46 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
basis of district differentials in wage rates, were nullified 
by the findings of governmental agencies such as the so- 
called Lane Railway Wage Commission, in the latter part 
of 1917, and later the investigations conducted by the 
Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor. 
The conclusions reached from these nation-wide surveys 
was that the cost of living was practically the same 
throughout the country, or, in other words, variations in 
one section were offset by different tendencies in another 
area, and in general the level of the cost of living did not 
vary in any substantial way from one section to another. 
In the principal industries and trades, rates of pay of 
industrial workers were, therefore, standardized. Em- 
ployees of shipyards received the same rates of compensa- 
tion for similar work on the Atlantic as on the Pacific 
Coast. Likewise, the building trades, railway employees, 
metal trades, and all those engaged in the basic, essential 
industries, were placed on an equal footing as to com- 
pensation, irrespective of geographical location. 
This tendency was further stimulated by the efforts of 
skilled craftsmen—especially in the organized occupa- 
tions—to broaden the classification of certain designated 
occupations in the building and metal trades, and in rail- 
roading and ship-building. Machine operators, and semi- 
skilled occupations arising from machine and factory 
processes in the division of labor, were successfully claimed 
to fall into the category of skilled craftsmen, and as a result 
received the uniform journeymen’s rates. Obviously, this 
procedure brought under the maximum rate of pay for an 
occupation all those who, in a division of labor by machine 
processes, had been receiving a considerable number of 
slightly varying rates; in other words, it tended to stand- 
ardize workmen upward to the highest rate of an all- 
around journeyman. In a few other cases, all workers