WOMEN WORKERS.

ATTITUDE OF THE STATE.

The Government still cries aloud for more women to work in the depleted ranks of the Civil Service, of the land, and of the domestic arts. There is a shortage in every department, except in the highlypaid one concerned with munitions, and the equally well-paid unskilled occupations, such as that of tram conductors, which need little thought, but a good deal of physical activity.

The falling-off in woman’s service is largely due to the handto-mouth way in which it has been used and the lack of any selection or thought in the Government stop-gap methods. This is true of both sexes. Mon have resigned good appointments, and their unfitness for the field have made them patriotically place themselves tit the disposal of the Government. One of these, a man eminent in a certain branch of business, found the work assigned him consisted in peeling potatoes and attending to an Army service canteen. University men who are employed by the Government to do special work in certain departments have the reward of patriotism, but nothing else, for the remuneration takes no account of what they have given up in professional work.

The wasteful exploiting of women leads to a reluctance to enter on the service the State requires of them. The Civil Service, where women before the war wore bonded under restrictions which kept them to a monotonous round of work, without any outlet for talent or ambition, is in a worse plight than ever. It is flooded by young uneducated women, picked at the recommendation of someone in the service, and their only qualification the skill to use a typewriter. New departments are organised, and the older Civil Service, with the experience of years of steady toil, are never used to organise, supervise, select, and teach the newcomers. Hundreds of women civil servants are leaving as the raw levies are thrust into their departments, for they see other openings, with better chances for the individual capacity, and they realise that only by war profiteering can they make a living wage in these days, when prices have altered all accepted ideas on the subject.

In the trade unions men are still determined to keep the women out of the organised industries and the better paid work within those to which they are admitted. The State follows their lead, and yet in such Civil Service departments as the Post Office, the Old Age Pensions, the Savings Bank they have women who have worked long in the service who realise that there is no hope or scope for their trained abilities. Into these older branches of the Civil Service the Government allows the new recruits to flood, untrained; but at the same rate of pay as the earlier labourers. In the new departments created by the war there is no method but that of exploiting any work-women who can be enlisted for pay varying from 35s to 45s a week. Their promotions within the limited range allotted them are at the favour of the military officer who, because of his sex, his Army rank, and his wounds, occupies the post created to meet the specialised department. He may have learnt all he knows from the woman who is his senior in the particular work, hut whether she goes or stays or receives the maximum rate of pay depends entirely on his favour unleavened by any special knowledge on his part of the department. The officer is the head, and the woman worker is the brains. This applies to all posts under the Government. There is no selection, no scope for legitimate ambition, and while the Government calls aloud in the byways and hedges for all women to come in the comparatively few who do enter by one door stream out at the other, certain that they can do more for the State working where there is order and a method in recognising fitness and gifts.

Let anyone look at the few decorations that fall to the share of the women workers in the war. The names are chosen at pure haphazard. The “name” counts, not the work, and those who have the advantage of someone who mentions them get the reward, while the real brain organiser and “fitter” goes unnoticed. The matter will never be corrected, and economy in numbers effected, until the Government and organised Labour come to recognise that the State needs the whole force of the people.