Alexandria Gazette

CONDUCTORETTES TOO YOUNG

Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company Scored by Grand Jury.

New York, June 19.—Charging the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company with "inexcusable neglect" in employing women and girl conductors as young as fourteen years and subjecting them to conditions "detrimental to their physical, mental and moral well-being," a grand jury here yesterday urged the immediate enactment of legislation "to protect the self-respecting womanhood of the country."

The inquisitors, after an investigation covering several weeks, reported that the street railway company had hired women of questionable character and drug addicts and that they were often required to work more than ten hours a day. The conditions at the car barns, the grand jury said, were "injurious to the community in general, and particularly as affecting many decent and self-respecting women now employed or desiring employment by the railway companies."

Admitting that the war imposes industrial hardships on all classes, the findings stated that, notwithstanding them, "in these critical times advantage should not be taken of labor conditions, but all employers, whether individual or corporate, should be compelled by suitable and adequate legislation to provide for the health and morals of their women workers, thereby insuring the best of service."

The opinion declared that while no violation of existing law had been found, no exigency, however great, would warrant the continuance of the conditions revealed.