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This article examines the relationship between women munitions workers, the 'munitionettes,' in WWI-era Glasgow and Paris and the radical anti-government labor unions. These two cities were the centers of industrial production in Britain and France during the war, and each contained radical, male-dominated labor unions that frequently challenged state authority. In hindsight, the munitionettes were ideal candidates for these radical unions, as they were underpaid and increasingly militant. Despite this, these unions undermined the munitionettes' work and opposed their movements for better wages and working conditions. This article explores how male-dominated WWI-era labor radicalism failed to incorporate women in the workplace due to gendered notions of work, patriotism and identity. It demonstrates how women developed their own working-class identity, militancy and unions, as they became the most effective strikers during WWI, despite their rejection by the radical labor unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

T his article examines the political economy of nutrition as a state-sponsored strategy to extract greater productivity from industrial workers in both wartime and peacetime. During World War II, the state, together with its munitions-industry allies, broadly considered workers' nutritional health as a critical component to achieving maximum wartime industrial production. Following the war, both the state and industry imagined the nutritional health of workers' bodies as crucial to Canada's postwar prosperity. Facilitating as well as frustrating these largely state-directed nutrition agendas was a combination of medico-scientific knowledge, the sometimes uncertain and unpredictable participation of both employers and workers, and wider national and international historical contexts. C et article examine l'économie politique de la nutrition en tant que stratégie parrainée par l'État pour accroître la productivité des travailleurs industriels, en temps de guerre comme en temps de paix. Au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l'État et ses alliés de l'industrie des munitions ont largement considéré la santé nutritionnelle des travailleurs comme un élément essentiel pour parvenir à une production industrielle maximale en temps de guerre. Après la guerre, l'État et l'industrie ont tous deux estimé que la santé nutritionnelle des corps des travailleurs était essentielle à la prospérité du Canada d'après-guerre. Faciliter mais aussi frustrer ces programmes nutritionnels largement dirigés par les États était une combinaison des connaissances médicales et scientifiques, une participation parfois incertaine et imprévisible des employeurs et des travailleurs, et des contextes historiques nationaux et internationaux plus vastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the series titled "Hands That War" by journalist and author Rebecca West that addressed the experiences of female munitions workers during the First World War.

Observations on munitions workers are organized to examine the relationship between their output each week, their working hours and days each week, and their working hours and days in adjacent weeks. The hypothesis is that workers need to recover from work, and a long working week results in greater fatigue and stress, and yet provides insufficient time for recuperation before the next week's work opens. Workers require time off the job to restore their physical, mental and emotional capacities, and if a long working week provides inadequate time to repair, then their subsequent work performance suffers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observations on munition workers, most of them women, are organised to examine the relationship between their output and their working hours. The relationship is non-linear: below an hour's threshold, output is proportional to hours; above a threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase. Implications of this finding for the estimation of labour supply functions are considered. The findings also link up with the current research on the effects of long working hours on accidents and injuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Older yet still abundant munitions such as tetryl present easily forgotten health hazards and associated needs for worker protection. Case presentation: Symptoms and findings from 22 workers who were exposed to tetryl are summarized. Conclusions: This study highlights the health hazards from exposure to tetryl. Occupational health professionals need to maintain vigilance to protect workers from the risks of handling older munitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]