The economic position of womenAcademy of Political Science in the City of New York
History
The economic position of women
Academy of Political Science in the City of New York
Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- United States -- Economic conditions
When different kinds of orders demand different processes, the
specialist must be prepared to face not only change in machinery, but
change in the size or character of her employer’s orders. This sort
of change may affect the organization of the workroom. Recently a
magazine, which had been gathered by machine, was enlarged by doubling
the size of its pages. Thereafter a force of inserters was employed,
and there was no work for gatherers. It may affect the process and its
demands on the worker. In one bindery a little girl was employed to
cut off books for one machine, earning four dollars. “I can keep up
with the machine when the books are the right size,” she said; “but
it’s awful when they’re thin.” It may affect wages. One girl who had
been employed to operate the sewing machine in the book department
was transferred to the magazine department where her work was to look
over sheets folded by machine and to fill the boxes of the gathering
machine. Her pay was reduced from ten dollars to a wage varying from
five to seven dollars according to the kind of work assigned to her.
This transfer from work on one product to another requiring different
processes was due to the fact that much of the book work formerly
done by this firm was withdrawn by a large publishing house which had
recently organized its own bindery.
If we trace the history of the folding machine or the gathering machine
we find that with the development of automatic feeding devices the
tendency is to dispense with the work of women and to employ men to
care for the machines. It is not a displacement of women by men; it is
rather the substitution of rubber fingers or other automatic feeders
for women’s hands, and as a result a reorganization of the force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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