BOY AND GIRL LABOUR.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20219, 2 April 1929, Page 11

BOY AND GIRL LABOUR.

ENGINEERS SUPPLANTED.

INTERESTING EVIDENCE.

It was stated in evidence before Judge Beeby, in tho Australian Arbitration Court recently, that unskilled labourers, even boys and girls, can perform the most delicate engineering work with tho aid of modem machinery.

Mr. M. G. Chapman, works manager for Chapman and Slierack, manufacturers of marine motors, of Erskinevillo, said that during the war he enteied into a contract in England with tho firm of Vickers, Limited, to manufacture Maxim machine guns. He was employed in a factory where there were 15.000 hands, and of that number a very small proportion only were skilled mechanics such as he claimed to be. Most of the work, and practically all tho production work, was carried on in various stages —all by juvenile labour, chiefly girls. He found that the operators had no knowledge of the fundamental principles of the machines they worked All they knew was how to move a lever and set a machine in motion, and to throw in a feed lever which automatically tripped up when the cutters had passed for tho work. Their duty was just to try a gauge, which had a very close limit. The work passed from one girl to another, and so right along the line of machines until it reached the end of the line a completed piece of work. It then went to the nspection department. Strange to say, the rejections after work had passed through all theso unskilled employees were only about -3 per cent. The witness exhibited the feedbox of a Maxim gun, which, he pointed out, was a very complicated piece of machinery. He said that he would defy any jobbing engineering shop in Australia to produce it in a jobbing manner. Yet it- had been made by machinery operated by girls. Tho hexagonal-shaped holo into which went a level that received the recoil from tlie gun was roughly three-eighths of an inch, but not even a ten-thousandth part of an inch variation was allowed. Ho once saw a girl of 14 years of age, whom ho thought too young to be in » factory, producing the holo with a little machine called a "broaching" machine. The operations that the witness saw in England wore adopted in Australia at the Erskinevillo factory, where several types of engines were made. There were drilling machines, with three spindles, which drilled two holes in about a minute. Those holes had to bo exactly parallel. A man could easily do 20 of them in tho machine while one was being dono on an ordinary lathe.