SCOPE OF THE FIVE-DAY WEEK MOVEMENT 21

rally, practicable in operation. The majority of these indus-‘ries
 are non-continuous in character, and length of working
time is not regulated by the manufacturing process. Consequently,
 a few hours can be dropped from the schedule or
transferred from Saturday to other days of the week without
interfering materially with the production routine. Ina continuous-process
 industry, however, the problem is quite different.
 There, the production process requires twenty-four
hour continuous operation each working day until the close
at the end of the week, usually on Saturday night, unless
operation on Sundays is also imperative. For such a consinuous-process
 plant to adopt the five-day schedule would
mean the dropping of an entire day in each week, or a sixth of
the week’s productive time, unless a supplementary force is
hired to permit six-day plant operation with five-day employment
 of the workers. Thus, while five-day operation in continuous-process
 industries was found in a few plants, it is not
likely to be anything but the exception to the prevailing
practice in these industries for some time.
From Table 4 it is evident that, even in establishments
that are definitely on the five-day weekly schedule, a small
percentage of employees works a longer schedule. This percentage
 ranges from less than 19, in the women’s clothing
industry to 6% in the printing and lithographing shops.
These employees, who constitute less than 1% of the total
employment in all plants covered, are chiefly maintenance
and repair crews and shippers, who can often work to better
advantage when the plant is not in operation.
The sex composition of the total working force in these
five-day week plants is arresting because of the apparent
preponderance of male wage earners. While the sex distribution
 of wage earners in manufacturing industries generally is
approximately in the ratio of one woman to four men, it 1s
shown in Table 4 that in these five-day week plants the ratio
is approximately one woman to sixteen men. Closer analysis,
however, indicates that this proportion results from the
heavy weighting given to the totals by the figures from the
Ford Motor Company, which employs men almost exclusively.
 If figures from this company are omitted, the ratio
of women to men in the remaining companies approximates