Daily wage

“ If there are a thousand workmen employed, getting $2 each per day, that would be a wage fund of $2,000 a day. If, when prices fall and business becomes dull, the employer should want to reduce the pay of each workman to $1.50 a day, and if the workmen, by striking, should prevent that decrease, and if, then, 25 per cent. of their number should be discharged, the loss to the working class, as a body, and to the community at large, would be the same as though the wages were reduced to $1.50 a day. ”

“ Were the business of the country in the active condition in which it could not avoid being if our money system were perfectly adjusted to industry, and if employers were competing for laborers with the same degree of eagerness that laborers are competing for employment, the average wage of a day for a working man would not be less than $2. ”

“ These weekly wages are obtained by dividing the annual wage by 52. Often the weekly rate is much higher, but for many weeks the workers are unemployed; the only fair estimate is that which is based upon the annual wage.
Have we any right to be content with conditions like these? Is the average wage of the average worker, as it is here indicated, all that he ought to ask? Should society wish him to be content with such an income? ”

“ The standard of life and comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make the wage correspond to this standard. It is an unending and often bitter struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages,"—a work upon which economists, however different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.
We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum, especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such culmination. ”

“ That argument is that it will prove impossible to maintain uniform standard wage rates throughout an industry in which the various enterprises are distributed over a wide area; in the several parts of which area the cost of living, the general conditions of labor, and the demand and supply situation for labor differ considerably. ”

“ With all these possibilities the eight hours day will not necessarily, suddenly, and in the long run, increase the demand for labour to such a degree that the employer will need to draw upon his interest, profits, and ground rents for a large and general rise of wages, or for the maintenance of the former rate of wage. ”

“ If the productive organization has at its command a plentiful supply of capital; if in the community there are many men possessed of a high order of business ability; if then, 55 labor for the commoner tasks of production is relatively scarce, the work of the ordinary wage earner will be a means of adding considerably to the total of market values produced. Or, as it is sometimes put, each use of labor will be an important use. Labor will be in great demand, and wages will be high. ”

“ From the standpoint of the employer, the rate per unit should be based on the productiveness of the individual, and should insure to the most skillful, a wage as high as, or slightly higher than, he would receive under the day-wage plan. ”

“ On the other hand, the introduction of factories or mining industries has sometimes affected directly the wages of farm hands through a large region by lessening competition.
Upward tendency of wages.—It is certain that the general tendency of wages in all employments is upward rather than downward, in spite of serious disturbances from financial depression often repeated. The gradual increase of welfare among wage-earners is greater even than the increase in money wages. ”

“ Wage variations are interdependent It is indeed evident from observation, as it must be from theory, that whatever be the circumstances which produce the difference of wages in different occupations, and although they frequently vary in relation to each other (producing, as between time and time, and place and place, greater or less relative differences) yet the rate of wages in one occupation is always dependent on the rate in another ”

“ The lag of wages behind prices varies in degree in different industries and occupations, for neither prices nor wages go up uniformly. The general direction of wage change is marked, but there is nevertheless considerable variation in the amount 93 of wage change. ”

“ Since profits generally are large, production tends to be stimulated and the volume of production increases. The turnover of industry is quickened somewhat. Plants are more fully utilized, and unemployment is small. More overtime is worked. The total earnings of the wage earners are likely to advance more than wage rates. The extent of the divergence between the increase in hourly or piece rates and weekly or yearly earnings is likely to vary greatly according to the nature of the causes of the price movement. ”

“ Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little, as steadily as a tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and forty years more there'll be at least one country where the mechanic's average wage will be two hundred cents a day! ”

“ And, secondly, what may be called for a lack of a better name, the doctrine of special reward—by which is meant, that the wage differentials between the standard wage levels of different types of labor should be regarded as special rewards, given in order to make it reasonably certain that industry will be provided with at least the existing proportion of the more skilled grades of labor, and to make it reasonably certain also that the more arduous, irregular, dangerous and disagreeable work will command the service of as much labor as at present. ”

“ They claim that it is not valid to assert that wages have kept pace with the increase in prices, if an employee must work continually over the time set for the minimum day in order to make his wages bear the increased price of commodities. ”

“ It is not merely the wage scale that must be kept up but the amount of wages that a worker receives over the course of a year. This is only another way of saying that what we need, fundamentally, is a broader distribution of the profits of industry. ”

“ The great mass of the people, the weekly wage-earners, four out of five of the whole population, toil perpetually for less than a third of the aggregate product of labour, at an annual wage averaging at most 40l. per adult, and are hurried into unnecessarily early graves by the severity of their lives. ”

“ Money Wages and Real Wages. Wages, as we have already learnt, are the payments received by a labourer in return for his labour. It does not matter whether these payments are received daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. A day gardener is, perhaps, paid every evening; an artisan is usually paid on Saturday or Friday night, or sometimes fortnightly ”

“ The wages which enable any workman to live are necessarily higher, if his work is liable to intermission, than if it is assured and continuous; and however severe the struggle for work may become, the general law will always hold, that men must get more daily pay if, on the average, they can only calculate on work three days a week, than they would require if they were sure of work six days a week. ”

“ An average per head of 4s. 103⁄4d. a week for food.
If the wages never rise, and if the family grows larger, the amounts spent on burial insurance, soap, coal, gas, and, later on, rent will increase, leaving less and less for food, with more people to feed on the less amount. Extra bedding will [149] eventually have to be bought, though the parents will naturally put off that moment as long as possible. Should the wage rise gradually to 24s., or even 25s., it would not all go upon the general living. ”

“ The actual amounts paid to the men and women who do the work of the industrial world are extremely small. Current wage rates, placed side by side with the expense accounts of thousands of families whose sole claim to income rests upon their ownership of property, are startling in their paucity. Five hundred dollars a year paid to an able-bodied man whose back was bent three hundred days of the year in his efforts to support a wife and four small children ”

“ As an applied doctrine, the doctrine of the unity of wage income and of the wage earners means that the same wage should be paid throughout industry for work which requires approximately the same human qualities, and which makes approximately the same demands upon the individual. The common effort involved in production is emphasized, rather than the differences between the work performed by workers in different parts of the field of production. ”

“ The laborers’ demands of three months ago covered recognition of the union, wage payments by the week, an eight-hour day, a wage minimum for pick and shovel men of $2 a day with revised hour rates for others of the lower grades of work. The eight-hour demand is essentially a demand for compliance with the state law which all the contractors on these public jobs have been breaking by working a nine hour day. ”

“ These numbers include only the minimum and always necessary force, and make an aggregate of 316 persons daily and nightly engaged for their entire working time, and borne on a pay roll of six thousand dollars a week for salaries and wages alone. ”

“ If the numbers in any group of wage earners are high relative to the uses in which the employment of the members of that group results in a considerable addition to the product of market values, the wages of that group will be low, and vice versa. The need of the productive system for any kind of labor, relative to the supply available to fill that need is an important factor in determining the reward paid for that labor. ”

“ Wages paid by an employer Production is always the mother of wages. Without production, wages would not and could not be. It is from the produce of labour, not from the advances of capital that wages come. Wherever we analyse the facts this will be found to be true. For labour always precedes wages. This is as universally true of wages received by the labourer from an employer as it is of wages taken directly by the labourer who is his own employer. In the one class of cases as in the other, reward is conditioned upon exertion. ”

“ On the verge of each occupation stand those to whom the inducements between one occupation and another are so nicely balanced that the slightest change is sufficient to determine their labour in one direction or another. Thus, any increase or decrease in the demand for labour of a certain kind cannot, except temporarily, raise wages in that occupation above, nor depress them below, the relative level of wages in other occupations, which is determined by the circumstances previously adverted to, such as relative agreeableness or continuity of employment, etc. ”

“ Wages in the first sense, the wages on which the labourer's comfort depends, we will call real wages, or wages in kind. Wages in the second sense, we may be permitted to call, for the present, money wages; assuming, as it is allowable to do, that money remains for the time an invariable standard, no alteration taking place in the conditions under which the circulating medium itself is produced or obtained. If money itself undergoes no variation in cost, the money price of labour is an exact measure of the Cost of Labour, and may be made use of as a convenient symbol to express it. ”

“ The rise of the nominal daily or weekly wages may therefore be accompanied by a price of labour that remains stationary or falls. The same holds as to the income of the labourer’s family, as soon as the quantity of labour expended by the head of the family is increased by the labour of the members of his family. There are, therefore, methods of lowering the price of labour independent of the reduction of the nominal daily or weekly wages. ”

“ If these assumptions were realized in fact, it would be correct to view the problem of wages as the study of one set of relationships that governed a basic level of wages—called the general rate of wages—with purely supplementary studies of the circumstances governing equalizing differences. The problem of wages would be a study of forces which were uniformly influential in relation to the wages of all labor. ”

“ There is, therefore, in the politico-economic sense of the term wages no distinction as to the kind of labour, or as to whether its reward is received through an employer or not. Wages means the return received for the exertion of labour, as distinguished from the return received for the use of capital, and the return received by the landholder for the use of land.
The man who cultivates the soil for himself receives his wages in its produce, just as, if he uses his own capital and owns his own land, he may also receive interest and rent. ”

“ But if, in the meantime, the advance of the arts or the economies that become possible with greater population have so increased the productive power of labour that at 20 the same exertion will produce as much wealth as before at 25, labourers will get as wages as great a quantity as before. The relative fall of wages will not be noticeable in any diminution of the necessaries or comforts of the labourer, but only in the increased value of land and the greater incomes and more lavish expenditure of the rent-receiving class. ”

“ In the beginning, money wages would probably remain the same as before, and the labourers would have the full benefit of the cheapness. They would be enabled to increase their consumption either of food or of other articles, and would receive the same cost, and a greater quantity. So far, profits would be unaffected. But the permanent remuneration of the labourers essentially depends on what we have called their habitual standard; the extent of the requirements which, as a class, they insist on satisfying before they choose to have children. ”