COURTING THE GIRLS

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 37, 14 February 1919, Page 8

COURTING THE GIRLS

'AMERICAN EMPLOYERS' TEMPT-

ING OFFERS.

The demand for1 " female help," as the employment of women and girls is usually termed in America, has reached a point of great intensity. The girl who has just turned sixteen is the object of countless advertisements offering rates of pay that two or three years ago would have been quite out of the question (writes the New York correspondent of London Sunday Chronicle). It is not too much to say that practically any girl residing in a large industrial city can, immediately on completing her sixteenth year, and though she is entirely inexperienced, step right into a, position at the equivalent of £? a week while learning. Employers are begging girls to come and work > for them. Individual concerns want them by the hundred and the thousand. Many firms find themselves "right up against it" for employees of any kind. As an instance, a factory in Jersey City, engaged in a particularly clean and pleasant line of work, is so urgently in need of 300 girls that the management has been driven to the expensive necessity of taking two-thirds of a page in several newspapers for an advertisement. This informs girls and yonng women that the factory is _ splendidly provided with every convenience, comfort, and service for employees, including free conveyance by automobile to and from the street car lines, and that wages are paid to the inexperienced while they are being taught. In that factory scores of girls of sixteen years and a few months are making £3 10s to £4 a week. Others are earning £5.

There is nothing exceptional about such wages. They are on a par with what is being paid in thousands of factories in the Eastern and Middle Western States.

When a demand is greatly in excess of the supply it is economically inevitable, given freedom of action, that firms- will directly or indirectly bid for other firms' employees. For that reason there is much changing of employment in the United States.

Twelve hundred waiters at four of New York's biggest and most fashionable hotels having gone on strike, the management quickly replaced them with women taken largely from the most capable and' presentable of the waitresses employed in lower-price restaurants of the city. Some of the lures set to tempt the girls have an originality that at least compels attention. Witness the following :—

" Fifteen typewriters and stenographers wanted at once. Salary excellent for right applicants. Chewing gum, face powder, rouge, and lipsticks furnished free. Mirrors all over the rooms."

There is internal evidence in that cry for help that it was compiled by one who had suffered much and was on tho verge of despair.