Labor Organizing by the Congress and Lawmaking by the Labor Board

Abstract

With what rapidity changes have come! We have Bartlett's testimony that shop working time in 1842 was 1234 hours per day, 76 hours per week. In 1860 the work week had been reduced to 68 hours, in 1900 to 58 hours, and in 1930 to less than 48 hours. Today it is considerably under 40 hours. Without the facilities for production that industry has provided, the standard of living would have been lowered in the same proportion as working hours; but how far from this are the facts! One hundred years ago the average family, although working from dawn to dark, lived in a poorly constructed home, heated by an open fire which served also for cooking. Candles furnished light. A wagon or stage coach without springs furnished transportation over roads so poor that twenty miles was a good day's jourey. Fabrics were hand woven and clothes handmade. A good cobbler eeded three days to make a pair of shoes, shoes that no one would wear today. Plumbing had not been dreamed of, nor any of the scores of comforts and conveniences we now have. It is a reasonable estimate that these comforts and conveniences which we now enjoy represent more than fifty times the productive effort that would be needed today to provide all the things the human race had one hundred years ago, and yet man produces them in half the working time. This is the triumph of industry. Careful studies have been made of real wages in the United States during this period. That of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York which covers the period from 1820 to 1834, with its index based upon 1913 as 100, shows that real wages on this scale in 1820 was 43; in 1837, after an advance to 54, the index was again 43; in the past hundred years there has been a steady advance up to a maximum in 1931 of 136, and for the past year, the estimate is 132.