45 



synonymous terms with women's trades. The first necessity is to 

 ensure that no worker, whether man or woman, shall work for a wage 

 less than shall enable him or her to live a decent and a pleasurable 

 life. The institution of a living wage, however, cannot be made by 

 establishing at one sweep one level minimum throughout the country. 

 That would be to rush upon disaster in two senses. It would either 

 cause a sudden dislocation of industry which the country could ill 

 bear at the period of dislocation after the war or it would establish 

 a minimum which, if sufficiently low on the one side, would be far 

 too low on the other. It would be at once a means of raising wages 

 a little in bad trades but of lowering them in good trades. A far 

 sounder method is to build on the already planned lines of the Trade 

 Boards, placing under their operation every trade which does not 

 normally pay a living wage to the men and women who work in it. 

 Thus the means of levelling up, giving time for the trade to readjust 

 itself to the new conditions and to profit by the productivity of the more 

 efficient and better fed workers, so as to rise to progressively higher 

 levels of wage-paying. But alongside these trades are the better 

 organised and more skilled trades in which the normal payments 

 have reached the level of a living wage. For these the question 

 of the continued employment of women is more difficult. For in 

 these it is that the difficulty of adjusting equal pay for equal work 

 without lowering or endangering the standard rate is chiefly felt. 

 The only way appears to me to be that recommended by the Joint 

 Committee. They propose : 



" Establishment in these trades of Employment Boards constituted 



as under, and with the objects and powers described. 

 Constitution. Equal numbers of representatives of employers 

 and employed, the latter being appointed by the workers 

 themselves, and including women as well as men. The chairman 

 to be chosen from a panel drawn up by the Ministry of Labour. 

 The Board to be called together by the Government, and supplied 

 by the Government with secretarial and office requirements. 

 Objects. To decide upon the conditions under which women 

 should be employed in the trade, so as to secure economic 

 equality between men and women workers. They would also 

 have to consider how far the partially trained women who have 

 been brought into the work during the period of emergency can 

 be given an opportunity to gain further training. 

 The general aims of the Employment Boards would be to establish 

 a minimum wage which would ensure to every worker, man 

 or woman, the possibility of maintaining a decent and healthy 

 standard of life. 



Power to enforce decisions. The decisions of such a body should 



be legally binding and subject to arrangements for revision/' 



This has been endorsed by the Joint Labour Committee, and seems 



to me to be of very far-reaching importance. It would cover by a 



system of Joint Boards the whole body of trades which have recently 



