SHELLS AND SHELL CASES—IN THE FUSE SHOP—CARTRIDGES AND BULLETS
Arrived in the munitions factory, the new-comer, whether from a Government Training Centre, or from another occupation, is given two or three weeks’ trial on the task she has come to undertake. Only a very small proportion of the women offering their services—one experienced manager puts it at 5 per cent.—are found unsuitable, and these are discharged during the probationary period.
Except in the case of those who have received a preliminary training, or of those who have merely transferred their energies from other factory work, the average woman has, at the initial stage in the munitions shops, to overcome an instinctive fear of the machine. Occasionally, the fear is intensified into an unreasoning phase of terror. ‘One has to coax the women to stay with such as these,’ said one understanding foreman, pointing to a monster machine with huge-toothed wheels. ‘We don’t ask a woman to sit alone with these at first, for she wouldn’t do it, so we put a man with her, and let her sit and watch a bit, and after a while she loses her fear and won’t work anything else, if she can help it.’
The women, in fact, soon get attached to the machines they are working, in a manner probably unknown to the men. ‘I’ve been here a year on this machine, and I can’t do near so well on any other,’ is a remark many a girl has made to me as I have watched her on a difficult job. From time to time, a girl will even confess that she ‘can’t bear to think of some one on the night-shift working her machine’. An understanding has arisen between the machine and the operator which amounts almost to affection. I have often noticed the expression of this emotion in the workshops; the caressing touch of a woman’s fingers, for instance, as a bore is being urged on to the job on the machine. This touch, which cannot be taught, or imparted, enables the operation to be started in the most effective method possible, and goes to the making of an excellent and accurate worker.
The femininity of the worker has, however, its drawbacks, and for the sake of successful handling of women in the munitions factory, it is as well that these psychological points should be noted. If, for example, a machine is out of gear, or if the operation is held up for any other cause, the women munition makers will sometimes behave in an unreasonable manner, quite bewildering to a foreman accustomed only to dealing with men. The temporary cessation of work may make only a slight money difference to the woman operator by the end of the week: ‘not enough to fuss about,’ as the foreman judges. But the woman nevertheless often does fuss, because in her eyes the wages do not loom so large as the interruption to her work. She ‘hates standing-by’, she will say, for she cannot express the emotion of which she is but dimly conscious, that a woman’s deep instinct is to give freely of her fullness, and it frets her very soul to be balked in the middle of a job.
ASSEMBLING FUSES
COOLING SHELL FORGINGS
