DIZZY HEIGHTS.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1504, 29 July 1912, Page 3

DIZZY HEIGHTS.

WOMEN AS BUILDERS. ' | A startling innovation, is to take place in New York, according to a journal of that city. Tho New York Master Build- , crs' Association, which includes in its membership eighty of tho contractors of Greater New York, has discovered to its dismay that the demand for skilled workmen in tho various building trades greatly exceeds tho supply, with the result that those trades are flooded with unskilled labour. Tho association has decided, therefore, to establish a big training school at Long Island, where women aro I o bo taught practically every one of tho building trades, including carpentering, bricklaying, plastering, steam-fitting and steel construction, and the higher branches of the trade, such as estimatemaking, contract-bidding, and superin'tendencc. The project is not entirely a new one, a similar school having baen in existence in Berlin for somo years. Like the Berlin institution, tho New York school will aim not so much at fitting tho. women students for the performance of tho manual part of the-trades that will be taught them as at equipping them to superintend others and do the necessary head work. As soon as the New York school begins to turn out graduates, the Master Builders* Association intends to apply to the Legislature to fix a standard of qualification for all who engage as workers in tho building trades, and it is hoped that tho new school will fix a standard that malo workers will have to live up to. Possibly tho scheme is intended to spur male workers into an attempt to attain competence by showing that women can excel them in their own special sphere. The experiment in Berlin is said to have proved highly successful, and the American women yrho aro about to enter training may prove equally adaptable. The departure, however, seems likely to accentuate the evils of unemployment among male workers, and unless the graduates of tho Long Island school are to bo paid at the samo rate as men employed in similar capacities the American building trades unions cannot bo expected to look upon the innovation with friendly eyes.