CHAPTER V[ToC]
Wages and Efficiency of Wage-earners
The question of wages and working efficiency are so closely related that they can be better treated together than separately. The material for this part of the monograph has been gathered from three sources, namely: a personal canvass, the records of employment agencies for personal and domestic help, and the statement of union rates published by the New York Bureau of Labor Statistics. It has not been possible to calculate the time loss by the worker, and therefore any estimate of annual income based upon the figures given must be made on the assumption of a full year of work. This, of course, is not the actual case, especially with many wage-earners in domestic and personal service.
I. WAGES IN DOMESTIC AND PERSONAL SERVICE
The Employment Agencies' Law of New York City requires that each agency keep a careful and accurate record of the wages of those for whom they secure situations, as well as written references from former employers of each applicant. Since inspectors from the Bureau of Licenses have access to these records at any time, they are probably carefully kept. The material on wages which has been taken largely from these sources has been arranged to show the number of individuals who receive a specified wage, beginning at less than $4.00 and running by $1.00 groups up to $9.00 and over. There follows ([p. 80]) a table covering 682 males in twenty-four occupations and 2,138 females in twenty-five occupations from 1906 to 1909. It will be noted that in some cases two occupations are given under one heading such as elevator and switchboard, or cook and laundress. In these cases, the individual is paid the same for the two branches of work; so far as the wage is concerned it is one occupation. It is significant that out of a total of 682 males, 513, or 75.2 per cent, received wages under $6.00 per week and that 141, or 20.7 per cent, received between $6.00 and $8.99 per week, while only 4.1 per cent received $9.00 or more per week. With the females, the showing is even more unfavorable. Out of a total of 2,138 females, 1,971, or 92.2 per cent, received less than $6.00 per week, and of these 1,137, or 53.2 per cent, received less than $5.00 per week. Of those receiving $6.00 or more per week, only 8 out of 2,138, or .04 per cent, received as much as $9.00 or more per week.
Of course, many of these wage-earners are furnished their meals in addition to wages; some have meals and room. In some cases question may arise about the effect of lodgings furnished by the employer upon the wages paid his domestic help, but both from the testimony of the employment agent and from statements made in the records, it does not appear that wages are different whether the servants "sleep in" or "sleep out." There are no data to show whether or not consideration of car-fare had any effect on the wages.
An inspection of the list of occupations for which these wages are given and the fact that they were employed in private families (see Table XVIII below) show that comparatively few of these wage-earners had opportunity to receive any considerable money from tips. This is especially true of the females. We may take, therefore, the figures of the table as probably giving an accurate statement of the wages received in domestic service in New York City during the four years, 1906 to 1909.
When one considers the probable dependents on many of these wage-earners, the high rents and high cost of food, he is not surprised to find that about half of these families take lodgers (see [p. 64]), and that a majority of the women are bread-winners (see [p. 73]). He sees the poorly-paid domestic service on the one side and on the other the cost of living as high walls bounding a narrow, restricted road that leads to a low standard of living and to social and economic disease. Table XVIII shows the picture in full relief:
Table XVIII. Weekly Wages by Groups of Wage-Earners for Selected Occupations in Domestic and Personal Service, New York City, 1906-1909.[A]