conditions, are essential to the cheapest forms of production
under present conditions. It does not pay either the employing firm or
the sub-contractor to consider the health or even the life of the
workers, provided that the state of the labour market is such that they
can easily replace spent lives.

4. The inability to combine for their mutual protection and advantage of
scattered employes working in small bodies, living apart, and
unacquainted even with the existence of one another, is another
"cheapness" of the workshop system.

5. The fact that so large a proportion of master-sweaters are Jews has a
special significance. It seems to imply that the poorer class of
immigrant Jews possess a natural aptitude for the position, and that
their presence in our large cities furnishes the corner-stone of the
vicious system. Independence and mastery are conditions which have a
market value for all men, but especially for the timid and ofte