Part 1
Women's Wages
"Give her the wages of going on, and not to die."
Women's Wages
BY
WILLIAM SMART, M.A.
LECTURER ON POLITICAL ECONOMY IN QUEEN MARGARET COLLEGE AND IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE, ST. VINCENT STREET PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY 1892
A paper read before the PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OF GLASGOW, 9th Dec., 1891.
WOMEN'S WAGES.
It is not necessary to prove that women's wages are, as a rule, much under those of men. In the textile trades of Great Britain, which constitute the largest department of women's work, the average of women's wages is probably--in Scotland it is certainly--about ten shillings per week. This labour is not by any means unskilled, as anyone who has ever seen a spinning or weaving factory knows. Twenty shillings per week, however, is a low average for a man possessing any degree of skill whatever.
In a paper read before the British Association at Cardiff, Mr. Sidney Webb gave some valuable statistics on the subject. Women workers he divides into four classes--manual labourers, routine mental workers, artistic workers, and intellectual workers. The two latter classes may be dismissed in a word. Sex has little to do in determining the wages of their work. A novelist, a poet, a writer of any sort, is under no disadvantage that she is a woman, while in many departments of artistic work women have an obvious advantage. But in the third class, that of routine mental workers, Mr. Webb finds that women's earnings are invariably less than men's. In the Post Office and Telegraph Departments, in the Savings Banks, and in the Government offices generally, where women do precisely similar work with men, and are sometimes, as in ledger work, acknowledged to do it better, they invariably earn much less. The largest experiment yet made in this direction is that of the Prudential Life Assurance Office, which began in 1872 to substitute women clerks for the lower grades of men clerks. There are now 243 ladies employed in routine clerical work, which they are said to do more efficiently than men. The salaries run thus:--£32 for the first year, £42 for the second, £52 for the third, and £60 on promotion--probably half of what men might be expected to accept. In Glasgow lady typists and shorthand writers are offering their services from 9.30 till 5, with one hour for dinner, for £25. In the teaching profession women almost invariably receive lower remuneration than men. The Education Department Report of 1888-90 gives the average wage of teachers throughout England and Wales as £119 for men and £75 for women. Similarly low salaries are found under the London School Board, in the Secondary Schools, and in girls' schools generally as compared with boys' schools.
The exception noted by Mr. Webb is interesting and, I think, suggestive. In the United States, where women teachers often alternate with men in the same school, the salaries of women are habitually lower. But in the State of Wyoming, where women have a vote, the salaries are equal.
Coming now to the manual workers, Mr. Webb takes the statistics furnished by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labour in 1884. These give the average of 17,430 employés in 110 establishments in Great Britain, and 35,902 employés in 210 establishments in Massachusetts, representing in both cases 24 different manufacturing industries. The women's wages show a proportion of one-third to two-thirds the amount earned by men, the nearest approach to equality being in textiles--cotton goods, hosiery, and carpetings in Great Britain, woollen and worsted goods in Massachusetts. Without going further into statistics, I think we may assume the fact of a great disparity between men's and women's wages, and go on to ask the reason of it.
If we put the question in general terms, Why is a woman's wage less than that of a man? there are some answers that spring to the lips of everyone. First, it is said that it is a mere question of supply and demand. Second, that women are not usually the sole bread-winners in the family to which they belong. Third, that their standard of living is lower than that of men. Fourth, that their work is not so good as that of men. Fifth, that the commodities made by women have, generally, a less value in the market. There is truth in all these answers, but I propose to show that each of them is at best a half truth, raising as many questions as it settles.
The first answer given is that women's wages are low because of the equation of supply and demand. Only certain branches of industry are open to women. In these there is a great number of women competing for employment. They are free to take work or refuse it. But over the industrial community there are found enough women willing to take the low wage which employers find they can offer, and free competition determines the level. If two women run after one employer, wages will fall; if two employers run after one woman, wages will rise.
Those who think this answer an easy and satisfactory one must be unaware of the unsettling of many problems since Mill's day. Mill had no less than three laws of value--that of the Equation of Supply and Demand, that of Cost of Production, and that of Differential Cost of Production. The former law, he said, applied to goods of which the quantity was naturally, or artificially, or temporarily, limited, and it was, besides, the sole determinant of the value of labour. But then Mill was assuming a definite Wage Fund--a fixed portion of the circulating capital of the country predestined for the payment of wages. This definite sum, and no more, was to employ all the workers, however many they might be. If, then, wages fell, the reason was obvious--there were too many workers. Wherever Mill touches on low wages we have a sermon on the evils of over-population, and his favourite explanation did not fail him here. "Where employers take full advantage of competition, the low wages of women are a proof that the employments are overstocked." But this is logical only if "overstocking" is the sole possible cause of low wages--which might be doubted even under a Wage Fund theory. But the Wage Fund is now one of the antiquities of political economy. Since Jevons we have looked for the measure of value in marginal utility; for the value of productive goods in their marginal utility as instruments of production; and for the value of labour in the value of its products, and not in any predetermined fund divided out among a variable number of workers by the action of supply and demand. And where invention is constantly widening and strengthening our power over natural resources and increasing the productiveness of labour, the presumption is against the idea that over-population is even a strong factor in modern wages.
There is, indeed, no formula in political economy on which the modern economist looks with more suspicion than that of Supply and Demand. The operation of supply and demand as determining market price is, of course, perfectly definite; but to say that any concrete price is fixed by the equation of supply and demand is a mere statement of an observed fact which says little, unless one knows and defines accurately what is involved in the "supply," what is involved in the "demand," and how those two factors stand related to each other. The price of railway stock to-day is determined by supply and demand; the price of a man's labour, whether unattached or working under restriction of the Trade Union, is determined by supply and demand; the earnings of the poor soul who sells her body on the streets are determined by supply and demand. What does this formula tell us unless we know the complex phenomena which determine the supply of railways and the demand for transit, the supply of labourers and the demand for work, the supply of hapless women and the demand for human souls? To say, then, that women's wages are low because there are enough women who take the low wage, is little more than to say that wages are low because people are paid low wages. We have still to ask: What are the factors, or influences, or motives, that make women take a wage below that of men, and what are the factors that make employers offer the low wage?
Apart from the general insufficiency of this first answer, it is enough to remember that the determination of wage by this mechanical equation of supply and demand could be tolerable only under absolutely free competition, which would involve perfect mobility of labour. But labour has this unique characteristic among all commodities that, physically, it is not mobile; historically, it has never been mobile; and ethically, it should not be mobile. A man's labour is--and should be--his life, not the mere instrument of providing a living; and, therefore, in the question of wages it is impossible to ignore the ethical consideration. Civilised society could not hold together if the workman and workwoman could only get their fair share of the world's boundless wealth by changing their trade, their residence, or their country, as a higher wage offered itself.
The second reason given is that, women not being as a rule the sole bread-winners of the family, their wage is auxiliary to that of its head; the woman's wage is, as it were, "found" money in the household purse. Underlying this statement is an assumption which is at least questionable. It is that the economic or wage-earning unit is the _family_. This is an old-time idea which, however beautiful and desirable, is a little out of place in the conditions to which the factory system has brought us. Once-a-day it was recognised that children had a far greater claim on the persons who brought them into the world than we now allow. It was thought that the one wage should be earned by the head of the house, and should be large enough to maintain the wife and daughters without outside work, and to educate and apprentice the sons till they were able to hive off for themselves. Any money earned by the junior members of the family was, in this case, supplementary, and determined by a different law. Perhaps in time we may come back to this view. Mr. Frederic Harrison is sanguine that we shall. But meantime the factory system has changed all that, and it is scarcely worth while looking for laws of wage in a condition of family life which does not now obtain. Putting aside the objections that many married women are not members of a family, and that many married women and widows are the sole bread-winners of the family, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that this answer would not be taken as explaining or justifying a low wage among what we call the "better classes." It would not be counted an excuse or reason for a publisher asking a lady novelist to accept a lower price for her books, or for a patient offering a lower fee to a lady doctor. If the sex of the author, artist, musician, doctor, intellectual or artistic worker generally, has nothing to do with her remuneration, why should sex determine the wage of the factory girl?
More clearly does this objection emerge when we consider the third answer. It is said that the inferiority of women's wage is owing to their standard of living being less than that of men. It is true that a woman, as a rule, eats less, drinks less, and smokes less. Tea to her is, unfortunately, both meat and drink, and it would be counted extravagance in a working woman if she took to eating twopence worth of sweets a day as balancing the man's half ounce of tobacco. But I am afraid a woman's standard of life differs from a man's rather in its items than in its cost. I have yet to learn that her standard of dress is less than ours, and I am quite sure she takes more medicines, and spends more on doctors' bills. As in the former case, we change our view according as we look at different classes. Among the "upper" classes, as we call them, the woman's standard of life is very much higher than that of the man. It is only because the poor seamstress, when put to it, will live on a shilling a-day, while a man will become a tramp or go to the workhouse first, that we say the woman requires less.
In a word, it is not that the physical and mental needs of woman are less than the physical and mental needs of man, but that many women, for some reason or other, can be got to accept a wage that will only keep them alive. If so, the answer, translated, simply runs: women's wages are less than men's because, for some reason, women accept less.
It is to be noted, however, as very significant of the popular ideas about wage, that the second and third answers just given account for the standard of women's wages by the _wants_ of the worker. A woman's wage is low because she does not _require_ a high wage, whether it be because her father partly supports her, or because her maintenance does not require so much. Now it may be said in passing that it is quite against our modern ideas to represent wage as regulated by wants. Under a socialistic régime, indeed, the wages of all might be thrown into a common purse, and divided out according to the wants and necessities of each; but under an individualist régime, like the present, what the worker _is_ is nothing, what the worker _does_ is everything. To assess the value of goods by the cost to the human life which makes them is to take ground on which the world is not prepared to follow the economist whatever it may say to the moralist. It is not the cost in killed and wounded that decides the battle. To the purchaser it is indifferent whether the cloth he buys wore out the fingers and heart of a woman, or only took a little tear and wear out of a machine. The one question he asks is: How will the cloth wear? _Caveat venditor._ If a man-worker, then, is supposed to get a high wage when he produces much, a low wage when he produces little, why should a woman's wage be determined by another principle? We cannot hunt with the individualist hounds and run with the socialist hare.
The next two reasons, accordingly, put the low wages of women on quite different and more scientific ground, namely, that of the work they produce. Of these the fourth says that women's work is not so good as men's. As a statement of fact this is probably true. It is no disparagement to the sex to acknowledge that, if women are necessarily off work several days in the year because of little ailments common to them, if they are insufficiently nourished relatively to their needs, or are naturally more delicate than men, their wage at the week's end will be less than that paid to the average man who scarcely knows what a headache means. Or, if the woman is compelled by law to leave the factory at six, while the man can stay and work overtime; or, if she is driven to the street for an hour at meal-time, while the man can gulp his tea within the walls and get back to his work half-an-hour earlier; we can see that the wage of the man will be higher by the time and the overtime he works. Similarly, if it requires not only skill but strength to work a heavy loom; or, if a man can do two jobs, the one alternative to the other; or, if he can "set" and "point" his tools as well as work his machine, while a woman has to go to the mechanic's shop for these things; in cases like these--and they are, of course, very many--we require no answer to our question. It is simply a case of better wages for better work--better in quantity, or in quality, or, at least, in advantage to the employer. That is to say, if men and women are working side by side at the same trades, and under similar conditions, it requires little explanation to say why the wages of men should be 20s. and the wages of women, say, 15s.
If this were all, the inferiority of women's wage would not be primarily a question of sex at all; it would be very much a question of unskilled labour as compared with skilled labour. Women would get lower wages than men for the same reason as the dock labourer gets lower wages than the artisan, and the artisan than the physician. The world might suffer nothing in pocket by adopting the principle--which, however, I am afraid is yet far from general acceptance--of Equal Wages for Equal Work, whatever the sex of the worker. And here it is that Mr. Sydney Webb deserves thanks for having accented a fact which we all indeed knew, but of which few of us saw the bearing. It is that men and women do not, as a rule, produce similar work alongside of each other, and that any argument which compares the wages of both sexes, without taking account of this fact, quite misses the mark.
To recur to the facts adduced by Mr. Webb: it seems to be impossible, he says, to discover any but a few instances in which men and women do precisely similar work in the same place and at the same epoch. In the tailoring trade, for instance, men do one class of garment, women another. In the cigar trade women make the lower-priced goods. So in all the Birmingham trades. In paper mills men do the heavier, women the lighter work. In cotton spinning, the mule tenders, called, _par excellence_, "spinners," are men, while women take all the preparatory processes. But there is one exceptional trade where this does not hold. "Weaving," says Mr. Webb, "appears to be nearly always paid at equal rates to men and women, whatever the material or locality." This seems to hold as regards the weaving industry generally, from the hand-loom weavers of Ireland to the carpet weavers of our own country; and it extends also to other countries, as, for instance, to the cotton and silk weaving in France. That is to say, as I understand, that the piece-work rate is the same, although in special cases strength may give the man an advantage in handling heavy looms. But what is most remarkable is that, over the great weaving district of Lancashire, not only are the rates of piece-work the same, but men and women do exactly the same work side by side in the same sheds, practically under the same Factory Act restrictions, and earn equal wages, namely, an average from 17s. 11d. in Carlisle to 21s. 4d. in Burnley. This, however, is distinctly and notably an exception. Women compositors, for instance, in London, receive uniformly lower piece-work rates for exactly similar work; for the same work the union man gets 8½d., the non-union man 7½d., and the woman only 5½d. As an exception, however, we shall have reason to recur to the Lancashire weavers later.
We thus come naturally to the fifth answer given to our question. It points to the fact that the kind of commodities made by women, or in women's trades, have, generally, a less value in the market--they are "cheap" goods. Even as a mere statement of fact this proposition is very loose. What are cheap goods? In the absence of any absolute standard of value, goods can be called cheap only as comparing present prices with prices of similar goods in the past, or in consideration of their cost of production as compared with other goods. If the former is meant, all modern manufactured goods are cheap, and this would not explain the lower wage of one sex. If the latter, it is prejudging the whole question. But to make this statement an explanation, and suggest that cheap prices are the cause of low wages, is surely to turn the causal connection the wrong way about; for the value of goods such as we are speaking of depends, according to the recognised theory, on cost of production, and of this cost of production wages is a large part. It is true that the connection between prices and wages is one on which economic science is somewhat slow to speak. We may not now be so confident as Mill was when he put the proposition "high prices make high wages" among common erroneous notions. And we may not be prepared to say with him that the effect of prices on wages is only indirect, through increased profits adding to capital. But we are not prepared, I think, to go in face of all our old faith, and declare that the _prices_ of goods determine their cost of production!
But as a fallacy is not usually put in a bald form, we must consider the concrete case in which it is assumed. Let us take an industry--say a branch of the textile trade--where labour constitutes a great part of the costs of production. Suppose that for many years low prices have ruled for the particular class of goods made. Any attempt to raise wages here meets with an obvious criticism. It seems most plausible to say: It is the wants of the people which have established this demand. The present price is all the consumers can or will pay, and the low wage is all that these prices can afford.
This is probably quite true. Once the prices are down, it is difficult to see how wages can be higher. But what brought down the prices? Is it ever the case that the world of consumers, practically, go to the workers and ask them to accept low wages on the ground that they can only afford low prices? Experience does not bear this out. So far as I know, the initiative of reducing prices, as a rule, comes from the producers, not from the public. The history of prices of most commodities of large use is something like this. They are at first dear, and only a small circle of consumers can afford them. As the production becomes organised, and capital brings more and more appliances to bear on the manufacture, the goods become cheaper, and a wider circle of demand is found. But below each circle of actual demand there are endless and widening circles of potential demand ready to take any particular commodity if it can be had cheaper. Thus, as, up to a certain point, large production is cheap production, there is always an inducement to the manufacturer and merchant to produce more cheaply. If they can reduce prices, and get down to a lower circle of consumers, it is well known in practical experience that the increase of trade which follows is out of all proportion to the degree of the reduction of price. But when this movement has gone on for some time, and goods have become very cheap, the demand has a way of appearing imperative, especially if these goods have entered into the standard of comfort of great classes. The goods become "necessary;" the low prices meet a "natural" demand; and these prices are just enough to yield an average profit to the employer--for profit must have its average, or capital, as we are often warned, will fly the country.
This is all quite true. The fallacy emerges only when it is suggested that the low prices are the cause of low wages. Here there are two possibilities: (1) All the reduction of cost may have been effected by perfecting machinery, organising production, and bringing producer and consumer together--that is to say, all the cheapening may have come from the side of capital. In this case there is no room for laying low wages at the door of cheapened prices. Or (2) as wages constitute one of the chief costs in all production--in the United States, for instance, they make up on an average a quarter of the manufacturing cost--they may have been reduced along with the capital expenses, and the low prices be partly due to these low wages.
What this does prove is, of course, that it was the reduction of wages, among other things, that made the reduction of prices possible. But what it was proposed to prove was the converse proposition, that the low prices made the low wages! To put it, then, in the plausible way, that the reduced prices "do not allow" of higher wages, is simply a very pretty specimen of the argument known to the vulgar as "putting the cart before the horse." What, however, we may very well learn from the wide acceptance of this view is that it is a very difficult thing to raise wages once they are down; and it may suggest that employers have some responsibility in reducing, and the public some responsibility in giving excuse for them being reduced.