34 MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES
Principle of Wage Fixation

|, QUALIZATION of home-workers’ earnings with factory wages
(the “ fair-wage ” principle, as in France, but with greater freedom
 of the boards to consider also the general necessity of a living
wage) was the principle used in wage fixation.
Results

[FREDRIK VOSS, chairman of the Home Work Council, reports *°
that two wage boards—one set up in Oslo and one in the second
main center of home work, Fredrikstad—worked well. The inspection
 of conditions, intrusted to the health councils of these cities and
~xercised with northern thoroughness, partly through house-to-house
inspection, proved that the wages prescribed were really paid, practically
 without exception. Elsewhere, setting up wage bvards for
small numbers of home workers proved to be too complicated and
too costly, and so no minimum rates were fixed. Efforts of the Home
Work Council and of local health councils, however, to persuade the
few employers in the smaller cities and towns where underpayment
was observed to raise wages voluntarily often succeeded. High
wages of home workers in Oslo and in Fredrikstad and low wages
elsewhere created unequal competitive conditions for employers in
different parts of the country. While generally the employers’ associations
 favored renewal of the law (which had first been voted for
five years only and was renewed by unanimous vote of Parliament),
there were serious complaints of employers about the unequal application
 of the law. The Central Home Work Council (composed, like the
wage boards themselves, of representatives of employers and of employees
 and presided over by an impartial chairman) asked therefore
 for an amendment to the law empowering it to fix wages directly
in places where the establishment of wage boards had been found impracticable.
 Parliament, however, refused, the chief reason being
that it was undesirable to give so much power to a central authority
in Oslo. The application of the law continues without change.
The Norwegian Ministry of Social Affairs reported on March 15,
1927, to the International Labor Office 2* that home-workers’ rates
are generally slightly lower than those paid to similar classes of
workers in factories, and that inspection seems to have insured observance
 of the rates. The whole experience seems to prove the usefulness
of minimum wage legislation for home workers but points also to the
necessity of overcoming difficulties of administrative machinery.
These difficulties have been much greater in the other sphere (commercial
 employees) regulated by minimum wage legislation during
seven years, as will be seen later in a survey of unsuccessful minimum
wage experiments (p. 112). These difficulties seem to have much impressed
 the Ministry of Social Affairs. It ranged itself with the
very small minority of Governments opposing an international con-20

 International Labor Office. International Labor Review, Geneva, December, 1925.
p. 805: “ Minimum wage legislation in Norway.”
2 International Labor Office. Studies and reports, series D (wages and hours of work),
No. 17: Minimum Wage-Fixing Machinery. Geneva, 1927, p. 149.