What should a woman do with wages to-day? Why, she has to have them to buy not only a proper breakfast, but to buy the children’s shoes and to pay the grocery bill and the coal bill and the crèche or the maiden aunt who keeps her house. Even if she has to have them to buy a new ribbon for her hat—why, she will go without her bacon to get it! What does a woman have to have wages for to-day? Oh, don’t ask foolish questions. At last she has those mysterious expenses, even as a man!
I think that Lloyd George was the first man to see it. Great Britain led the way with the now famous Orders L-2, which has come to be known as the Munition Women’s Charter. There is assured to women in the government factories and government controlled factories equal pay on piece work, equal pay on time work for one woman doing the work of one fully skilled man, and a minimum of £1 a week for all women engaged on work that was formerly customarily done by men. France followed with a declaration for equal pay for piece work for women. Governments have now enunciated the principle, have adopted it in practice and have recommended its justice to the private employer. Watch the skilled workman himself do the rest! Among the trade unions that have already stipulated equal pay for equal work for women doing war work in their craft are these: Engineering, cotton, woollen and worsted, china and earthenware, bleaching and dyeing, furniture and woodwork, hosiery manufacturing and the National Union of Railwaymen.
There has begun, like this, the greatest making over of all! Better than all the bouquets they’ve handed us is the making over of our wage envelope to man’s size! It isn’t finished yet. Girl lift operators in London still get 18 shillings a week on the same elevator for which men were paid 23 shillings. On the tramways of Orleans, France, women conductors get 2 francs and 2.50 a day for exactly the same work for which men were paid 4 francs a day. Nevertheless the new wage envelope is not so lady-like as it used to be. It’s coming out in larger and larger sizes. The London tailoring trade has increased the women’s minimum wage from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. In Paris the women conductors on the suburban lines have been advanced from the former 4 francs a day to the men’s 5 francs. Glasgow has 1020 women conductors at men’s pay, 27 shillings a week. London has 2000 women omnibus conductors with the wage formerly paid to men, 38 shillings a week. Even the German brewers have come to equal pay for women. Thousands of women in munitions in England are making 30 shillings a week. Some at Woolwich are making £2 to £3 per week, a few up to £4 a week. Henrietta Boardman at a skilled man’s job gets exactly a man’s pay, 1 shilling 1d. and 1 farthing an hour, amounting to about £4 a week. At the sixteenth annual congress of the Labour Party, held in Manchester, England, in January, 1917, the following resolution was introduced: “That in view of the great national services rendered by women, during this time of war and of the importance of maintaining a high level of wages for both men and women workers, the Conference urges, That all women employed in trades formerly closed to them should only continue to be so employed at trade union rates (the wages paid to men).”
For the new woman in industry is too efficient to be countenanced as a competitor in the labour market to offer herself at a lower wage than men. Trade unions may even admit her as a comrade, not yet but soon. For she’s safer to them that way! In England they are giving their cordial support to Mary McArthur with her organisation, The National Federation of Women Workers, in which there are already enrolled 350,000 women. In France they are backing Mme. Duchene, who in many of the little dim-lit cafés of Paris is holding meetings to organise the women in industry into what the French call “waiting unions.” Why waiting? Because the men’s trades unions are ready even to make over their constitutions to admit women to membership if necessary, that is, if women stay in industry. But they are waiting to see. And every little while they pull out from their pocket a soiled scrap of paper to look contemplatively at it. It is a government agreement. The Government has said the women will go home. But will they?
WOMEN WANTED AFTER THE WAR
Read the answer in the columns of “Casualties” appearing in the daily papers from Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London and now New York. How many millions of men have been drafted from industry into the awful battalions of death, no government says. But we at least know with too, too terrible certainty, that the jobs to which no man will ever return from the front, now number millions and millions. And there is going to be a world to be rebuilded! Every nation must enlist all of its resources if it is to hold its own in the international markets of the future. The new woman in industry, her country is going to keep right on needing in industry!
Her husband and her children may need her there! After the men that are dead, there are millions more, the maimed, the halt and the blind, for whom women must work for at least a generation after the fight is finished.
And her employer is going to need her! See all the rows and rows of little capstan lathes made smaller for a woman’s hand? See the slender, supple fingers so well adapted to, we will say, gauging. See Henrietta Boardman with her finer colour sense for tool tempering than any man in C-F-5. See, oh, see the girl who drills 1000 holes an hour, where the man drilled 500!
Listen to Sir William Beardmore, owner of a projectile factory at Glasgow, in an address before the Iron and Steel Institute: “In the turning of the shell body, the actual output by girls with the same machines and working under exactly the same conditions, and for an equal number of hours, is quite double that of trained mechanics. In the boring of shells the output is also quite double, and in the curving, waving and finishing of shell bases, quite 120 per cent. more than that of experienced mechanics.”
Again, in the workshops of Europe, above the rattle and the roar of crashing machinery in shop after shop, I hear the echo of some foreman’s voice: “Here and here and here we shall never again employ men because we cannot afford to.” In one great factory on the banks of the Seine where I inquired, “Are you going to keep women after the war?” an American superintendent who had been brought over from Bridgeport, Connecticut, answered promptly: “Sure, 9000 of ’em. We’re going to convert this into an automobile factory and we’re not going to throw all this specially made-to-measure-to-woman-size machinery on the scrap-heap, you know.”