BOY AND GIRL LABOUR

Southland Times, Issue 20791, 4 June 1929, Page 2

BOY AND GIRL LABOUR

ENGINEERS SUPPLANTED. INTERESTING EVIDENCE. It was stated in evidence before Judge Beeby, in the Australian Arbitration’ Court recently, that unskilled labourers, even boys and girls, can perform the most delicate engineering work with the aid of modern machinery. Mr. M. G. Chapman, works manager for Chapman and Slierack, manufacturers of marine motors, of Erskineville, said that during the war he entered into a contract in England with the 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 the 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 the 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 inspection department. Strange to say, the rejections after work had passed through all these unskilled employees were only about 3 per cent. The witness exhibited the feedbox of a Maxim gun, which, he stated, 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. The hexa-gonal-shaped hole into which went a lever that received the recoil from, the gun was roughly three-eighths of an inch, but not even a ten-thousandth part of an inch variation was allowed. He- once saw a girl of 14 years of age, whom he thought too, young to be in a factory, producing the hole with a little machine called a “broaching” machine. The operations that the witness saw in England were adopted in Australia at the Erskineville factory, where several types of engines were made. There were drilling machines, with three spindles, which drilled two holes in about a minute. These holes had to be exactly parallel. A man could easily do 20 of them in the machine while one was being done on an ordinary lathe.