EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN AND YOUNG PERSONS BILL. (Hansard, 24 June 1936)

§ THE EARL OF MUNSTER
My Lords, owing to the unavoidable absence of my noble friend Lord Feversham, it falls to my lot to ask your Lordships to give a Second Reading to this Bill to-day. About a year ago the late Home Secretary appointed a Committee to inquire into the working of the temporary provisions contained in Section 2 of the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Act of 1920. Since 1925 this section has been continued by inclusion year by year in the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill. This Bill empowers the Home Secretary to authorise the employment of women and young persons of sixteen years and upwards in shops averaging not more than eight hours a day on weekdays, but not before 6 a.m., 188 or after 10 p.m., or after 2 p.m. on Saturdays. I am advised that there are still about 800 orders in force to-day, applying to a variety of works, but the majority of the workers concerned are employed in a few industries in which there have been important developments since the War.
The Committee which the late Home Secretary set up examined the question very thoroughly. After a long and exhaustive inquiry it presented a unanimous Report in which it was recommended that the system should be continued on a permanent basis. Those of your Lordships who have read the Report will, I think, be forced to the conclusion that there is really no reason why powers to authorise this shift working should not be continued, subject to certain safeguards proposed in the Bill. It has many advantages both for the development of industry and for meeting the pressure of work which from time to time may occur, and from the point of view of ultimately shortening the hours of labour. There is very little more that I can usefully add to commend the Bill to your Lordships. The whole matter has been fully discussed in another place, and it now arrives in your Lordships' House, where I hope we shall be prepared to give it a Second Reading and so place these shifts in an Act of Parliament, thereby removing them from the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill which requires enactment from year to year. I beg to move.

§ THE EARL OF LISTOWEL
My Lords, I have been asked to say a word on this Bill on behalf of my colleagues on these Benches because, although it may be in some respects a minor measure, it directly affects the lot of some 36,000 women and young persons, and may affect many more if employers make further application to the Home Office in order to operate this method in their business concerns. We object very strongly indeed to the principle of the double shift in industry. This Bill has always met with bitter opposition during its passage through another place. This opposition has been reiterated year after year, and I do not think it is idle to continue to put forward the arguments which we believe invalidate this double-shift 189 system in industry. I am sorry that the noble Earl did not go into rather greater detail in order to support the case for the Bill. I can perfectly understand why he did not do so. At the same time it is always easier to attack a measure when one has a target at which to aim. I am in the position of having to advance the arguments of my opponents in order to be able to demolish them.
The principal argument that has always been used in favour of this measure has been one of economic expediency. In certain peculiar circumstances such as the seasonal rush at Christmas or a sudden change of fashions, or it may be the acquisition of expensive machinery that has to be used regularly in order to cover the initial cost, it has been considered necessary to adopt the very abnormal method of working employees for double shifts from six o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at night. Of course no single employee would work for more than eight hours at a stretch. I would respectfully suggest that employers should use every possible means of reducing their costs of production and acquiring an adequate remuneration for what they produce before they resort to this last expedient. I believe that demands should be made upon capital in cases of this kind as well as on labour. It is desirable to see what can be done about cheapening loans from banks or paying a rather smaller return on shares in the way of dividends before this exceptional procedure is adopted. It is only fair to point out that the sacrifice that the investor would have to make in terms of a slightly reduced income is nothing compared with the sacrifice the working man or working woman has to make if either has to work under these conditions, We are very strongly of the opinion that the double-shift system impairs the health of those who are engaged in operating it and also detracts very seriously from their educational opportunities.
It cannot be good for these married women or single women to have to rise, it may be, at four o'clock in the morning in order to get to work at six o'clock, and probably they have to trudge a very long distance in order to reach the workshop. That cannot be a healthy way of life. It cannot be desirable, instead of having regular meals at ordinary hours, 190 that they should have a cup of tea about four o'clock in the morning before they set out and a snack, not a real breakfast, at nine o'clock and, finally, their midday meal probably not until three o'clock in the afternoon. That is an interference with those regular habits which we believe to be conducive to good health. Let me point out that most of those who are affected probably fall into the category that Sir John Orr describes as under-nourished. He says in his report that about fifty per cent. of the population of this country are under-nourished. That being so, the strain and the fatigue imposed on those people will tell to a far greater extent than it would in the case of an average well-nourished person like any member of your Lordships' House.
To my mind, an even more serious argument against this system is that it effectually prevents the prolongation of education of young working men and working women after they have left school. Those of us who believe that education is the greatest good fortune that can befall a working man or any other citizen believe strongly that when people must leave school at a very early age they should at least have the full advantage afterwards of continuation classes. When a young man or young woman of sixteen or seventeen or eighteen has to work from two o'clock in the afternoon until ten o'clock in the evening it is quite obviously impossible for him or her to attend evening classes at those places where instruction is given. Even if they are employed in the morning shift from six o'clock until two in the afternoon, one cannot imagine they would have sufficient energy left to be able to attend evening classes and profit from the instruction they would there receive. I feel that the educational argument is the strongest objection by far to this particular measure.
I should like to point out that this measure was originally introduced during the War as an emergency measure that had to be put on the Statute Book because it was necessary to sacrifice what one might call humane considerations for the far greater interests that inspired all of us during those four critical years; but it has been continued from year to year under the Expiring Laws Continuance Act. Now, for the first time, it will acquire its own independent place 191 on the Statute Book if it passes successfully through your Lordships' House. I suggest that a measure of this kind is not in accordance with the progressive improvements in the conditions of the working class of which we can in many respects be so justly proud in this country. It interferes with the education of many young people, and it accepts as normal the 48-hour week for such persons. Surely, in the mid-twentieth century we ought to be moving towards a 40-hour week. This is what we want if the working man is to have adequate leisure and, besides, if employment is to be spread as broadly as possible. I do not think we should allow Continental countries to take the lead in this matter. For these reasons I am bound to deplore this measure on behalf of my colleagues and on behalf of many educational bodies, such as the Workers' Educational Association and the Education Committee of the London County Council, both because it detracts from the opportunities that many young working-class people have to get as good an education as possible and because it stereotypes the status quo conditions of life in industry instead of marking a step forward such as should be taken in the middle of the twentieth century.

§ VISCOUNT BERTIE OF THAME
My Lords, when the noble Earl rose to address your Lordships against this Bill I was not altogether surprised to find that there were only two occupants of the Socialist Bench, neither of whom was in this House, I believe, at the time of the Socialist Administration. Your Lordships will remember that the Socialist Administration on two occasions at least caused this Bill to be renewed in the Expiring Laws Continuance Bill notwithstanding the facts, according to the noble Earl, that the Bill impairs health, that there was always opposition to it, and that it was an emergency measure during the War. I think the present attitude is really rather trying to go back on what the Socialist Government did, which I should have thought they would have felt to be most humiliating.

§ THE EARL OF LISTOWEL
I entirely agree with what the noble Viscount has said. May I suggest that all Governments, even the best Governments, and even in crucial matters of foreign policy, 192 are inclined now and again to change their minds.

VISCOUNT BEBTIE OF THAME
On two occasions the Socialist Government thought the Bill was working well. I suppose it has worked well, and I hope your Lordships will give it a Second Reading.

LORD STRABOLGI
My Lords, I do not know if the noble Viscount was deliberately throwing a fly over me. If so, I am rising to it at once, and I hope, if he throws a fly over a real fish, he will have equal success after the rise. I was not in the House, as the noble Viscount has unnecessarily reminded your Lordships, when the Labour Party was in office, but I was in another place, and I was a supporter of that Government and know exactly what happened. We had a Bill on the stocks, a very comprehensive Bill, to which Mr. Clynes had devoted a great deal of labour, for the re-modelling of the whole of the law with reference to factory work, and if we had not been thrown out by a disreputable plot that Bill would now be on the Statute Book. That is the short answer to the noble Viscount. With regard to his other point, he is entitled to say that there were only two of us on this Bench at the time my noble friend Lord Listowel made his pungent and useful remarks. That is quite true, and the noble Viscount has a right to say so, because he is one of the most constant attenders in this House. But he is a member of a Party that numbers some 600, and if he will do a little mental arithmetic, he will see that the proportion of my colleagues now present, numbering three, is quite reasonable compared with the proportion of his colleagues who have taken the trouble to come here this afternoon.

§ THE EARL OF MUNSTER
My Lords, I rise to reply to some of the questions which have been addressed to me, and at the same time I may say with all respect to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, that I very much doubt if he has read the Report at all. He will observe in that Report that his fears regarding the health and education of these young people are really quite unfounded. Moreover, he informed your Lordships that the Labour Party most strongly objected to the principle of the double shift. I am completely at a loss to understand why. 193 The noble Earl gave us no clear indications of the reason. Furthermore, the Labour representative on this Committee, I think it was Mr. Brown himself, in another place vigorously supported the whole of this Report and the working of the double shift. I turn next to the question which the noble Earl raised about shares and dividends, and I would point out that this Bill has really nothing whatever to do with shares or dividends. It deals with setting up a double shift permanently in industry.
On the question of the employment of young people on two shifts it is true that the system was severely criticised by the Trade Union Congress representatives together with their medical adviser. On the question of health he admitted that he could produce no proofs which would be regarded as scientific, but he gave his general impressions, derived from conversations with a number of boys employed on shift work, that they became nervy and irritable. But that was not what the Committee found. The Committee found that the other evidence they had before them did not in any way bear out the contention that young people are affected more seriously in health than other shift workers. Moreover, on the question of education, the Report says: It is common for young persons wishing to attend classes to be taken off shifts and put on day work. In others, when on the afternoon shift, they have been allowed time off to attend the classes, while some education authorities are said to have arranged for the same lecture to be given both in the daytime and in the evening, so that the workers on the morning shift can attend the evening classes and those on the evening shift can attend the day classes. If the noble Earl had read the Report he would have observed that there is provision contained in it for reasonable facilities to be given for young people to attend continuation schools.
I do not think there is anything further that I can add on this question except that I am not in any way satisfied with the argument that the double shift is a most dangerous weapon for industry. I hope that one day it may fall to my lot to hear from some representative of the Labour Party a real and solid reason why they object to this double shift in industry.