An equal scale of wages was found impossible of general application because men and women are seldom found doing exactly the same kind of work, and even when apparently the same there is generally a "net advantageousness" about the labor of the male employee; (") still the schedule of piecework in the cotton industries of Lancashire is the same for male and female operatives, and this is acknowledged as a triumph for the woman trade-unionists in this stronghold of trade unionism, the total female membership of the Lancashire cotton unions being about 146,000 in 1908, or approximately 75 per cent of the entire membership.

But the Lancashire unions must not be taken as indicative of the strength of women's trade organizations throughout Great Britain. In chronicling this triumph of organization, almost three-fourths of the women trade-unionists are disposed of, and because of the matured condition of trade unionism in this district before the advent of women into industrial organization there is not obtained an adequate idea of the difficulties ordinarily encountered by those attempting to combine women workers not massed in one district.

OBSTACLES TO ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN.

The achievement from the formation of a benefit club of 66 members in the bookbinding trade to the present enrolled membership of over 200,000 women trade-unionists has not been easy for the organizers. A survey of the obstacles encountered explains why stable organization has been so difficult in the great proportion of women's labor.

Certain theories in regard to women in the industrial system handicapped the initial efforts for organization. The recognition that “ for good or ill, in spite of the sentimental idea of woman's place being the home, women have come into industry to stay," was slow to come. (") "The gradual influx of women into almost every trade or industry and the consequent lowering of wages which their unregulated competition entails was necessary before the woman wage-earners could be considered sufficiently important as an economic factor to make protective combination among them practicable.

It is estimated that, outside of agricultural workers, there were, in 1906, 1,600,000 women workers in the trades and industries of Great Britain out of the total of 6,200,000 wage-earners, (c) and against this numerical strength there can be no absolutely prohibitive opposition to the attempts to solve by organization the problems inevitable to the advent of female labor in the industrial world.

a Sidney Webb, in the Economic Journal, Vol. I, pp. 635 et seq.

Mary R. Macarthur, in the Labor Record, June, 1905.

Ninth Annual Report of the General Federation of Trade Unions, 1908, p. 27.

OCCUPATIONS TEMPORARY.

The greatest difficulty in forming women's trade unions lies with the women workers themselves. While there is no sex inability to recognize the necessity for combination, the probability of marriage as a relief from work in the factory or workshop makes it difficult for the women to see any advantage in organizing, because they look upon their occupations as merely temporary.

The withdrawal from wage-earning on marriage has been found a sufficiently common occurrence to affect the stability of women as a labor class in Great Britain, but the force with which it militates against the facility of their organization is due to the fact that lack of permanence from the workers' point of view discourages the acquiring of technical instruction and lowers the standard of their work. The temporary nature of woman's employment prevents her becoming expert in the higher branches of a trade, and this want of technical training keeps her wages down, and it is in the low wages of women workers that the chief difficulty of effective organization lies. The trade-union leaders, therefore, have to cope with the apparently paradoxical situation of women being frequently poorly paid because they are not organized, and protective organization rendered impossible because they are too poorly paid to afford even the small dues attendant upon combination. An illustration of this appears in the following extract from the annual report of the Women's Trade Union League for 1906:

In June a number of bag makers employed by an East London firm went on strike for an increase in the price offered for certain bank cash bags of exceptionally thick paper. A meeting of the girls was held, an interview with the management obtained, and finally the demand of the girls for an increase of 2d. [4 cents] per 1,000 was conceded. An attempt was made to organize the girls, but owing to their low wages-averaging about 7s. 6d. [$1.83] weekly-and the consequent difficulty of paying contributions, they were only able to keep together for a few months.

LOW WAGES AND LOW STANDARD OF LIVING.

That the low standard of living necessitated by low rates of pay to women workers is one of the great difficulties of organization among them was set forth by the secretary of the Women's Trade Union League in her testimony before the House of Commons Select Committee on Home Work in 1907:

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Q. May I ask you if the general outcome of your experience is to support the evidence that it is very difficult to organize workers of this class, and consequently very difficult to carry on for them or with them an effort to improve their wages and conditions?

A. Yes; and I wish to make clear on that point that the low rates of wages are not confined to the home workers, and that the question

of organization is equally difficult with the similar class of labor in the factory-almost equally difficult when the wages are very low in the factory.

Q. And for the same reasons?

A. For the same reasons, yes.

Q. Which are?

A. Which are that it is difficult for the worker to afford to pay a contribution out of her slender wages; the wages vary so much, and it is difficult to get her to look far enough ahead to see what the benefits will be. * * * So that it is very difficult to form a permanent organization amongst lowly paid women workers, either in the factory or in the home. (")

*

But returning to the question of the extent to which the prospect of marriage has been found to militate against women's organizations, there is a note of optimism in the following opinion on this difficulty: Any investigator of women's work knows full well that what most handicaps women is their general deficiency in industrial capacity and technical skill. * * Doubtless it may be said that the men are to blame here; it is they who induce women to marry, and thus divert their attentions from professional life. But though we can not cut at the root of this by insisting, as I once heard it gravely suggested, on "three generations of unmarried women," we can do a great deal to encourage the growth of professional spirit and professional capacity among women workers, if we take care to develop our industrial organization along the proper lines. (")

While among labor leaders the anticipation of marriage as a solution to individual labor problems, and the consequent creation of the "casual amateur" class of operatives, is quoted as one of the chief deterrents to the spread of organization among women workers, throughout England married women are entering more and more into the industrial arena, and the fact that a girl is going to marry does not by any means necessarily mean that she is going to give up her occupation. In the centers of textile manufacture, in which the great majority of working women in Great Britain are employed, employment of married women is encouraged. There is a unanimous opinion among the organizers of women's trade unions that the difficulty of effecting concerted action through organization in any industry is greatly lessened where there is a proportion of married women among the employees. In Lancashire there are more women organized than in any other district, and while, according to officials of labor organizations, married women in the industries, constitute approximately 20 per cent of the total number of women employed there, it should be borne in mind that in the total of female wage-earners in all England there are about 1,000,000 married women to 3,250,000 unmarried.

Report from the Select Committee on Home Work, 1907, Minutes of Evidence,

p. 134.

Problems of Modern Industry, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, p. 96.

CLASS DISTINCTIONS.

Another great difficulty encountered in a high grade of woman workers is the class distinction adhered to in the different departments of employment. This has made for a long time the organization of such workers as stenographers and typists, clerks, shop assistants, nurses, civil servants, telephone and telegraph operators, and other professional and semiprofessional classes very difficult. For instance, in one public-service system in England, partly state owned and partly a private monopoly, the company has a large staff; but the women employed by the Government, although they are doing exactly the same work as the women employed by the company, regard themselves as superior in the social scale because they are civil employees, and they decline to be members of a society admitting the employees of the private concern.

The same thing is found in other branches of the civil service. Women who have passed a government examination and are employed in a department of the government service consider that a class barrier separates them from the girls who act as telephone clerks, perhaps in the same building.

Among shop assistants this feeling of caste distinction between the gradations of employment under the same roof has presented great difficulties to organization among the women engaged in the distributive trades. For example, the girls who are employed in the showroom of large department stores in London and who, by reason of their occupation as models and exhibitors, wear well fitted, modish dresses, consider that the girls downstairs, who are behind a counter selling handkerchiefs or ribbons, belong to a different social world.

It was not until 1891 that any permanent organization among the shopgirls of England was accomplished. In that year the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants was formed. This union now has 22,000 members out of the 500,000 engaged in the distributive trades. (a) The membership in London is 5,500, and only about onethird of the members are women.

There is now a small trade organization in London among the women engaged in dressmaking, but for a long time all attempts to unite these workers for an agreement as to hours of work and continuance of employment during the slack season were combated by the women themselves, who considered that membership in a union would sacrifice their status of gentility. They would accept 20 hours' continuous stretches of work in the rush season, and starvation in the time when the fashionable world was sated with gala garments, rather than have their occupation put in the category with the factory

"These figures are given on the authority of the secretary of the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks.

workers. But it should be remembered that in England this class feeling is not confined to women, but also has been found a difficulty in the organization of men employed in the highly skilled trades.

LIABILITY TO VICTIMIZATION AND APATHY.

Certain characteristics attributable to sex do, however, augment the difficulty of preserving a stable organization among industrial women. The secretary of the Women's Trade Union League, who has actively pursued the work of propagating women's trade unionism in Great Britain, gives the following as her opinion on this point:

The woman worker is more submissive than the man worker, more inclined to underestimate her own value, and more easily overdone by an unscrupulous employer. It has frequently been experienced that women who join a union, or maybe leading it, are victimized by an employer who would not do so in the case of a man. A valuable example of this may be seen in the case of the

*

* * *

trade of

* . Here, while the masters' association, recognizing the men's union, voluntarily sat around an arbitration table to discuss grievances and agreed to minimum rates of payment and other important questions, they absolutely declined to admit representation from the women workers, also organized, despite the fact that the men themselves tried to get the employers to recognize that women should be included in the agreements. Therefore it may be said that women are - more liable to victimization and consequently less likely to form stable organizations.

Another difficulty upon which almost every leader of women's trade unionism throughout the large industries of Great Britain remarks is the apathy of the woman worker toward any change in the condition of labor to which she has been accustomed. This is largely a matter of temperament. In England, except in the sweated industries, the competition of foreign labor is a negligible quantity, and to the mass of native women workers who have, as they say in Scotland, "been born with a hank of yarn in their hands," custom is regarded as law, and unless the infringement upon their wages or mealtime is flagrant they are slow to respond to a call for organization. When combination is effected the management and the paid secretaryship of the union are more often than not given to male unionists, and the female members never think of conducting initiative action. Even among women trade unions where age has lent dignity and stability to their organization this difference is apparent. In one of the towns in Lancashire, where women operatives in the cotton textile manufacture are perhaps as successfully organized as anywhere else in Great Britain, this condition was found.