Welsh Journals

IMPRESSIONS OF LIFE IN A MUNITIONS FACTORY POVERBS are notoriously misleading. And I if anyone sets out to write his experience of life in a great munitions factory, he does well to remember that the adage about the outsider seeing most of the game is not the least fallacious of its kind. I shall, therefore, offer no precise conclusions as the result of this survey. It has to be read as a very episodic record of the three months' experiences of one whose acquaintance with industry and its problems is very slight. I should place on record first of all the amazing feats of endurance and energy which stand to the credit of the great majority of the munition workers. My own particular business gave me a dose acquain- tance with the clock-cards of the men in several of the shell shops in one of the great industrial cities of the North of England. The usual arrangement is that for one week a man works continuously from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m.; for the next, from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. During the week-end, when the transition from days to nights is effected, the shifts are from 5 p.m. on Saturday till I p.m. on Sunday, and from I p.m. on Sunday till 6 a.m. on Monday, shifts of twenty hours and seventeen hours respec- tively. And there are many cases where men are exceeding even these hours. Clock-cards of over 100 hours actually worked are not uncommon. The demands of these long hours on the physique and the morale of the workers are tremendous. There is no seventh day respite to which they may look forward, for the week-end is the period of the longest and best paid hours. The holidays in most parts of the works were cut down to two and a half- days, though the furnaces which had produced enough to keep the machines going for the interval were able to afford a full week. All this, of course, has its effect on the health of the men. But, so far, the results have not been so serious as might have been expected. In the one half-hour of the day when the works run easily and the men eat their mid-day meal, you will find the younger men playing football at the line-side or in the yard, and the boys having the wildest and most headlong chases over waggons and piles of shell. The sickness rate in the approved Society in connec- tion with the works is certainly heavier than usual, but not alarmingly so, and it is to be feared that the worst result is not in actual ill-health among the workmen but in a dullness of mind and body that at the least makes all kinds of outside interests impossible, and at the worst produces a lowering of vitality, an irritability and hardness of outlook and temper that will almost certainly leave just as per- manent an injury on the workman as a severe wound on the soldier. Unfortunately, there is little chance of any im- provement in this state of things. For the moment. indeed, there is possibly an available reserve of skilled labour which might be used to introduce a three-shift system instead of the existing two-shifts. But this reserve is available only for a very short time, and it will be more than exhausted in meeting the requirements of the new shell factories and the extensions of existing factories which are now in progress. And it must be said that the men do not particularly want a three-shift system. They are making better wages than they have ever made before (though they are far from making the enormous incomes which popular opinion attributes to them), and they know that even to piece-workers, the in- troduction of the three-shift system would mean a considerable financial loss. And this very fact should dispose of some part of the conviction that the average worker is doing far less than his best. If that were true, then more active exertion during eight hours would in the case of the piece-worker, endow his lengthened leisure with the same wage as he now earns in eleven or thirteen hours. There would plainly be another of those cases of the conjunction of patriotism and profit which are not unknown in more exalted circles. But the average man knows quite well that he is doing more in his long shift than he could ever do in the shorter, though no doubt he might by greatei alertness make up for some curtailment of his working hours. The conditions of work, for the most part. are inevitably unpleasant. Fortunately, some remediable hardships are being mitigated by the provision of canteens, where a greater variety of drinks than Oxo and sarsaparilla is to be had, and where the edibles comprise more than three varieties of biscuits. It has been said that the first beginnings of the more commodious and better-served canteens were ahnost too sweepingly successful. The men were so pre- occupied with the unusual experience of having ladies to attend to their wants that their visits to the canteens were too frequent, and too prolonged for the approval of the foreman. Housing is another most serious problem. There is a large influx of workers into the great munition centres where the