More than Munitions by Clare Wightman

Author:Clare Wightman [Wightman, Clare]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, General
ISBN: 9781317876472
Google: T78eBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-07-30T03:37:25+00:00

The ‘woman’s rate’

Engineering’s extensive collective bargaining system not only dealt with issues of disputed work; it was also responsible for national wage rates and other conditions of employment for all its workers. Using evidence from negotiating conferences this section examines the criteria that shaped women’s pay and earnings. There is no mistaking the narrow view taken by the EEF of women’s employment in the industry. It assumed that there were natural limits to the use of female labour. Not only must marriage ‘have a pronounced bearing on any question of detailed training and instructional schemes in the industry for women’, the progression of women within the industry to higher grades of skill and responsibility, ‘is remote and is not to be seriously contemplated’, for, as a general principle ‘the male is the more appropriate of the two sexes for gaining the necessary experience and giving continuity of service in the Production Shops of the Engineering and its Allied Industries, and therefore it should be recognised, so far as employment of labour is concerned, that the male is the mainstay of the industry’.42 As we shall-see, the EEF’s view of women as peripheral workers meant that they were not formally included in important procedural and national agreements and this was to have significant consequences for their pay and working conditions.

It is not surprising then to find the federation admitting in 1932 that for male and female wages ‘the arrangements made have been in certain respects on an entirely different basis’.43 Generally speaking, negotiations about wages and working conditions were held separately for men and women, even where the agreements reached were similar and where the unions concerned represented both men and women. The tendency of the EEF to treat women ‘on an entirely different basis’ is also shown by their non-inclusion in some important agreements governing wage conditions. More than once the EEF questioned whether agreements made with general unions apparently on behalf of their whole membership automatically applied to their female members. Nor were women formally included in the basic procedural agreements which governed the industry’s collective bargaining.

In the early 1920s, engineering employers were quick to reduce wages inflated by the exceptional circumstances of wartime to a more ‘appropriate’ level. They did this as part of their return to normality, regaining control of their industry from government, but also as a response to post-war slump and price deflation. Part of the industry’s return to normality was a clear return to the idea of the ‘rate for the grade’ in wage payment. In the history of women’s wages, the war was seen as an exceptional time when women, instead of getting a ‘woman’s rate’ as they did before and afterwards, received the rate for the job. In practice, as Chapter 3 showed, even in wartime the wage rate was still defined by whose job it had been so that, for example, ‘split’ work had to be paid at the fully skilled man’s rate rather than on the basis of an assessment of the job content.

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