The statement issued by the Women's Industrial League on the position of women as industrial workers contains a number of features which are regarded in Labour quarters as misleading. In the first place, it is pointed out that the report as a whole is based entirely on returns from employers, who cannot always be taken as reliable witnesses on the trade union attitude. Statements by firms that they cannot employ women owing to trade union opposition should, it is held, always be received with reserve until it is known what wages these firms are prepared to pay and under what conditions, If these facts were clearly stated, trade unionists argue that the opposition would be found in many cases to be based, not on sex ex-elusiveness, but on a refusal to agree to the undercutting of established rates.
Again, it is pointed out in the report that "in some districts women are employed in certain industrial processes without opposition from men, while in other districts they are debarred from sharing in these very processes. In reply, trade unionists state that exactly the same could be said of most classes of male workers. There is no uniformity between one district and another in the class of labour employed to operate the various classes of machines, and "in some districts semi-skilled men are employed in certain processes without opposition from skilled men, while in other districts they are debarred from sharing in these very processes." This lack of uniformity may be a bad thing, but it is absurd to treat the local differences which have always characterized the engineering industry as a form of sex exclusiveness. Exactly the same differences existed in relation to both men's and women's employment long before the war.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.