Women -- Employment -- Great Britain; Women labor union members -- Great Britain; Working class women -- Great Britain
It will be seen that the dress, millinery and mantle-making group is
divided into two according to whether the place of manufacture is a
workshop or factory. For this purpose a workshop means a place where
mechanical power is not used, and a factory a place where such power is
used. The distinction also roughly corresponds to the difference between
ordered or bespoke and ready-made garments, ordered garments being made
principally in workshops, and ready-made garments principally though not
so exclusively in factories. This being the case it may perhaps be
surprising that the average for the workshop section, namely 13s. 10d., is
so appreciably below that for the factory section, namely 15s. 5d., and
the statistics in this respect serve to indicate that the introduction of
mechanical power and other labour-saving devices into industry by no means
implies that from the point of view of wages the workers employed will be
any worse off.
The workshop section of the dress, etc., trade is almost entirely a
woman's trade, the number of men and boys being insignificant. Within the
trade itself a considerable range of earnings exists. Fitters and cutters
form the aristocracy of the profession, but one which is recruited from
the humbler ranks. The average earnings for the United Kingdom of those
who "lived out" amounted to 33s. 5d., and of those who "lived in" 27s. 9d.
The practice of "living in" and being provided with full board and
lodging, or at any rate being provided with partial board, is a feature of
this section of the trade, some 2500 women and girls out of 40,000
included in the returns being noted as receiving payment in kind in
addition to their cash wages.
Another feature of the trade is the relatively large number of apprentices
or learners who received no wages at all, 8·7 per cent of the women and
girls in the dressmaking trade, 43 per cent of the milliners, and 17 per
cent of the mantle-makers being so returned. These, of course, would be
mostly under eighteen years of age, and their inclusion in the statistics
would not affect the average given in the table for women. Considering the
general level of earnings which the statistics disclose, one can only
conjecture that, as in certain men's professions, the existence of a few
well-paid posts exercises an attraction to enter the trade, the strength
of which is out of all proportion to the chance of obtaining one of these
prizes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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