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The rapid development of the war industries, which
claimed millions of new workers and compelled many of them to leave
their own districts, made it urgently necessary that there should be the
best possible personnel management in the factories.
Many educated men and women, too old or otherwise
unfit for the Force, have made this work their war job. (In one
West-country aircraft factory, the women welfare officer was formerly a
lecturer in philosophy at Oxford.) With the Joint Universities Council
for Social Studies and the Institute of Labour Management, the Ministry
arranged special short training courses, and several hundred students of
these courses have already found such posts.
Returns show that of the larger factories employing
more than 500 persons, about 90 percent, have some definite form of
welfare supervision. New workers entering the factories, perhaps with
worrying personal problems still unsettled, often consult the personnel
manager or welfare officer, who is able to give them sound advice and so
relieve their minds.
Often a man or woman has some small trouble that he
or she does not wish to take either to the trade union or to the
ordinary works management, and here the good welfare officer can
probably put things right, and so help the workers, the management, and
the war effort.
Medical supervision and service in war factories
have been enormously extended. There are now 180 full-time work medical
officers compared with 35 at the beginning of the war and 750 doctors
substantially employed part-time as compared with 70 when war began.
This latter figure does not include all the doctors who may visit
factories more or less regularly.
There are no figures available for the increase in
the number of works’ nurses but the number now employed is over 6,000.
In many of the new large factories, the clinics are extremely well
equipped and are ready to do anything for their patients, from pulling
out their teeth to giving them artificial sunlight.
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