SHOP ASSISTANTS AND FORTY-HOUR WEEK

Grey River Argus, 3 December 1943, Page 7

SHOP ASSISTANTS AND FORTY-HOUR WEEK

Shop-assistants are campaigning* for a forty-hour week cf five days. This is a reform which is years overdue, although there never has existed any tenable reason why workers in shops should be compelled to work any longer than workers in other occupations who have long enjoyed a shorter working week.

But always the conditions of shop-assistants have lagged behind the*conditions of the majority of workers. The reason for this is not difficult to trace. Except in a comparatively few cases, shop-assistants have ho wide contact with each other, being employed in twos, threes and fours in numerous individual businesses; then, a large proportion of those in the trade are juniors of both sexes, having little knowledge of the value of trade unionism and the heed for industrial and political organisation. Finally, the large number employed in small businesses, coming as they do into close daily contact with their employers, are loath to take an openly active interest in their trade union for fear of incurring their employer’s displeasure. It is, therefore, obvious that, through the causes mentioned, organisational weakness supplies the reason why shop-assistants have continued so long to lag so far behind other sections of workers in the matter of working conditions.

However, conditions for shop-assistants have shown considerable improvement during the past dozen years. This has been due, not so much to their numerically improved trade union, but to the growth in the strength of the remainder of the trade union movement to which they are linked. Alone, the Shop-Assistants’ Union has much less fighting or negotiating strength than many other unions with a comparable membership; only by strengthening the bonds between their union and the rest of the organised workers can they hope to raise and maintain their conditions on a level with those of the more powerful sections of organised workers. It is vital that shop-assistants bear this important fact in mind as a guide to future action. Nor should the stronger unions lose sight of the fact that they have a duty and a responsibility to assist those unions which, for fundamental reasons, can never be as powerful as themselves, thereby building up the strength of the whole trade union movement.

The demand for the abolition of Saturday work' in the present campaign is a natural one, and we trust it will be met. There is also the matter of the late shopping night. Tn the interests of the juvenile workers at least, the twelve-hour day should be eliminated. The strain and fatigue occasioned by such a stretch of working hours in the confined and stuffy atmosphere of an often-crowded shop cannot be anything but detrimental to the health of growing girls and boys. If the members of the Shop-Assistants’ Union prefer the abolition of Saturday morning work to the abolition of the late shopping night, then some staggering of hours should be insisted upon for their junior members in order to cut down the length of their working day. All trade unionists should interest themselves in this question. After all, it is mainly their sons and daughters who are employed in the shops, and it is the health and welfare of their sons and daughters which is at stake.

Let us hope, following on the series of very successful meeting’s being* held throughout the Dominion, the working* hours of shop-assistants will be reduced;..and further,, this campaign will result in creating* among* shop-assistants a stronger feeling of interest in their trade union and a more general realisation that only through the trade union Movement and its allied political organisations can their objectives be obtained and maintained.