CHAPTER III[ToC]
THE WAGE EARNERS OF CLEVELAND
In 1910 Cleveland ranked sixth among the cities of the United States as to number of inhabitants, with a population of approximately 561,000. The city is growing rapidly. From 1900 to 1910 the increase in the total number of inhabitants was over 46 per cent. The Census Bureau estimate of the population in 1914 is approximately 639,000.
Of the 10 largest cities in the country only one—Detroit—had in 1910 a greater proportion of its wage earners engaged in industrial employment than Cleveland. Relatively Cleveland has one and one-fourth times as many industrial workers as New York, Chicago, St. Louis, or Baltimore, and one and two-fifths times as many as Boston. On the other hand a smaller proportion of the adult workers of the city earn their living in professional, clerical, and commercial work, or in domestic and personal service employments than in most large cities.
Table 1 shows by large occupational groups the distribution in 1910 of the working population in Cleveland. The classification is that adopted by the federal census. More than 56 per cent of the male workers of the city and about 33 per cent of the women workers were engaged in manufacturing and mechanical occupations. The trade group ranks next, about 14 per cent of the men and approximately 11 per cent of the women being engaged in commercial occupations. Of each 100 women in employment 30 are servants, laundresses, housekeepers, or are engaged in some other form of personal service, while only five men of each 100 earn their living in this kind of work. Railroad and street transportation, with the telegraph and telephone and mail systems of communication, requires the services of 11 per cent of the male working population, but uses very few women. About seven per cent of the men and 15 per cent of the women are employed in clerical work. A slightly larger ratio of women to men is found in the professional occupations, due mainly to the large number of women in the teaching profession. The whole professional group constitutes less than five per cent of the total working population.
TABLE 1.—OCCUPATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORKING POPULATION OF CLEVELAND,
CENSUS OF OCCUPATIONS, 1910[TableList]
| Occupational group | Men | Women | Total |
| Manufacturing and mechanical industries | 109,644 | 18,201 | 127,845 |
| Trade | 27,229 | 5,942 | 33,171 |
| Domestic and personal service | 9,546 | 16,467 | 26,063 |
| Transportation | 21,530 | 1,110 | 22,640 |
| Clerical occupations | 14,047 | 8,100 | 22,147 |
| Professional service | 7,204 | 4,869 | 12,073 |
| Public service | 3,461 | 39 | 3,500 |
| Agricultural and extraction of minerals | 1,367 | 80 | 1,447 |
| Total | 194,078 | 54,808 | 248,886 |
From the standpoint of vocational training one of the most striking facts about Cleveland wage-earners is that a large majority of them are not Clevelanders. Almost exactly half of the men in gainful employment were born outside the United States and, due to the rapid growth of the city, there has been a considerable influx of workers from the surrounding country in recent years, so that a large proportion even of the American working population was born, brought up, and educated in some other place. The number and per cent of foreign born, of foreign or mixed parentage but born in this country, and of native parentage is shown in Table 2.