II. Measures to elevate standards of living.
The primary conditions essential to rising standards of living are energy and enterprise on the part of wage-earners and opportunities to make energy and enterprise count in the form of higher earnings. The principal contributions which social legislation may make to advancing standards of living in the United States are believed to be: (1) measures serving to encourage saving for future needs on the part of wage-earners by providing safe investments for savings; (2) measures protecting wage-earners from the debilitating effects of an unregulated competition; (3) measures serving to bring within the reach of all opportunities for industrial training. Standards of living will also be advanced, of course, by nearly all measures calculated to promote the general well-being, such as tax and tariff-reform legislation, laws safeguarding the national domain, the public regulation of corporations, especially those with monopolistic powers, etc., but these are not usually classed under the head of social legislation.
(1) The greatest present need under this head is for a postal savings bank like those of European countries. The advantages of a postal savings bank over privately managed banks are the wider distribution of places of deposit, post-offices being located in every section of the country, and the greater confidence depositors would feel in such a bank. Once established the postal savings bank might enter the insurance field, as has the British postal savings bank, not as a rival of privately managed insurance companies, but to bring to every wage-earner the opportunity to secure safe insurance. Next to providing itself opportunities for safe investment and insurance, the government has an important duty to perform in supervising the business of privately managed savings banks and insurance companies. Notwithstanding the progress made in recent years in the United States in this field, there is still something left for social legislation to accomplish.
(2) If energy and enterprise are to be kept at a maximum, wage-earners must be protected from exhausting toil under unhealthful conditions. Skilled wage-earners can usually protect themselves through trade unions, but unskilled workers, women and children, require legal protection. Under this head belong, therefore, the familiar types of protective labor laws. The following may be specified:
(a) Laws prohibiting the employment of children below fourteen in all gainful pursuits. Such laws should be uniform throughout the United States and rigidly enforced by means of employment certificates based on convincing evidence of age and physical examination to determine fitness. As provision for free public education is made more adequate to present needs the minimum age may be advanced perhaps to sixteen.
(b) Laws limiting the hours of labor of young persons over fourteen. Protection here should extend to eighteen, at least in factory employments, and employment certificates should be required of all under that age.
(c) Laws limiting the hours of labor of women. In the regulation of women's work in the United States the principal needs are uniformity and machinery for efficient enforcement. The last is facilitated by the plan of specifying in the law the working period for the protected classes, and American courts must be brought to see the reasonableness (administratively) of such prescriptions. The nine-hour day and prohibition of night work set a high enough standard until greater uniformity and more efficient enforcement shall have been secured.
(d) Prescriptions in regard to sanitation and safety appliances. General prescriptions in regard to ventilation, etc., need to be made more exact, and much more attention needs to be given to the special regulation of dangerous trades, the existence of which has been largely ignored thus far in American legislation.
(3) The chief reason for restricting the labor of children and young persons is to permit the physical and mental development of childhood and youth to proceed unhampered and to ripen into strong, vigorous, and efficient manhood and womanhood. To attain this end, it is necessary to provide not only for wholesome living conditions and general free public education, but also for special industrial training for older children superior to the training afforded in modern factories and workshops. The apprenticeship system now fails as a method of industrial training, even in those few trades which retain the forms of apprenticeship. There is urgent social need for comprehensive provision for industrial training as a part of the public school system, not to take the place of the training now given to children under fourteen, but to hold those between fourteen and sixteen in school. As this need is supplied the period of compulsory school attendance may gradually be extended up to the sixteenth year. The guiding principle of such industrial training should be that it is the function of free public education in the United States not only to prepare children to lead useful, well-rounded and happy lives, but to command the earnings without which such lives are impossible.