UNDERPAID RAILWAY WOMEN

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2523, 31 July 1915, Page 10

UNDERPAID RAILWAY WOMEN

This week a new underground railway station was opened at Maida Vale, on the Bakerloo tube, and it is staffed entirely by women (states tho London correspondent of tho "Daily Telegraph" on Jitno 10). Already it goes by tho nieknamo "Maiden Vale." We in London have grown iised in the past few months to occasionally taking our tickets from or giving them up to women. Even station mistresses and women porters may be seen on the -provincial railways. But "Maiden Vale" supplies the first instance in which, except for the station•master, men are not employed at all. Thereare about ten women on the staff, all of whom have been trained for their work on other stations. They wear smart blue serge uniforms, and go briskly about their duties as if- they liked them. The work is arranged in shifts, and is, therefore, not too strenuous. The pity of tho whole thing is—and it does seem mean and senseless—that^inmost, if not all, the companies in which female labour is heing introduced tho women are receiving much less pay than the men did, in spite of the fact that rates of pay were fixed by"arbitration. As a natural result, tho National Union of Railwayman is getting agitated, and at a recent meeting at Southampton the president announced that either the under-paying of the women had to stop or else there must be a, clear understanding as to the future. I wish ho had not put in the alternative.