122 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
would inevitably be raised. This is what actually hap- 
pened, and during the past five years budgetary studies of 
minimum family requirements have generally included an 
allowance of at least 10 per cent. of the total for savings 
to protect the wage-earner and his family against the ordi- 
nary contingencies of life. 
Quite recently a further upward impetus has been given 
to the basic wage conception by the striking declaration of 
the head of one of our largest industrial corporations. He 
gave expression to the opinion that the worker’s income 
should be sufficient to provide for a proper “cultural life” 
and not merely for his physical needs. Furthermore, he 
expressed the hope that some day labor would become 
capital, or, in other words, that our great business and 
industrial undertakings would be owned by those who, in 
whatever capacity employed, gave to them their best efforts 
and their lives. 
The industrialist who put forward this unusual point 
of view was Mr. Owen D. Young, Chairman of the Board 
of Directors of the General Electric Company. In the 
course of an address on industrial relations and conditions 
delivered at Harvard University on June 4, 1927, which 
was widely commented upon, he developed his point of 
view as to an adequate wage standard as follows:? 
Gradually we are reducing the area of conflict between the 
iwo. Slowly we are learning that low wages for labor do 
not necessarily mean high profits for capital. We are learn- 
ing that an increasing wage level is wholly consistent with 
a diminishing commodity-price level. We are learning that 
productivity of labor is not measured alone by the hours of 
work, nor even by the test of physical fatigue in a particular 
job. What we need to deal with are not the limits to which 
men may go without physical exhaustion, but the limits within 
1 Monthly Labor Review, U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, November, 1927, 
pp. 45-48; see also Forbes Magazine for Dec, 1, 1927, p. 9.