Food poverty-the way out

[Vorpal]

Have you examples of women in any sort of number working nights prior to the equal opportunities legislation? Presumably nursing would be an example but I cannot think of others. (I don't think it affects the point about changing work patterns but the ban on women working nights affected things like immigration.)

The ban was only on factory work, not work in general, and did not cover nurses, or other care workers, airline staff, military, laboratory technicians, office workers, farm workers, managers, and other roles. Emergency services & support workers (i.e. police women, police phone staff, and earlier telegraph operators) were specifically exempted from the legislation, as were some types of government workers. Furthermore from 1951 (the implementation of Night Work (Women) Convention (Revised), 1948) companies could & did obtain exemptions from the Department of Employment and Productivity (I think that's what it was called, then?).

Secondly, the ban was during the 11-hour period between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m, which meant that women could still work a few hours in the evening (not technically night work) even in roles that were included in the ban.

I read, but cannot now find the source, that the night work ban for women probably only affected about 1/4th of women workers.

[thirdcrank]

Thanks for that - I'm going largely from memory. I think that beyond industrial shiftwork, there were far fewer people of either sex working nights. ie There was much less night work. Most shops closed at tea time and robustly enforced closing times in pubs etc were 10pm - 1030pm. Re emergency workers, I don't remember any women in the fire or ambulance services. In Leeds City Police, with an establishment of just over a hundred policewomen, we routinely had two working "full nights" ie 2200 x 0600. That was an unusual arrangement AFAIK as - anecdotally - if a police woman was - rarely - needed at night in most forces, somebody would be called out, and out in the sticks, a policeman's wife would do the necessary. I particularly remember that nighttime GPO telephonists were all men. Train drivers and stokers were men. etc.

My interest in this was only really triggered by economic migration. eg I believe it's received wisdom that when the woollen textile industry in parts of the West Riding - particularly in and around Bradford and the Heavy Woollen District - tried to modernise Victorian machinery, introducing a night shift was needed to make it cost effective. The women who formed by far the greater part of the workforce could not legally work nights and men would be too expensive so migrant labour was recruited from what was East Pakistan, more recently Bangladesh.

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,

Cream, once a luxury, is cheap due to skimmed milk, and that means butter is also very affordable .My mum used it Sundays ,otherwise it was Echo or Stork,or dripping.

I remember Stork coming on the market (there was some sort of slogan "you can't tell it's not butter" - I bloody could, but I have to say it was an improvement on the old wartime Ministry of Food ?margarine.
I've had dripping on toast - it was a favourite of my father - but I wouldn't eat it now.
I don't suppose it's still so, but margarine in South Africa couldn't be coloured, so it looked like a block of lard.lp

Wasn't stork A cure all the things like bruises
I'm sure you can find many other uses for it too if you really are a bit of a Scrooge, not sure about the flavour though

[Vorpal]

Thanks for that - I'm going largely from memory. I think that beyond industrial shiftwork, there were far fewer people of either sex working nights. ie There was much less night work. Most shops closed at tea time and robustly enforced closing times in pubs etc were 10pm - 1030pm. Re emergency workers, I don't remember any women in the fire or ambulance services. In Leeds City Police, with an establishment of just over a hundred policewomen, we routinely had two working "full nights" ie 2200 x 0600. That was an unusual arrangement AFAIK as - anecdotally - if a police woman was - rarely - needed at night in most forces, somebody would be called out, and out in the sticks, a policeman's wife would do the necessary. I particularly remember that nighttime GPO telephonists were all men. Train drivers and stokers were men. etc.

I don't imagine that there were very many women working in the emergency services, even answering phones. But there must have been a few somewhere to prompt the specific exemption. I can well imagine that folks in rural areas would have ignored such laws, when needed, anyway.

[Jdsk]

From today's NIESR report:

"For 2022-23 we estimate that 1.5 million households across the UK face food and energy bills greater than their disposable income, with the highest incidence in London and Scotland."

https://www.niesr.ac.uk/publications/sa ... ic-outlook

Jonathan

[thirdcrank]

@ vorpal

Thanks again.

To make it clear, my query about women working nights was in response to this, which implies to me there was a lot of it going on.

In the 1950s, married women who held jobs outside the home generally worked only part time and/or night shift, though that was already changing

I may have misunderstood your point.

FWIW, my mother left school when she was thirteen - with the headmaster's special permission - to get full-time work (as a shop assistant + general dogsbody) and was continuously employed full-time till she reached state pension age, with the exception of the period between my birth - 1944, and my younger brother starting school - 1952, during which time she generally worked part-time on Saturdays.

I would have thought that one important point was that during WWII, women did much of the work previously considered men's jobs with great distinction and little recognition and in the post-war years were expected to revert to the status quo ante bellum - literally.

(The reserve army of labour.)

[Vorpal]

@ vorpal

Thanks again.

To make it clear, my query about women working nights was in response to this, which implies to me there was a lot of it going on.

In the 1950s, married women who held jobs outside the home generally worked only part time and/or night shift, though that was already changing

I may have misunderstood your point.

FWIW, my mother left school when she was thirteen - with the headmaster's special permission - to get full-time work (as a shop assistant + general dogsbody) and was continuously employed full-time till she reached state pension age, with the exception of the period between my birth - 1944, and my younger brother starting school - 1952, during which time she generally worked part-time on Saturdays.

I would have thought that one important point was that during WWII, women did much of the work previously considered men's jobs with great distinction and little recognition and in the post-war years were expected to revert to the status quo ante bellum - literally.

(The reserve army of labour.)

Sorry, I was not suggesting that the majority of women in the workforce worked night shift. But the majority of married women worked part time &/or evenings / nights.

It is an important point that women replaced men in many jobs during WWII. This is one of the many reasons for increasing numbers of women in the workforce. But still, married women were often under pressure to quit. Many women were fired when they married on the basis that they no longer needed to work. Part time work was somewhat more acceptable & often welcomed by the main breadwinner. The 1950s is also when women began to re-enter the workforce after a few years' break to raise children.

Statistics are hard to come by outside of paid material, but a number of publicly available sources at least imply what I am talking about.

https://www.historytoday.com/history-ma ... rking-wife
https://academic.oup.com/past/article/233/1/269/2915149
http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/59365 ... 202016.pdf

The last includes

married women - with or without children and across social classes - increasingly did engage in paid labour. And they drove an expansion of the part-time sector as they did so, assisted by the 1950 Factories (Evening Employment) Order which relaxed restrictions on female shift work facilitating an early evening - family duties friendly - ‘twilight shift’

[Jdsk]

It is an important point that women replaced men in many jobs during WWII. This is one of the many reasons for increasing numbers of women in the workforce. But still, married women were often under pressure to quit. Many women were fired when they married on the basis that they no longer needed to work.

And there were explicit and enforced marriage bars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_ ... ed_Kingdom

Jonathan

[thirdcrank]

AIUI, The start of the abolition of those rules came with the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 which seems to fit in with the reserve army of labour concept.

My personal experience is of how that affected the police. Had women not become to be employed on the same nominal terms as men, there would have been no police service left, so acute was the wastage. (I'm not suggesting the SDA removed all the barriers faced by women in employment.)

[Jdsk]

AIUI, The start of the abolition of those rules came with the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 which seems to fit in with the reserve army of labour concept.

No. That was the end of the abolitions because the residue immediately became illegal. It was the start of the statutory prohibition.

Some of the earlier dates are in the linked article.

Jonathan

[al_yrpal]

People rely on food banks because they do not know how to budget or cook, a Conservative MP has claimed.

Speaking on Wednesday during a debate on the Queen’s Speech, Lee Anderson said there was “no massive use” for the scheme and people could cook for themselves for as little as 30p a day.

Mr Anderson urged “everybody” on the Labour benches to visit his constituency of Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, where he said residents had to register for a budgeting course and cooking course before they received food parcels.

“What we do at the food bank, we show them how to cook cheap and nutritious meals on a budget,” he said. “We can make a meal for about 30 pence a day, and this is cooking from scratch.”

Asked by Alex Cunningham, a Labour MP, whether food banks should be “necessary” in Britain, Mr Anderson, a former miner who defected from Labour to the Tories in 2018, replied: “I think you’ll see first-hand that there’s not this massive use for food banks in this country.

“We’ve got generation after generation that cannot cook properly, they can’t cook a meal from scratch, they cannot budget, the challenge is there. Come to Ashfield, come to a real food bank that’s making a real difference to people’s lives.

I would like to see his 30p menu!

Al

[simonineaston]

This patronising and hypocrital individual will know full well the colossal amount of money that supermarkets and the processed food industry spend on lobbying government ministers so they can stay in control the sort of food that ordinary people can choose from. The labelling, the production, the marketing and advertising is all slewed massively in favour of the industries and this MP will know that.
If he has half a brain, too it may have occured to him that the reason so many ordinary state school educated people don't have a good grasp of cookery and home finance is because the subjects are absent from the governement controlled national curriculum.
These people make me sick.
On the plus side, my half-day shift at the food bank this morning put half a metric ton of food products back into circulation.

[simonineaston]

So, I just listened to "this patronising and hypocritical individual" on Times Radio this morning and heard him describe the project they have in place in Nottingham and I have to say he's doing pretty much exactly what I'd do, if I could!

When people come now for a food parcel, they have to register for a budgeting course and a cooking course.
And what we do at the food bank, we teach them how to cook cheap and nutritious meals on a budget. We can make a meal for about 30p a day, which is cooking from scratch.

However, my earlier point stands - if we think about why people don't cook from scratch in the first place, there are a great many reasons, to do with education, the market and the culture we live in and for the MP to ignore all that is missing some very important points.
I wish him the very best of luck with what souds like an effective and novel intervention, but wouldn't it be so much more effective if scratch cooking and home budgeting was a core part of the school curriculum? Can you imagine the faces on the food industry executives - they'd be livid !!

[thirdcrank]

Lee Anderson MP doesn't fit the stereotype of a Tory MP.

[al_yrpal]

I do agree that Home Economics has a place in every schools curriculum, but here and now this guy is offering adult education by volunteers which is a worthy alternative for those who might benefit from it
Patronising? I dont think so, practical would be my description. I can appreciate that some folk might see it that way and decline, bad habits die hard.
Milk and teabags for a day would exceed his 30p limit. I am going to drop him a line and ask him to publish his menu.

Meantime, here is a video from Mr Ashfields Facebook page... https://youtu.be/xt8fEcV-zXA

Nice to see something positive to help the least well off from a politician.


Al