Did you know that the women employed as seamstresses during the early Victorian era had to pay for the needle and the thread out of their pay packets? They were treated as independent contractors or as risk-taking capitalists. Later on seamstresses had to pay rent for the sewing machines their work required:
The East End seamstress could expect to take home a pitifully low wage. In the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System 1888-1890, Miss Beatrice Potter (a most famous female Fabian socialist reformer) and others, gave evidence of the atrocious working conditions and meagre pay. Mrs. Lavinia Casey made shirts at 7 pence a dozen. She normally worked from seven in the morning to eleven pm at night. After deducting time devoted to her children she averaged twelve hours work a day.
In that time she normally made two dozen shirts. Her total daily wage amounted to one shilling and two pence. From her weekly earnings she had to deduct two shilling and sixpence for the hire of her Singer sewing machine plus one shilling, to one shilling and three pence for sewing machine oil and sewing thread. She could barely keep her family on this income. She was in arrears with her payments to the Singer Company, but her livelihood would be threatened if the sewing machine were taken away.