On This Day, 10 December 1918

Birmingham Daily Gazette 

Tuesday 10 December 1918

WORK QUEUES

Many Women Waiting to Register

BIRMINGHAM SCENES

A competent estimate of the number woman war workers discharged in Birmingham last week-end is that they will total the number already discharged since Armistice day.

As a consequence there were work queues at the Central Employment Exchange, Corporation-street, yesterday, and further departments had to be opened as an emergency measure to keep the women from waiting in the street. Except that most of those “signing on” or registering for the first time were young girls, the queues had many of the disagreeable characteristics which caused so much indignation in the months ago.

What the Women Said.

There were wan faces whose owners would have been better in warm household; women carried their babies because there was no one else to look after them, and others had very young children trailing at their skirts.

“It’s a fat lot when we get it,” the Gazette representative overheard one tired-looking woman in black remark. “Twenty shillings. What did the papers say it was worth now? Nine shillings.”

Most the comments in the crowd were good humoured, however. The staff at the Exchange dealt with the women quickly, and the officials are to be commended upon the machinery that has been created in a few days to deal with thousands of women.

Shy of Domestic Service.

There are not vacancies for a tenth of the women, it is stated, and the girls are markedly shying at offers of domestic service. “Domestics who have had a year or so of other work are refusing to go back to the living-in system,” said one official. Other work offered is being accepted, however; it being said that 95 per cent of last week’s notified vacancies were filled.

The Central Exchange premises are now being devoted wholly to women, the men’s departments having been removed to the Woodcock-street Baths. There also yesterday was an increase in the number of visitors, but the discharges among men have not reached anything like the figures revealed among women. The sections dealing with “engineering—semi-skilled and unskilled” were kept busiest yesterday.