Chapter 12 #3
“You really pulled off a great move with our government contract,” he complimented her.
“And we’ve got some great girls working here.
I’m going to miss them when our boys come home,” he said, which reminded Victoria that she would have to figure out how to handle that when the men returned from war.
She hadn’t decided how to deal with it yet, though she was determined to find a solution.
But the war was only starting, and it was far from over.
There had already been some catastrophic battles since August and September.
And in the spring, as Victoria celebrated her industrial victory with her government contract, the war news was disastrous, with the Second Battle of Ypres and the use of poison gas by the enemy.
The Germans were freely sinking passenger ships in the Atlantic, most notably the Lusitania in May, which particularly upset Victoria, bringing back all her traumatic memories of the Titanic, and she had nightmares about it for weeks.
The battles continued through 1915, and 1916 was even worse.
The Battle of the Somme in France lasted from July to November of 1916, with shocking losses.
On the first day of the battle, the British Army suffered fifty-seven thousand casualties in one day.
The fighting was so brutal that men’s bodies and minds were shattered.
The Battle of Verdun dragged on from February to December.
And the Germans had begun air raids, with Zeppelins dropping bombs from August 1914.
They targeted Manchester by air twice in 1916, hitting surrounding areas, and again in 1917, but weather and navigational issues interfered so they dropped their bombs on the Midlands and London instead.
Manchester was lucky and suffered no direct airstrikes during the war, but the fighting was brutal all around Europe, and some of the worst battles were in France, with men freezing and dying in the trenches for months.
Industrially, the war strengthened and improved Victoria’s business, but the loss of life was heartbreaking.
By the end of the war in November of 1918, there were close to forty million casualties, with fifteen to twenty-two million dead and twenty-three million wounded, both civilian and military.
It ravaged the population in Europe. America had entered the war in 1917, a year before it ended, and suffered heavy losses as well.
Most of the young men Victoria had grown up with had been killed.
Nearly half the women who worked for her had been widowed.
At the end of 1918, Victoria had to face what she would do when the surviving men came home.
Many of the previous workers had been killed in the war, but it was entirely possible that one or two thousand would want their jobs back, and she couldn’t in good conscience fire the women who had worked hard, been loyal, and needed their jobs more than ever, with so many of them widowed.
They had caused no problems, and had been dedicated workers and learned their jobs well, in some cases better than the men had done before them.
In 1915, there had nearly been a strike when the women demanded to be paid closer to what the men would have earned in the same jobs.
Their pay scale was lower simply because they were women, which truly wasn’t fair.
They worked just as hard, with excellent results.
The army was happy with the uniforms, and Victoria didn’t like paying the women less.
The other mill owners took full advantage of the lower pay scale for women.
The mills were struggling to survive, stuck stubbornly with the significantly lower wages for women, and were planning to fire them all when the men returned.
Victoria refused to adhere to the same principles.
She had not fully raised the women’s wages to the male pay scale, but she had given them a very sizeable raise, which the women were satisfied with and thought was fair.
There had been no strike and no violence.
The matter was resolved entirely by negotiation, and Victoria willingly gave in because she agreed with them.
With the men returning from the war at the end of the year, she had to make a decision about her women workers.
They had had losses among their ranks at the factories too.
Hubert Maddox was killed early in 1915 in the Second Battle of Ypres.
He had died in a nerve gas attack after weeks of torture.
They hadn’t heard from many of the men, but got news through their wives, many of whom worked for Victoria, making uniforms. There were heavy casualties among the men coming home, and the women who had worked hard for four years didn’t want to give up their jobs, and Victoria didn’t blame them.
She felt it her moral duty to honor and protect them, but they also owed something to the men who had fought for them and served king and country.
Victoria had a poll distributed to get a sense of how many of the women wanted to continue working, and how many couldn’t wait to go home and let their husbands work to support them. Some of the older men who hadn’t gone to war wanted to retire and stay home.
When the polls came back to Victoria’s office, seventeen hundred of the women wanted to keep their jobs, and needed to.
Many of them were widowed. And twenty-three hundred wanted to stay home and rely on their husbands.
It meant that Victoria had jobs for two thousand, three hundred men returning from the war.
She didn’t know yet how many of their old workers had been killed, and how many would be coming home.
They had heard here and there about some of them, but they had no idea how many were coming back and would want jobs.
And new workers would want jobs too. The other mills were going to fire the women when the men came home, which Victoria refused to do.
At the December mill owners’ dinner, she got in a heated argument about protecting the women’s jobs, which none of the other owners would agree to.
She wondered at times if Thor had survived the war. She hadn’t heard from him in four years.
Victoria announced to her workers before Christmas that the women who wanted to keep their jobs would be allowed to stay.
The men had already started trickling back, many of them severely damaged and unable to work.
Manchester was swelling with the returning men.
Poverty was an issue for many who were too damaged to work.
There were beggars on the streets everywhere in Manchester.
It tore at Victoria’s heart to see them.
Many of their old workers had come back, and she gave as many of them jobs as she could.
She was also turning over her factories now for civilian work, back to cotton, some wool, some silk.
The women workers who had made uniforms during the war had never done the finer work, and someone had to teach them.
She convinced some of the older workers, all of whom were foremen, not to retire yet and to teach the women the finer skills they didn’t have.
The women workers were trying hard to make the transition to the new, more delicate skills they had to learn to adapt to peacetime.
By January, the mills were swamped with demands from their old workers as they returned to Manchester.
In mid-January, there was a riot outside the factory, organized by men who wanted their jobs back and had been replaced by the women Victoria had hired and who had been loyal for four years.
Victoria recognized some of the faces in the crowd, men who had been faithful to her before the war, and were skilled workers.
She needed them too. She met with a committee of the men who organized the riot, and agreed to add five hundred new jobs.
Some of the workers would have to find jobs elsewhere, but five hundred new jobs would take off some of the pressure, and the men were satisfied when they left.
Victoria realized that the returning workers were going to cause a problem with the women too, who were making lower wages than the men would.
She was paying the women more than any other mill, but she couldn’t totally upend the pay scale and how women were paid in their industry.
It was an injustice, but she couldn’t right all the ills in the world, she was running a business.
In a perfect world, Victoria believed that men and women should be paid the same, but that world hadn’t arrived yet.
She thought it would happen one day, but it hadn’t yet.
The riot calmed down, with the men somewhat satisfied, and the women still disgruntled at the difference in their pay from what the men made, although they would have fared worse at the other mills, where women were paid considerably less and were being fired now that the men were back from the war.
As Victoria left the riot, once it calmed, her dress torn and her hat trampled, she spotted one of the old foremen. He had a scar on his cheek, and he looked ten years older than when he left. She approached him and saw that he had a patch on one eye.
“Hello, Walter, it’s good to see you back. Are you all right?”
He smiled at her. “I’m okay. A lot of the men came home a lot worse. We were at Ypres and Verdun. I got my old job back. It’s going to be strange working with women.” He didn’t look happy about it.
“They helped us out for four years while you were gone. We can’t just turn our backs on them now. They need the jobs too, a lot of the men didn’t come home.”
“I know,” he said. “We’ll get used to it. At least we’ve got work.” He was grateful for that, which she appreciated. It was going to be hard if they had warring factions fighting with each other, the women over their wages, and the men that the women were there at all.