NO "BOSSING"

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 132, 23 July 1941, Page 6

NO "BOSSING"

GIRLS ON NATIONAL SERVICE i'GRANNIE" TRAINS AS ENGINEER "I'll do anj' -work so .long as I'm not bossed by a woman." Time and again I've overheard this remark recently, made by young girls now being registered for national servicc. I'm told officiary, too, that it is the verdict of the great majority of "conscripts,'" states a writer in the Overseas Daily Mail. And so the A.T.S. (the women'; army corps whose' officers are women) can't get enough recruits, while thousands of girls are willing to work in factories or on the land where their "boss" Avill be a man. This attitude is understandable, though not strictly fair. Most of the officers in all the women's active services Avhom I have- met are highly intelligent, reasonable women. But there are others.

War conditions inevitably gave tlie chance of a job to over-Kcaious, mud die-headed women who had never had a training in business or 'ill any other sphere of activity which could teach them method and management of other women. Fi.ndin.tf themselves in authority for the first time in their lives, they inevitably 'became autocratic, and, as the girls say, "bossy." But though the "conscripts" don"' like working for women, it's the women who see that their men bosses treat them kindly in the factories. Besides the numerous women factory welfare workers, there is Mrs Winifred Raphael of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, who has been visiting factory managers on the girls' behalf. Among suggestions she puts te them for encouraging the girls' Avon's are these: Show them their progress in output by means of little figures climbing ladders; divide them into teams to compete: if they home ties let them work in short shifts; help them manage their household shopping by selling rationed foods at tin? factory canteen. Not all the, arms workers, by t'hc way, ;ire girls in the early twenties. There's at least one grandmother, ] learn from Miss Caroline Haslett. adviser to the Ministry of Labour on women's training. This "grannie" is training to do engineering work; her small grand son is coaching her at home in a simple arithmetic course. At a first-aid post in Fulham. West London, nurses and Avardens busily sit making toys Avhen there isi no mOre serious work to be done. T'hev nre answering an appeal on. behalf of bombed-out children, now in the country, who have lost all their plav things. The nurses were stitching away at mattresses for dolls' beds Avhen I called at the depot. They make the pillows and covers out of bomb-dam-iged bed linen, they told me. Everything that could possibly be used for the toy-making is salvaged by the AA'orkers. Scrapings of paint I in the bottom of throAvn-aAvay tins are always' considered a great find. There seemed to me no limit to tho kind of toys these clever folk could make. Stacked in the room were trains, horses and carts, dolls' beds and aeroplanes. They are even haA'ing a try at '"mass production" noAA r to speed ut> the Avork. Each man specialises at making one single item.