Employment agents in other leading cities already mentioned have very little complaint against the honesty of Negro domestic workers except in the matter of taking food. Their explanation of the psychology of such dishonesty is as given above.
IV. Wages, Hours, and Specific Occupations
While wages and efficiency are in some degree related in domestic service, there is the custom of paying the "going wage" for specific occupations, irrespective of efficiency. Wages vary, of course, in different sections of the country and in different localities. Occasionally attempts are made to grade such laborers. One employment bureau, in Indianapolis, for example, divides its day workers into grades A and B with respective wages of 30 cents and 25 cents an hour for each grade.
Two other questions current in the problem of wages in domestic service, both of which seem to be slowly lending themselves to adjustment, are the payment of weekly wages instead of bi-weekly or monthly wages, and equal pay for equal work irrespective of whether a man or a woman, a Negro or a white employee, does the work. Bi-monthly payment in domestic service has come to be the custom due largely to the convenience of the employer, and to the possibility of weekly wages increasing the turnover. A domestic worker often leaves unceremoniously as soon as he gets his first pay. However, workers claim that the custom of bi-weekly or monthly pay inconveniences them since they cannot arrange to pay their rent, or purchase clothing and other necessities on that basis.
The question of equal pay for Negro domestic workers does not enter the domestic service wage problem of the South because Negroes pre-empt this field in that section. Although the scarcity of domestic labor seems to be settling this matter in other sections of the country, it still persists in some measure. Twenty-five years ago Miss Eaton discovered that Negro butlers on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, received on an average $36.90 a month, while white butlers were getting from $40 to $45 a month.[25]
In the fall of 1921, during the period of labor depression, eleven of the Washington, D. C., clubs and expensive boarding houses attempted to make a change from Negro to white chambermaid-waitresses at an increase of $10 a month for each worker. The four clubs that succeeded in making the change discharged their white chambermaid-waitresses after one week each and re-employed Negroes at the old wage of $35 a month. One of the successful employers felt that, inasmuch as the white servants were no more satisfactory than the Negro workers, she had just as well keep the Negroes and pay them less.
When the minimum wage law for women and minors of Washington, D. C., recently declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, went into effect, practically all of the hotels and restaurants in that city immediately discharged Negro workers and took on white ones. Some of the managers told the agent at the United States Employment Bureau that they were making the change because white servants were more efficient than Negro workers. Other managers, some of whom had used Negro labor for more than fifteen years, simply said that $16.50 a week was too much to pay Negroes, and, therefore, wished white workers instead. The few hotels and restaurants that retained Negroes as a rule put them on a much shorter working week than 48 hours, thus reducing their pay.
Boarding houses and institutions such as private schools, sanatoria, and the like, that offer excuses and fail to pay workers should be mentioned in this connection. The manager of one such boarding house in Washington, D. C., was sued by a worker who won her case because other unpaid laborers testified against the manager. The superintendent of a small private school in that city—also among such paymasters—had repeatedly been reported to the Minimum Wage Board which forced her to pay the Negro women day workers. After a few months of such experience she changed her help and began to employ men, over whom the Minimum Wage Board had no jurisdiction.
The wages of Negro domestic workers today are considerably higher than they were in past decades, as is shown by a comparison of figures in past periods for the Continental United States and for selected cities with figures in 1920-1923. For the twenty-five years prior to the World War there had been only a slight wage increase in domestic and personal service. During the World War there was a considerable increase in wages for both male and female domestic workers, the increase for the latter being larger than that for the former. Since the World War wages for such workers have fallen to some extent but not anywhere near the pre-war level.
The following tables, with one exception, show the wage changes at different ten-year periods over a range of 30 years. In Table IX the figures from the Boston Employment Bureau illustrate the fact that the average weekly wages for female domestic workers of Boston were decidedly higher than elsewhere in the country. This table also makes clear the fact that wages for men were considerably higher than those for women.