276 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES
creased 12 per cent., real wages 18 per cent., and “social
wages” as defined by the Federation of Labor, or money
wages related to prices and production, 19 per cent.
The remarkable improvement in living standards has
also been vividly apparent from increases in general in-
come, building and road construction, life insurance, sav-
ings deposits, and the assets of building and loan associa-
tions per capita, as well as the extraordinary increase in
attendance at public schools and colleges, and the almost
incredibly wider use of automobiles, radios, telephones,
phonographs, and household electrical appliances.
Three especially noteworthy tendencies, however, stand
out clearly in considering the unprecedented gains which
have accrued to labor: (1), the distribution of these gains
has been unequal as between different groups of wage-
earners; (2), the workers in certain backward and overex-
panded industries, such as bituminous coal mining, cer-
tain branches of textile manufacturing, and agriculture,
have not participated in the new prosperity ; and, (3), the
earnings of the greater proportion of industrial workers
are still wholly inadequate for the maintenance of proper
standards of living.?
As should be normally expected, the larger share of the
gains of the recent industrial expansion has accrued to the
benefit of the wage-earners who have been organized. This
group constitutes, however, only about one-ninth of those
gainfully employed. The leading organized groups are the
building, metal, printing, barber, and baking trades, team-
sters and chauffeurs, street railway conductors and motor-
1 Article entitled “Wages in Manufacturing Industries,” by Jurgen Kuczy-
uski and Marguerite Steinfeld, American Federationist, July, 1928; also article
in New York Times Current Hisiony for August, 1928, by Dr. Edward T.
Devine, entitled “American Labor’s mproved Status since 1914,”
2 See statements by Prof. Irving Fisher, Yale University, and of the Secre-
tary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, in the New York Times for Nov. 26, 1927,
and Dec. 2, 1927, respectively.
en t— pe
