Much that was abnormal and bound to be injurious to health if long continued has been brought within manageable limits. Excessive overtime and Sunday labor have been checked and as nearly as possibly abolished.... In general the experience of war emergency work, far from making employers in love with extended hours, appears to be producing a contrary effect and bringing about a sense of the importance of so limiting the period of employment as not to produce any feeling of exhaustion or even of marked fatigue.
Much attention was paid to the question of Sunday work by the interdepartmental hours committee. In January, 1916, it obtained a weekly rest period for all women in explosives factories under continuous operation. It soon secured the entire discontinuance of Sunday work by “protected persons” in national projectile and shell factories except a short shift in the projectiles establishments for “rectifying” shells and cleaning the shop. Night work for women, which was never recommended for abolition during the emergency, of course persisted and even tended to increase, as more and more plants went into continuous operation. Especially in shell factories large numbers of women worked at night. Fewer factories worked overtime without permission, though some prosecutions were necessary in the woolen industry. The idea that the factory acts were in abeyance till the end of the war was disappearing. With an increased recognition of the injury done to both quality and quantity of work by fatigue the powers available under overtime orders were in some cases not fully used by the employers. One employer remarked that overtime orders were “like a drop of brandy, a useful thing to keep in the house, but you didn’t want always to be taking it.”
The developments in the regulation of women’s hours noted in 1916 were typical of the course of events through the latter part of the war. “The tendency to reduce hours continues,” said the factory inspectors in 1917. “Cases in excess of the factory acts are now rare.” In a report published in 1917, the Health of Munition Workers Committee made an important contribution to standards of working hours by stating that the hours “provisionally” fixed were probably too long, except for very short periods or for very light work carried on under exceptionally good conditions. While the hours which produced the largest output varied according to the nature of the work, age and sex of the workers, and conditions inside and outside the factory, in general “the time was ripe” for a further marked reduction in hours. For certain processes weekly hours could “advantageously be reduced to a total of from fifty to fifty-five” and even lower limits might give an equally good output.[183] No action was taken during the war period by officials to put these recommendations into effect.
The factory inspection department of the Home Office had outstanding in 1917 emergency orders permitting overtime only in various textile industries, where hours were normally limited to fifty-five instead of sixty, in munitions and shipbuilding where the emergency orders of 1916 were continued, in boot factories and in flour mills, oil and cake mills and malting, where night work by women was permitted.[184] Sunday work was strictly limited, being allowed only where women replacing men were obliged to work a few hours on Sunday, as in dairy plants, in temporary emergencies in munition factories and in continuous processes, provided another weekly day of rest was given.
An indication of the actual hours worked in munition plants at this time may be obtained from a survey made by the factory inspectors in 1917 of 177 factories in the southeastern part of England which employed 27,000 persons. The largest group, sixty-two, worked between fifty-five and sixty hours weekly, while fifty-one worked from fifty to fifty-five hours. In thirty-two cases, weekly hours were sixty, and in only five cases were hours longer. On the other hand, twenty plants worked from forty-five to fifty hours and seven less than that number. The factory inspectors stated that the number of “temporary exemptions” to the regular overtime order for munitions work had become very small. In November, 1917, Mr. H. W. Garrod of the Ministry of Munitions gave the average working hours for women munition makers as fifty-two to fifty-four, with one to four hours of overtime. He claimed that the Ministry wanted to do away with overtime altogether, but that the women objected, because it would reduce their earnings. The longest legal hours were apparently in shipbuilding and repairing, where the inspectors felt its harmfulness was reduced because “overtime was intermittent and the work done by time and at a leisurely pace.”
Evidence as to the development of eight hour shifts is somewhat conflicting. The factory inspectors reported that in 1917 the system had “no general development.” By April, 1917, however, an investigator for the British Government was said to report that women were working eight hour shifts in all government plants, not through any general order but through the action of various local committees to whom the power of regulating hours had been entrusted,[185] and a year later, in April, 1918, the final report of the Health of Munitions Workers Committee speaks of the “increasing number of firms” which had substituted three eight hour for two twelve hour shifts.
Authorities agree, however, that Sunday work had been “reduced to small dimensions” before the end of 1917. In April, 1917, almost all Sunday work by all classes of workers was abolished in every controlled and national munition plant.[186] The Ministry ordered that the customary factory holidays be observed by all controlled establishments in the summer of 1917. Much night work continued up to the very end of the war, being found on a large scale in munition factories and elsewhere, principally where women were replacing men in occupations in which night work had been customary before the war. The factory inspectors sometimes sanctioned night shifts of as long as twelve and a half or thirteen hours, including meal times.
In spite of the various improvements and a much more sympathetic attitude toward restrictions on the part of employers and employes alike, a woman labor leader asserted as late as July, 1917, that “the factory act was in ruins,” and that dangerous privileges “had been accorded to certain classes of employers.”[187] Yet it is probable that for the later months of war this is an unduly pessimistic point of view.
For 1918, the last year of the war, the Chief Inspector of Factories reports that “there are no women and young persons being employed beyond the weekly limit of hours allowed by the ordinary provisions of the Factory Act and the employment of women on Sundays has practically ceased.”[188] The report states also that there had been a great advance in the voluntary movement to reduce hours for all classes of labor.
In summing up the war time experience on hours of work and having regard both to the health of employed women and proper leisure for them as human beings, the Committee on Women’s Employment of the Ministry of Reconstruction make the following recommendations for future action: