Cost of living in German towns

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 866449027

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-93831

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Cost of living in German towns

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Stat. Off.

Year of publication:: 1908

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (LXI, 548 Seiten)

Collection:: Economics Books

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1 In the case of the building trades the weekly wages given are, for both countries, the wages for a full working week in summer. In the case of the engineering trades, the English wages are the standard time rates recognised by the unions concerned ; the German rates, on the other hand, are in most cases based on returns of actual earnings, and it is consequently doubtful how far the two sets of returns are strictly comparable. The standard time rates being often exceeded by actual earnings on piecework, it is probable that the German rates appear somewhat too high relatively to the English. The compositors rates in both England and Germany are standard rates. For skilled men in the building trades the German wages are about 75 per cent, of the English ; for skilled men in the engineering trades about 85 per cent, of the English* ; for compositors in the printing trade (hand compositors) the ratio is about 83 per cent. Building trades' labourers in Germany earn about 86 per cent, of the weekly earnings of the corresponding class in England, and it is only the lowest paid class of all—the engineering labourers—whose earnings in Germany are as high as in this country. It is evident that the weekly wages in Germany are as a whole considerably below the level of those prevalent in England. If we may take the arithmetic mean of the individual index numbers, given in the last column of the above Table, as representing approximately the level of German wages compared with English, we find that, on the whole, the wages of the German workman are to the wages of the corresponding English workman in the selected trades as «3 to 100. The above comparison is probably slightly too favourable to Germany owing to the fact that the Engineering trades (in which for reasons already given the German wages are likely to be overstated in comparison with the English) are over-represented in the statistics. Seeing that most of the above data for Germany are based on the gross wages, before the compulsory deductions on account of insurance which have been dealt with above (p. xxxiii) have been made, it might at first sight appear that a correction should be made for such deductions, and the figure (83) for Germany somewhat reduced. In point of fact, however, the deductions from the German workman’s wages for insurance correspond in part to the payments of the British working man to his friendly society or sick club for similar benefit« and in part to savings, and only differ from these in being compulsory. There does not seem to be, therefore, any reason for making a deduction from the predominant German wage rates to make them comparable with the English. ! Hours of labour.—A table giving the usual weekly hours of labour in the towns investigated for the several standard trades was given above on p. This subject was not dealt with so completely in the Report on the United Kingdom, and no corresponding table was there given for the standard trades in England. This omission has now been supplied from the data collected for the English Report, and a table is given in the Appendix to this introduction (Table D (ii) ip. lvi). It will be seen that while in Germany 60 hours or 59-60 hours a week are markedly the most frequent for all trades except printing, in England and Wales the distribution is, lor the building trades at least, so irregular that it is almost impossible to give any range narrower than 49 to 57 hours as at all predominant. This I renders the use of the u predominant range ” an unsatisfactory method for the present case, and it becomes better to use the simple arithmetic mean of the usual working hours in the several towns investigated. These have been taken but to the nearest half hour and are collected in the Table below, for the same trades as in the Wages Table :— ‘ h * This figure is probably somewhat too high (see above).

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