=Warehouses.=--The conditions of life in warehouses are much the same as in shops, but some of the special grievances of the latter are absent. Fines, though not wholly unknown, are not customary, and “living-in,” though practised to some extent, especially among London city firms, is not general throughout the country. Women are much employed in furriers’ and trimming warehouses. Wages are poor--often only from 7_s._ to 10_s._ a week; but a good saleswoman in a wholesale house may earn as much as £1 a week. Long hours, poor wages, and insanitary conditions are the chief grievances of warehouse assistants, and they are making common cause with workers in shops for their removal. =Combination among Assistants.=--Strenuous efforts are now being made to secure combination among shop assistants, but the task is not easy. Shop assistants are apt to regard such measures as suitable only to artisans and labourers, failing to perceive that from lack of combination they themselves are often much worse treated than the labourers whose methods of self-defence they despise. No artisan would think for a moment of enduring the conditions with regard to fines, forms of agreement, and method of living, which are imposed upon shop assistants, whose hours of labour are also, as I have shown, far beyond those worked by factory “hands.”[14] The fear of dismissal is a more real cause for hesitation; but if the union is carefully organised, and causes of offence are avoided during its early days, there seems no reason why this objection should not gradually disappear. There are now in existence the “United Shop Assistants’ Union,” the “National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks,” with head-quarters in London, and branches in most of the large towns, and the “National Union of Clerks”; besides an outside society, the “Early Closing Association,” which works for one special object--the shortening of shop hours. The others are unions for mutual help and defence, and the “National Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen, and Clerks,” which has about 2,000 members, is constituted upon genuine Trade Union lines, giving sick benefits and out-of-work pay upon a graduated scale for payments of 1_s._ 2_d._ to 2_s._ a month.