Part 14

In our textile manufacturing states the men (though a minority of employes in the industry) have succeeded in so bringing to bear their trade organizations and their votes as to obtain legal restrictions upon the working hours of women in industry. For married women the net result of this palliative measure has, however, proved largely illusory. Every shortening of the working day tends to be followed by speeding up of the machinery to keep the output as large as before, or by a cut in wages due to reduced output if no change is made in the speed. Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children, are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health.

Because we have never observed or recorded the facts in relation to the industrial work of married women we have no statutory provision for rest before and after confinement, yet many textile manufacturing communities have their body of knowledge (common and appalling knowledge) of children born in the mill, or of mothers returning to looms or spinning frames when their babies are but three or four days old.

Those industrial nations which scorn the fool’s paradise gather the facts, face the truth, and act upon it. Thus Bavaria, which accepts as inevitable the factory work of mothers of young children, began in 1908 to encourage employers to establish nurseries in the mills and permit mothers to go to them at regular intervals. The government voted 50,000 marks for payment to physicians and nurses who supervise the nurseries. The avowed object of these institutions is to reduce the disease which has ravaged bottle-fed babies left to the care of neighbors and of older brothers and sisters. In Italy, also, for several years employers have been constrained by law to give to mothers regular intervals for nursing their babies.

Fourteen nations of Europe, and the state of Massachusetts, have abolished night work by women in manufacture. This is obviously a boon to working mothers.

For the protection alike of the community and the workers, England, Germany, Austria and New York state have all been vainly striving for twenty years to devise legislation which would minimize the evils attending homework, yet would not abolish it. During this effort the tenement houses licensed for homework in New York City alone have reached the appalling number of twelve thousand.

In England a long agitation has resulted in the enactment of the trade boards law, in force since January 1st, 1910, providing for the creation of minimum wage boards and the establishment of minimum wage scales. How effective this may prove time alone can tell.

Several lines of action are clearly desirable and possible:

1. There must be a body of knowledge which we do not yet possess as to the number of married women at work and the industries which employ them, and this must be kept up to date from year to year. Why have the federal and state bureaus of labor statistics hitherto neglected this inquiry?

2. Such laws as are already in force against deserting husbands and fathers can be more rigorously enforced than is common at present, and their scope can be widened.

3. Orphans and widowed mothers of young children can be pensioned and removed from the labor market. This is the most useful palliative yet attempted.

4. The lives and working careers of husbands and fathers can be prolonged by prevention of accidents and disease. Effort in a large way to this end is only now beginning.

5. Those legislative measures which make work more endurable for all women (such as the obligatory provision of seats) can be promoted with especial reference to the urgent needs of married women.

6. A campaign of education among philanthropists can be carried on to induce them to cease from their cruelty to widows and deserted wives, and to lead them to imagine how any one of themselves would feel if she had to work all day in a mill or factory or laundry and then gather her babies from the day nursery for the night.

7. Public opinion can be created in favor of a minimum wage sufficient to enable fathers to support their families without help from wage-earning wives.

8. Finally, effort to substitute coöperative work for competitive work can be promoted. And herein lies the ultimate solution of the problem of married women’s industrial employment. For it is only in the coöperative commonwealth that they can find just and beneficent conditions in which to carry on those industries which were theirs from the foundation of human life.

THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK” IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY

JOHN MARTIN

Board of Education, New York City

For some time the Interborough Association of Women Teachers in New York City has conducted a vigorous agitation under the banner “Equal pay for equal work”. This motto has won wide acceptance. Taken literally “Equal pay for equal work” is self-evidently just and reasonable, and persons or governing bodies who oppose it are put on the defensive. But in connection with the schools the phrase is not to be taken literally.

It is a factory phrase. For manual workers equal pay for equal work is embodied in the piece-work system, a system generally preferred when the work is of a routine character and when the output of each worker under exactly the same conditions can be measured with precision. A fixed piece price is paid for spinning a yard of cotton, for cutting a dozen coats, for rolling a ton of steel, for making a gross of paper boxes, for stitching a score of shirtwaists. Though in fact men and women rarely perform the same process, even when they work in the same factory, yet the pay per unit is fixed regardless of the age, sex, color, or competence of the worker. There is equal pay for equal work. Superior skill means superior speed and increased output, and pay is proportioned simply to output.

But nobody has ever found a satisfactory way to measure the output of a teacher. In England one way has been tried. In the early seventies, when the public schools were made in part an imperial charge, the manufacturers, who were dominant in Parliament, were anxious lest the imperial grants should be so awarded as to encourage laziness among teachers. Somebody hit on the phrase, “Payment by results.” That settled the matter. The phrase caught the fancy of men who ran woolen mills and iron works, men who wanted some rule of thumb by which to measure whether the nation was getting what it paid for. So every year an imperial inspector visited the schools and put to each boy and girl a test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The exact number of sums worked without mistake, and of misspelt words in the dictation exercises, the precise number of errors each youngster made in reading--all were written down, and the money paid by the government to help that school was proportioned to those returns.

Sometimes a teacher’s salary consisted of the grants so obtained; always the teacher’s professional standing and promotion were determined by these miscalled “results.” In consequence the teacher who was most cruel, who kept children late in school, who sacrificed most relentlessly the finer parts of education, who drove the helpless youngsters at the bayonet’s point, as it were, who wasted no precious moments in merely training the faculties--that teacher got the most money and the most rapid advancement. To their honor be it said that the teachers of England for decades combated the hideous system. At last they convinced legislators that the growth of a child’s mind, the emanations of a teacher’s spirit, cannot be measured by yard stick or quart pot, and the system of “payment by results” was relegated to museums of instruments of torture.

America has been free from any factory method of attempting to gauge the teacher’s work. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to establish piecework in schools and so give equal pay for equal work. The battle cry, like most political catch-words, is inexact and misleading. The Interborough Association means by the “equal pay” principle the merging of the salary schedules where the schedules now distinguish between men and women, so that, whatever other differences of qualification the schedules take into account, they shall ignore differences of sex in the teachers.

To determine the economic and pedagogical results which would flow from the adoption of this principle it is necessary to examine first the system upon which the existing schedules are constructed. Why are thirty-one complicated schedules, which group teachers by a variety of standards, adopted at all? Why is not each teacher judged individually? Because, in New York, where the army of teachers, instructors, directors, principals and superintendents numbers 17,073, individual treatment is physically impossible, and, if it were tried, the schools would be permeated with politics. Perforce the army is divided into a few groups and the members of the same group are paid upon principles which ignore their individual differences of quality.

In constructing salary schedules what elements are taken into account? A number can be detected, of which the chief are: 1. A living wage. 2. Years of experience or age. 3. Length and quality of preparation for the work. 4. Responsibility of the duty performed. 5. Total demand upon the taxpayer which the schedules entail and willingness of the taxpayer to meet the demand. 6. Adjustment over a long period of the supply of teachers to the demand.

Consider these elements separately.

1. A teacher is expected from the first month of work to be self-supporting and to live in a manner befitting the dignity of the profession. Not simply a bare subsistence, but refined recreation and continued culture as well as freedom from economic anxiety about the future are essential to the discharge of the teacher’s high duties. On what sum can a young person in New York secure these advantages? That sum must fix the minimum paid even though stark necessity would force sufficient unfortunates to accept less, temporarily, if less were offered. For some years the New York minimum has been $600 for the first year, an amount, as I shall show later, admitted to be inadequate at present.

2. Normally, by added experience, a teacher for several years becomes more valuable year by year. Therefore an annual increase of salary is granted automatically, falling like the rain upon the just and the unjust, except that the eighth and thirteenth increments are given only upon satisfactory reports of the teacher’s work. In practice the increment is hardly ever withheld. But no attempt is made to determine at what age a teacher reaches maximum efficiency. Maximum salary for grade work in the elementary schools is reached by women in 16 years and by men in 12 years, not because the men reach their maximum efficiency more rapidly than women, but because a more rapid advance to their highest salary has been judged necessary to hold them in the profession. Probably most men and women are as efficient after five or six years’ service as they ever become for grade work.