THE LAUNDRY SURRENDER.
THE passing of the Factories Bill is in many respects so good and honourable a legislative achievement that its disfigurement by the gratuitous surrender on the laundries question is a matter for peculiarly keen regret. From no point of view, unfortunately, can that proceeding be regarded as of slight consequence. The Bill in its original form, and as it came from the Grand Committee on Trade, which examined its provisions with great care and intelligence, contained a clause extending in several important ways the control given by previous legislation over the working of commercial laundries. Among other things, its effect would have been to curtail substantially the amount of overtime allowed for women, reducing the maximum number of hours permitted for actual labour in laundries from fourteen to twelve on any single day. The fourteen hours' limit, which means, in practiee, that the women concerned may on three days m one week, though not on more than thirty days in the year, be kept in or about the laundry for sixteen hours- Sa.y from 7 a.m. to n p.m.—is believed by persons of calm judgment, well acquainted with the conditions in which the labour is carried on, to involve an altogether excestiye and dangerous strain on their constitutions. Besides pro- hibiting strains of that character, the clause of which we speak would have brought commercial laundries so corn. pletely within the scope of the factory administration of the Home Office that the Home Secretary would have been able to iSalle special Orders on any matter which he judged to be of sufficient importance as affecting the health or safety of those employed. - If any one desires evidence of the necessity of this complete supervision of laundries in the interest of a large and growing number of workers, of the classes whose protection Parliament has definitely under. taken, he may be recommended to study the extremely inter. esting report by Miss Deane in the Annual Factory Blue. book for 1900. Miss Deane, to whose excellent judgment and administrative capacity high tributes are paid, both by her chief, Miss Anderson, the principal lady factory inspect(); in the same Blue-book, and by her selection as one of the Committee of ladles sent out to examine the Boer refugee camps in South Africa, has been for some two years in charge of the laundry, dressmaking, and millinery establish. meats in the district of West London. This is the first instance in which the labours of one of Miss Anderson's staff have been permanently localised, the United Kingdom being the province of the other members of that excellent but exiguous corps. Miss Deane's energetic administration of the law OA it stands in the district assigned to her has amply justified the policy of concen- tration in regard to the supervision of all the industries placed under her charge, and particularly so in the case of laundries, of which she writes that in some districts of London and the neighbourhood they "may almost he called the staple industry.' In certain localities whole streets exist, nearly every house in which is a laundry within the meaning of the Act." This trade, she says, "is in process of rapid transformation from a domestic into a regular factory Industry, in which. machinery and division of labour play an important part in the organisation." We regret that we have not space to quote Miss Deane's most interesting sketch of this transformation, but no one can read it without feeling that the industry she is describing is in need, not of less, but if possible of more, supervision than many others over which the Factory Acts give full control, hiving regard to the rapidly grow- ing numbers of those engaged in it, to the exhausting heats in which much of the work is done, the dan- gerous character of much of the machinery, and the ignorance and inexperience in management of machinery which cannot but exist in the case of many of those who are entering the field as employers. As it went to, and as it came from, the Grand Committee, Mr. Ritchie's Factories Bill would have strengthened the law in regard to laundries at all, or almost all, the points at which the experience of its administration has shown that it required to be strengthened. As it left the House of Commons, alas ! none of those extending and fortifying amendments remained, for—incredible as it may seem—the omission of the clause containing them was moved by the Home Secretary himself, " told " for by the Government Whips, and carried by a large majority, composed of a combina- tion of Ministerialists and Irish Nationalists Such are the facts, and no surprise need be felt if on the morrow of that ugly vote there prevailed, as we axe assured that there did prevail, a widespread sense of profound humiliation in the House of Commons. What conceivable explanation could there be for such an issue to an important branch of a first-class legislative enter- prise ? We say "explanation," for of vindication or justi, fication there could be none, as Mr. Balfour's attempt to provide one abundantly showed. The explanation lies in the fact that during the progress of the Bill through the Grand Committee Mr. Ritchie was unhappily inspired to accept from Mr. W. Redmond an amendment excluding reformatory, religious, and charitable laundries from the operation of the laundries clause. Even so, this exemption was only carried in the Grand Committee by a majority of 5-29 to 24—and a strong feeling was aroused and expressed, which took• shape in various notices of amendments to the clause at the Report stage in the House of Commons, that the exemption agreed to by the Home Secretary involved an unworthy concession to the mouthpieces of Irish Roman Catholic Rreill; dice. _Several of these amendments proposed the simple rescission of Mr. Redmond's amendment. But .a reason- able compromise was offered by an amendment standing in the name of Mr. Talbot, who could hardly be suspected of indifference to the feelings or just claims of the conductors of any religious institution. Its effect was to empower the Home Secretary to modify the requirements of the Act in regard to any laundry connected with an institution of a reformatory character as to which he was satisfied, by representations made to him, that its discipline would be impaired by inspection of the ordinary kind. This com- promise had the greater claim on the consideration of the Government and the House in that it was practically identical with a proposition which Mr. Ritchie him- self had put forward, but had not stood to, in the Grand Committee. It recognised and took account of the special difficulties under which religious and benevolent institutions of the kind in question labour. And that it appealed to the good sense of at any rate English .Roman Catholics was shown by the approval of it expressed by Mr. Fitzalan Hope, nephew of the Duke of Norfolk, on the understanding, which might readily have been given, that a lady visitor should be appointed in the cases in question, enjoying the confidence of the managers and of the Chief Inspector of Factories. But, unfortunately, the nerve of the Government was not equal to the trouble of insisting on a real settlement on such lines, and before Mr. Talbot's, or any other, amendment could be moved, Mr. Ritchie was up moving the omission of the whole of the laundry clause. His defence was that the discussion of the various amendments to the clause, and of. the remainder of the Bill, in the temper which would certainly be engendered, would render it im- possible to carry the Bill through at all, and that it was better to sacrifice a part to save the rest. In this con- tention he was sustained by Mr. Balfour, and despite strong protests from Members on both sides of the House specially interested in the welfare of the working classes, the omission of the clause was carried by 237 to 65.
When in the Tipper House on Thursday Lord Windsor desired to reintroduce the laundry clause, with Mr. Talbot's amendment, Lord James of Hereford and the Lord Chan- cellor resisted and ultimately bore him down with the same class of arguments. But as the Archbishop of Canterbury well pointed out, nothing was said affording any sufficient ground for the belief that the desired reinforcement of the Bill could not be safely carried through in the Commons. For our part, we cannot, and do not, believe that any necessity existed for a choice 'between the grave sacrifice which has been made and the utter legislative disaster which would have been involved in the failure of the Bill as a whole to pass into law. It is said, indeed, that the Government could not be sure of keeping a hundred of their men in town, that without a hundred to support it the Closure cannot be carried under the existing rules, and that without the Closure the Session might have dragged on for ever. We cannot, and do not, believe that if the Government had addressed a firm appeal to their supporters to sustain them in making their Bill complete, by including their laundry clause as passed by the Grand Committee, with the addi- tion of a considerately worded modification in the case of convent and other institution laundries, Unionist Members would have preferred their ease and sport to their Par- liamentary duty. They could not have faced the opinion of their constituents and of the country at large if they had done so. The country, we are convinced, is perfectly clear in its mind on the subject. It is clear that while those who undertake the arduous and delicate charge of reformatory institutions ought to be treated with the greatest gratitude and consideration, it is not good, either for them or for those under their care, that when they carry on an industry like that of laundry- work they should be altogether exempted from the pro. visions of the law designed for the protection of workers M commercial establishments. Concentrated as their atten- tion i is on the moral reform of the charges, it would be entirely in accordance with hhman nature that they should not always be equally alive to their physical needs, and especially that they should sometimes, if not often, be wanting in full comprehension of the requirements of a mechanical industry from the point of view of the workers. For such reasons as these, which must weigh with every reflecting person, there is, we believe, an overwhelming opinion in favour of some such settlement as that which the Government thought of, but, unfortunately, failed to carry through ; and there will be universal regret that, having committed that error, they bought the passage of the remainder of their Bill, excellent as it is, not by the acknowledgment and reversal of their blunder, but by a concession seriously injurious to the interests of the whole of a large and rapidly increasing industry.
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