This was an agreement made between management and trade unions that assisted in replacing skilled workers with unskilled or semi-skilled workers including older men, women and the disabled. The unions accepted this proposal on three main conditions; firstly that laws would be put in place to stop people making profits out of the war; that the measures would only last for the duration of the war; and thirdly that women would get paid the same wages as the men.
This measure was put in place to maintain the rate at which male workers were paid, rather than out of solidarity with the suffragette movement or recognition of equal pay, as demonstrated by the evidence submitted by the National Union of Clerks in There can be no possible doubt that to safeguard the interests of men enlisting that the same rate of pay must be paid to the women undertaking their duties.
Female Factory Worker in Overalls. Between and , hundreds of British factories altered their functions to make munitions. Over , women — teenagers, wives, mothers, even grandmothers — joined the two million already working in factories.
They filled the gaps left by volunteer and later conscripted servicemen, many taking on jobs once believed to be too strenuous for women. They did manual, repetitive labour in dangerous conditions. Women outnumbered the few men and youths employed in the factories by four to one. Given that they took the jobs as a call to action to serve their country and they were paid per task, rather than an hourly rate, it's fair to assume their motivations were similar too.
Manual labourers can track their hours more easily — making it easier to measure their output. For those in offices, it can be much harder Credit: Getty Images. One-hundred years on, the results of overwork don't seem to be all that different for knowledge workers. Working too many hours backfires for both employers and employees, whether you measure by decreased outputs, lack of creativity, a drop in quality or poorer interpersonal skills.
That's not to say that a short sprint of long hours to finish a project or meet a deadline isn't worthwhile. And some may argue that, despite regular long hours, CEOs and other dedicated executives still manage to thrive in their roles.
Although there certainly could be outliers, there isn't a body of research pointing to long hours being the optimal condition, whereas there's ample evidence in support of shorter workweeks for all kinds of workers. People need weekends and other types of time off to recover from work and return to a job refreshed and fully productive. A study of Israeli workers who all took the same two weeks away from the office found that everyone experienced some form of relief during their time off.
It didn't matter if one employee felt acute stress before the time off and another didn't. Some types of workers can't avoid long hours in a condensed schedule, usually due to the conditions of their workplace. Emergency response workers, sailors, miners, long-distance lorry drivers, surgeons and airline staff all come to mind.
Studies of such groups usually focus on the effects of sleep deprivation, because working long continuous hours means not sleeping. Whereas in there were , women working in the munitions industry, by the end of the war it had increased to , Christopher Addison, who succeeded David Lloyd Georg e as Minister of Munitions, estimated in June, , that about 80 per cent of all weapons and shells were being produced by women.
These women workers became known as Munitionettes.
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