At first glance the principles involved in the legislation limiting hours and those in minimum-wage legislation may seem to be the same. But there is an important difference. In the former case the evil is that of a too long work ing period, injurious to health, and this can be reached di rectly and stopped by an efficiently administered law. But in the latter case the real evil is industrial weakness and in capacity such that the workers are unable to command a "living wage" in a competitive market. A minimum-wage law, by itself, neither cures the industrial incapacity nor in sures employment to the industrially weak at any wage. The law does not attempt to compel employers to employ at the legal minimum wage every one who wishes to work; it merely declares that the employer shall not employ any one whom, in his employ, he finds to be not worth so high a wage.
§ 10. Wage theory in the minimum wage. In most discussions of the wages of women there is a ready confusion of sympathetic ideals of what one would like to see with the cold facts as they are. Women's services (espe cially those of young women) have increasingly of late been coming upon the labor market in such a way as to cause abnormal congestion in a few occupations. Employers have not caused low wages in these cases. Partly these occupa tions are the clean, light, and agreeable ones; partly they have a relative social glamour ; largely they can be followed for a few years near the home of the worker; nearly always they may be undertaken with brief training and little skill. Investigation has shown that at least 80 per cent of this group of girl workers live at home. A wage that is a "living wage" when used as a pro-rata contribution to an American family income is frequently insufficient for the girl living "independently." Such a girl is, under the con ditions, unable to earn a living in her chosen occupation, and the minimum-wage law takes her need as the standard up to which must be raised the wages of the other four fifths.
It may be better to deal with such individual cases as ap pear among the one fifth of all girls employed than to apply governmental wage-fixing to the whole group. Unless the demand for a particular kind of service is absolutely in elastic (a rare if not impossible situation in a large market), there must be fewer jobs for the less capable workers at high than at low wages, other prices remaining the same. Fur ther, some of the less capable workers must be crowded out of such jobs as remain ; for an artificially higher wage at tracts into an occupation some from other occupations in which the pay before was higher. It seems to be admitted by the
friends of minimum-wage legislation that this result is logi cally to be expected, and that to some degree it appears. Of course, it is never possible to tell to just what extent workers have been and are being excluded in this way from any par ticular establishment or occupation. Forbidden to earn what they can, the poorer workers must become dependent on charity. It may be said, and perhaps truly: better this than underpaid labor destructive to the health of the workers, and evil in its competitive effects upon other wage workers.
§ 11. Limitations of the minimum wage. Generous sympathies have guided this movement, of which much has been hoped, and which, on the other hand, has always had its adverse critics. Its friends, after more than twenty years of experience, hardly claim more for it than that the "dire predictions" have not been verified. In truth, it would seem that the plan as yet has not been tried on a scale that could yield very large fruits either for good or for evil. The persons whom it is sought to aid are only selected groups of the lowest paid workers, generally limited to minors and young women, who in many cases are those of immigrant fam ilies in urban districts. A large volume of discussion on this subject has developed, mostly of an a priori nature, of which we may here touch only a few of the salient points.
The one unquestioned service of the minimum-wage law is that of diagnosing the evil of low wages rather than in rem edying it. The minimum-wage law brings to light the in dustrial incapacity of particular individuals to earn a living wage. Alongside of the abnormally low paid occupations or elsewhere in the industrial organization are other occupa tions in which with, or often even without, special training, the sweated workers could get, competitively, more than the minimum wage if they could, or would, qualify for the work. More direct remedies would be to transfer workers to jobs in which they can get a living wage, to abolish the incapable workers or their incapacity by such methods as regulating foreign or cityward immigration, custodial care of the physi cally, mentally, and morally weak, vocational guidance, and more effective measures of industrial education.