WOMEN’S LABOUR

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10207, 18 February 1919, Page 6

WOMEN’S LABOUR

Now is the time for a great national stock-taking of women’s labour (says a writer in. the London "Weekly Dispatch"). No doubt many women earnestly desire to return to their home*, and where this is the case, and where the women have homes to return to, the community is not even called upon to give advice. But there will remain possibly some tjiree to iour million women ■whose magnificent power of production is a potential source of vast national wealth! Meantime there are great professions and occupations crying out for lack of women workers. No scheme of reconstruction 1 will please - women voters which does not build a bridge between the demobilised woman worker and a nullable career for her future. Alftough the positions specifically reserved for men must honourably be ie-_ turned to them, that by no means im-. plies a starvation demobilisation for the mass of industrial women. The vast increase bf production upon which our future will depend will find a place for every capable woman, especially in new industries or in the recaptured ones, which the women of this country will never again allow to fall into German hands. , .. As far as the staple industries of the country are concerned, women have by prescription an assured place. Half the cotton spindles of the world are in South Lancashire and, some years before the war, of every eleven workers in cotton textile seven were women. We hoar much of the Government pledge to restore pre-war trade union conditions; women should- remember that this was a bipartite agreement in which they—a vitally concerned third party—were never consulted, and should the restoration of these conditions involve any serious limitation of their right to work, they, are bound to resist such pressure by a higher ‘•patriotism than any which ever delayed civilisation by restricting output or .excluding .tho willing worker. In a word, the solution of the problem of the woman worker who has been having too much cake temporarily—and has eaten it—must be based upon justice and national welfare. She must learn, if need be, a now culling and bo prepared to take for it a reasonable return; not under-cutting the men’s market nor taking' towards them a dog-in-the-manger attitude.