A long-standing demand from labour activists for an Eight-hour working day to be signed into law was enacted for heavy industries and munitions factories in November 1918 and was quickly implemented across industry. The benefit for Ella Kay, as a factory worker, was immediate: she now had her evenings free to pursue her own further education. After the 1923 currency reform, with the party again able to pay salaries, Ella Kay took a job at the party head office in . She worked in the department concerned with workers' welfare and the women's secretariat. (There was, at the time, no separate department dedicated to workers' welfare.) Although "cocoa was occasionally distributed", the did not have the resources to operate as a charity on its own terms. Instead it worked with public authorities, identifying where a specific need arose and then campaigning directly with the public body (potentially) involved for the needs and entitlements of those disadvantaged. The nature of her work changed in the middle of the decade when she started work in the youth office in her own district, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. While working as a youth welfare officer, Kay also embarked on a traineeship in care work more broadly. She combined this, from 1924, with work as a district councillor. Later, between 1929 and 1933, she served as a member of the . Members were allocated fixed seats for a legislative term. Incongruously, during one term, Ella Kay found herself sitting next to Joseph Goebbels for council meetings. During this time a new approach to youth welfare work was developed in Prenzlauer Berg, in response to the intensifying impoverishment and surging unemployment that took hold in Germany as the great depression spread across from the west. Between 1927 and 1933 Ella Kay worked in Prenzlauer Berg as head of the department responsible for youth day-care centres in the district. In December 1927 she enrolled at the Socio-political seminar of the German Politics Academy (""Deutsche Hochschule für Politik""). Classes took place in the evenings, which made it possible for her to combine her studies with her paid day job. Thanks to a recent dispensation by the the training courses at the academy, originally intended only for male social work students, could now also be made available to women. Applicants were selected on the basis of interviews, subject to satisfactory previous qualifications and experience. Ella Kay was the first female student to be accepted onto the course. A contemporary fellow-student and political soul-mate with whom Kay formed a what would prove a lasting friendship was .