justment and was the least easy to adjust. Every device that was possible was provided, regardless of expense, to minimize the strength required in lifting, hauling, loading, stoking, scraping boilers, and the specially hot and heavy work done in foundries and retort- houses, chemical works and tanneries. At the end of it all, the em- ployment of women on this work was costly and ineffectual. Three women were needed on an average to do the job of two men, and at special points one man's work would occupy two or even *hree women, while the hardest jobs had now to be performed continuously, instead of as part only of their task, by the remaining men.
On repetition work the sweeping changes that were made were due not so much to the sex of the new operators as to war conditions. The subdivision practised was the natural result of mass production, and has remained where mass production has remained, though men have replaced women at the machines. The fool-proof devices were a protection against the lack of experience of the dilutees, whether men or women, and they too have survived as a means of decreasing worry and improving output.
On neither of these grades, where they already existed as such, did the men make serious opposition to the coming of women. The general unions to which most of them belonged were not before the war the centralized and powerful bodies they are now ; they had been able to establish few privileges, and their men were at the mercy of the recruiting officers. They therefore treated the matter as one of individual feeling rather than of labour policy, and were entitled to more gratitude than they received from their country for the un- selfish way in which most of them helped the women who were to fill their places and make it possible for them to be spared for the army. It was the splitting up of the skilled work, and the consequent reduction of many of its parts to a semi-skilled rank, which produced the bitter opposition which increased rather than diminished as the war went on. This was due in some degree to mass production but more to the shortness of the training which was all the urgency of the times allowed. The strength of the women was insufficient for labour- ing work, but by the end of the war it became clear that they did not lack the intelligence and character necessary for the acquirement of an exacting technique. What follows is the official verdict of the Ministry of Munitions:
" Many women might become skilled mechanics, given the necessary training and experience. But these were precluded by the conditions under which munitions were manufactured. Intensive training sufficed to meet the emergency of the moment, but it was no substitute for a thorough apprenticeship; and the (male) ap- prentices who were up-graded under schemes of dilution suffered like others from premature specialization. Subject to this limita- tion, there were few branches of skilled work which some women did not execute with success. They made tools and gauges to the finest limits, they set up complex automatics, they machined and fitted the most delicate mechanisms, they inspected the rifling of guns and mastered the use of the micrometer and vernier, they conducted scientific tests in the laboratory, they acted as charge hands and forewomen."
Had the war continued they would have been used upon this work jn increasing numbers'. As things were, however, it was more econom- ical, given the large output, to train them and the male dilutees with them, to do one particular part of the complex job which a skilled man had been accustomed to carry out, and whose more difficult portions only were now left for him. Most of the work of a skilled category given to women was actually work which had been treated in this manner. For such subdivided tasks they were found perfectly suitable, and the checks to their more extensive use were, in the first place, the uneconomical rates of wages which the men's unions had imposed as the price of dilution; and secondly, the almost des- perate opposition with which their employment was met by the skilled men. It was not only the employers who objected to giving a woman the full rate of a skilled man when all she could do was one among his many different jobs : the men actually working with them, however much they agreed in principle with the system of the rate for the job, could not bear with equanimity the sight of raw, un- qualified women receiving wages almost equal to their own.
The obstructive policy pursued by the skilled unions was directed as much against mass production in general as against women in particular. They knew that the women must go after the war; but they feared, not unnaturally, lest the new methods and processes should stay, which meant working toward a state when the skilled man who could not find employment in the tool-room, or as a super- visor, or on experimental work, would find himself degraded to the position of a machine-minder, with his privileges gone, the interest of his life as a craftsman gone, his standard of living in danger, and the prospect before him of becoming gradually merged in the masses of the semi-skilled. Much of this had happened in America, and the utterances of certain employers gave ground for thinking that in England it was at least desired. In small sections of the metal trades they could almost see it coming to pass. On sheet-metal work, for instance, machines and processes were brought in by which women and boys could perform rapidly and cheaply work which had been slowly done by hand by skilled sheet-metal workers. The men were released for the army and left knowing that their work would be gone if ever they came back. It was no wonder that opposition was felt at such a time to this acceleration of the process by which in-
dustry develops for the benefit perhaps of future generations but to the hurt of those whose whole equipment for life is their suitability to one of its changing industrial phases.
If this was the origin of the continued disputes that attended the incoming of the women, they were embittered by the fact that nothing was more vague, or varied more from district to district, than workshop practice with regard to demarcation of work. Some shops were entirely staffed by skilled men and apprentices ; others did the same work with a few skilled men and a residuum of semi-skilled machinists, unskilled men and boys. Claims were put forward by the unions that work should be treated as skilled and carry the skilled man's rate which would have covered half the work habit- ually done by boys; and the employers on their side seemed to con- sider that the slightest change in a job handed over to women dropped it at once to the minimum labouring rate. These quarrels, at first more or less local, so far from being settled were growing in intensity when the Armistice removed their cause. They did not begin until the autumn of 1915, when the introduction of women on to certain machines in Glasgow opened the troubles on the Clyde.
As will have been gathered, permission to employ women on men's work in the engineering trades had been gained at the price of a wages settlement, intended not so much to benefit the women as to protect the skilled man's rate. It maintained piece-prices and stated that the skilled man's time-rate must be paid to women undertaking a skilled man's work. These compacts, known as the Shells and Fuzes Agreement and the Treasury Agreement, were arrived at in March 1915 between the Government and the engineer- ing unions, and it was hoped that dilution would immediately follow upon them. Unfortunately they did not produce the results ex- pected, and in July it was found necessary to supplement them by statutory powers under the Munitions of War Act. In Sept. the new Ministry, impelled by a pledge given by Mr. Lloyd George in July that there should be no sweated labour in the munitions trades, appointed a committee to settle the wages of the women, who were by this time fast entering the metal trades. The committee, repre- senting the Ministry, the trade and the women, recommended the time-rate of i a week for women on men's work other than skilled men's work. This rate, though finally nearly doubled by the awards issued from time to time by the special Arbitration Tribunals to which claims for increases were referred by the Ministry of Muni- tions, remained the basis of their payment throughout the war, and the standard by which wages were unavoidably fixed for other classes of women. Thus women on munitions work other than men's work came finally to a basis rate of 5jd. per hour. The i rate was imposed on the National Factories already among the largest employers of women and handed on as a recommendation to private munitions firms, a method which was found inadequate to ensure payment. It was therefore embodied in a Statutory Order, binding upon all controlled establishments under Sec. 5 of the Munitions of War Act. From that moment State regulation of the wages of women on munitions work, under pressure from trade unions representing both the women entering and the men displaced, became more comprehensive every few months, until at the time of the Armistice the Ministry of Munitions' orders covered about 2,000,-
000 women employed in 27 trades, and a similar number were cov- ered by arrangements made with the Admiralty and the War Office. The work of dealing with women's wages was then taken over by the Ministry of Labour in accordance with the provisions of the Wages (Temporary) Regulation Act, which lapsed only in the autumn of 1920, leaving the general level of women's rates in the trades affected at about three times the very inadequate amounts
1 is. to I2s. on an average that had been usual before the war.
This regulation was the price of dilution, and it was only natural therefore that men anxious to oppose dilution should pick endless quarrels with the interpretation placed upon the wording of the agreements and pledges by the Government departments concerned, and also with their carrying put of their own orders. Into the details of these controversies it is not possible to enter here the whole subject is covered by the report of the War Cabinet Commit- tee on Industry which sat to consider the question, as well as to deliberate on the theoretical problems of women's wages. On the whole it may be said that the real basis of the men's charges was their objection to dilution and not any important dereliction on the part of the Government. Until the end of 1920 the women in the industries which had been engaged on war work were adequately protected, and they themselves realized this, and showed that they did so by the steadiness and docility with which they continued to work in the face of incitements to unrest. From first to last the time lost by strikes among women on munitions work was negligible, and only one case was brought to light where they were really re- stricting output.
While this was going on in the munitions trades proper which included among others shipbuilding, engineering, electrical en- gineering, ordnance and aircraft work, wire-rope, cables, hemp-rope, tubes, iron and steel manufacture, scientific and optical instrument making, and the manufacture of explosives, chemicals, rubber, asbestos, packing-cases, and tin boxes the recruiting crisis which took place in the winter of 1915 forced other trades to take steps to denude themselves of men and carry on with women's labour. This was done as a rule under national agreements between the unions in
