The manager of a business in Manchester, who employs five shorthand typists, pays them from 15s. to 30s. He admits that it is impossible for the girls to live on their salaries unless they are at home with their parents, as is the case with all of them. But he says that it is unreasonable to expect him to give more than the market rates, and that for 30s. he gets excellent service. He suggests that the only way to raise wages is for the clerks to organise.
The principal of a high class typing office in the City, a woman of experience, who trains only a select number of educated girls, never allows a pupil from her school to begin at less than 25s. a week with a prospect of speedy increase. She pays her own translator £3, 5s. a week, and four members of her staff are paid at the rate of £160 a year.
Mr Elvin, Secretary of the Union of Clerks, tries to enforce a minimum wage of 35s. a week as the beginning salary for an expert shorthand typist, and this may be regarded as the present Trade Union rate. Mr Elvin's difficulty is chiefly with the girls themselves. They are so accustomed to the idea of women being paid less than men that it is not easy to get them to insist on equal pay. In one case he was asked to supply a woman secretary for a certain post. He agreed to find a suitable person if the firm would guarantee a commencing salary of 35s. a week. After some demur this was conceded, and he sent to a well-known school for three competent clerks that he might examine them and recommend the best of the three. After the test he asked them, in turn, what salary they expected. They were all over twenty-one years of age and all competent. One mentioned 25s., the second 23s., and the third £1 a week. On being asked, they said they knew they were worth more, but they thought that, as they were women, they would not get it.
Where there is no one to safeguard the interests of the clerk, an employer, on the look-out for cheap labour, finds it easily enough. The head of a big firm offered a French girl, an expert shorthand writer in three languages, 15s. a week, with a possible rise after three months. She finally accepted a post at 30s. a week as she could get nothing better through registries or by advertisement.
Unless a girl has a claim on a school where she has trained, or has influential friends, it is very difficult for her to get a post suited to her needs in London. The whole profession seems to be in a chaotic condition, and the chances through advertisement are haphazard and unsatisfactory. Employment bureaux maintain that there are more good posts than there are qualified women to fill them, but individual secretaries are timid about giving up unsatisfactory posts as they do not know how to get better.
Take the case of a private secretary to a Member of Parliament. He loses his seat, retires to the country, and gives up his London secretary. He gives her a number of introductions. These lead to nothing, and she is forced into the competition of the City. Her particular training is of no use in a commercial office, and her value falls to 30s. a week.
A woman with an intimate knowledge of women clerks and secretaries in the City for the past twenty years, says that it is difficult to overestimate the poverty of a vast number of girls. Many of them are the chief breadwinners of the family. She knows of half a dozen cases of men of forty and a little older who are living on the earnings of their daughters; there may be two girls in the family, one getting 12s. and the other 25s. a week.
The private secretary who lives in, has usually excellent food and pleasant surroundings, but in some cases the life is a solitary one. Unless there is a governess or other educated employeé in the household, she has no companionship. The salary varies from £30 to £120 and sometimes more. There is apparently no fixed rate. One lady writes:
"For two years I lived in the house of Sir——, the most hopelessly isolated and uninteresting existence, within the four walls of his study. A secretary should certainly stick out for a free week-end once a month when living in. Isolation is horribly bad for one."
The secretary living in with congenial literary or medical people, where she is made one of the family circle, has a happier time, but the payment is not high.