AN AFTER-WAR PROBLEM

Gisborne Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 4758, 4 January 1918, Page 3

AN AFTER-WAR PROBLEM

POSITION OF WOMEN WORKERS

One of the many pub-committees j dealing with the problems of after-i peace construction has been consider- . ing the position of women workers, . and the London Weekly Dispatch • understands that the solution at pre- ( sent favoured in Government circles . can be summed up in the one word, j “emigration.” . I There has been _a certain amount of 'mystery about the persons entrusted with tackling (he problem of women workers. The majority of„ them arc permanent Civil Servants; there are- a number of “reformers” of the, Fabian Society statistical school; women welfare workers employed by the War and similar offices, and a limited] number of trade union officials—men and women. By no means a bad or unrepresentative selection, and certainly not an incompetant one. But the. Government should be urged! t° consider a solution other than emigration, for .the sake both of women and of the country. . What precisely, is the problem? It is that owing to the war a million and more women who hitherto did little or nothing have entered the labour market and in taking the place of the men at the front, achieved temporary independence. . 1 Tile men, or at any rate most of them, will want 4o back to their old jobs. Those who are predicting a wholesale stampede to the land on the part of soldiers hitherto employed in city officers ai;e indulging in empty dreams; it is far more likely that former farm workers will desert the land after the war. Official inquiries show that, only seventeen per cent, of the men at the front intend to return to the land. But the statistics do not say how many of them are going back to the city and that the young damsel who so sufficiently held the fort have to go. . But such a drastic solution of the women worker problem is not necessary, and there is not the slightest reason why every woman who is willing to work should uot obtain employment! in this country i The war has taught all classes valuable lessons not likely to be forgotten when peace is declared. The most important of these lessons is that there is no such thing as a given quantity of wealth which lias got to he divided the best way possible among all the people in the country but that everybody who does honest work of some kind or other actually produces wealth. There is no reason why every soldier coining back from the front and every woman who has been doing soldier’s work should not have work in th : s country. There is not the slightest reason why women slipuld not continue to work on the land, in factories, workshops, and offices in friendly rivalry with men. There must not, however, lie any undercutting of wages.