A survey by Management Team shows that ten percent of those surveyed sometimes cheat at work. A century ago, the fear of sex in the workplace was a reason to keep women out of the workforce.
'One big brothel' was Regout's Pottery Factory in Maastricht. Young workers were found to have sex with their bosses and supervisors. That wrote the socialist newspaper Right for All in 1890. At a time when there were hardly any contraceptives, unwanted pregnancies were common. In 1898, the National Exhibition of Women's Labor signaled that working girls were "indulging in the worst things… One girl gave birth three times unmarried."
Sex outside of marriage was an absolute disgrace. Especially for the woman then, the men escaped the dance. According to MP Van Dorp, this 'wilderness of morals' could be combated in 1910 with a ban on factory labor for young girls. Moreover, they would then have time to prepare for their real destination:taking care of the household and the family. He did not mention the financial consequences for the women.
Some entrepreneurs didn't wait for the law to tell them what to do. In the late 1800s, a cigar manufacturer explained to a researcher why he had fired the girls in his factory. The all too close collaboration between male and female cigar makers had resulted in bastard children. “The stimulus came pretty quickly. And I did not find it necessary to have a factory of anything else besides my factory.”