Health of the War Worker
1942-04 1942 1940s 44 pages giving the best production on most processes,* while many experiences both in the last war and this have proved the value of one complete day's rest a week in increasing output. There are, of course, important exceptions to this — for example where a r...
| Institution: | MCR - The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick |
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| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
London : Labour Research Department
April 1942
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10796/05B8937D-AC87-44F8-B07C-B735908849DC http://hdl.handle.net/10796/B81F09B8-856A-46A8-990F-2A89E6BBFBFE |
| Summary: | 1942-04
1942
1940s
44 pages
giving the best production on most processes,* while many experiences both in the last war and this have proved the value of one complete day's rest a week in increasing output. There are, of course, important exceptions to this — for example where a rush job has to be got out against time, or on urgent maintenance work, or where a temporary bottle-neck in one department is holding up production throughout the factory, or in conditions like those in the U.S.S.R. where whole factories had to be dismantled in a few hours to save the machines from the enemy. It is impossible to lay down a hard-and-fast rule as to the length of working week that will give the best production, because this varies with the type of work done, the degree of mechanization, and also the distance the workers have to travel and the working conditions in the factory itself. Undoubtedly, too, you can keep up your rate of output for a much longer time if you are really convinced that your job is vitally important. The only way to find out for certain whether the working hours in your factory are too long is to test the effect on production over several weeks if they are reduced, by means of records of output, absenteeism, and sickness. Nevertheless there are standards which ought to apply in most works and in practice are very often exceeded. For example, if your factory is regularly working two 12-hour shifts, seven days a week (as was happening at one factory where the stewards recently consulted us on the hours of work) you do not need any complicated charts of output or sickness to know that the workers cannot work effectively all the time, and that if they try to do so their health and power to produce will be seriously affected. It is important, too, to realize that once workers have become exhausted through a long period of excessive hours, it will take them a long time to recover their old freshness and productive power even if the hours are reduced. Working capacity takes less time to wear down than it does to recover. This is why the working of very long hours is a short-sighted policy which cannot solve the problem of increasing production.† 24 *After the Dunkirk spurt, when thousands of factories worked 70 hours or more, exhaustion among the workers became very marked, and the Ministry of Labour issued instructions that hours should be reduced at once to 60, and thereafter where possible to 56, "which experience has shown to be the optimum standard." † Details of research on hours of work, on which the above is based, will be found in Emergency Report No. 1 of the Medical Research Council on "Industrial Health in War": in the Reports of the Select Committee on Expenditure: and in the Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories, 1940.
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| Physical Description: | TEXT |