Especially in industrial occupations women had been largely confined to the least skilled and lowest paid lines of work. To a deplorable extent they had been the “industrial drudges of the community.” It is, for instance, officially estimated that out of the 100,000 “home workers,” whose work has become almost synonymous with “sweating,” three quarters were women. An estimate by the English economist, Sidney Webb, of the wages of adult women “manual workers” in 1912[9] placed their average full time weekly earnings at 11s. 7d. ($2.78). Making allowance for an annual loss of five weeks a year from sickness, unemployment and short time—a conservative estimate—average weekly earnings throughout the year would be about 10s. 10½d. ($2.61). Only 17 per cent of the women regularly employed were believed to receive more than 15s. ($3.60) weekly, and those averaged only 17s. ($4.08) for a full time week. The average full time wages of adult male manual workers were estimated by the same authority at 25s. 9d. ($6.18) a week.
Legislative Protection for Women
Since the forties, however, much special legislative protection had been extended to women workers mainly through the factory acts. There were numerous regulations to protect their health and safety. They might not be employed in cleaning moving machinery, nor in underground mines, nor in brass casting nor in certain processes exposed to lead dust. In other lines where women were in danger of contracting lead poisoning, they were allowed to work only if found in good condition through monthly medical examination. In some unhealthy trades separate rooms for meals were required and in some dangerous ones women were obliged to cover their hair. Separate sanitary accommodations were compulsory in all factories and workshops. A provision which had proved of less value than anticipated because of the difficulties of enforcement, forbade a factory employer knowingly to give work to a woman within four weeks after the birth of her child. Wherever women were employed as “shop assistants” one seat was to be provided for every three assistants.
For factories and workshops an elaborate code limiting working hours had long been in existence. No work on Sunday or at night was allowed, and only a half day on Saturday. The maximum weekly hours permitted were fifty-five in textile factories and sixty in “nontextile factories and workshops.” Daily hours were ten in the former, and in the latter ten and a half, with, in certain cases, a limited amount of overtime. The time to be allowed for meals was also strictly regulated.
The latest phase of regulation of working conditions, the fixing of minimum wages, was begun in 1909 by the Trade Boards Act. Minimum wage rates might be fixed for trades in which wages were “exceptionally low” by boards made up of employers, employes and the general public. Though the wage fixing covered both men and women, the large proportion of women employed in the trades first regulated made the law of special importance in a consideration of women’s work. The trades covered up to the outbreak of the war included certain branches of tailoring, shirt making, some forms of chain making, paper box, sugar confectionery and food preserving, and certain processes in lace finishing. The minimum rates fixed for experienced adult women in these trades varied from about 2½d. (5 cents) to 3½d. (7 cents) an hour amounting on an average to approximately 14s. a week ($3.36) for full time work. The awards appear to have been effective in raising the wages of a considerable number of low paid women.
Child Labor
In matters of industrial employment the English recognized not only “children” under fourteen, whose employment was in great part prohibited, but also a special class of “young persons,” whose employment was subject to special regulation. Boys and girls under eighteen whom the law allowed to work were in the latter group. The 1911 census returned 98,202 boys and 49,866 girls, or a total number of 148,068 children between ten and fourteen years as “gainfully employed” in Great Britain. Mr. Frederic Keeling, an authority on English child labor conditions, believed, however, that this number was an underestimate because it failed to include many children employed outside of school hours. In 1912 he set the number of working children under fourteen in the United Kingdom at 577,000, of whom 304,000 were employed outside of school hours, and the rest under special clauses of the factory and education acts.[10]
The great majority of the boys and girls in Great Britain went to work before they were eighteen years old. There were 1,246,069 male “young persons” and 902,483 female “young persons” gainfully employed in Great Britain in 1911.[11] In England and Wales in that same year 309,000 boys and 241,000 girls of seventeen were at work, and only 20,600 boys and 87,400 girls of that age were “unoccupied.”
The 1911 census figures covering the principal lines of work in which girls and boys under eighteen are employed had, in November, 1917, been published only for England and Wales. For boys these occupations were the building trades, the metal trades, textiles, agriculture, mining, outdoor “domestic service,” messenger and porter work—which is in most cases a “blind alley” occupation—and commercial employment, whereas for girls they were textiles, clothing, domestic work and commercial employment. The girls, it may be noted, were found mainly in the same kinds of work as were adult women.
While, as has been previously mentioned, there was a relative increase in the number of young working girls between fifteen and twenty, the number of working children under fourteen was falling off. There were 97,141 boys and 49,276 girls under fourteen, a total of 146,417, employed in England and Wales in 1911. In 1901 working boys under fourteen numbered 138,000 and working girls 70,000, a total of 208,000. In Scotland there were but 1,600 young children of these ages at work in 1911, and 17,600 in 1901.