CHAPTER 14—TYPICAL AND ODD FORMS OF
MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION
Main Currents

YHE preceding chapters have shown that different types of minimum-wage
 legislation have developed in different regions of the
} world and in the different types of social organizations, but that
tnside of each of these regional and social groups fairly homogeneous
Sypes of minimum wage have evolved.
In the United States women in shops and stores, for purely humanitarian
 reasons, are the beneficiaries of the minimum wage.
In most parts of the British Empire the application of minimum
wage has started with home work and been extended to unorganized
trades generally, and from them to all trades (point reached in Australasia),
 while Canada, combining generally British and American
traits of social organization, also combines British and American
traits of minimum wage (laws mainly but not exclusively for women,
with a strong tendency for extension of the laws).
The three countries whose forms of government have been changed
recently through social revolutions—Mexico, Russia, and Italy—tend
toward general legal fixation of wages, Mexico through a typical but
comprehensive minimum wage law for all workers and Russia and
Italy through organization of industry under State control.
Home-work legislation has always been and still remains typical
for several democratic States on the Continent of Europe and for
A tpmiinn, with a tendency for further development along British
ines,
States with large-scale agriculture and a numerous class of rural
wage earners (Great Britain, Hungary, and Uruguay) apply minimum
 wage to agricultural workers.
There are a few experiments which seem to nullify that generalization
 of a precise relationship between type of minimum wage and
general regional and social characteristics of the countries, but when
examining these apparent exceptions from the rule it will be found
that these experiments away from type, sometimes started with great
hopes, have either been abandoned as unsuccessful or have been
maintained only in restricted fields without much success.

Minimum Wage in British Coal Mines

Odd Forms

\V HILE home work, unorganized trades, and agricultural labor
} are exposed to sweating, and minimum wage legislation had for
its primary object the abolition of sweating, the problem is different
In the coal mines, Certainly the fate of the miners is also a hard
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