The post-office appropriation bill for the year beginning July, 1913, which was passed in the last days of the Sixty-second Congress, provided for 2,400 additional clerks as well as an increased number of carriers. It raised the minimum pay for clerks and carriers from $600 to $800 a year and set the minimum for substitutes at forty instead of thirty cents an hour. Large appropriations were made for auxiliary clerk and carrier hire, a special sum being set aside to prevent overwork of the regular employes during the summer vacation period. The minimum pay for laborers and watchmen in the department was raised from $650 to $720.
The raising of minimum salaries and the provision of extra service to prevent overwork and insure the effectiveness of the eight-hour day worked within ten consecutive hours, which was passed last year, rounds out the legislation of the Sixty-second Congress affecting the postal employes. This Congress, in the words of the Union Postal Clerk, in the two years of its existence, “enacted more legislation providing for the betterment of the condition of the postal employes and the improvement of the service than has ever been enacted since the establishment of the civil service among postal employes.”
The conditions which prevailed at the opening of this Congress were described in The Survey of August 6, 1911. Last year’s improvements, which were summarized in The Survey of July 13 and September 14, include the abolition of the gag rule; the enactment of an eight-hour day for clerks: and a Sunday-closing provision, with compensatory time off for the group of employes who are not affected by this provision; the raising of pay in the mail service; the providing of safer construction for mail cars, and the provision that 75 per cent of clerks and carriers in the second highest grades of pay should be automatically raised each year to the highest grade.
The post-office is not as yet, however, in the opinion of those who have studied its labor problem, a model employer. The substitutes are not on an entirely satisfactory basis, as no provision is made guaranteeing them a minimum number of hours a week, or setting a limit to the number of years they serve before they are received into the regular service. By the terms of the bill, whatever may have been done by administrative readjustments, no provision is made to relieve the overstrain on certain sections of the railway mail service. In spite of many years of vigorous agitation no retirement or pension bill for the service has as yet been passed.
THE AMERICAN COMMISSION ON
CO-OPERATIVE RURAL CREDIT
Over a hundred strong and representing over three-fourths of the states and Canada, the American Commission for the Study of the Application of the Co-operative System to Agricultural Production, Distribution and Finance in European Countries sailed from New York on April 26. This commission is to visit certain European countries under the direction of the Southern Commercial Congress. According to the officers of the Congress it will take special note of
| 1st. | The parts played, respectively, in the promotion of agriculture by the governments and by voluntary organizations of the agricultural classes. |
| 2nd. | The application of the co-operative system to agricultural production, distribution and finance. |
| 3rd. | The effect of co-operative organization upon social conditions in rural communities. |
| 4th. | The relation of the cost of living to the business organization of the food-producing classes. |
The work of the commission was given standing by the joint resolution of the Senate and the House of Representatives authorizing the secretary of state to bespeak for the commission the diplomatic courtesies of the various European governments. It was further strengthened by the appointment by President Wilson of a commission composed of seven persons to accompany and co-operate with the American commission, and through the appropriation by Congress of $25,000 for the expenses of this federal commission. Senator Duncan Fletcher, of Florida, president of the Southern Commercial Congress is chairman of the federal commission. The other members are: Senator Gore, of Oklahoma; Congressman Moss, of Indiana; Clarence J. Owens, of Maryland, managing director of the Southern Commercial Congress; Kenyon L. Butterfield, of Massachusetts, president of Amherst College; John Lee Coulter, of Minnesota, the government’s expert on agricultural statistics; and Colonel Harvie Jordan, of Georgia, president of the Southern Cotton Growers’ Association. Sevellon Brown accompanies the federal commission as a representative of the State Department.
The American commission will return to New York on July 25. The federal commission will as soon as possible thereafter render its report to Congress. A committee of nine governors appointed at the last conference of governors is awaiting the report of the American commission in order to draft appropriate state legislation in regard to farmers’ credit and co-operative organizations. Few commissions have gone abroad with the backing and the enthusiasm that accompanies this one. Representative of national and state public authorities, business men, and farmers, its report promises to hasten practical measures for the relief of the financial burden of the American farmer.