INTRODUCTION
5
involved in reaching a single figure were all necessarily
sxtremely costly.!
In 1917, in order to settle the constant disputes in the
shipbuilding industry, the Shipbuilding Wage Adjustment
Board of the Emergency Fleet Corporation entered into an
agreement with the unions involved to readjust wages at
intervals of not less than six months, if the majority of the
craft or crafts at a plant requested it, on the basis that there
had been a “general and material increase in the cost of
living”? To determine if there had been such an increase
and to ascertain its amount, the United States Bureau of
Labor Statistics late in 19173 undertook investigations in
the principal shipbuilding centers. Expenditures of families
in 35 communities in 1917 or in 1918 were taken, and through
prices collected from local merchants the increases in cost
between 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918 were computed.
No attempt was made to establish desirable standards of
living, but only to measure changes in the cost of maintaining
the existing standard on the basis of changing rents and
retail prices. These estimates for separate localities were
not combined into an index for the country as a whole, but
prices in 18 of them later served as the basis, through
December, 1917, for the Bureau’s present index of the cost
of living in the United States.*
In the meanwhile, in June, 1918, the first estimate of
changes in the cost of living made for the country as a
whole, based on a complete budget with retail prices weighted
according to consumption, was constructed by the National
Industrial Conference Board. This was designed to meet
the growing demand of industry in general and of the em-
ployer members of the then functioning National War Labor
! The Massachusetts Commission on the Necessaries of Life reports that in con-
structing its index of the cost of living over 400,000 mathematical computations
were made. Massachusetts, Commission on the Necessaries of Life, Report,
Boston, 1920, p. 112.
2 i Review of the U. 8. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, March, 1918,
pp. 74-75.
® The report on Philadelphia was published in the March, 1918, Monthly Review
of the U, S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; the report on New York, in April, 1918,
Reports on subsequent places appeared in the June number of the Monthly Review
and in the August, September and October numbers of the Monthly Labor Review.
See pp. 63-65 of this volume.