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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baltimore became a center for the manufacture of men's clothing. Men's clothing was made in two steps. The first took place in factories, where bolts of cloth were cut into properly sized pieces by skilled cutters and trimmers. The pieces then had to be sewn together to make a finished garment?the second step. Clothing manufacturers subcontracted this work to sweatshop owners, who agreed to sew the garments at a fixed price for a fixed quantity. Sweatshop contractors, in turn, hired immigrant tailors and other workers, including many women and children, paying them as little as possible of the contract price and pocketing the difference.

Working Conditions in Sweatshops
The city's sweatshop workers suffered from low pay and from unsanitary and crowded conditions. Sweatshops were usually located in the upper floors of a rowhouse. Dirt and piles of clippings left from fabricating the garments covered the floors. Heat from the stoves that kept pressing irons hot combined with humid summers to make conditions oppressive. Sweat poured off workers—hence the name "sweatshop"—and the smell of sweat, stale tobacco, and cooking odors from other floors created a stench that one prominent labor leader, Jacob G. Schonfarber, thought "would make a hungry horse leave its oats."

He also accurately characterized the sweatshops as "disease breeding pest holes." Even excluding tuberculosis, some 2,000 Baltimoreans died each year of infectious diseases during the heyday of the sweatshops. The number of sweatshop workers who died from these diseases far exceeded the citywide average. Conditions at the workers' homes were little better. Their housing was cramped, and outdoor privies were often full and dirty.

Origins of the Sweatshops
Before the Civil War, women supplemented their household incomes by producing clothing to order. After the war, this cottage industry evolved into the sweatshop system. First, manufacturers took over the critical first step of cutting the fabric to the correct size. Then a few Russian Jewish home workshops began to hire non-family workers: men, women, and children to help complete garments.

Also at this time, persecution in Eastern Europe drove many Orthodox Jews to immigrate. The Jewish population of Baltimore expanded from 10,000 to 50,000 by 1900. These immigrant orthodox Jews were by far the largest group of workers in the sweatshops because employers in other industries usually declined to hire them. For one thing, a six-day workweek was standard, and the immigrants refused to work on Saturdays. Since other laws forbid anyone working on Sundays, the immigrants could only offer a five-day workweek. Unable to find work elsewhere, they became the employees of their co-religionists, the sweatshop contractors.

Union Organization of Sweatshop Workers
Although some labor leaders opposed immigration of foreign workers, both the trade unions and the Knights of Labor set about organizing those immigrant workers already present in the city into a union. Success was minimal until the immigrants became better acclimated to American conditions, but by 1890, the Knights had succeeded in organizing most sweatshop workers. The garment industry eventually included three local Assemblies of Knights, one of which was the Bohemian Tailors' Assembly.

The Knights of Labor and the United Garment Workers Union both sought to represent all workers in the clothing industry. This struggle complicated progress in achieving better pay and better working conditions for the sweatshop workers. Labor leaders generally opposed "dual unionism," believing that employers could play one labor organization off against the other. After fierce competition, the United Garment Workers by 1896 eliminated the Knights from the clothing industry, both at the factory and the sweatshop levels.

Cross-Class Reform Efforts
Besides the tactics of labor unions, another path to progress was open to the sweatshop workers of Baltimore: lobbying the legislature for reforms. A severe five-year depression in the mid-1890s helped mobilize reform-minded people across society. Thoughtful members of the middle and upper classes increasingly realized that rapid changes in society held great potential for social harm. These people joined forces with labor to seek state regulation of working conditions. Unemployment among sweatshop workers reached a probable peak of 27 percent in the winter of 1893-94, the first year of the depression, but the prospect of eventual legislative relief was a positive result, nonetheless.

Many groups, especially the city's clergy, came together with labor to found the Union for Public Good, the first cross-class organization in Baltimore lobbying continuously for social-justice legislation. Under the leadership of Charles J. Bonaparte, the city's leading reformer, the Union for Public Good lobbied successfully in 1894 for a statute—unfortunately too easy to evade—regulating cleanliness and crowding in the sweatshops. In 1902, however, labor and its allies persuaded the Maryland legislature to strengthen the 1894 law. This 1902 law provided for paid inspectors to enforce the 1894 statute. Four years later, the chief of the State Labor Bureau thought that "the old-time sweatshop has practically been eliminated in Baltimore."

Better pay and shorter working hours remained issues of contention between clothing workers and manufacturers. In 1915, struggles between labor unions to represent the city's clothing workers recurred when the Amalgamated Clothing Workers replaced an increasingly unresponsive United Garment Workers as representative of the city's tailors. A few sweatshops even reappeared from time to time, but working conditions were greatly improved in Baltimore's clothing industry.

—George Du Bois