THE DOMESTIC HELP.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 June 1921, Page 10

THE DOMESTIC HELP.

■W" : '»S K, SCARCITY IN ENGLAND. London, March 8. “In my kingdom,” said that excellent French monarch, Henry IV., “every laborer will have a chicken in the pot every Sunday.” Perhaps it was this excess of amiability which led to his being assassinated. The war brought untold misery, but it also brought to very many here, for the first time in their lives, the edible comfort which the good king wished for the French people. The difficulty now is to get someone to. help to cook the chicken, roast beef, Canterbury lamb, Irish stew, or whatever else is going in the culinary department of a fairly well-supplied home. The housewife, often with cares of, children on her hands, says that she is overworked, and often has to add that she cannot get a domestic help for love or money—meaning thereby what she is willing to give either of them. Yet Dr. Mncnanrara, Labor Minister, told an inquiring member in the House of Commons this week, that on February 11 there were 3,261 women drawing unemployment w pay who had registered as domestic servants. The bulk of these, however, were described as “non-resident servants,” who, for reasons good, bad or indifferent, were not prepared to live at the place of employment. The Minister also mentioned that in January there were six ordinary domestic posts vacant for every suitable woman on the register, but only one non-resident situation for every six women applying. That was still very much how matters stood a few days ago, when the Ministry of Labor issued new regulations governing'unemployment pay. In future this will be available only to persons who, being enrolled as domestic servants, cannot get suitable resident employment, unless they can urge “some valid objection arising from domestic ties;'—as could be done, for example, by the mother of a family who has to earn bread for her children, but who must first send them to school in the morning and be available to look after them at night. It will be interesting to see how the new regulations work out, but they will not, we think, greatly help the housewife needing assistance unless she contrives to make the “place” reasonably agreeable and remunerative.

SMALL HOUSE PROBLEM. In the larger houses, where - two or more servants are kept, and both companionship and regular time off are thus assured, women and girls work for from £3O to £5O a year money wages, plus board, or board, wages and lodging. So far as we can judge, there is no great difficulty, in getting them, although probably the mistresses, true to their traditions, say, as their grandmothers did, that “the girls of to-day are not what the girls used to be, my dear.” The real problem is that supplied by the household which can only afford to employ one woman—cook, maid-of-all-work and more.-or-less laundress. It is not much' of a room she is offered; as a rule, it is a. sort of attic. Those who v'ant this class of all-round worker may be i i.able or unwilling to pay what is only ranscnahle wages, in view of the reduced purchasing power of money, further, they may be of the dass that n ; i.s on so much “side” that the househelp’s supposed social inferiority is continuously marked. No real companionship is offered to her by members of the family, and her time off is the subject of frequent alterations, bickerings, misunderstandings. That is what happens in so many small establishments, that employers really willing to do their part, to make the conditions of domestic employment comfortable, find it difficult to get women to help them. For the employee—it’s like her confounded impudence, of course—insists upon being as human as the employer, both, you see, being women-—alleged to be always more human than men. Apropos of the better-class house, from the domestic worker’s point of view, Punch quotes this week,'from a provincial paper, the following advertisement: —“About La'dyDay lady wants Lady Cook and Lady Nurse, £5O and £4O respectively; lady housemaid kept; separate bedrooms;,.' level kitchen and gas cooker, plain cooking; only five children and one husband.”