Women at Work

A Brief Introduction to Trade Unionism for Women

Mary Agnes Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351986229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book, first published in 1941, is concerned to relate the argument for Trade Unionism to the needs of women who work, whether in their homes or outside them. It is, in part, a historical analysis of the inter-war years, and it also prefigures the changes to women's working conditions brought about by the two World Wars. War necessitated the mass employment of women, and Trade Union action had greatly improved the position of the woman war-worker of 1941 compared to a quarter century previously. This invaluable book examines that Trade Union action.

CHAPTER VIII

A BRIEF SURVEY OF CERTAIN MAJOR EMPLOYMENTS

IN the original plan of this book, a main place was to have been filled by a detailed survey of conditions in every important trade and branch of work occupying women.

Circumstances have prevented this; and the pages that follow are admittedly incomplete. They cover only certain main trades in which active Unions exist.

I. THE TEXTILE GROUP IN GENERAL

In any survey of women at work, the Textile trades must come first. The processes of spinning, weaving, finishing, bleaching and dyeing cotton, wool, flax, hemp, jute and silk, whether natural or artificial, are among the oldest female employments. Eve traditionally spun, while Adam delved. The Hosiery and Clothing trades are closely allied to the Textiles and present many of the same features. At the weaving loom and in the card-room, and as knitters and garment-makers, women outnumber men.

The Textile trades occupy by far the largest body of industrial working women; they also represent by far the biggest Unionised group. In 1937, according to Ministry of Labour statistics, out of 1,170,000 employed in this group (excluding clothing), 720,000 were women. Out of a total of 450,000 cotton workers, 300,000 were women; out of a total of 223,000 in wool and worsted, 130,000 were women; out of 133,000 in hosiery, 108,000 were women; out of 45,000 in jute and flax, 30,000 were women.

Textiles are not less important from the Trade Union standpoint. In both Cotton and Wool, organisation has a long and honourable history. In Cotton, collective bargaining was established long before it was won in other industries. In Cotton, too, thanks to Trade Union effort, women have for long enjoyed, on the weaving side, a position of equality wellnigh unique.

More than a quarter of all women in Unions belong to the Textiles: there, indeed, they are almost as highly unionised as the men. The average rate—30 per cent.—for the Textiles as a whole is mainly due to the very much higher percentage in weaving. In Wool and Worsted the rate is low, and in Hosiery not high.

Employment in the textiles is skilled. The manipulation and control of costly and complicated machinery require no small intelligence and patience, as well as concentration and manual dexterity. The woman textile worker is proud of her capability and of economic independence.

On the other hand, the Textile trades are low wage trades. The wages of men are low, and in these trades as a whole the wages of women even lower. This is not only the case in Britain. It is found in every part of the world. In 1937, a very valuable study of World Conditions in the Textile Industry was made by the International Labour Office. The Report states:

“When the wage situation in the textile industry is compared with that in other industries, textile workers appear, on the whole, to be in a worse position than most workers in other industries in most countries …”

Low wages are general and international. So is the fact that industry employs a very high proportion of women: an average of 50 per cent. The proportion is even higher in Italy (75 per cent.), Portugal, Sweden, the U.S.S.R. and Japan; it is relatively low in the U.S.A.

These general low wage-rates account for the fact that the typical home in the textile towns, both in Lancashire and Yorkshire, is supported by and dependent on a family wage. In a high proportion of cases, the woman worker stays on in the mill when she marries, or, after a brief interval, returns there, if there are children. She carries a double burden, and its weight is obvious to the most casual visitor to a textile town.

Moreover, although relatively to other industries, the ratio of women in Lancashire Trade Unions is high, it is much lower for women than for men, although women outnumber men; and the Unions are run by men. The loyalty of the women is perfect. They pay their dues. They come out, when they are called. They work heroically, at election times. But their participation is passive, and their sense of responsibility small. Whether or no because of some innate conservatism in Lancashire, the men certainly do not push the women forward. In some branches they function as minor officers, but neither on the central committee of the Cardroom Amalgamation nor of the Weavers Association has a Woman ever sat, although in both these great Unions the women members are in the majority. There is only very rarely a woman in the delegations sent to Trade Union Congress year by year by the Textile Unions. In this and other respects, conditions in this great group of industries present, to anyone who believes strongly both in Trade Unionism and in women, a formidable challenge.

In the economic history of Great Britain, the importance of wool is older than that of cotton. The woollen industry was strongly established, notably in the West of England, before the Industrial Revolution. But the fortunes of Yorkshire, as of Lancashire, were transformed by the discovery of steam-power. For the best part of a century, it came to seem natural, and even inevitable and right, that raw material should be transported across leagues of sea to be worked by skilled fingers in the north of England into fabrics, then sent forth anew across the seas to clothe the peoples living as far off as the distant East. The drive to work and wealth was tremendous. There was of course a grim and terrible side to the swift enrichment the new power made possible; the towns that were flung up, carelessly, with a total indifference to light, to sanitation, to amenities even of the simplest type, on the sides of the deep valleys through which coursed the precious water-power, blotted out the beauties of the countryside, as the “dark, Satanic mills” they served and surrounded blotted out happiness and denied free growth to the men, women and little children who toiled within them, and suffered things of which, now, we can hardly bear to read. But England grew rich; Lancashire and Yorkshire were making it rich, and knew a queer, deep pride in the fact.

II. COTTON

This was specially true of Lancashire. On cotton, the Empire rose. “What Manchester thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow”; indeed, the free trade under which the vast, new wealth developed so fast was, on the continent of Europe, known as the Manchester system.

No break came in the abounding prosperity of the prosperous until the American Civil War. Then, the fires that slumbered hidden behind the taciturnity of the Lancashire mill-worker were suddenly and splendidly revealed. They were ready to risk all to save others, far away, from slavery. The view of the millowners was given in the jingle of the day:

Though with the North we sympathise,

It must not be forgotten

That with the South we’ve stronger ties

Which are composed of cotton,

Whereof our imports run into

A toll of many figures;

And where would all these imports be

Without the toil of niggers?

Far different was the outlook of the mill-workers. To them, those imports meant their livelihood; but, as so often, they could see a great issue more clearly than their “masters”. No mere materialists, these gritty folk; they knew what slavery was; they were for Lincoln and freedom, no matter if it meant, as it did, hard times.

For three-quarters of a century, exports of cotton manufactured goods were the backbone of British foreign trade; the most important element in Britain’s economic predominance. Even before the 1914 war, however, there was a change and, for Lancashire, an ominous change. Competition was growing; the European and American textile industries were growing; in the Far East, indigenous industry was growing, notably in Japan. Then war brought to cotton workers a period of hardship as severe as that they had known at the time of the American Civil War. As is stated in the Report of the Cotton Control Board:

The trade was called upon to suffer, like a non-combatant, from the blows of foe and friend alike; once again, a patient endurance was the supreme contribution it could render to the cause it had at heart. … Though, at one time, the production of the principal section of the industry was cut down to less than 40 per cent. of its normal, the cotton operatives contributed throughout an element of steadiness to the national temper.

Next, and not less serious in its effects on the future well-being of the industry and above all of the workers in it, was the financial frenzy which marked the brief and false post-war boom. A heavy price is still being paid for this unreal and perilous phase of superficial prosperity, during which mills changed hands at inflated prices and cotton shares soared to fantastic levels. It masked, most dangerously, the fact, only too patent when the spurt collapsed, that a change had taken place in the outlook for Lancashire, and one that was likely to be permanent. In the new factories of Japan, of India, and of China, an exploitation of cheap labour like that Lancashire had endured in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution was backed by modern, rationalised organisation, and selling and marketing systems far more centralised and concentrated than Lancashire’s. An epoch was drawing to an end. The last twenty-five years have been years of steadily contracting markets, production and employment.

Internal reorganisation is long overdue. It is necessary, if healthy industry is to survive. But few hope to see Lancashire wholly retrieve the position it enjoyed before the 1914 War; or a cotton industry affording the volume of employment it did in the past. With an insured working population of well over a million, the volume of employment was in 1912 only 712,000; in 1924, 610,000; and in 1936, 438,000. Production is now only half what it was before 1914; the volume of plant in operation has been reduced by a third. Unemployment and under-employment lay like a blight on the lives of its people until 1940. Wartime needs have produced a change, but one that can hardly be permanent.

Under such conditions, Trade Unionism has had a hard fight. Its history is a proud one. Collective bargaining was firmly established in cotton long before it was won in other great industries, and a system of uniform piece-work price-lists was secured. In the early history of Trade Union Congress, cotton leaders play a prominent part. One section of the trade—the weavers—enjoys the almost unique distinction of having secured for its women workers complete equality with their men colleagues so far as basic rates are concerned. Yet, under the crashing blow of the 1929 slump, the machinery of collect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• I Background of Fact
• II A B C of Trade Unionism
• III Organisation as it is To-day
• IV The Women’s Trade Union League
• V The Fight for Trade Boards
• VI 1914
• VII Post-War
• VIII A Brief Survey of Certain Major Employments
• IX Payment
• X Some Problems
• XI And Now?
• Appendix — Census 1931: A. Population; B. Occupational Groups
• Appendix To Chapter III — Women in the Principal Unions