Wage Reductions in the United States.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20351, 25 September 1931, Page 10

Wage Reductions in the United States.

The cable messages tp-day from the United States would suggest that -wage reductions are being enforced for the first time in all the major industries. What is actually happening i 3 rather that a cut has been made in the wages of specialised craftsmen who, throughout almost two years of depression, j have been able to retain high wages through collective bargaining and the I threat of a paralysing strike. Almost | all other workers, with the exception | of civil servants, whose salaries occasionally go up but rarely come down, have already suffered wage reductions, ranging from 10 per cent, to 25 per cent. In addition, hundreds of thousands of workers, have avoided a decrease in their daily wages by accepting a shortened working week, even to the extent of four six-hour days for each shift, both employers and workers recognising that in difficult times it is better to give four days' work to six men than six days' work to four men. hundreds of indush-ial companies during the last six months have adopted this system, while other concerns have adopted methods of rationing—usually days off in rotation with a month's holiday without pay in the good weather. The result has been that American publicists have been able to assert abroad that there has been practically no reduction of wages, although millions - of workers have learnt that a pay-envelope for four days' work is thinner than one for six. There are forty-five million workers in the United States, and the majority of them are receiving less than they did, for example, when President Hoover, before the Labour Convention at Boston last year; supported the trade union argument that "mass production must be accompanied by "mass consumption through raised "standards of living—something new "in the world's economic life." Since then the American farm worker's wage (242 dollars a day without board) has been reduced 22 per cent. Office workers, from the managing director to the bell-boy, have suffered up to a 25 per cent, reduction. Expert women stenographers in New York are glad to accept thirty-five dollars a week instead of the fifty or more paid to them a year ago for lower-grade work. The pay of factory workers, which not so long ago averaged thirty dollars a week in New York State, has been reduced 12 per cent. In the construction iodustrieg, hundreds of firms have made wage cuts, though a union electrical worker w etUX paid 13.20 dollars a day for eight hours' work, and rests on Saturday as well as on Sunday. Such high wages have been maintained because the cost of material has fallen considerably. Now of coursa

prosperity is sagging under its own weight—or, which .is the same thing, the weight of luxury and extravagance —and the outcry against adjustment cannot permanently affect the. result.