HKB
degrees to prevent women workers from claiming in higher wages that share of the increased capacity of the community for making wealth which men workers have been able to procure.
Sec. 11. The above-mentioned forces operate chiefly as barriers of free economic competition. But women are equally at a disadvantage when and in so far as they do compete for work, and wages. Weak, unorganised units of labour, they are compelled to make terms with large organised masses of capital. By the organised action of trade unionism the majority of skilled working men have been able to raise their wages far above the bare subsistence minimum, and to hold it at the higher level until a firm standard of higher comfort is formed to be a platform for further endeavour. With a few significant exceptions, skilled women workers have been unable to do the same. Instead of presenting a firm, united front to their employers in their demand for higher wages, or their resistance of a fall, they are taken singly and compelled to submit to any terms which the employers choose to impose, or custom appears to sanction. The consequence is that in most instances skilled women workers are paid very little higher wages than unskilled women workers. The high value due to their skill goes either to the employer in high profits, or, where keen competition operates, to the consumer in low prices; the woman who puts out skill is paid not according to her worth but according to her wants. Yet the possession of technical skill is the basis of trade organisation. Wherever a number of women workers possess a particular skill and experience, and are engaged in fairly stable employment, the requisites of effective trade organisation exist. By combination these women can wield an economic power, measured by the difficulty and cost of dismissing them en masse and replacing them by less skilled and experienced labour, which they can use as a lever to raise their wages and other conditions of employment by a series of steps until they approach the maximum limit imposed by their productivity. That such action is feasible is proved by experience. Concerted action of factory women in several minor trades, both in London and in the provincial towns, has been attended with success. The examples of the cigar-makers at Nottingham, the women at Messrs. Bryant & May's, the rope-makers in a large East London factory, show what can be done by determined combination, even confined to workers in a single factory. But the crucial case is furnished again by the textile industries. In the Lancashire weaving, where men and women are working side by side in the same sheds, and are members of the same trades unions, we find the one notable exception to the low wages of women. Here women's weekly earnings are nearly the same as men's. The weaving is unquestionably skilled work, but so also is a great deal of other textile work not nearly so well paid. It is beyond doubt the power of the joint union of male and female weavers that alone maintains these wages for women. The same is the explanation of the equality of wages paid to men and women in the Sheffield file-making.