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So far living wage legislation in the United States has been applied to female industrial workers only. The argument against the extension of the principle to male wage earners is put on two grounds the constitutional and the economic. On the constitutional argument, only the briefest comment will be attempted; and that without any intention to dogmatize upon a most complicated subject.
First, the labor unions represent manual wage earners almost exclusively not by intention, but as a matter of fact. They include only an infinitesimal proportion of small employers, self-employing artisans, or salaried employees. Second, the unions by no means include all the manual wage earners, and only in a few industries do they include a majority.
The Federal Government should continue its solicitous care for the 8,500,000 women wage earners and its efforts in behalf of public health, which is reducing infant mortality and improving the bodily and mental condition of our citizens. The most marked change made in the civil service of the Government in the past eight years relates to the increase in salaries.
While the duties on this small portion, representing only about 12 per cent of our imports, undoubtedly represent the difference between a fair degree of prosperity or marked depression to many of our industries and the difference between good pay and steady work or wide unemployment to many of our wage earners, it is impossible to conceive how other countries or our own importers could be greatly benefited if these duties are reduced.
It must be admitted that this conclusion as to the inadvisability of adjusting wages by reference to the profits return of particular industries is not set down without hesitation. It is plain that if that idea is to be rejected, the policy of wage settlement as a whole must give some other guarantee of distributive justice to the wage earners.
The wife, to be sure, will feel something more than her husband's equal, and the Frenchwoman never has felt herself the inferior in the matrimonial partnership. But how about the wage earners? Those that made ten to fifteen francs a day in the Usines de Guerre, and will now be making four or five?
I loom up to such proportions that I cast my shadow over every field of labor, from the turning of the grindstone to the moving of every railroad train. I massacre thousands upon thousands of wage earners a year. I lurk in unseen places and do most of my work silently. You are warned against me but you heed not. I am relentless.
Yet the building of the railroads and their consolidation into great systems, the development of manufacturing and its concentration into large concerns, and the growth of an army of wage earners brought about a problem of such size and complexity as to demand all the information and vision that the country could muster.
There are some groups who would argue that no division of the product of industry is fair unless it gives to the wage earners the whole of the product. Such a view, of course, amounts to a desire to revise the whole of the present economic system fundamentally. No policy of wage settlement akin to that put forward in this book could win favor in their eyes.
The calculation of the wage increase to be awarded, when the profits test shows that the profits return in industry as a whole is greater than that conceived to be a fair return, and the basis of distribution of this wage increase among the various groups of wage earners, were dealt with at some length and cannot be described more summarily.
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