"A very important, perhaps from the economic point of view the most important, effect of legislation has been to spread the period of work more uniformly through the week, month, and year than had been the case before regulation" (p. 5).
"The tendency to put off giving orders to the last moment is easily checked when the customer can be met with a universal legal prohibition" (p. 7).
"Restriction is met by adaptation of manufacture or rearrangement of numbers employed and time at which work is done, women being still employed at the work" (p. 13).
"Except for a few complaints as to the abolition of the possibility of payment for overtime, which, as has been pointed out, by no means prove any loss of earnings ... the Committee have no record ... of any loss of wages or earnings traceable to the [Factory] Acts" (p. 25).
[67] Presented at Southport in 1903.
Thus, it will be seen that the loss of overtime is not necessarily a loss of work, but a re-distribution (and an economical one, too) of the times at which work is done, and does not therefore mean a loss in income, but a steadying and regulation of income.
Nevertheless, before the re-organisation which has been consequent on Factory legislation, overtime and nightwork were necessary in order to turn out a certain volume of trade by a certain number of workpeople, and the influence of restrictive legislation has been shown in the following directions:—
1st. An increase in the class of workers called "job hands";
2nd. An enlargements of the permanent staff;
3rd. A rearrangement of the employment of male and female labour.