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passed our act that women should not work at night. During the war women did work in large numbers in our munition plants at night, in night and day shifts. That has been one letting-down of standards that we have done in this struggle. People have said-and I don't know in one sense whether it is really fair, it is well to remember we were in a very desperate position and people say we acted in the first part of the war in a sort of spurt, as if we believed it would soon be over, and we could throw everybody in, the soldiers and the workers, throw them into work just as hard as they could, believing that this spurt would finish the war. Well, there may have been something in that view of what we did. I think there is also the fact, as I say, that there was desperate need and as you know we did not possess the factories, arsenals and plants necessary until they were actually built and made over for war work. We had very heavy conditions among the men, where some went into the shipyards on Friday night and did not come out literally until Sunday morning. I have known of foremen who worked 94 hours a week for the greater part of two years in our country; and the most impossibly heavy work was done, chiefly, as I have said, by our men, and chiefly of course by the skilled men, men like the foremen in the plants. But the women also have in many cases had long hours. The Woolwich Arsenal women's hours are roughly twelve, including their meal hours. Looking at them it is very difficult to get a text for talking about overwork and hard-driven people, because despite the work, they look extremely well. That brings us to another feature that we have vastly improved in the general conditions of our war work. You all know of course that before the war we had our factory acts, and we laid down very definite principles about our overtime. We had our women inspectors as well as our men; our acts made definite conditions for all factory life; but we did not possess welfare workers to any extent at all. When Mr. Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions, and set up the ministry and started on the dilution problem, he set up a department under Arnold Rowntree to deal with the welfare problem. They have carried out a policy that I think you know broadly, of putting into all the government's plants and into the controlled plants under the ministry, which num

bered about seven thousand, women whose duty it was to look after the welfare of the workers in the factory. Our ideal always was that the women used in the management scheme should be the persons who took up the work of hiring and dealing with the question of employing and dismissing. The welfare work has included a great deal of canteen service, the serving of meals to our workers, along the lines of your cafeterias, and the canteens have been extremely successful, and have of course worked in with our other problems of saving food, because it is a great saving of food to have it done in that scientific way. The first attempt to help the men-again it was the men chiefly who suffered in the early dayswas done by some of our own voluntary societies, the women going down through the night shifts and giving the men coffee and sandwiches, and what we could, in order to give them what they needed.

The criticism of our welfare workers, to take the other side, has come from trade-union women who believe that all of these welfare women in the factories should be government officers, that they should not be paid by the employer, because they contend that that nullifies to a certain extent her will and her power to make changes. But I think any fair observer of our conditions will say that the welfare work among our women, and in general, the humanizing importance of the work has been very marked indeed during the war. The women have worked heavily, and there is one other group of our people who, I think, have had very heavy work in the war, the young boys and the girls, especially the boys. The boy whenever he left school in our country was put to work. The farmers in the rural districts have used their local powers to take boys away from school in the early months of the summer and put them on the land, so that there has been a big fight about the treatment and use of the quite young people of the country; and we have had to watch very carefully to protect the young girls in plants who have been used sometimes, as inspectors tell us in their reports, in a way that they should not have been used, in order to get the full use of labor that could be got. So, we have that to deal with..

Now, to talk of the children, the Fisher Education Act, which

has just gone through, is going to destroy forever a thing that I feel has been a disgrace to England for years and years past, and that is the half-time system in Lancashire. For years I never used to make a speech without attacking it with great vigor, and when you did that in Lancashire you would be amazed how people would rise up and defend it. That is going to be put an end to.

You know how we have dealt with our munition people, particularly in the matter of housing. Gretna, for instance, is a new city. Eltham in Kent has been built up, and some of the naval bases; the government has done a great deal of building, and is housing the girls in great buildings, like the Coventry houses that hold about one hundred to two hundred girls. They have been looked after by welfare people, and that has been another section of our handling of women in the war.

Then there is the great question of wages, which I gather you have also, as you have spoken several times of our old minimum-wage boards, which really were established to deal with our sweating conditions, and in the war the question of women's wages has naturally been, as everywhere, a question of great contention. One of the means devised to meet it, circular L 1, a resolution enactment, was passed by the Ministry in agreement with the unions at the end of 1915, and it was enforced, laying down the principle that piece and time rate work, skilled work, should be paid for exactly the same for women as for men. In the case of the oxy-acetylene welders some means were devised to secure the enforcement of that principle now and then; but if you take the broad condition we do not find, if you take all our women in munitions, and so on, that they are paid at the same rate even if you try to allow, as you must, for the difference in work. Some people estimate that broadly the difference in payment comes down to somewhere around four dollars a week.

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We all know the wage boards of the government know their work in settling the amounts of bonuses to be added to the worker's wages; additional bonuses, revised each three or four months, to meet the cost of living. One of the recent strikes of our women, the strike of the bus girls

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in London, was not on the question of wage. tramway or railway system in our country employing women that does not give them the same wage as the men. That is true, but when the bonuses were given out, when the last bonus was due in London, they made the bonus apply only to the men and left the women out, and the women struck for the additional bonus. They were supported by the trade-union men who struck with them, for they contended that the only safety for our men after demobilization is this equal standard. They say that if the women are going to have a lower payment than the men, the men will never get the positions back. If you take the whole country we are, as I suppose every country is, a curious jumble on the question of equal pay. If you hold any executive post in our country, the women receive equal pay with the men. Before the war our insurance commissioners, our women, received $5,000, just the same as the

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I know of no woman holding an executive post in the war where she did not receive the same as the men in the departments. Frequently they received higher, if they were on a higher plane than the men in the department work. you take the higher professions, like medicine, you have the same standard. If you move into teaching during the war, the treasury has given a higher additional grant in order to secure higher payments for our teachers. We find the amazing fact that the National Union of Teachers has never declared in favor of the principle of equal pay for equal work, although every other teachers' organization has. In this period of adjustment and reconstruction that we are coming to, I know that part of our problems will consist in working at this problem of payment to women. We have groups, incidentally, in our country who believe in some system of endowment of motherhood, and we have other groups, quite an active group, who contend that a man is in a different position as regards payment; but the majority group contends that the only sound principle is to pay for the work irrespective of the sex of the worker. That is going to be one of our questions. Most of you I am sure feel as I do that you cannot talk of the problem of women in industry now without realizing that the whole question hangs on our policy in dealing with the problems that we are confronted with at this moment.

You cannot talk about what possibility there is, for instance, of our women being flung out and suffering hardships, you cannot talk about that apart from talking of our financial policy after the war, what we are going to do to get our currency right, to cut down the inflation, what we are going to do as a country to encourage new industry, what we are going to do to assist us to find our markets in the world. We cannot think of the problem of women except in relation to the whole great policy of our country, and I am one of those people who believe that if our own country handles the conditions with which we are faced now wisely there is no really serious problem at all, because I maintain that there is work for all, for all of the women who wish to stay in work, and for all of the men. We have altogether in our whole Empire about a million dead, and about eighty per cent of them are our own island dead. We have about two hundred and seventy thousand disabled men. You can see that if we do the work that is clamoring aloud to be done in our country there is great work for all of us. We need at least three hundred thousand houses in order to give us the houses that we must have, that our young wives and the husbands returning from the front must have in order to begin housekeeping. We must develop our transportation, and I believe it is clear that we are going to nationalize our railroads, hold them as government industries. That seems to be emerging at this election. We want to develop transportation, to develop electric power and those schemes of housing which are going to be partially financed by the treasury. We want afforestation, and that is the kind of work we feel can be done, if there is any period of depression, as we go along. You may say, as people have felt it right to say, "What is the possibility of your people's purchasing power in connection with those schemes for doing great work within the country?" Well, when we started in this war three hundred and forty-five thousand of our people held government securities, consols. Now that we have finished the war seventeen million people hold these war bonds of ours, and if you go by saving, our workers never saved anything like the sums which they have saved in this war. If you will take the ordinary working-class home in our country, every one

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