REPLACEMENT OF MEN BY WOMEN IN INDUSTRY. 277 



found taking the place of highly skilled men ; but large numbers have 

 released the unskilled and those termed, in engineering, ' semi-skilled.' 

 But when the work of the men involved a degree of skill and experience 

 which women seldom possess, new machinery of a moz'e automatic kind 

 has been introduced (sometimes to such an extent as almost to transform 

 an industry), and subdivision of processes has changed highly skilled 

 work into a series of repetition operations which can be accomplished by 

 relatively untrained workers. This has to be boi-ne in mind when women 

 are stated to be doing the work of skilled men. 



The success of the women on these repetition processes is marked. 

 They learn quickly; they are good time-keepers; they have, so far at 

 least, stood the strain of long hours extremely well, and their manual 

 dexterity enables them to achieve good results in the way of output on 

 repetitive processes. On work demanding greater judgment and adapta- 

 bility the evidence of their success is not so great; but their industrial 

 training has been short. 



For some time the employment of women on men's processes was 

 opposed by Trade Unions, which still in some industries "bring forward 

 strong objection^ to replacement. But in the most important industries 

 agreements have been reached between men and employers as to the 

 conditions on which replacement may be carried out during the period 

 of the war. Those conditions usually include an agreement as to 

 women's wage-rates and a guarantee of the re-employment of the men 

 replaced. 



The wages of women in war-time have been influenced by the fixing 

 of a minimum for certain kinds of munition workers in certain classes 

 of munitions establishments ; by the competition of munitions with other 

 industries in the demand for female labour; by the pressure of the 

 Trade Unions ; and by the general rise in prices. The fact that even in 

 districts where the competition of munitions is keenest the wage-rates 

 for women in other industries, on processes involving similar skill and 

 exertion, have not always risen to the munition level, suggests that the 

 withdrawal of the minimum regulation, twelve months after the war, 

 will lead to a fall in women's wages. But it is unlikely that they will 

 fall to their general pre-war level. 



The fact that not a great proportion of the women war workers were 

 previously occupied suggests that after the war the problem of a large 

 surplus of women may not be so serious as has been feared. The 

 married women are for the most part in industry only for the period of 

 the war ; and inquiry among women workers generally shows that many 

 of them have no desire to remain in competition with men. But this 

 involves the question of the increased demand for women on repetitive 

 processes ; and if, as seems likely, the subdivision of processes and the 

 highly automatic machinery introduced owing to war conditions have 

 come to stay, there may be a change in the relative demand for skilled 

 and for unskilled labour to the disadvantage of the former. 



