=The Attitude of Women Toward Labor Problems.=--The family is
concerned next with the attitude of women who are wives and mothers,
or daughters partially supported from the family purse, toward the
whole area of industrial problems. It may be always right, as it is
often necessary, for married women, even when mothers of young
children, to earn in the outside labor world. It is, however, always a
social crime for women who try simply to piece out an insufficient
family income to do it in ways to bring down or to keep down wages in
the specialty of work they take part in, especially to bring down or
keep down the wages of men in that specialty of work. It may be best
(it usually is) for young daughters to earn wages even if they do
kinds of work which in the labor market will not secure a return
adequate for full self-support. The work may be educational in its
quality; much that young girls do in department stores is of that
character; but wages too low for full self-support must be reckoned as
part pay for a work-opportunity mixed of training and service, not one
that lists the worker in full competitive position.
=Necessary Protection for Children and Youth in Labor.=--Where young
boys or young girls enter into the industrial world they should step
from either a Trade School, and if so, with the guidance and care of
some representatives of that school to aid them in making physically,
morally, and vocationally helpful alignment, or else should be given
half-time employment in the factory or shop that takes them on as
helpers and find in some "Continuation School" a right use of the rest
of the work-day. The right sort of protective aid to boys and girls
between the ages of fourteen, when the law allows some form of
wage-earning, and that of sixteen to eighteen years, when they may
safely shift for themselves, should halve the wage-earning hours (four
instead of eight each day or twenty-four instead of forty-eight a week
or alternate weeks at work or study); should double the numbers set to
each stated task in shop or factory; should treble the supervisory
control of society, in a union of Health Board, School Board, and
Employers' and Employees' Council; and should quadruple the fitly
trained teachers, the school sittings, the adequately equipped
recreation centres and all incitements to higher uses of leisure time.
The early years of every child should be held sacredly apart from the
whir of wheels and the din of machinery; he should then rehearse in
some degree, as will be later shown, the handicraft age of industry
and its personalizing influence. His entrance into the world of modern
labor should be not a plunge or a tumble but along a regulated highway
of well-outlined endeavor, with social influences on either side to
make his passage into wage-earning safe for himself and useful to
others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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