Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a hard, demanding job.

1832		Egan Bk of Sports 19: It would be lucky for them if they ever caught him in such a predicament again — it was a regular sweater!
1861		(con. 1840s–50s) H. Mayhew London Labour and London Poor I 126/2: The business is a sweater, sir; it’s heavy work.
1926		L. Esson Bride of Gospel Place 109: Smithy: Talk about a sweater. It was head-down from coat-off to stagger-home.

2. a harsh, demanding employer.

1846		Manchester Guardian 21 Mar. 7/4: A sort of middlemen, called ‘sweaters’, who get it [i.e. tailoring work] by men and women at starvation prices .
1849		C. Kingsley Alton Locke (1850) 97: Were not the army clothes, the post-office clothes, the policemen’s clothes, furnished by contractors and sweaters, who hired the work at low prices, and let it out again to journeymen at still lower ones?
1859		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc. 105: sweater common term for a ‘cutting’ or ‘grinding’ employer.
1867		Sportsman 4 Apr. 2/1: Notes on News [...] Victims of Whitechapel Jew ‘sweaters’.
1870		Hotten Sl. Dict.
1886		Daily News 21 Feb. in Ware (1909) 237/2: In the second number of the Charity Organisation Review there is a short account of a co-operative needlework experiment, the object of it being to emancipate poor workwomen from the ‘sweaters’.
1888		East London Obs. 30 June 3: [headline] A Sweater’s Meeting.
1891		J.A. Riis How the Other Half Lives 121: Many harsh things have been said of the ‘sweater,’ that really apply to the system in which he is a necessary, logical link. It can at least be said of him that he is no worse than the conditions that created him.
1895		Truth (Sydney) 28 Apr. 1/6: The Japs will soon [...] (like other Great Powers) be in the front ranks as ‘scabs’ and ‘sweaters’.
1907		Sun. Times (Perth) 12 May 4/7: The Sweater-Boss bloats in his pride / [...] / With slaves famine-thin in his shop.
1910		Sun. Times (Perth) 17 Apr. 2nd sect. 9/1: They Say [...] That this notorious sweater hasn’t a friend in the district. That his ‘friends’ are raising a subscription to send him to the South Seas.
1914		R. Tressell Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1955) 604: The surest way to obtain better conditions would be to elect gangs of Liberals and Tory land-grabbers, sweaters, swindlers and lawyers to rule over them.
1929		Brisbane Courier 30 Sept. 12/4: A plot by the Bruce-Page Govrnment ‘to reduce the basic wage’ [...] and to give local protection to the ‘sweaters’.

3. in specific use of sense 2, a pimp.

1861

N.E. Police Gaz. (Boston, MA) 5 Oct. 5/2: Carrie Western has left [...] bag and baggage. Her sweater will have to patronize swill barrels [ibid.] John Winslow Brown [...] is a sweater for Maria Hall, alias Jo. Brown!

4. (US campus) a worrier.

1966		Current Sl. I:1 4/2: Sweater One who worries unnecessarily, esp. about minor matters.
1976		(con. 1969) C.R. Anderson Grunts 137: At least that worthless, chickenshit sweater of an XO, that panicky bastard Lancaster is dead.