WOMEN WORKERS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume IV, Issue 956, 5 March 1917, Page 4

WOMEN WORKERS.

We are told a great deal about the wages women workers are earning at Home just now. The other side of the picture is veiled. The home workers of Bethnal Green who crept out of their crowded back rooms and cellars last week to a gathering in the Excelsior Hall heard a dazzling piece of news: Nothing less than this—that there is a prospect of an increase in the price of 2Jd per gross paid for the making of match-boxes! This amazing good news raised a great sigh of expectancy from those faded, broken, drab women, some young, some old, who sat munching bread and butter and gulping down cups of hot tea. It was really true, then, comments an exchange, that this war prosperity of which everybody was talking, was at last to touch with a ray of silver the gloom of their lives. One huudred and forty-four match-boxes to be made and pasted together for 2Jd, and find your own paste! There are 144 containers to be made first, then 144 covers, then the one to be slipped inside the other —and 2sd at the end of it. Seven gross have to be made before the factor}- will take them in. When 1008 match-boxes, tied up into a parcel with hemp, have been taken to the factory, 1/94. has been earned, but from this has to be deducted the cost of the string and l£d for the flour used in making the paste. Before the war Jib of flour, which would serve for the paste for seven gross, was bought for 3d. Now the price is 14d. And the price of hemp, too, has risen. No wonder New Zealandera buy wooden matches cheap.