Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/571

NOTES AND MEMORANDA .549 taken between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., with an hour-and-a-half off for meals, except on Saturday, when the period is eight hours with half- an-hour off. The new Act makes it an offence punishable by fine for any person to bribe an operative to disclose an employer's trade secret regarding the process of manufacture; and while it gives pieceworkers in the textile industries a special right to have supplied to them along with their work suf?cient particulars to enable them to ascertain the rate of wages they are entitled to be paid for the work, it makes the disclosure of any of these particulars a penal offence. Finally, it contains two provisions directed against the sweating system. The occupier of any kind of workshop (except the domestic) is now required to advertise the factory inspector of the opening of his workshop exactly as factory occupiers were required already, and the occupiers of all factories and all workshops alike are required to keep, in a certain particular form, a list of their outworkers for the inspection of the sanitary authority and the factory inspector. LAUNDRrES are included in the workshops brought under the sanitary requirements of this new Act. But an amendment proposed by Lord Dunraven in the House of Lords for giving laundresses the full pro- tection of the Factory Acts, and more especially for shortening their present hours of labour, was thrown out by forty-nine votes to thirty on the ground stated first by the l?finister in charge of the Bill, and then repeated with more emphasis by the Premier himself that this was a new departure, which ought not to be made the subject of legislation without first instituting a full and special inquiry into its bearings. The new departure, according to Lord Salisbury, was this, that whereas in factory legislation hitherto we always had to do ?Sth industries which manufactured articles for sale, we should in laundries be dealing, for the first time, with what is in reality a species of doneestic service. A BILL for the creation of a national system of working-class insurance was introduced in the French Chamber of Deputies by the Minister of the Interior early in July, and is now undergoing con- sideration. It provides both for a pension in old age and an insurance against death; and is to be open to all workmen, employSs, m?tayers? and domestic servants of either sex, if they are of French nationality and have an annual income of less than 3,000 francs. Apparently small peasant proprietors and artizans working on their own account-- both very numerous classes in France remain outside, and, in fact, the chief provisions of the scheme are inapplicable except to persons in the employment of another. It is not made compulsory to join the fund, but every person entitled to join it is presumed to desire to do so