The Family and the Workers : Part 3

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 16 of 23)

In the mediæval times, when laborers were gaining slowly a class consciousness outlined by Guilds and Unions of special groups of workers, the family was still the main centre of work-direction and of united profit from work, and hence it was evident to the dullest mind and the coldest heart that members of a family should work and save together. Now the whole trend of industrial relationship is toward making independent and individualistic connection between the worker and his job outside of family unity. Even movements for legal protection of the worker against exploitation by masters in industry often take little account of family relationship or the varying inherited family ideals. Setting the well-being of one member of the family against what is supposed to be the well-being of other members of the family, as in the case of some child-labor laws, may be necessary and socially wise, but it surely does not lead to family stability.

Demands of Family Life Upon Industry and Labor Legislation. - The demands of family life should at least be stated and have some weight in any further attempts to make the lot of the individual worker better, and should be considered in any drastic attempts to enforce labor legislation which sets the parent and the child against each other in the courts, or which hampers a mother in what she deems of vital necessity in the carrying out of her parental duty.

"The Code for Women in Industry," issued by the division of Women in Industry of the Department of Labor, in coöperation with the "War Labor Board" and the "War Labor Policies Board," when the questions concerning standards for employment of women in war plants were acute, as published in the Survey of January 4, 1919, is in brief summary as follows: No woman employed or permitted to work more than eight hours a day or forty-eight hours a week. One day of rest a week demanded for all and no night work for minors or women. The basis of the wage-scale to be form of occupation, not sex; and no lesser wage for women permitted unless it can be proved that their employment lessens the output of work. A legal minimum wage for all women, which should include cost of living of dependents as well as of individuals. All work conditions to be good and safety adequately secured. Women to be prohibited from working in occupations where exposure to heat or cold or to poisonous substances, or where bad position or too great muscular strain, endanger health. Home work prohibited.

Should Adult Women and Children be Listed Together in Labor Laws? - There is grave question whether some of these items listed as essentials in the protection of women in industry, and certainly useful in the peculiar conditions of munition manufacture into which women rushed in such vast numbers in answer to the call of war, should form a permanent outline of the relation of law to women workers. Some of them have, and clearly, a place in any future code in peace time. The requirement for one day of rest in seven; the demand that quality and power of labor, not sex, shall set the wage-scale; and the legal requirement for sanitary, safe, and moral conditions in workshops and factories, all are vital to sound social demand in the interest of women workers. Are these not also demands for just labor conditions of men? The eight-hour day is now fixed as a standard for men and women alike, with the forty-eight hour a week definition. A minimum wage, including cost of living for dependents as well as for individuals involved, has justice at its base, but requires for its application less a blanket sum indicated by law than a wages-board or other form of discriminating commission with power to adjust flexibly, with due consideration of place and of quality of work, the wages to the task. Conditions of labor should be "good" in all cases, and what is good should be fixed by disinterested persons.

Physical safety and moral protection must be secured at all hazards, and in the case of women special protection, particularly for those under twenty-one years of age, is needed. Any work which is peculiarly a menace to health and to the race-life for mothers or potential mothers may well be forbidden by law. The absolute prohibition of night work and of home work to adult women may well be left in the background, however, until the industrial situation is clearer for all women workers. The evils of night work for the "sweated" woman, untrained for any lucrative labor and who has to catch on to the labor wheels at any point open to her effort at middle age, must not blind us to the fact that one of the most precious things in the inheritance of brave and loyal natures is the determination to earn for one's own support and for that of one's dearest. The tenement labor, which is such an evil in many of our cities and one so impossible to deal with adequately by ordinary inspectorship provision, is not all there is to "home work." It may well be that, as has been before indicated, the new uses of electrical power may return to the home, and in ways to the advantage of the family, some of the processes now wholly under factory control and provision. The point is that while there cannot be too much protective legislation for children and youth, the place of adult women in the labor world must not be too firmly and exclusively held by the side of children lest we add to the difficulties women still experience in finding and keeping a place in the world of modern industry.

Women in War Work. - In England, we are told, there were one million women employed in war plants during the great struggle with Germany. In every variety of munitions manufacture women were found in great numbers, often furnishing eighty per cent, or more of the total number employed. It is a fact that they "made good." It is also a fact that the average of health among the working women of England rose in many localities where women were employed at these unwonted tasks. The reason given for this by one keen observer being that the higher wages earned enabled many thousands of women, before undernourished because of their poverty, to have "three square meals a day." When we remember that in England there are nearly two million more women than men, and that the men who served in the army and have returned physically and mentally able to take back the jobs they left for army service are clamoring for them, and when we remember that the struggle for a standard of living never goes backward and that women workers once used to good wages will not willingly take poor ones again, we can see what difficulties the war has made in our sister country for both men and women in industry.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.