FOREWORD. The phrase "women in industry" was used so often during the war that it becomes the part of wisdom to remind ourselves that women are not new in industry. As a matter of fact, women have always been an integral part of the factory system. Three hundred thousand women turned the wheels of production in New York State. Some industries are even known as women's industries because their hands hold the tools and operate the machines. Women are the backbone of garment making, knit goods manufacture, candy making and the paper trades. They fill the ranks of the unskilled and semi-skilled in large plants with standardized products and in small low grade workshops in large cities. In common with all workers in unskilled and repetitive production of goods they have been unhonored and unsung. Unhonored, that is, until the war came; unsung, until their performance in the making of war material caused employers, government and brother workers alike to recognize a new phase in industrial development. The women who took men's places and did men's work have served all women in industry by opening for discussion old and new problems of women's working life. The story of the woman who took the place of a man gone to war, and, untrained, produced more 3-inch shells than he, trained, had ever delivered, has been told with variations adjusted to every plant on war production. That woman has been the pride of aircraft and machine gun plants, naval and optical shops, Liberty motor and army truck factories. Every plant has had at least one of her; some departments have been full of her kind. Were it safe to assume that the brilliant performance of one woman worker out of twenty was an index to the productive capacity of the other nineteen, the problems of replacement would be simple. The processes of industry would be rearranged in order to place the most competent new worker at the most suitable job, and production would proceed merrily along. As matters stand to date, however, the facts concerning the capacity of women who have replaced men are not known. We know only that they have taken men's places during a period of great stress. The significant questions concerning their precise degree of success on certain processes in terms of production and steadiness remain to be answered. The scientific apportionment of women's wages in relation to their output and the wages of men they replaced remains to be made. The effect of the unrestricted introduction of unskilled labor into the ranks of the skilled has not been estimated. The possibility of women's permanence in their new work has not been considered nor its causes analyzed. Administrative problems in shop arrangement and trade union policy limiting the success of women have not been clarified or solved. Because the unknowns are greater than the knowns, the Bureau of Women in Industry has made this preliminary study not for the purpose of saying the last and most authoritative word on the subject of replacement, but in order to clear the ground for further and more detailed examination. The time will soon come when the women who have caused a stir by taking men's places will have been accepted and absorbed into the industrial process as if they had always been there. Their adventurous spirit will have been merged in the humdrum routine of the 300,000 who have always worked in the factories of New York State. It will then be impossible to make a clear cut effort to equalize men's and women's opportunities in the same work. Women have replaced men not to compete but to cooperate. If, by chance, their performance is better or not so good in any branch of work, it is as workers that they should be judged. Their usefulness to industry should be determined and recompensed in accord 3 ance with their production and general efficiency as these are limited by plant working conditions and the wisdom with which the individual woman worker is chosen for the job. The Bureau of Women in Industry has no desire to do more than present the surface facts of replacement. It is hoped that they will speak for themselves without interpretation. REPLACEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN. of a The extent and character of replacement of course The Influence was governed in every country by the length of the Long War. war period. This one factor alone determined the difference which exists between replacement as it occurred in Great Britain and replacement as it occurred in the United States. In both countries there was the same sudden demand for enormous quantities of war material complicated by the departure of skilled male labor to war. Great Britain had four years in which to solve the problem, however, and this country, only 18 months. Four years gave Great Britain time in which to build new factories, planned and equipped for women; to shift women workers from plant to plant in order to obtain for them the most suitable work; and more important, to build machinery and rearrange processes so that the most productive combination of male and female labor could be made. In the United States, on the other hand, the same demand pushed women into the plants and into men's places without any change in machine or rearrangement in process. In countless factories where the employment of women was new, the war was over before women's rest rooms and sanitary service was begun. In other plants it was a matter of months before an overhead lever could be made six inches longer and the strain put upon a short woman eliminated. In both countries women literally took men's places without shutting off power, but in England industrial manage Dilution and in Aeroplane 4 ment had time to go further and rearrange processes and rebuild machines. This difference between the experience of Great Britain and the United States illustrates the distinction between two words which have been ushered into the vocabulary of industrial managers and workers since the war. These words are "replacement" and "dilution." Both occur in industry as a result of an emergency such as the war, when an increase of the existing labor supply must be instantly secured. Dilution implies the thinning out or spreading of the functions of skilled workmen among those that are less skilled with or without division of process or change in machine. Replacement, on the other hand, is a specific form of dilution in which the less skilled, usually a woman, takes the place of the more skilled, usually a man, without division of process or change in machine. Two exceptions to this definition of replacement appeared in the United States. One was in the munition centers, created by the European demand for shells before America's entry into the war. In such plants a rough parallel of English development could be observed in its successive stages. First, the hasty direct replacement of men by women, second, the subdivision of the original process, assigning usually the heavy work and tool setting to men and the machine operation to women, third, the building of new machines to meet the problems of standardization. The other exception took place in aeroplane construcReplacement tion. Strictly speaking women did not replace men in the Construction. building of aircraft because aircraft had never been built before the war in sufficient numbers to develop a body of technical knowledge or a group of aircraft mechanics. Men were quite as new to the work as women. The only sense in which women can be said to have replaced men in aeroplane shops is in the sense that while men had never operated machine tools for the purpose of building aeroplanes women had never operated them at all. In New York State dilution has occurred in its elemen 5 in the State tary form of replacement. Where exceptions to this rule Replacement have taken place they are instructive of what would have of New Yor been the case had we remained at war a longer time, or what may be the case in after years when women are more widely used industrially. Division of process has taken place in only a few plants, through substitution of power machinery for tools, and the use of porters to do heavy lifting. In one case noted, a certain department had always used men to operate hand machines because the process was both heavy and continuous and women had been unable to stand the strain involved. When it became impossible during the war to secure men, electric power machines were introduced and women substituted for men. In foundries employing women coremakers it is the custom to have porters carry the cores to the furnace. This does not result in an increased number of employees but in merely a higher degree of specialization. Porters do all lifting while women devote their entire time to actual making of cores. Porters are also used in the aeroplane industry to turn and move half finished parts on which women work. In other industries they frequently carry heavy boxes of material to and from machines which women are operating. Here also a greater degree of specialization is the result rather than an actual increase in number of employees. SCOPE OF REPLACEMENT IN THE STATE OF This study has covered 26 communities and 117 plants |