Minimum Wage Boards

BY

FLORENCE KELLEY
General Secretary National Consumers' League

From the Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction
CLEVELAND, JUNE, 1912

NATIONAL CONSUMERS' LEAGUE
106 EAST 19TH STREET
NEW YORK CITY

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Minimum Wage Boards
By

Mrs. Florence

Kelley,

General

Secretary

National

Consumers'

League.
L a s t night, when a speaker said t h a t five hundred delegates were
already here and a thousand on their way to confer on the problems
of poverty, I felt a thrill of pride and pleasure in participating in so
great a conference. But, to-day, I have been wondering why it is t h a t
this thirty-ninth annual conference needs to be larger t h a n the
original conference thirty-nine years ago, or a n y which has occurred
meanwhile. Without some continuing, active cause of poverty growing as our nation grows, this conference surely could not be larger
year after year, finding itself confronted with ever more bewildering
conundrums. W h a t is this permanent, active cause of the poverty
against which we struggle?
For m a n y centuries the poor were believed to be punished by
their poverty for their faults. I n the nineteenth century, however,
a second stage was reached in which prosperous and philanthropic
people developed a sense of participation in sin, and spent many anxious years in discussing the question- h o w far they were, by out-door
relief, by doles and b y over-lapping charities, themselves increasing
the very poverty which they labored to prevent and to mitigate.
We know now t h a t there is some foundation of t r u t h underlying
both beliefs. We know r t h a t ill administered charity, public and private, aggravates the evils of poverty. We recognize, too, t h a t we
have always among us (besides the aged and the crippled) a certain
ratio of people overwhelmingly afflicted, who are through some inherent, permanent, incurable fault of their make-up, mentally and, therefore, industrially, deficient. They are incapable of full self-support,
and inevitably a burden upon charity throughout their lives. No
change in industrial conditions could bring to them complete selfdirection and self-dependence.
A generous estimate of the people so afflicted, based upon long,
careful study gives, however, a maximum of three in a hundred of
our population, as it grows from decade to decade. B u t it is with
vastly more t h a n three in a hundred of the population, t h a t we are
concerned in this conference year after year. Upon us there is forced
the slow, reluctant recognition of a third cause of poverty, which was
hidden from our predecessors. We cannot longer escape the knowledge t h a t there is no more efficient cause of wholesale destitution in
the United States t h a n industry.
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I t can be said with t r u t h t h a t poverty is the regular and inevitable by-product of our present industry, as wealth is its normal product.
We carry on our industry to produce wealth, and incidentally we produce wholesale poverty. I believe t h a t it is because we have dealt
with myriads of incidental things and not with this fundamental
cause of permanent and growing poverty, t h a t we assemble in greater
numbers year after year, and go home increasingly baffled b y the evil,
and bewildered by the myriad remedies t h a t we discuss. Other speakers will present other aspects of this truth, as they deal with tuberculosis, industrial injuries and dependence in diverse forms. This paper
is confined to the single aspect of insufficient wages and the proposed
new method of dealing with it b y minimum wage' boards.
Insufficient wages underlie a vast proportion of the need for
correctional and reformatory work. They entail upon the community
child labor, tuberculosis, underfeeding, lack of refreshing sleep, and
the consequent nervous breakdown. They underlie industrial employment of mothers, whose neglected children consequently fail in health
and morals. The children in t u r n crowd the hospitals, dispensaries,
juvenile courts and custodial institutions.
Insufficient wages are proof of incompetent management and of
the greed of employers.
They pre-suppose the existence in the community of dishonorable earnings b y women employes, and of charitable
supplements to honest girls and their families. Such outside aid must
be permanent and continuing. I n all the great cities there are department stores which base their wage rates upon the knowledge t h a t th&
social evil and the wide v a r i e t y of the activities of private charity
will eke out the pay-rolls. Finally the whole community supplements
the insufficient wage b y means of clinics, dispensaries, hospitals, sanatoria, courts, reformatories and prisons.
The National Consumers' League—the organization which I serve
as General Secretary—was instructed in September, 1908, at Geneva,
Switzerland, by the International Conference of Consumers 7 Leagues
in which representatives of t w e n t y nations participated, to agitate for
the creation of minimum wages boards until these should be introduced
and carried to success and usefulness. Since I had the pleasure of reporting upon our efforts last year in Boston, long strides have been
made. A fundamental work on the whole subject has been published
b y one of our French correspondents, Paul Boyaval of Eoubaix, under
the title " L a L u t t e Contre le Sweating System, M and we thus have
the first comprehensive, scientific discussion of this subject. I n our
own country we have Josephine Goldmark's monumental work on
" Fatigue and Efficiency, "* which is the foundation of all recent leg*Published by the Russell Sage Foundation, New York, May, 1912. Price
postpaid, $3.50.
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islation for shortening women's working hours. Building on these two
books, it behooves us now to put in practice, as rapidly as we may,
some standard of payment for the weakest of the working people; some
standard of payment having due relation to the expenditure of life
itself, in the service of all, t h a t is made b y those who work for wages.
The New Law in Massachusetts
Two states, Massachusetts and Ohio, have t a k e n long steps in this
direction. Massachusetts, as usual, marches conservatively at the head
of industrial, experimenters. The S t a t e Commission of 1911 which sat
for months studied the department stores, the candy trade, the laundries and the textile industries as industrial producers of poverty. I t
filed a report and drafted a bill, creating a permanent Commission
on Minimum "Wages Boards, which has been enacted b y the legislature
and was signed on J u n e 4th, 1912, b y Governor Foss.
The Massachusetts law provides for a permanent state commission
with power to ( create boards in the various branches of industry, such
as now exist in Australia and in England, each board consisting of
persons elected b y the workers and others chosen b y the employers,
with persons elected b y these delegates to represent the consuming
public.
One American state has thus expressed its intention of compelling
wages bargains within i t s borders to be real bargains. They are to be
based upon mutual knowledge of the facts and not on ignorance on
the p a r t of the weaker side. Henceforth the principle will slowly and
surely be brought into practical application t h a t the living wage must
be a first charge upon industry. I t must r a n k with rent and interest.
I t must take precedence of profits and dividends, and all other considerations. I n d u s t r y will, therefore, be decreasingly subsidized b y charity, public and private.
Under the stimulus of the Massachusetts Commission, a leading
store in Boston—Filene's—has for several months, beginning in March,
1912, maintained a minimum wage of eight dollars a week. For many
years this store had employed no one who had not finished the work of
the eighth grade of the public schools. I t has thus set for the whole
country an example of retail t r a d e as a field in which industry can be
carried on under all the difficulties entailed b y unlimited competition,
with profit and success, and without producing poverty as its by-product. Laws are, however, needed to compel the more greedy and less
enlightened to do t h a t which a single extraordinarily efficient employer
does voluntarily. F o r the mass of the young girls are not organized
and cannot be.
They have no votes. Their occupations call for little
skill. Fresh young faces and eager zeal are more desired t h a n experience and character. The number of candidates for employment is
legion. Their pay inevitably gravitates below the living level.
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The new law will take effect July 1st, 1913, and Massachusetts
will then—twenty years after the original experiment was made in
Australasia, and three years after t h a t experiment was copied in England—introduce into our Republic the first attempt practically to apply
science to wages. We have never before brought to bear the experience of the people most closely concerned. These are the employers,
the workers, the consumers, not the bondholders, and stockholders. The
employers know, b e t t e r t h a n any other persons can possibly know,
the meaning of the pay-roll in relation to their particular branch of
industry. The workers know, as no one else can, what it costs to
bring up a family in a particular place in a given year, and what, if
anything, can be put away for the future out of a weekly wage.
When, therefore, these two participants, and representatives of the
consuming public, pool their knowledge and correlate the wages with
the cost of living in their community, in the full light of publicity,
all the available, intimate knowledge and practical experience is
brought to bear upon the wage scale thus established.
This is a new extension of democracy into a field of industrial bargaining. I t gives the moral and legal support of the state to its weakest economic elements, to the women and children. By thus turning on
the light, it makes real, for the first time,; t h a t .which has b y the
economists and the courts been assumed to exist, b u t has not yet existed, equality of the two contracting parties. I t gives effect to the
will of those who have in the past been mere pawns in the hands of
masters who have played the game on terms laid down by themselves
alone. I t gives votes to women in a field in which women most sorely
need them, in the determination of their wages. I t tends, for the
first time, to substitute justice through self-government in industry, for
charity.
*
There is No Equality in Making Contracts
For half a century we have been told by our courts that, when
wage contracts are made, the people who make the contracts are equal
before the law. But in this the courts have always been in error.
No isolated^working girl, seeking a job in a department store, is equal
before the law, or in any other way, to the employer from whom she
seeks employment. When the Massachusetts law is in force, what
the courts have held to be true in law will, for the first time in our
industrial history, begin to be true in fact. Then, for the first time,
the weakest of the working people—women in unskilled occupations—
will be represented by persons chosen by themselves for the purpose,
and clothed by the state with power of bargaining for all in t h a t
industry.
Even in advance of the creation of wages boards we see, to-day,
a highly significant intervention for regulating wages b y three dig6

nitaries of the United States in behalf of several thousand of the most
responsible, highly paid and perfectly organized men in this hemisphere. Chief Justice White of the Supreme Court of the United States,
and the Hon. Martin Knapp, Chairman of the I n t e r s t a t e Commerce
Commission, and the Hon. Charles P . Neill, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor, are selecting arbitrators to decide what wages shall
be paid to all engineers employed by the railroads north and east of
the Ohio Eiver. I t is through the ministrations of these gentlemen
t h a t - we have all been able to get to this conference and have
a reasonable hope of getting away. If they were not serving as they
are doing, there would in all probability be at this moment a strike,
tying up ev^ry mile of railroad north and east of the Ohio Eiver.
Why do the Chief Justice of the United States and the Chairman of
the I n t e r s t a t e Commerce Commission and the Commissioner of the
Bureau of Labor interrupt their activities to serve in this way?
Surely, one reason is t h a t the engineers are among the most responsible
working people in the world. They have our lives in their hands
whenever we travel. They have the traffic of the nation in their hands
every hour of every day. They are perfectly organized. They all have
votes. There is a presidential election coming; and they are, for all
these reasons, enormously important.
Observe the contrast. I n the tenement house where I live in
New York there lives also an honest, well-behaved young girl, the
j a n i t o r ' s daughter, who worked for seven years in a great departmen store on Twenty-third Street, becoming a highly skilled clerk
selling shirtwaists. She was receiving $6.00 a week a t the end of
seven years in the service of the same employer, and had no outlook
for improvment in her wages. Fortunately, she had an acquaintance
who, b y interceding, succeeded in getting her transferred to a like
position at $8.00 a week at W a n a m a k e r ' s . The girl was frankly happy
when she received this increase of $2.00 a week, $104.00 a year—she
works fifty-two weeks in the year. The same thing could have happened the other way round. I t would have been perfectly possible for
a girl to work seven years—from her fourteenth birthday, when she
began at $3.00, to her twenty-first birthday at $6.00—in the Wanamaker
store and then to have been transferred to Twenty-third Street at
$8.00.
There is no standard of wages in either store, or in the stores
anywhere throughout the country. There is no standard of wages
for women or girls in the whole great field of retail trade.
In the Case of Women Workers
Existing wage rates are especially unbearable, because they rest
on the economic error t h a t all women wage-earners are supported—
at least in part—by men; t h a t every woman has a father, brother,

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husband, son or some male relative earning enough money to furnish the
bulk of her maintenance, so t h a t she need make merely a contribution.
I n this assemblage of social workers one need not speak in detail of
the thousands of widowed mothers with children, of the faithful wives
whose husbands are tubercular, or are in lunatic asylums or penitentiaries, or disabled by poisons or other industrial injuries. Yet in all
these unnumbered cases the wage rate is fixed upon the unfounded assumption t h a t these women's earnings are a mere fraction of the
family budget, of which the main fund is contributed by an ablebodied man.
This flaw in the basis of women's wages is only one example of
the many anomalies in the wages situation which we know about. I t
raises disquieting questions as to how many others there may be which
we do not yet know about. W h a t facts we do know alter nothing in
the usage t h a t women's wages rest on the hypothesis t h a t some contribution comes from elsewhere t h a n themselves. I believe it can be
said justly t h a t wages in the vast field of retail trade rest upon knowledge t h a t the pay-roll is eked out by the social evil.
An ugly item in recent finance is the circular issued by the Woolworth Company (United 5 and 10 cent Stores), notifying subscribers
t h a t the investment would be profitable because of the small wages
paid to clerks b y reason of their youth and consequent cheapness.
I do not believe t h a t wages are adjusted in innocent ignorance.
The fact t h a t charity, also, both public and private, ekes out what the
pay-roll does not afford is another large contributing element in deciding the wage rates paid young girls in all our industries.
This paper is, therefore, an appeal to every appropriate organization represented in this Conference to co-operate in promoting the
worldwide movement for minimum wages boards a s . a means of correcting this economic error, affording a wider knowledge of wage rates
t h a n we yet have, and lifting from charity an undue burden which it
has borne too long. We, in America, have been slow to recognize the
worth of the method in effect since 1893 in the Antipodes and imported into England in the present decade. I n England, since January, 1910, minimum wages boards have been at work in four great
sweated industries. Their introduction within the past sixty days into
the coal mines of Great Britain has fixed upon this method of dealing
with industrial poverty the attention of the whole world.
The Ohio Constitution
The State Constitutional Convention of Ohio has adopted, as
a
section
of the proposed new constitution, upon, which
the
men of Ohio will vote on September 3rd, the following provision:
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" L a w s may Ice passed fixing and regulating the hours of labor, establishing a minimum wage, and providing for the comfort, health, safety
and welfare of all employes; and no other provision of the constitution
shall impair or limit this p o w e r . " I t is the obvious intention of this
convention to forestall all difficulty on grounds, of constitutionality so
far as its own powers extend.
I t may be asked whether there is not danger, in case this constitution should be adopted and so interpreted t h a t minimum wages boards
can be created under its terms, of driving industry out of Ohio into
Pennsylvania, "West Virginia and Indiana, where wages may still be
forced down below the minimum Jevel of vital efficiency without interference. That t h r e a t has been made in the Australian colonies and m
the English Parliament. I t is made by the textile trades in Massachusetts, and will continue to be made in our states. But no industry
goes. Cut-throat competitors may go. But experience has shown t h a t
the increased efficiency t h a t accompanies the creation of wages boards
deprives competition of its power for harm. I n Victoria more than
half of the 91 trade boards now in existence have been asked for b y
employers glad to be rid of cut-throat and incompetent competitors.
When, through the acquisition b y the weaker working people of
proper elements of bargaining strength, a living wage is made a first
charge upon industry, incompetent employers must either call in the
efficiency doctors and follow their prescriptions, or themselves seek
work in some occupation other than b a t t e n i n g upon defenseless workers and keeping them in chronic destitution.
W h a t of the workers whose work is not worth a minimum wage?
The compulsory minimum compels the employer to increase in every
possible way the efficiency of every worker, in order to make him worth
his wage. I n Victoria, for instance, it is specifically provided t h a t
the wage of an employe shall not be less than t h a t which is paid by
a reputable concern to an average employe. This spurs t h e employer
to select carefully every person t a k e n on. I t spurs the lazy to earn
the wage. There is, however, a provision under which incompetent,
untrained beginners and aging workers, the deaf, the slow and persons
otherwise handicapped, may receive a reduced rate specifically prescribed after careful investigation by the wages boards. But all such
workers must be registered, and the number allotted to one establishment is rigidly fixed. This prevents the accumulation in one place of
hundreds of unskilled young girls, such as we commonly see in American paper box factories, whose sole recommendation is t h a t they accept a low wage; who learn nothing and make no improvement either
for themselves or their industry with t h e passage of time.
A further question arises in connection with the prices of goods
in industries in which wages are determined by wages boards. Will
not t h e increased labor cost, we are asked, so drive up the price of9

goods t h a t the workers must themselves meet an artifically increased
cost of living? This has been exhaustively discussed by Boyaval, who
shows t h a t the experience in England hitherto is so brief as to shed
little light upon this question. I n Victoria, however, where experience
goes back to 1893, the evidence is t h a t raising wages at the bottom
for women, children, and the worst paid men, involves no considerable
change in the retail price of the simple necessaries of life, and it is
with these goods alone t h a t the poor are concerned. If the prices of
luxuries are increased in order t h a t the poorest workers may receive
a living wage, who will object?
Even in the production of luxuries, however, it appears, according
to Boyaval, that a material increase in retail prices does not follow
the creation of minimum wages boards. That genius for organization
which in innumerable industries produces profits, finds itself after the
creation of wages boards, constrained to scrutinize afresh the efficiency
of every method in use, and of every new employe, before attempting
in the midst of competition to raise retail prices.
One after another the states are by law shortening the working
hours of men and women in the interest of their health and the public
welfare. The states must exercise their function of protecting the
weak by assuring them equality in making industrial contracts. The
Supreme Court of the United States has established the principle t h a t
working hours both of men and women may be shortened by statute,
whenever it is shown to the court t h a t this section is in the interest
of the health of the employes or of the public. This gain must not
be defeated by reductions in wages which substitute debility due to
hunger for debility due to fatigue.
The same reasoning applies to child labor legislation. Slowly,
gradually but certainly, the children are departing from the labor market to the schoolhouse. Either their parents or charity must henceforth maintain them. The only satisfactory assurance t h a t the maintenance will be by the parent lies in making good the theory t h a t the
employe is an equal p a r t y to the industrial contract. The wages board
is the most democratic way of accomplishing this.
Reference has already been made to Massachusetts and Ohio.
Minimum wages boards bills have been introduced also into t h e legislatures of Minnesota and "Wisconsin, but have not yet become laws.
The Industrial Commission of Wisconsin is making comprehensive investigations looking toward legislation a t the next session in 1913. In
Washington and California the same groups who obtained the eight
hours day law are campaigning for minimum wage laws to be adopted
in 1913, and with a cheerful prospect of success.
Is there not, finally, a danger t h a t , as this legislation spreads
from state to state and becomes known abroad, immigration may be
stimulated by the knowledge t h a t minimum wages are established
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here? This may be met in divers ways. One way is by the enactment
of pending legislation of several European nations. I n Europe bills
are before the parliaments of France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland
and Belgium.
I n our own country, the promotion of all these state laws can be
greatly expedited by this Conference, just in proportion as we face
the facts and tell the t r u t h t h a t charity does not and cannot carry
t h e burden which industry places upon it. The poor are not adequately relieved. More important, it is an intolerable thing t h a t ablebodied people of sound mind should both work throughout the best
working years of their lives and also be objects of charity. Let us
take courage and_ make known, especially to the legislators, t h a t from
this day forth charity declines farther to a t t e m p t the impossible, to
make good the social deficit created b y insufficient wages. Let us
insist upon justice.

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