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The Miscellaneous Workers and Wage Cuts
Secretary Mrs. Florence Anderson Speaks Out
In the "Labor Call" is week we publish
a forceful article from "Scrutator" on this
subject.
Following the report in our Industrial
pages m a recent "Call," a representative
ot this journal interviewed Mrs. Anderson,
the secretary of the Miscellaneous
workers, who has been putting up a good
fight for these women workers against
cowardly assaults on their meagre earnings.
The majority of them are office cleaners
in the city, and as Mrs. Anderson
points out, they are compelled by their
occupations to put in two shifts a day.
They must catch the early workman's
trams or trains from their residences
in industrial suburbs to be on their jobs
by 6 o'clock in the morning.
They go back again to town between
4.30 and 5 in the afternoons, and work
until 7.30 or 8 p.m.
NO TRAIN CONCESSIONS
This means four journeys a day on full
fares!
They have been denied the concessions
granted to other train patrons, such as
the college youth, who travel in the peak
hours of traffic.
Theirs is a 24-hour week, and the recent
wage cuts have brought their actual
earnings down to £1/12/2 a week, on
which a cold-blooded capitalist system
callously expects them to live, and in
many cases provide for a young family.
They could put the children on the
State perhaps, but for the sake of being
mothers they prefer to work and keep
little homes together in which their loved
ones can be reared under a gentler maternal
care.
Out of thirty-two shillings and two
pence a week they are now expected to
buy clothing, blankets, fuel, fares, house
room, lighting and food for themselves
and their dependants!
LONG LIFE OF SLAVERY
They have no pensions to look forward
to, no social insurance—nothing but
a long life of slavery and an obscure
corner in the necropolis at the end of
their days.
"Scrutator" describes them as "Heroines
of the Dawn."
Australia rewards their virtue, their
motherly self-sacrifices, their useful and
necessary services, by reducing their pre-
vious award (1930) from £2/11/3 to £1
18/9 (1931), and now by a further cut
£1/12/2 a week plus tax!
Some of them, widows, have raised
their boys and girls from infants to the
age of 19, and now—thanks to the financial
deflators—there is no work for them.
In Melbourne there are from 3000 to
4000 children depending on the labors of
these women for subsistence.
It goes without saying that these
sweated victims and their young folk are
ill housed, ill nourished, and ill clad.
NO BIG BROTHERS
No "Big Brothers" for the little Australian
boys whose mothers sweep and
clean the temples of Commerce and Government
twice a day.
They can starve on the doorsteps of a
land of plenty.
Women with children to tend and prepare
for school cannot compete with factory
girls and the younger women who
find jobs—if they are lucky—in tea rooms
and restaurants, so they become victims
of a policy which is approved and enforced
by the "strong men" of Nationalist
Governments and Employers' Federations!
The plans of Rats and Retrenchers are
being implemented at the cost of broken-down
sick women—one of whom recently
was taken to a public hospital, a physical
wreck. She struggled back to work
after six weeks, collapsed, and was removed
to another institution, where she
died.
Another, whose husband died not long
ago in Austin Hospital, stuck her job
till the week-end—was carried from her
home with double pneumonia, and has
since died, leaving two little orphan children
to the further mercies of the Wage
System.
WORKERS OF THE DAWN
"Yes," said Mrs. Anderson to our interviewer,
"they are "Workers of the
Dawn, and Dusk too."
"If you could only stop to think how
very necessary these women are. What
a service they render. The whole of the
big city buildings have to be cleansed
every day. The work is of a domestic
nature, and it is proved beyond a doubt
that the women make the better cleaners,
besides being cheaper than male labor.
All the work has to be done in the offices
before the tenants come in at 9 a.m. The
starting time is 6 a.m., so that means the
women must rise at 4.30 or 5 a.m. at
latest to catch first train or trams. The
hour of ending work is any time up to 9
p.m. The working weeks average from
26½ to 27 hours, so their work is spread
over a 15-hour day to get in their time.
At the present time there are women
walking in at that hour of the morning,
and do it four times a day, from industrial
suburbs, as far as from Abbotsford
to Spencer-street to save fares.
"Most of the women do not have even
a cup of tea in the morning until they
return home after 9 a.m. The offices
are frequented by all classes of people
during the day. The women inhale all
that dust and smoke. It has affected
some of them so badly that they were
obliged to leave the occupation. They
are called on to sweep walls, scrub paint
work, and even to clean men's conveniences.
"These poor women have been buoyed
up in the past with the hope, when their
children reached a working age, they
could supplement the income and make
the burden lighter for them. The tragedy
of it all is that for the past two years not
in one case out of ten can the children
find employment, and the unfortunate
mother discovers that to-day her purchasing
power has rapidly declined."
And yet people quote "equality of sacrifice"
as an excuse for inflicting further
hardships on Australian mothers whose
only offence is that they have been made
targets for "the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune."
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