Most children and “young persons” were, of course, receiving very low wages. Sidney Webb estimated the average earnings of girl manual workers under eighteen to be 7s. 6d. weekly ($1.80) and those of boys to be 10s. ($2.40).
Laws Affecting Children’s Employment
The chief forces in bringing about this diminution of child labor were, naturally, the laws forbidding child labor and requiring compulsory schooling. Children were required to attend school until they were fourteen unless they were thirteen and could secure a certificate of “proficiency” or of regular attendance. They might not work in factories until they had completed their school attendance, except that “half timers,” girls and boys of twelve, might work not more than thirty-three hours a week and were compelled to go to school half the time. Most of the “half timers” were found in the Lancashire cotton mills.
Children under eleven might not sell articles on the street, boys under fourteen might not work in coal mines, and the local authorities might forbid all work by children under fourteen, though unfortunately the power had been but slightly exercised.
The health and safety regulations affecting “young persons” under eighteen were similar to those for women, but somewhat more stringent. The lead processes which were forbidden women were also forbidden girls and boys under eighteen, together with a few other very unhealthy trades. In others where women might be employed, boys and girls under sixteen were forbidden to work. Children under fourteen might not be employed “in a manner likely to be dangerous to their health or education.”
In factories and workshops the same regulation of daily and weekly hours, night and Sunday work, applied both to adult women and to “young persons.” In addition the hours of boys under sixteen employed in mines were limited, and a maximum of seventy-four hours a week was fixed for shop assistants under eighteen.
The minimum rates set by the trade boards for boys and girls under eighteen generally rose year by year according to age from about 4s. weekly at fourteen (96 cents) to 10s. ($2.40) or 12s. ($2.88) at seventeen. Girls with the necessary experience in the trade received the full minimum rate for women at eighteen years of age, but the boys, who sometimes began at a higher rate than the girls, did not reach the full men’s rate till they were twenty-one or more.
Almost all these working conditions—the principal kinds of work women and children were doing, the rate of increase in their numbers, their wages and the legal regulations protecting them—were changed during three years of the world war.
CHAPTER III
First Months of the World War—
Labor’s Attitude toward the War—
Unemployment among Women Workers
August 4, 1914, was a momentous day for the working women and children of England. On that date the nation entered the great conflict which was not only to throw their men folk into military service, but to affect their own lives directly. It was to alter their work and wages and to come near to overthrowing the protective standards built up by years of effort. What was the attitude of the women and of organized labor in general toward the war and the industrial revolution which it brought in its train?