Consumers and Wage-Earners: The Ethics of Buying CheapRoss, J. Elliot (John Elliot)
Philosophy
Consumers and Wage-Earners: The Ethics of Buying Cheap
Ross, J. Elliot (John Elliot)
Consumers -- United States; Wages; Wages -- United States
If we turn to the clothing industry, we find conditions even worse. In
the five cities investigated (New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Rochester,
and Philadelphia), 6788 employees, or 37% of the total (1217 men and
5571 women) were being paid at a rate less than the individual living
wage of $6.00. Taking the family living wage of $11.00 as our standard,
3499 men, or 62% of the total, fail to reach it.[58]
Again it must be repeated, that the actual wages are from 7-1/2 to
20-1/2% lower than these figures (l. c., p. 161). In one New York
special order shop, the earnings for December fall to 55% of the
average (l. c., p. 178).
These figures, however, are for shop-workers only. The _average_ wages
for home-workers are: Chicago, $4.35; Rochester, $4.14; New York, $3.61;
Philadelphia, $2.88; and Baltimore, $2.24. "Here again the caution must
be borne in mind that home-workers' wages, low as they are, often stand
for the earnings of more than one worker. Sometimes, as reported on the
books of the firm, it represents the earnings of more than one week" (l.
c., p. 139). Ninety-eight per cent. of the married shop-finishers, and
practically all of the home-finishers, too, earned less than $350.00 a
year (l. c., p. 226). The average yearly earnings of home-workers are
given as varying from $120.00 in New York to $196.00 in Rochester. From
page 235 to 239 inclusive, the details of the earnings, size of
families, and number of those working is gone into at great length. It
must suffice here to say that families of five are recorded whose total
yearly earnings are less than $100.00. One family of eleven is
chronicled whose yearly income was $445.00, sixty-five dollars of which
was earned by home-work. Working six days a week for ten hours a day,
the home-worker cannot hope to make more than $156.00 a year.[59]
Seventy-six per cent. of the women employed in the glass industry earned
less than six dollars a week.[60] Their average annual earnings, in
fact, are stated as ranging from $163.00 for those sixteen years old to
$292.00 for those from twenty-five to twenty-nine (l. c., p. 544).
Nearly one-third of the female department-store employees receive less
than $6.00 a week.[61] Yet many of them had other persons depending upon
them (l. c., p. 55). One family, consisting of a mother,
seventeen-year-old daughter, and three younger children, was supported
by the daughter's $5.00 a week. They managed it by living in two rooms
and eating practically nothing besides bread and tea or coffee (l. c.,
p. 56).
In New York State in 1906,[62] it was found that even among organized
laborers reporting to the Bureau of Labor, 6078 men and 2011 women were
earning less than the lowest individual living wage ($300.00), and
59,226 men and 8881 women (17.6% and 63.8% respectively) were earning
less than the lowest family living wage ($600.00). If conditions were so
bad among union men, they were probably much worse among unorganized
workers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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