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employment for men. No wife or daughter admires the laundress's 

 husband. It is pretty generally held by women that nothing is worse, 

 socially as well as economically, than the unemployed man. And her 

 honourable understanding with the men who have entered their country's 

 service in the army or navy, or on national work of other kinds, 

 is that on their return the women shall not keep their jobs away from 

 them. That is clearly the right position. The returning man gets 

 his job. The woman must in fairness give way to his claim. But 

 there are many jobs to which men will never return. There are changes 

 in work which have swept away the old positions, there are men who 

 have given their lives, there are men who have given their strength 

 and come back crippled, there are men who will go seeking more 

 adventurous paths of work for the future. -And there may be certain 

 paths of employment that will demand more workers than ever before. 

 But take it all round, I believe we must face the fact that with our 

 present army of workers the amount of work available will not be 

 sufficient to go round. What is to be the action of the community 

 in face of that ? It might be to say, " Well, there is one thing clear : 

 the emergency of war alone called women into industry of this or that 

 kind we must go back to the old scheme of pre-war days and shut 

 women out again ; we must make room for the men at all costs, and 

 back again to their ill-paid work with its narrow scope of unskilled 

 and semi-skilled avenues of employment the women must go." That 

 indeed would be the strictest interpretation of the Trade Union's 

 pledge for the reinstatement of their rules. And they have the right 

 to demand it if they feel it just and wise to do so ; or would it be better 

 to hold it in reserve to use if the conditions of their waiving it should 

 not be fair and reasonable and to the advantage of the community ? 

 To re-establish wholesale exclusion would, I am convinced, be the 

 worst possible way of dealing with the situation. To begin with, 

 it would not work. It would simply create, in organised as well as 

 unorganised trades, a confusion of interests in which the men would 

 find the employers seeking cheap labour and combining with the 

 women to gain it. The women have and it is well to remember it a 

 distinct margin between their old and their new wages, and a still 

 greater one between their old wages and the men's wages. With that 

 margin, the employer would have scope to use his power as a bargainer 

 and as an organiser of cheap labour, and he would be able to break 

 through the solidarity of labour with effective force. And the women 

 could not justly be blamed for accepting his offer. 



What the male worker has to do is to find a way of knitting together 

 the interest of men and women (they are really one if honestly faced) 

 so that justice can be done with corresponding advantages to both. 



The first step is to see how far the army of industrial workers is 

 rightly recruited. Ought there to be all these men and women, boys 

 and girls, seeking work ? The answer is a simple and a negative one. 



Take boys and girls out of industry entirely until they are fourteen 

 and, by successive steps, fifteen, and finally sixteen, and keep them 



