Friday 19 February 2016

Compulsory Minimum Wage For Women

From the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 16th February 1916.

COMPULSORY MINIMUM WAGE FOR WOMEN.


DECISION THAT AFFECTS MUNITION WORKERS.

£l A WEEK TO EMPLOYEES IN CONTROLLED SHOPS.

The official recommendation to munition making employers to pay a minimum weekly wage of £1 a week to women workers over 18 years of age is about to be given the force of an instruction that must be observed.

In recent conferences with the Minister of Munitions, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers has insisted that the recommendation should be converted into an actual order, and Mr. J. Binns, the district organising delegate of the society in Manchester, told a Press representative last night that his Executive has notified that it has now been incorporated in instructions to all controlled firms.  The decision will affect the women employees in about 4,000 works.

[This report can be compared with the previous report of Mary Macarthur's lecture in which she said that  many women munitions workers were being paid very low wages and working very long hours.  £1 a week is 6d, an hour for a typical 40 hour week - more than twice the rates that she quoted in some of her examples.]  

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