problem thus raised is the greatest one which organized labor faces. For if we do not wish to see the American workmen reduced to a great semi-skilled and perhaps little organized mass, a new mode of protection must be found for the working conditions and standards of living which unions have secured, and some means must be discovered of giving back to the worker what he is fast losing in the narrowing of the skill and the theft of his craft knowledge. It is another problem which the organized workmen must solve for themselves and for society. See also 166. The Transfer of Thought, Skill, and Intelligence. 169. The Machine and the Laborer. 222. THE LOT OF THE WORKINGMAN' You are a workingman. All your life you have known the conditions which surround the lives of working people like yourself. You know how hard it is for the most careful and industrious workman properly to care for his family. If he is fortunate enough never to be sick, or out of work, or on strike, or to be involved in an accident, or to have sickness in his family, he may become the owner of a cheap home, or, by dint of much sacrifice, his children may be educated and enabled to enter one of the professions. Or given all the conditions stated, he may be enabled to save enough to provide for himself and wife a pittance to keep them from pauperism and beggary in their old age. That is the best the workingman can hope for as a result of his own labor under the very best conditions. To attain that level of comfort and decency he must deny himself and his wife and children many things which they ought to enjoy. It is not too much to say that none of your fellow-workmen in Pittsburgh, men known to you, your neighbors and comrades in labor, have been able to attain such a condition of comparative comfort and security except by dint of much hardship imposed upon themselves, their wives, and children. They have had to forego many innocent pleasures; to live in poor streets, greatly to the disadvantage of the children's health and morals; to concentrate their energies on the narrow and sordid aim of saving money; to cultivate the instincts and feelings of the miser. The wives of such men have had to endure privations and wrongs such as only the wives of the workers in civilized society ever know. 1 Adapted by permission from John Spargo, The Common Sense of Socialism, pp. 5-7. (Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1911.) Miserably housed, cruelly overworked, toiling incessantly from morn till night, in sickness as well as in health, never knowing the joys of a real vacation, cooking, scrubbing, washing, mending, nursing, and pitifully saving, the wife of such a worker is in truth the slave of a slave. At the very best, then, the lot of the workingman excludes him and his wife and children from most of the comforts which belong to modern civilization. A well-fitted home in a good neighborhoodto say nothing of a home beautiful in itself and its surroundingsis out of the question; foreign travel, the opportunity to enjoy the rest and educative advantages of occasional journeys to other lands, is likewise out of the question. Even though civic enterprise provides public libraries and art galleries, museums, lectures, concerts, and other opportunities of recreation and education, there is not the leisure for their enjoyment to any extent. For our model workman, with all his exceptional advantages, after a day's toil has little time left for such things, and little strength or desire, while his wife has even less time and even less desire. The best that the most industrious, thrifty, persevering, and fortunate workingman can hope for is to be decently housed, decently fed, decently clothed. That he and his family may always be certain of these things, so that they go down to their graves at last without having experienced the pangs of hunger and want, the worker must be exceptionally fortunate. And yet, my friend, the horses in the stables of the rich men of this country, and the dogs in their kennels, have all these things, and more! For they are protected against such overwork and such anxiety as the workingman and the workingman's wife must endure. Greater care is taken of the health of many horses and dogs than the most favored workingman can possibly take of the health of his boys and girls. 223. THE SHARE OF WAGES Α' That wages in the United States as a rule have a higher monetary value than the corresponding wages in Europe may readily be admitted. But the numerous investigations made in connection with workmen's compensation, with minimum wage legislation, and 1 Adapted by permission from I. M. Rubinow, Standards of Health Insurance, pp. 12-16. (Henry Holt & Co., 1916.) so forth, have demonstrated a very frequent lack of correspondence between customary earnings and necessary minimum expense. The conclusions to which the writer came some years ago may perhaps be stated here. 1. From two-thirds to three-fourths of all productive workers in the United States depend upon wages or small salaries for their existence. 2. From four-fifths to nine-tenths of the wage-workers receive wages which are insufficient to meet the cost of a normal standard of health and efficiency for a family, and about one-half receive very much less than that. 3. If a certain proportion of wage-workers' families succeed in attaining such a standard, it is made possible only by the presence of more than one worker in this family. This condition, however, can be only temporary in the history of any workingman's family. 4. An annual surplus in the workingman's budget is a very rare thing and is very small. 5. The growth of savings-bank deposits in the United States is not sufficient evidence of the ability of the American workingman to make substantial savings. A large proportion of these savings belongs to other classes of population, and in so far as information is available, the average workingman's deposits are very small. While these are all statements of static conditions, the investigations of the dynamics of the condition of the wage-working class lead to even more striking facts. It is but too often complacently assumed that the rise of American wages offers an almost automatic corrective to all economic problems of the wage-worker's existence. 1 A comparison of wages and retail prices from 1890 to 1912 led to the following conclusions, at present universally accepted by various shades of economic opinion: "In years of falling or even slowly rising prices, the American wage-worker was able to hold his own or to improve his condition to a slight extent. But when confronted with a rapidly rising price movement (accompanied as it was by a violent growth of profits) the American wage-worker, notwithstanding his strenuous effort to adjust wages to these new price conditions, notwithstanding all his strikes, boycotts, and riots, notwithstanding all this picturesque I.W.W.-ism, new unionism, and the modish sabotage, has been losing surely and not even slowly, so that the sum total of economic progress of this country for the last quarter of a century appears to be a loss of from 10 to 15 per cent in his earning power." BI But, after all, absolute figures are of but little interest to most of us. Which has been gaining at the expense of the others? Which has been losing in the race? The answer to these questions is presented in Table XXXI. TABLE XXXI THE ESTIMATED PERCENTAGES OF THE TOTAL NATIONAL INCOME RECEIVED RESPECTIVELY BY LABOR, CAPITAL, LAND, AND THE ENTREPRENEUR We have observed that labor has been fairly successful in retaining about a half of the total product, but this tells us nothing about the portion going to each individual and this is a question of vastly more importance than the study of the share obtained by labor en masse. Has the compensation for the efforts of the average laborer increased as fast as should be the case considering the tremendous improvements in industrial processes? Has the entrepreneur distanced the employee in the race, constantly securing the lion's share of the added spoils ? Some light will be thrown upon these questions by reference to Table XXXII. The purchasing power of wages has remained stationary or declined slightly during the last sixteen years. But it must not be inferred from this that the present condition of the American laboring class is bad as compared to that of the working classes elsewhere. Adapted by permission from W. I. King, The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, pp. 160–202. (The Macmillan Co., 1915.) |