LAUNDRIES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2705, 30 August 1894, Page 3

LAUNDRIES.

The Labour Journal quotes high English authorities on the conduct of laundries, concluding with the following from a medical journal:— Cases have been brought to light frequently in which work goes on from an early hour in the morning till 11 and 12 at night without any extra meal time. Sometimes the hands are kept washing through the whole of Friday night, after a long day’s work, till mid-day on Saturday. Several of the factory inspectors report that the laundries are frequently kept going all night, and the case of the poor woman who worked 42 hours at a stretch is mentioned. These fearful hours are worked, it must be remembered, as a rule, under the most trying and unsanitary conditions. Go into an ordinary washhouse where a few hands are employed, and you will find the women standing at their tuba on an uneven floor, where the water col'ects in little pools; their clothes are pretty well siturated long before their work is over, and their feet are wet through. They take their food sitting on an upturned basket in the midst of the reek and steam. When the gass is turned on at night these places, whether underground or aboveground, become choking. The fumes of the chlorate of soda, whose devastating properties most of us have cause to deplore, remind you of the alkali works, and give a sickening pungency to the damp and spongy composition of gas, steam, and foetid air which the women have to breathe. In the ironing room, where the drying is generally carried on as well for economy of space, the temperature ranges fr9R% 76 to I<v ' ? r—degress,

and there is no sort of provision for ventilation. The sanitary accommodation in the places I have visited was infamously bad. No wonder the poor creatures are crippled with rheumatism; that you find the wards of the consumptive hospitals crowded with them; no wonder they drink; no wonder their character goes sometimes with the ruin of their health and spirits. In many »f the steam laundries the sanitary conditions are better, and the hours worked are not so excessive. But the quantity of rapidly moving machinery and the number of young girls employed make their supervision quite as necessary as that of the smaller places.”