Chapter VIII

FACTORY WELFARE AND ITS RECOGNITION BY PARLIAMENT; WORKS’ COMMITTEES AND
WELFARE MANAGEMENT

“The sweat of industry would dry and dye but for the end it workes
too.”

“The sweat of industry!” It was in a factory where excessively hot, heavy, and humid work, in which women bore their share, was carried on that a foreman once said to a Woman Factory Inspector: “We are told that man should earn his bread in the sweat of his brow, but here we earn it in the sweat of the whole body.” The saying implied a sense of the need of a new standard of control. It is with a new social way of control that this final chapter is concerned, and we were only at the beginning of seeing what it might achieve when the period covered by this book closes.

Labour of a sustained kind, bodily or mental, is, as it always has been, the lot of the greater part of civilised mankind, and on the wealth it produces depends the possibility of any means of ordinary welfare for the community. Since the dawn of history energy, and the sustained capacity for the essentially human function of work,[225] have been the test of racial quality, and the power of a people to survive and develop has depended on power in some measure to socialise the use of that function. And yet, until the idea lately arose of analysing the psychological and physiological capacity of the human agent in industry, and of studying the rhythm of fatigue and rest, custom and instinct were the main, and sometimes the only, safeguards of the natural pleasure of exercising this function. Among the great majority of consumers of articles produced by the factory system there was, even more fixedly than among employers, a blind acceptance of the fact that:

“... for them many a weary hand did swelt,
In torched mines and noisy factories....”

They had little means of knowing definitely, however, what it all involved, and it was a great encouragement to the Inspectors to see, as the facts came out gradually, through the publication of Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector and of police court proceedings, the growth of various societies for the help of the workers.

The overstrain, the overloading, and occasionally the misuse of the delicate human motor that has persistently characterised much of our factory production even by young workers, can, in some measure, be gathered from facts touched on in Chapter IV. The frequent lack of simple conditions and appliances conducive to energy and preventive of unnecessary onset of fatigue has been seen in Chapter II. And yet, in spite of all, the marvellous capacity for much contentment, sometimes even joy, in work never perished. “Weaving is a wonderful art, you are never done learning,” was a saying, expressing the enlightening power of thought, by a Yorkshire textile trade unionist, but the pride with which a woman weaver will inform you that she has been reckoned “a champion weaver” tells the same tale of the power that the exercise of skill in the old trades had over workers’ minds (and thus over their bodies). And the spirit appears in far humbler workers, sometimes on apparently monotonous work; even more strikingly did it appear in the new processes opened up for women in the War.

That “created man is made to create, from the poet to the potter”[226] is an idea that in some degree, however inadequately, has always been implicitly accepted for men with their special aptitudes in exercise of energy. As for women with their dual service in social life, in the home as well as in productive work, realisation of the essential part that they played in industry was slow in coming, even after the development in the early part of the nineteenth century of textile industries on a great scale by aid of women and children. It needed the second great “industrial revolution,” referred to in the last chapter, to make it plain to the whole community that a great deal of women’s pre-War industrial work was either more skilled or heavier than had yet been generally admitted, and that, whether skilled or heavy, it was indispensable to the success and welfare of the trades into which it entered. During that testing time the share that women workers held in the racial reserve endowments of endurance, adaptability, and capacity for labour also came out clearly.

While it was the unprecedented part played by massed factory production in the Great War that brought the essentially social service rendered by industrial labour into public recognition, it was the prominence of women’s share in it that finally made legal provision for “welfare” possible.

The injurious manner and extent of employment of children in the beginning of the factory system had, as we have seen,[227] first made possible any effective Parliamentary intervention to secure elementary conditions of health and safety in factories and workshops. The experience and its lessons were not forgotten, and it was almost common ground between employers and the State in 1916 that rapidly extended employment of women and girls must be accompanied with measures for their welfare and safety to prevent injurious consequences for society.

Voluntary welfare, with here and there a little co-operation from science, had grown up into a conscious “movement” in industrial life in our country during the twenty years preceding the War. In its principles it differed little from those of which Robert Owen reminded his fellow- manufacturers in 1813 when he showed them that, just as power-driven machinery was improved by being carefully tended, kept clean, and well lubricated, so the far more delicate living human motor could be benefited if carefully studied and well cared for. Yet the only possible basis on which the movement could grow vigorously in such a factory system as that of the nineteenth century was first laid when State administration began effectually to enforce on all employers alike national standards in hours, health, safety, defence against industrial diseases, and finally against sweated wages.

Those reformers and administrators who wrought ceaselessly between 1892 and 1914 to give effect to new safeguards of health in the factory surroundings of the worker were laying foundations, better than they knew, for social aims in factory administration. The Women Inspectors, indeed, as we have seen, had persistently invited employers to pass on from hygiene in the factory to better care of the welfare of the workers, but they never doubted that completion of the former was the indispensable groundwork of voluntary welfare.

A new stage and a new opportunity for the factory system in Great Britain began when, in 1916, Parliament first made provision for “securing the welfare of the workers,”[228] and when (almost at the same moment) statesmen and administrators called for the aid, in many ways, of joint industrial councils of employers and workers who could follow up welfare provisions and help to make them correspond to the needs of the workers. The legal provision by itself could carry “welfare” only a little way: development of the means of co-operation between workers and employers, and between both of them and the Factory Inspectors and scientific investigators, was an indispensable adjunct in this new enterprise. The very unrest and suspicion that met some of the first systematic attempts of managers at welfare supervision, in controlled munition factories lacking representative works’ committees, made that plain.

The legal provisions in the Act of 1916 were framed, of course, for the welfare of both men and women workers, but it was the large-scale introduction of women substitutes and dilutees into men’s trades, and their migration by tens of thousands to centres of munitions production, that, in fact, had made the starting-point for the new socialising measure. And so, at last, in factory production we had come full circle, and “the guiding ideas of women in regard to conditions essential for a good industrial life of both men and women” could begin to influence industrial life, openly and unofficially, as well as through Inspectors and a few enlightened employers. Scientific aid from many investigators could also be brought to bear effectively on the task of civilising working conditions when a true social structure in factory production had once begun.

In England, work of a scientific kind for the reform of the factory system had been hitherto occupied chiefly in the directions shown in the chapter on dangerous processes. From the Continent of Europe[229] came the earliest direct researches of physiologists and psychologists into causes and prevention of industrial fatigue and into the possibilities of vocational selection of workers; while from America came “motion study” and the work of the efficiency expert. True to the humanitarian bent as a whole of her factory legislation, it was Great Britain that first planned a statutory basis for promoting the welfare of industrial workers. It is open to one to wonder whether this factor was not decisive in leading to the great place given in the Peace Treaty to constructive work by the League of Nations for the social welfare of labour.

Before attempting to sketch the legal and administrative position in promotion of the welfare of the factory worker in Great Britain between 1916 and 1921, the completing of the outline of the story told in this book requires a backward glance at some of the experiences of the Inspectors while voluntary welfare grew up. Without the pioneer work of employers by works’ welfare committees and other agencies encouraged by the sympathy and advice of the Inspectors, and without the long succession of Inspectors’ Reports recording that work, the legislative step would have been difficult if not impracticable.

We can neither here treat the subject of factory welfare systematically, nor attempt to cover ground now being gradually covered by textbooks and pamphlets. We are concerned simply with the voluntary growth of attention to the matter before 1916 in an economic system that was built up on a theory adverse to its implications, and with the immediate outcome of the new legal experiment.[230] When the great pressure came for munitions and all the indispensable commodities in the field of war, the voluntary movement had gained so much experience that it was possible to make strikingly rapid application of measures and means for canteens, first-aid and ambulance work, cloakrooms and washing conveniences, suitable protective clothing for very varied processes, rest rooms, recreation for the large new aggregations of workers in crowded centres, some trained welfare supervision—in fact, for all the specific subjects that were included in Section 7 of the Act of 1916 as primâ faciê necessary to the health and welfare of the workers. Selection of workers for particular types of operations and some increased care for prevention of unnecessary fatigue naturally followed. The scattered efforts and examples, all over the country and in every kind of industry, were rapidly wrought up into an officially guided movement by the combined efforts of Departments concerned, under the Home Office, the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Labour, and last, but not least, by the Canteen Committee of the Board of Control (Liquor Traffic), and by the non-executive Committee above-mentioned, the Health of Munitions Workers Committee, with all its important published memoranda.

Before all else in the welfare movement it was the work for canteens, for access by the hard-pressed munition workers to something like adequate food decently cooked and conveniently served, that was the decisive factor in enabling them to sustain their intense fatigue. The great need in many places for tolerable means of preparing and taking food at or near the works had been the earliest and most strongly expressed of all the demands of the woman worker for elementary means of welfare. For years the most frequent of the complaints I had to classify in my annual reports as “outside the Acts” was that messrooms (or food and drinking water) were not accessible or not well maintained; and many workers found it hard to understand or believe that the law did not intervene in this matter except where dangerous processes came under special regulations or where poisonous materials were handled.

The success of the movement for canteens in those years of war strain has effected a completely changed outlook on the question in the factories themselves, that makes the past conditions remembered by the Factory Inspectors—especially between the years from 1893 to 1903—seem now well nigh incredible. For no workers was this change more greatly needed than for the poorly fed women and girl workers. The first time, however, that I specifically used the word “welfare” in an annual report in connection with lack of means for the personal well-being of the workers was, not as regards either food or rest, but as regards the incomprehensible general failure to supply means of maintaining personal cleanliness, which came especially to the front in 1899 in the early pressure of preparing soldiers’ rations in another war. The failure to include the matter in the English Factory Acts was the more difficult to understand when one saw how carefully access to washing conveniences was provided for in French and German codes. “Employers,” I said, “who have sufficient ... interest in such matters to make the experiment, quickly find their profit in provision for the welfare of their work-women, in particular those which tend to raise the whole standard of self-respect among them.” And again: “The need for washing appliances, increasingly felt among the women and girls, has a moral and social value as well as a strictly hygienic aspect. It is a matter for surprise how frequently the effort is made in the most unlikely and difficult circumstances by working women to turn homeward with a neat and cleanly appearance.”[231] On the moral and social side, the right and claim of the woman worker to have her conditions of work supervised by competent women appeared to the Woman Inspector, from the outset, the only effective remedy for many kinds of complaints that, like the lack of canteens, were “outside the Acts.”

And trained women’s superintendence was also conceded during the Great War, not only in the controlled and national factories, but in the factories where the Home Office granted exceptional hours under an Emergency Order or urged the substitution of women to secure the release of men. It was contended by a workers’ delegate, in 1917, at an inter- city conference in Sheffield of local advisory committees, that “welfare” is an ethical and spiritual matter more than it is a material one; she was sure that working women would always press for the former elements. However strongly one sees that both material and spiritual or ethical elements are inherent in the very meaning of “welfare,”[232] one must pay tribute to the prominence of the latter element in the complaints from factory womanhood.

In 1900 I was able to quote, from the Inspectors, testimony to the growth of instances of welfare supervision in factories, where women of intelligence, refinement, and kindliness are placed as superintendents or forewomen and exercise a wonderful influence for good over the workers whom they control.[233] At the same time instances were shown of very great need for such control, and in various subsequent years it appeared that it was frequently from such places that serious complaints came. In great food-producing, sugar, confectionery, and other factories, the names of manufacturers of world-fame are well known as pioneers in this movement, but in the older and greater textile industries employers were slower in taking a definite share in it. When, in 1907, some striking examples were given of introduction into large textile mills of _trained_ women superintendents (the first note of a professional stamp in such appointments), the aim was specifically given as “an experiment ... to bring about a higher standard of civilisation.” The manager explained that he was of the opinion that “a woman’s influence was needed in his mill and that he proposed to appoint a woman whose duty it would be to supervise health conditions ... ventilation, temperature, humidity, cleanliness, the registration of all Home Office requirements, the passing of the children by the certifying surgeon, the supervision of dining-room and catering arrangements, and occasional visiting of cases of distress.” A doctor was also appointed, arrangements were made for special access of the children to public baths, for good meals for the half-timers; and various other amenities followed.[234] It was frequently the motive of improving the standard of health that caused thoughtful employers to embark on these schemes, and always in such cases efforts were made to provide access to wholesome food at prices within the reach of the workers. The other side of the picture may be seen in the following words from Miss Whitworth in the same year:

“Young girls of fourteen frequently go to work with only three-
halfpence or twopence with which to provide their dinner in Poplar and
Hackney; this kind of worker is greatly in need of some place like the
‘Welcome Institute’ (Isle of Dogs), where she can get a proper meal
for that price. Although some employers have dining-rooms provided
with ovens and women employed to cater for the workers, there are
places where the girls have not even seats that they can use in the
mealtime, and they take their food sitting on the floor, in paper-
sorting works, in laundries, in rope works, and others; cloakrooms are
almost unknown. One finds hats and coats bundled together in passages,
under tables, and along the walls of workrooms and anywhere except in
properly warmed cloakrooms. When girls come a long way to work they do
need to have somewhere to dry their clothes and boots on wet
mornings.”[235]

For years, and perhaps most pressingly from 1906 to 1913, the Inspectors had emphasised the importance of these and allied matters, and the urgent need for reform. Their communications, as far back as 1902, aroused outside sympathies as well as the attention of employers: the Christian Social Union Research Committee made independent enquiry into it, and this stimulated among various social workers a movement for opening simple dining-rooms in localities where there were many workgirls employed in factories or workshops far from their homes, and in these some of the help and comfort of a club was provided. The evils of lack of any care, supervision, or comfort at mealtime pauses was strikingly obvious where workers were legally bound to be excluded from workrooms during mealtimes because of the presence of dust, acid, or other matter in the manufacture, making the place unsuited for the consumption of food.

It would take too long to quote from records of our earlier work in this connection. The evil was sufficiently brought out through the enquiry in 1911 (already referred to) by Miss Whitlock, M.B., into dusty processes in the Midlands. She said then:

“Absence of a messroom or of proper washing accommodation was the rule
in the Sheffield buffing shops, and quite common in the Birmingham
ones. The rule forbidding the taking of meals in these shops was
absolutely neglected, and the conditions under which the women ate
their meals were sometimes appalling. In combined asbestos and rubber
works, where the dust of some rooms and the naphtha fumes in others
might certainly suggest the desirability of a messroom, this was not
infrequently wanting. It is, of course, quite common to find wet
spinning rooms with numbers of workers sitting on cloths on the wet
floor to take their dinner—and upturned tins in carding rooms—because
seats or tables for the occasion, even where a messroom is provided,
cleanliness, proper heating, and a cheerful appearance, are by no
means common. At one factory the messroom was known amongst the girls
as the ‘dead house,’ and certainly the resemblance to a mortuary was
not imaginary. At another I found shortly before the dinner a
temperature of 40°F., and was informed that the heating apparatus had
been out of order for some time.”[236]

The formation of two dinner clubs by an association of factory girls in Sheffield followed on the Inspector’s systematic instructions to occupiers that the section enjoining exclusion from dusty workrooms during mealtimes must be obeyed. Similar results followed the same kind of concentrated work in other towns. Employers gave some help to the movement, and it developed into greater local activity during the great production of munitions.

Many interesting examples reported in the years 1908 to 1912, both of good and careful provision, and its total absence, drove home the importance of direct endeavour by manufacturers to promote conditions of ordinary human welfare in their factories for the workers who spend so many hours in them. One Inspector would comment on the “pathetic gratitude” of rag-sorters for a decent mealroom in districts where any provision at all was rare:

“The subject is one of the utmost importance for workers, who often
leave home at 5.30 a.m., or earlier, and have nearly an hour’s walk.
They have to take their food with them, and the only means of warming
it is the steam-heated sink in the yard.... I counted nine
confectioners’ and fried-fish shops in three-quarters of a mile in a
main road all besieged by workers during the dinner hour.”

Another Inspector would urge that nothing could exceed the discomfort in which meals were often taken, the food on the edge of a workbench covered with work that must not suffer from contact; the worker seated on the most unrestful kind of stool.[237] In 1909 and 1910 Miss Escreet repeated the special requests of cardboard box makers for seats to obviate (as they said) the necessity for sitting either on the table or the floor at mealtimes—their work being mostly done standing, and messrooms and cloakrooms being then almost unknown luxuries in that industry. “In the large places gas-cooking stoves are provided and a woman is kept who serves the workers in various ways, warming their meals, heating their glue, etc., but for these benefits the workers generally pay at least in part.”

Just as the question of proper canteens and messroom arrangements was bound up with organisation and good welfare superintendence, so also did other items appear to be associated with it in the Inspector’s reports— _e.g._, suitable protective clothing for those engaged in dusty or dirty processes, in excessively wet or excessively hot processes, in use of acid or caustic liquids, or in working about dangerous machines. Cloakroom arrangements and their care were specially closely bound up with the possibility of securing responsible supervision—and for years in many places the difficulty of getting any adequate attention to seating arrangements proved on the whole one of the most intractable problems that the Inspector had to deal with, so long as seats remained a matter “outside the Acts.” Complaints continued year after year of the strain of standing occupations, of disciplinary refusal by foremen to allow workers to sit down at all during spells of work, of vibration jarring the nervous system through ordinary chairs or while standing. Seats remained in this category down to 1916, and great must have been the loss to industry as well as to individual workers through the long years when conservation of strength by reasonably good seating arrangements was widely neglected and sometimes ignorantly opposed by managers.

In 1907, for example, repeated complaints were received of lack of seats, and some could not be remedied through unwillingness of employers to accept advice on the subject. In a factory where in the previous year the injury to health to girls had been shown and advice tendered, it was found in 1907 that stools had been provided for only thirty-seven out of three hundred little girls, most of them being between thirteen and fifteen years of age.

“Many looked delicate and weary, and said they got very tired before the end of the morning and afternoon spells of work, standing as they did for five hours at a time ... some seemed to be suffering from swollen legs and feet or from debility.... Reference was made to the certifying surgeon, who suspended one from employment and urged the employer to provide seats for the others. After much persuasion the employer undertook to increase the seating accommodation, yet when the surgeon attempted to qualify his certificate with the proviso that the girl must be provided with a seat this employer said that any girl whose certificate was so qualified should be discharged.” In such ways did the need for simple direct regulation of these matters become abundantly evident. In a spinning factory where seats had been provided for the preparers, one woman told the Inspector that she had left a factory where she was earning sixpence a week more in order to work at this factory where she would have a seat, and “now she was ready for another day’s work every evening.”[238]

“The custom of employing half-time children on their feet ‘buttoning’ at shirt factories in Lancashire, on the alternate day system, so that they stood for ten hours on the alternate days, was found by the Women Inspectors to be most unsatisfactory. In a few factories seats were provided at their request by the occupiers, but in some places persuasion failed: the children worked rapidly, and it was said they could not get through the same amount if they sat at tables.”[239]

One felt how closely all this was allied to the overstrain touched on above in Chapter IV. in weight lifting and carrying, and through overpressure in various ways. In its many manifestations overstrain of young workers seemed elusive of direct prohibition, and more amenable to control by well-developed welfare superintendence in touch with a department thoroughly versed in prevention of industrial fatigue. Constructive work starting from a rational basis apparently becomes inevitable for administration after the first stage of prevention of gross abuse has been passed.

First-aid and ambulance work in the factory system was clearly a foremost point in welfare work, and has already been touched on in the chapter on dangerous processes and accidents. Development of Workmen’s Compensation Acts greatly strengthened the argument for it among enlightened managers, and in many large Midland factories a well- equipped ambulance room, with a fully trained nurse, had afforded considerable experience before the War came, bringing new developments of this safeguard of health and life as well as of limbs. Even in 1911 a Factory Inspector wrote:

“On visiting a large factory recently I was interested to find a rest
room in which there were four couches. Two of them were occupied by
girls who were sleeping soundly. I was informed that this room was
often used by girls not feeling well or tired, and that the renewed
vigour with which the workers returned to work after a few hours’ rest
soon made up for the loss of time.”[240]

In 1912 a large factory in Coventry, where hundreds of young girls were employed, was reported on by Miss Whitlock. A nurse was employed by the firm whose sole duty was to look after the health of the workers, and she had a small surgery at which she attended to any slight injuries—of which there were forty-nine on the day of this inspection. A doctor called daily and could be consulted by the workers without charge. Messrooms, where dinners could be cheaply obtained, and an open-air swimming bath were provided. In a large surgical-dressings factory the plan was adopted of having a social welfare secretary to care for the health and welfare of the two to three hundred girls, and here a rest room was part of the equipment. The cleanliness of the workrooms was itself a lesson in hygiene. In the same year there were again examples given by the Women Inspectors, showing the boundless room for growth of general welfare work and of the more pressing safeguard of supervision of girls’ labour by trained women superintendents. In a large printing works in a small provincial town, where 120 women worked among 600 men, an Inspector found no foreman and no women in charge. There had been a complaint of behaviour to the Inspector, and she found the manager anxious about the tone of his factory and ready to welcome her visit. She urged the appointment of women overseers, and this was promised.[241]

In the year 1909 a step of some consequence to the movement was taken in the convening at Bournville, Birmingham, by Mr. Cadbury, of the first general conference of social secretaries, welfare superintendents, and manageresses, to consider the aims and results of their work.[242] At this conference some very practical and helpful papers were read. By invitation I spoke on the basis existing in the national standards laid down in the Factory Acts, for the working out in individual factories of the personal health and welfare of the workers, and I asked them to look into and consider fatigue and its prevention. Discussion arose on the means, legal and voluntary, for improving both the conditions in factories and the physical and industrial fitness of the workers. There was a marked gain in such meetings and discussions, leading as they did to the clearing up of ideas, that at that stage were bound to be a little vague, on the main objects of welfare superintendence and their relationship to the production of wealth. The majority of welfare supervisors present at the conference in 1909 would have been surprised if they could have heard the high estimate of their calling to be expressed in 1918 by Professor Urwick. “This is a skilled job,” he said, “so skilled that it is beyond the scope of anyone who has not made a careful study of the conditions of it ... it requires essentially detachment as well as knowledge.” However high the estimate was to be, there was certainly room throughout for ancillary welfare workers as well, and these early conferences strengthened the professional spirit in the calling. Partly from them and also from the interest shown by leading employers came a new movement in the provincial Universities— following an older one within the London University[243]—to provide some training for such social workers by hygiene and social welfare courses and diplomas. This growth led again, in 1917 and also in 1920, through the war conditions of industry to conferences on training, officially convened at the Home Office, between representatives of Universities, employers, leading welfare managers, and the Factory Department.

Perusal of the pages, concerned with the increase of welfare work in the experience of the Women Inspectors in the Annual Report for 1913,[244] published but a few months before the great industrial upheaval of the War, gives a strong impression of growth in the employers’ interest in welfare, and of the vitality of a desire among an increasing number of them to secure for employees much better conditions of work than can be laid down in an Act of Parliament. The value of this growth lay not only in the details of work done by the social secretary or superintendent in organising medical, dental, or nursing facilities for care of the health of the workers, methods of cleansing workrooms, organising messing arrangements, bathing and washing conveniences, suitable protective clothing, restful seating arrangements. Behind and above it all was the possibility of making the “social helper most important to the workers and a real help to the carrying out of the spirit of the Factory and Workshop Act. An Inspector may remind an occupier that his factory must be kept in a cleanly state, but unless there is some woman permanently on the premises who will organise and look into the details of the cleansing, and suggest contrivances for the purpose, it is seldom properly done. Four firms visited in 1913 had arranged classes for their work-people and ... for technical training ... most social workers had the initiation of social clubs in their charge ... clubs for sports as well as gardening.”[245]

In 1914 we passed from peaceful promotion of welfare to warfare, and a new note had to be struck immediately. “How greatly,” said Miss Squire, “the army of industrial workers need a commissariat department to cater for them during their days of active service will perhaps be better realised now that the public attention has been rivetted on the victualling of our soldiers in camp and on the front. If ‘an army fights on its stomach’ is it not also true that a factory works on it?” The answer came promptly to this and to similar questions that had long been asked, apparently vainly, by the Inspectors about the needs of industrial workers. In an East End social restaurant, where the midday meal was served daily to a hundred workers from a neighbouring factory, the superintendent and her helpers had for years deplored the insufficiency of the dinner purchased by the young girls under sixteen, and they could scarcely refrain from supplying more than was paid for. “One day soon after the War broke out there was such a run on meat-and- vegetable dinners that the supply was not equal to the demand ... the wages had that day been raised voluntarily by the occupier to the proposed Trade Board rate; the effect was immediate and continued ... a striking answer to those who cling to the theory that an increase in wages is of no substantial value to a girl.”[246]

By the close of 1915 an entirely new position and outlook had been opened for girls and women in industry. In demand for their labour, in wages, in conditions, and in the possibilities of their output, the situation had led to a “systematic introduction of hygienic safeguards that Factory Inspectors had advocated for many years ... supervision of women by women, provision of means of personal cleanliness, proper meal and rest rooms and qualified nurses” in the factories. There was a “new general awakening to the dependance of sufficient output on the welfare of the human agent.”[247]

This awakening was strikingly expressed in the formation of the Welfare Department by the Minister of Munitions, for promoting the means of such welfare in controlled and national factories. This department had as its first Director an employer experienced in the successful promotion of industrial welfare experiments in his own factories, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree. At his wish I supplied him with detailed surveys of the munition factories, made by the Women Inspectors. Before the end of 1916 he was supplied with 1,396 surveys relating to the welfare conditions of nearly 200,000 women and girls, classified according to the degree of urgency for his attention: 31 per cent. of the factories were in the first and best class, 49 per cent. in the second, and 20 per cent. in the third class. In the second and third classes were placed factories lacking in varying degrees and combinations, means for preparing and taking food, cloakrooms and washing conveniences, first-aid or rest rooms, seats, and suitable supervision. One must remember that in many instances the workers travelled daily long distances with only defective means of transport, and most were working twelve-hour (day and night) shifts. Great progress was made during the year in so transforming the conditions in many of the factories as to qualify them for advance to a higher class. A great stimulus was given to supply of welfare superintendents by the forming of a panel of likely persons and by giving them access to intensive training. While mistakes were unavoidably made in the rush to supply the need, employers being free to make their own choice, a remarkable proportion of capable and a few highly distinguished welfare administrators were put up by the movement. Medical women, moreover, had, and made good use of, a new and important channel for experience as medical officers of great national factories.

The supply of surveys and reports from the Factory Department to the Welfare Department, Ministry of Munitions, continued, while co-operation with dilution officers also developed until well on into 1917. One of the Medical Inspectors of Factories, Dr. Collis, then succeeded Mr. Rowntree in charge of the Welfare Department, and early in 1918 Miss Squire, Deputy Principal Lady Inspector of Factories, passed into charge of the Women’s Welfare in that Department. Thus a kind of fusion of the emergency wartime department with the peacetime department for industrial welfare preceded the end of the War and the rapid closing of the munition factories that followed. The making of Welfare Orders by the Secretary of State had, however, begun in October, 1917, under the powers given by the Act of 1916.

In “The School Child” that Act was pleasantly described as a “little Police Act,” by which “the Home Secretary obtained large powers to compel the provisions of many measures for the welfare of the workers in factories and workshops.” It was there also truly designated as “in fact, a large extension of the Factory Acts,” dependent in some degree on the reception given to it by the workers. The prompt issue of a summary of the operative clause of the Act, in “School Child Leaflet No. 14,” is one of the many straws then floating about that one can gather up now, showing that a new wind of the spirit was blowing in the industrial affairs of the nation. As I said, however, at the Birmingham Congress of the Royal Sanitary Institute in 1920:

“Only after the Great War was it generally realised how largely the
personal welfare and health of manual labourers rest on their own co-
operation in ... demand for, and use of all the new means placed by
development of science and advancing humanitarian and Christian ideals
at the disposal of industry, and how important it is to have trained
technical assistance in developing the full use of all these means in
each workplace.”

A skilled workman in a large factory, president of his union (a craft union), and taking a leading part both on the works’ committee and the district committee of the joint industrial council of his trade, said to me in the summer of 1920 that he believed that the workers had it in their power (if they could only see it), in co-operation with the employers, to do no less than recreate their work and surroundings.

At the time of the passing of the “little Police Act,”[248] in 1916, there was some apprehension amongst the few workers’ leaders who took any notice of it that it might mean no more (at the worst) than some new kind of efficiency engineering or possibly (less objectionably) a mere revival of philanthropy by employers. Employers themselves appeared to be too busy to take notice of the Act before it was passed, and it quickly and quietly became law, the only amendments being such as to strengthen the provision for initiative by the workers in working out details.

The Act provided that, “where it appears to the Secretary of State that the conditions and circumstances of employment or the nature of the processes carried on in any factory or workshop are such as to require special provision to be made at the factory or workshop for securing the welfare of the workers or any class of workers employed therein in relation to the matters to which this section applies, he may by order require the occupier to make such reasonable provision therefor as may be specified in the order, and if the occupier fails to comply with the requirements of the order or any of them, the factory or workshop shall be deemed not to be kept in conformity with the Factory Act, 1901.” Meals, drinking water, protective clothing, ambulance and first-aid, seats, facilities for washing, accommodation for clothing, and supervision were the subjects particularly specified as covered by the section, but power was given to the Secretary of State to extend it to other matters, and rest rooms have since been added.[249]

“Orders may be made for a particular factory or workshop, or for factories or workshops of any class or group or description.” The first order, dated October 5, 1917, provided for simple welfare arrangements for workers in tinplate factories, with their rough and heavy processes in which women have been employed for many years.[250] The second order of the same date provided for a wholesome supply of drinking water at convenient points with suitable drinking vessels in all factories and workshops in which twenty-five or more persons are employed. The third order, dated October 12, 1917, was of great significance, providing in detail for first-aid and ambulance arrangements in large groups of metal factories, where the greatest number of accidents, fatal and non-fatal, are reported (including blast furnaces, copper mills, iron mills, foundries, and metal works). The same provisions were applied, in an order of November 8, 1918, to sawmills and factories in which articles of wood are manufactured, the next greatest accident producing group of works. First-aid was, however, also required in various other classes of works, for which general welfare orders were made; for example, works in which bichromate of potassium is used in dyeing, March 22, 1918; oilcake mills, July 21, 1919; laundries, April 23, 1920; gut scraping, July 28, 1920; gutting, salting, and packing herring in Norfolk and Suffolk, September 9, 1920. By the beginning of March, 1921, fifteen orders had been made, of which ten made various requirements for particular industries. The interesting progress made in development of these general welfare orders may be followed in the chapters on welfare in the Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector from 1918 onwards.[251]

The Act further provided that “orders may be made contingent in respect of particular requirements upon application being made by a specified number or proportion of the workers concerned, and may prescribe the manner in which the views of the workers are to be ascertained,” and may “provide for the workers concerned being associated in the management of the arrangements, accommodation, or other facilities for which provision is made where a proportion of the cost is contributed by the workers; but no contribution shall be required from the workers in any factory or workshop, except for the purpose of providing additional or special benefits which, in the opinion of the Secretary of State, could not reasonably be required to be provided by the employer alone, and unless two-thirds at least of the workers affected in that factory or workshop, on their views being obtained in the prescribed manner, assent.”

Under these latter provisions no order had been made before the close of 1921, but the way is clearly open for a new initiative by the workers, and in many factories a share in management of welfare arrangements by workers through works’ welfare committees had indeed begun before the War. This share was further developed during the War and has blossomed out in many new ways since 1918. In 1916, in a large national factory, I found a workers’ welfare committee, elected on their own initiative, fully developed with an income of £50 a week. The committee members were nearly equally men and women, representing every branch of work, one member representing the management. The funds were raised by agreed deductions from wages, no other collections being allowed in the factory. Regular subscriptions were made to local hospitals, dispensaries, and to prisoner-of-war funds. Newspapers were provided daily in the canteen and concerts arranged twice weekly. “Whatever we want we can have,” said a member of the committee to me in describing the activities of his committee.[252] In a printing works in 1918 a shop committee, consisting of eleven members, two representing the employers and nine the workers (four the women and five the men), looked after all the welfare arrangements, including management of the canteen, alterations in hours, and wages questions. When the Factory Inspector found the five hours’ spell being exceeded, the alterations necessary in arrangements of work were made by the shop committee. In a northern tailoring factory employing many women there was, in 1917, and still flourishing in 1921, a “Workers’ Trustees Council” on which workers of over ten years’ standing in the factory served. Their special function was to consider and report to the firm suggestions made by the workers, and some of the most fundamental, with regard to hours, have been carried into effect. In a large stationery factory—where a Whitley Works Council dealt with employment, wages, and staff questions—a specially elected committee dealt with the canteen and sports questions, and special education and health officers with continuation classes and sanitation and health questions; the whole welfare organisation was known as the “Personal Service Department.” In a woollen factory with representative committees and with well-developed canteen, rest, and recreation rooms and other provisions for health and welfare, the works’ welfare magazine took the name _Service_, and its first editorial, May, 1919, said: “We want to prove to the world that the primary function of industry is service.”

Examples could be multiplied from the experience of the Inspectorate of various types of works’ committees with practical co-operation of workers and management. These committees, building on a basis of fairness in wages and other fundamentals, showed that a very good cement had been found in joint work for welfare, for the building up of peaceful industrial relationships, even before the formal development of joint councils of the Whitley type had begun. It has been one of the great satisfactions for the Inspectorate, when preparing by systematic enquiry for welfare orders or for the making of welfare pamphlets, to come upon long, modest, almost unnoticed, histories of welfare institutions in old-fashioned mills and factories. There is, as Prince Kropotkin pointed out in his “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” a survival all over England of smaller factories and industries helping to keep alive an older social atmosphere than that of the “factory system.” Something has certainly lived on in our country that partly accounts for the definite experience, that representative works’ committees can revive or replace the more personal relationships formerly existing between management and workers in manufactures.

Returning for a moment to the legal and official provision for the workers’ share in welfare activities, the sudden falling away of employment in the summer of 1920 limited the developments in this direction, so far as individual factories are concerned, for the remainder of the period with which this book deals. In the larger matter of consultation with joint councils for trades, when draft orders were considered for welfare and for regulation of dangerous processes or other matters, great progress has been made—_e.g._, in the furniture, laundry, pottery, building, and silk trades. The Home Office steadily proceeded with the making of welfare orders, which were generally received with enthusiasm by workers and by many employers as instalments of reforms long overdue; also with the helpful series of welfare pamphlets[253] designed to spread a requisite knowledge of successful experiments on which good hygienic and welfare arrangements can be built up in factories and workshops.

At the onset of the almost catastrophic degree of unemployment in 1920— at the moment when industry appeared to be in full flow of life and energy—the interest of the community swung round inevitably from the evolution of a better order within industry to the primary problem of restoration of that ebbing life and energy. Never could the mutual interdependence of aims for successful application of material and labour in industry and for health and welfare of the human agent in production be more conclusively shown. Nor could the social and economic value of institutions making for harmonious co-operation between organisers of industry and the manual workers, in constructive self- government within the factory system, be more dramatically demonstrated.

It had been a splendid and cheering experience at the brief time of activity, when the women and girl munitioners and substitutes for men were being re-absorbed in their old occupations, in 1919 to 1920, to learn from the Inspectors who were revisiting textile and clothing factories, laundries, potteries, ropeworks, and other peacetime industries of women, of the new demands for improved conditions that the women were making and with good effect. It was the more cheering because the women had behaved very well in the unselfish spirit in which they had gone out from their interesting temporary occupations. They left new welfare behind them for the returning men, and they spoke to the Inspectors with pride and dignity of the new amenities growing up in their own old workplaces. Large numbers of women munition workers had been recruited from the old-time industries with unreformed conditions of personal hygiene, and they rightly showed a marked reluctance to accept the old bad standards. Alert young managers, back from the field of war, quickly took the hint and moved their old directors into the new and right direction. “We have seen the impossible undertaken and accomplished, and we want to carry on here too,” was the keynote struck by some of them. New standards had, of course, been tried and their value proven in production for the nation; yet there was something greater than the realisation by employers of the possibility of more harmonious relations and the higher efficiency to be gained by better conditions of work. There was a widened outlook and a new spirit of comradeship for the workers in many young employers lately returned from the War, and a readiness to put responsibility on to workers’ representatives. Managers would “speak with enthusiasm of the general interest and communal responsibility that has resulted” from the activities of representative works’ committees, and would praise the “eminently practical” nature of their proposals.[254] In socially backward, rough industries, where even elementary requirements of the Factory Act had still to be forced on the attention of occupiers, the Inspectors hoped for an awakening through the application to them of the new stimulus of a welfare order. In the trades that were little organised from the workers’ side enquiries began to come from individual workers—a hopeful sign—as to when an order might be expected in their particular trade.

The effect in some factories with old-established welfare institutions of the introduction of representative works’ committees has been remarkable in the advance of the workers in self-reliance and interest in their work, and in initiative in developing better conditions. Most striking in their activities are some of the works’ committees in industries where the constitution of the committee has been approved by the Joint Council for the trade. In one such factory the accomplished welfare superintendent has been enrolled a member of the trade union. She is secretary of the works’ committee, and the elections of the committee are carried out under the care of the trade union secretary. Here the careful supervision of the health and safety sub-committee of the works’ committee is evident in the excellence of the fire drill and other arrangements and the good, coloured “safety first” notices at the machines. The note of authority that is apparent in the rules drawn up by the committee reflects the representative basis of the government of daily life in the factory. An extensive, well-chosen library is an outstanding feature of the social arrangements.

The immense advantage for future control of many risks and inconveniences, as well as promotion of constructive welfare work in industry, that may be reaped from the vigilance of workers, practised in methods of self-government, is so obvious after seeing some of their earlier achievements that one can only marvel that it has taken so long for the “captains of industry” to begin to make the discovery. The position of influence over the minds of workers held in the old-time craft industries by the “master” craftsman can, it appears, in a new way, be regained in modern factories with their specialised production. The whole organisation of great industry is necessarily so intricate and complicated that with the added machinery of internal factory government, by committees, a “master organiser” is certainly necessary to the success of the undertaking. This will become increasingly clear to all workers capable of entering into the meaning of their surroundings, when their share in self-government grows and their contact with the organiser becomes closer. Already eloquent tributes may be heard from individual workers to the “wonderful” organising gifts of the employer or manager where the boon of representation has been conceded to them.

Notwithstanding all the wonderful discoveries and inventions multiplying power to increase wealth that could have been turned to the social welfare and happiness of the worker, the factory system of the nineteenth century failed portentously on this social side. It failed through its blind and too often barbarous neglect of the really great part that can be played both in workmanship and in organisation by the spiritually endowed human agent of production. Man, woman, young worker, or child, with their varying needs and capacities, they were all alike “hands.” Their moral claims to a secure share in the good things—the wealth and the welfare—that their labour helped to buy for the whole people were not the only things denied to them. They have only won through to the possibilities of the new position that lies ahead (when industry can be revived), through sufferings and trials that are difficult now to imagine, but of the story of which no responsible thinker or leader in the nation’s affairs should ever be allowed to remain ignorant.

“In the struggle for life to which industrial undertakings are subject,” said the Belgian Vandevelde many years ago, “the final victory is reserved for those who know how to meet their rivals not only with the most perfect machinery, but yet more with the best human material, the most solid array of moral and intellectual forces.”

That was a warning that need not have fallen on deaf ears, even in an avowedly competitive society, and that might have been understood by the factory organisers of the nineteenth century. It is a new world that has to be faced now, and although we should not forget that saying, we may better dwell on the thought that harmony in industrial relationships promises to be the natural outcome of associated human effort for the sound, plentiful production that mankind so greatly needs and that may minister to a reviving desire for fitness and beauty in the world.