Page:Alice Riggs Hunt - Facts About Communist Hungary (1919).djvu/13



At this socialised factory, work begins at seven a.m. and stops at 3 p.m., and there are fifteen hundred women among the twenty-five hundred workers. Before the war, it was the largest incandescent lamp factory in Europe, hut now, owing to tho lack of materials, it produces only fifteen thousand lamps a day, and the employees, in order to ensure work for all, are employed only four hours a day though a full day's wage is paid them all. The Controlling Council, of seven members elected by the workers, raised the wages from one hundred per cent, at first to two hundred per cent.

I talked personally to many of these men and women workers. The average wage for women in this factory before the war was twenty crowns a week, and under Communism it is from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty crowns a week. Older women are paid more than younger, women, not only for their experience, but as a social policy, which desires to minimise the attractiveness of factory life for young girls. In fact, the young girls of fifteen or sixteen years at present employed, because they are unskilled workers and can obtain no other employment, will be subject to compulsory education up to eighteen years, as soon as the schools are organized for their admittance. Some of the older women get three or four hundred crowns a week.

"Skilled men workers before the war got sixty crowns a week, their wages now averaging about four hundred and eight crowns a week," explained the President of the Controlling Council. "The Controlling Council has decreed that an apprenticeship of ten years for women and of six years for men is essential before either can be classed as skilled workers. They account for this apparent discrimination against women, by pointing out that women have only recently, during the war, entered the factories."

"What has that to do with their present ability, or the kind and quantity of work they can do"? I asked.

"It has nothing to do with it" he answered honestly. "The simple fact is that women have never been allowed to take part in public affairs, and therefore the mental attitude towards them is unconsciously unjust. When, however, the