ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 12% all groups whose earnings were below the rates of pay shown by budgetary studies to be necessary for the maintenance of an average wage-earner’s family on the level of health and decency. Later, when all classes of employees became involved in the effort to resist wage-reductions, a concerted attempt was made to have the Railroad Labor Board recognize a minimum standard of “health and modest comfort” for the lowest grades, such as the maintenance-of-way employees, and corresponding changes in differentials in rates of pay above this minimum for occupations requiring skill, hazards and responsibilities. Expressed concretely, the attitude of the employees, as submitted to the Board, may be comprehensively illustrated by the following statement by their economist in one of the final hearings of the series of controversies of the period 1921-1922: From the time of the first hearings before this Board in the Spring of 1920 up to the present day, the representatives of the employees, consistently and without variation, have urged the Board in making general wage adjustments to adopt the following course or procedure: First: To fix for the unskilled laborer, or the lowestpaid worker in the scale of railroad occupations, a “living wage,” or a wage sufficient to support a standard of living based on health, decency, and a reasonable and modest degree of comfort, and Above this basic, living wage, to establish differentials for the higher grades of railroad workers, such differentials to extend upward according to skill, hazard, responsibility, experience, training and productive efficiency. Second: 1 These proceedings involved all classes of transportation employees, numsering at that time about 2,500,000. See “Proceedings before the United States Railroad Labor Board,” Chicago, 1921-1922. The records of the Labor Board are now at the U. S. Board of Mediation and Conciliation, Washinglon.