In most discussions of the wages of women there is a ready confusion of sympathetic ideals of what one would like to see with the cold facts as they are. Women's services (especially those of young women) have increasingly of late been coming upon the labor market in such a way as to cause abnormal congestion in a few occupations. Employers have not caused low wages in these cases. Partly these occupations are the clean, light, and agreeable ones, partly they have a relative social glamour, largely they can be followed for a few years near the home of the worker, nearly always they may be undertaken with brief training and little skill. Investigation has shown that at least eighty per cent of this group of girl workers live at home. A wage that is amply a "living wage" when used as a pro-rata contribution to an American family income is frequently insufficient for the girl living "independently." Such a girl is, under the conditions, unable to earn a living in her chosen occupation, and it may be better to recognize that fact and to deal with such individual cases as appear among the one fifth of all girls employed. The one unquestioned service of the minimum wage law is that of diagnosing the evil of low wages rather than in remedying it. The minimum wage law brings to light the industrial incapacity of particular individuals to earn a living wage. The direct remedy is to abolish the incapable workers or their incapacity by such methods as regulating foreign or cityward immigration, custodial care of the physically, mentally, and morally weak, vocational guidance, and more effective measures of industrial education. Alongside of the abnormally low paid occupations or elsewhere in the industrial organization are other occupations in which with, or often even without, special training, the sweated workers could get, competitively, more than the minimum wage, if they could, or would, qualify for the work. § 11. #Mediation and voluntary arbitration#. The labor controversies in which the public has the largest interest as a third party[10] are those which result or may result in strikes. The public interest becomes acute when a strike results in interference with the individual freedom of other workers and of nonparticipants, when it causes a blocking of the highways and disturbance of the peace, and when it prevents the regular production and transportation of the commodities which the public consumes. The public, therefore, has steadily become more interested in all methods and agencies designed to conserve better relations between employers and wageworkers, and to diminish or, if possible, to do away with strikes when individual and collective bargaining between the two parties fail.