Help Wanted: Female

A dapper little man with a lisp and a limp walked into an UNRRA office in Germany and showed his credentials. He was Ludger Dionne,* first-term member of the Canadian House of Commons from St. Georges, in Quebec's Beauce County and he was in Germany with the approval of the Canadian Government and the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. What he wanted made UNRRA officials blink: 100 girls, preferably Poles.

Ludger Dionne, 59, is a canny industrialist who operates, among other things, a shoe factory, a heel factory and a rayon mill--all in St. Georges (pop. 6,000). Most of his rayon-mill hands--he runs two shifts, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.--are daughters of local farmers. About 50 of them live in Le Foyer, a dormitory built as an annex to the Convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. On the first floor of the greystone four-story building are a cafeteria, a recreation room and parlors where the girls can entertain Sunday afternoons and evenings and two or three nights a week. They eat the same food as the nuns--with chicken and ice cream on Sunday--and sleep, two to six to a room, on the upper floors.

Dionne, a religious man who goes to Mass every morning, is also a believer in the letter of the law. He keeps wages in most cases close to the legal minimum of 20-c- an hour, or $9.60 for a 48-hour week. Girls housed at Le Foyer spend $6 of this amount for board & keep.

New Hands for the Looms. Every year Dionne has trouble with his hands when summer comes. They quit and go back to the farm, that costs him money, for looms stop clanking, and production costs soar. Considering this problem, Dionne recently had an idea. Why not bring in D.P.s from Europe? He persuaded the Government at Ottawa to declare that "there is a shortage of textile workers in Canada" and to waive immigration rules. Then he headed for Europe.

He explained his needs to UNRRA officials. The 100 girls he wanted for his mill must be Roman Catholics and unmarried virgins. (An Army chaplain talked him out of the second requirement.) Once he got them to St. Georges, he promised, he would house them at Le Foyer, teach them about Canada, pay them the legal minimum of 20-c- an hour. He plans to spend $42,500 to fly the girls to Canada. "I can't wait for boats," says Ludger Dionne.

In Canada, opinion is divided as to whether Dionne's scheme is the "oeuvre de charite" (charitable act) that the Sisters of the Good Shepherd call it. The General Council of the Catholic Labor Syndicates called it a "great scandal." Other unions have protested. In the House of Commons at Ottawa, CCFer Clarence Gillis labeled it "a fire sale of human misery." But among the 12,000 D.P.s in Camp Wildflecken, near Fulda, Germany, the idea sounds fine. Last week Ludger Dionne, with the help of doctors and the Canadian consul, was busy hand-picking his 100 new mill employees from hundreds of applicants. Within a few days, they will be on the way.

* No kin to the quintuplets.

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