Women in the Printing Trades: A Sociological Study.
General
Women in the Printing Trades: A Sociological Study.
Printing industry -- Great Britain; Women -- Employment -- Great Britain; Women printers -- Great Britain; Working class women -- Great Britain
Attempts have been made to organise women elsewhere as, for instance, in
Edinburgh, where a Union of women compositors existed for a year; also
in Birmingham, where ten years ago a Union was formed specially to
include the machine-rulers who had been introduced about ten years
previously. But the movements have failed.
Such is the record of the organisation of women in the trades with which
we are dealing. It is almost exclusively confined to London and
Manchester, and in London, out of 19,000 women connected with
bookbinding, most of whom are book and paper-folders, certainly not more
than 500 are organised. In 1901, in the seven Men's Unions covering
these trades there were 41,907 members, whilst the total membership of
the Women's Unions was well under 1,000.
[Sidenote: Maintaining standards without organisation.]
Our enquiries have discovered, however, the existence of a kind of loose
organisation of majority-rule and custom in some firms. Standards of
prices and conditions are thus kept up. It must not be forgotten that
where men and women work together all concessions won by the men's
Unions are shared by women, as for instance, when the Typographical
Association of Scotland secured a fifty hours' week for Aberdeen
compositors. This is an interesting feature of feminine methods. In one
house we came across two collating-rooms, one of which was staffed by
older hands, who stood upon their dignity and would not accept inferior
work or tolerate reductions in wages. The other room was conducted after
the methods of the ordinary employer of cheap women's labour; the
workpeople were careless and casual and the room had no traditions and
no industrial "public opinion." This force of opinion, which assumes
almost the nature of caste, is most strongly developed amongst job
hands. These women manage to keep up a comparatively high standard of
pay, and we have discovered the most unusual circumstance that in one or
two instances the wages of job women have been cut down to the Union
rates. We have been told on most trustworthy authority that the
unwritten laws of these job hands are sometimes enforced upon
recalcitrant work-women by "a hiding."
[Sidenote: Organisation in the miscellaneous trades.]
As regards organisation in the more miscellaneous trades included in our
investigation, little has to be said. A few card mounters once joined
the Women's Printing and Kindred Trades Union after a strike, but soon
fell away, and a Union started in 1890, of which little information can
now be obtained, included some envelope makers: but by 1893 it, too,
seems to have died.
No attempt has been made to organise women engaged in the preparation of
materials for printing either in London or the provinces.
[Sidenote: The attitude of employers.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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