WOMEN’S CLUBS STUDYING LABOR PROBLEMS Nearly every state federation of women’s clubs has its industrial committee, and many large clubs have a corresponding department.  It is these industrial sections of the women’s clubs which are such a thorn in the flesh of Mr. John Kirby, Jr., the new president of the National Manufacturers’ Association.  In his inaugural address Mr. Kirby warned his colleagues that women’s clubs were not the ladylike, innocuous institutions that too-confiding man supposed them to be.  In those clubs, he declared, their own wives and daughters were listening to addresses by the worst enemies of the Manufacturers’ Association, the labor leaders.  By which he meant that the club women were inviting trade-union men and women to present the worker’s side of industrial subjects.  “Soon,” exclaimed Mr. Kirby, “we shall have to fight the women as well as the unions.”

The richest and most aristocratic woman’s club in the country is the Colony Club of New York.  The Colony Club was organized by a number of women from the exclusive circles of New York society, after the manner of men’s clubs.  The women built a magnificent clubhouse on Madison Avenue, furnished it with every luxury, including a wonderful roof-garden.  For a time the Colony Club appeared to be nothing more than a beautiful toy which its members played with.  But soon it began to develop into a sort of a woman’s forum, where all sorts of social topics were discussed.  Visiting women of distinction, artists, writers, lecturers, were entertained there.

Last year the club inaugurated a Wednesday afternoon course in industrial economics.  The women did not invite lecturers from Columbia University to address them.  They asked John Mitchell and many lesser lights of the labor world.  They wanted to learn, at first hand, the facts concerning conditions of industry.  Most of them are stockholders in mills, factories, mines, or business establishments.  Many own real estate on which factories stand.

“It is not fair,” they have openly declared, “that we should enjoy wealth and luxury at the cost of illness, suffering, and death.  We do not want wealth on such terms.”

The Colony Club members, and the women who form the Auxiliary to the National Civic Federation, have for their object improvement in the working and living conditions of wage earners in industries and in governmental institutions.  A few conscientious employers have spent a part of their profits to make their employees comfortable.  They have given them the best sanitary conditions, good air, strong light, and comfortable seats.  They have provided rest rooms, lunch rooms, vacation houses, and the like.

No one should belittle such efforts on the part of employers.  Equally, no one should regard them as a solution of the industrial problem.  Nor should they be used as a substitute for justice.

Too often this so-called welfare work has been clumsily managed, untactfully administered.  Too often it has been instituted, not to benefit the workers, but to advertise the business.  Too often its real object was a desire to play the philanthropist’s role, to exact obsequience from the wage earner.