46 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES

basis of district differentials in wage rates, were nullified
by the findings of governmental agencies such as the socalled
 Lane Railway Wage Commission, in the latter part
of 1917, and later the investigations conducted by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor.
The conclusions reached from these nation-wide surveys
was that the cost of living was practically the same
throughout the country, or, in other words, variations in
one section were offset by different tendencies in another
area, and in general the level of the cost of living did not
vary in any substantial way from one section to another.
In the principal industries and trades, rates of pay of
industrial workers were, therefore, standardized. Employees
 of shipyards received the same rates of compensation
 for similar work on the Atlantic as on the Pacific
Coast. Likewise, the building trades, railway employees,
metal trades, and all those engaged in the basic, essential
industries, were placed on an equal footing as to compensation,
 irrespective of geographical location.
This tendency was further stimulated by the efforts of
skilled craftsmen—especially in the organized occupations—to
 broaden the classification of certain designated
occupations in the building and metal trades, and in railroading
 and ship-building. Machine operators, and semiskilled
 occupations arising from machine and factory
processes in the division of labor, were successfully claimed
to fall into the category of skilled craftsmen, and as a result
received the uniform journeymen’s rates. Obviously, this
procedure brought under the maximum rate of pay for an
occupation all those who, in a division of labor by machine
processes, had been receiving a considerable number of
slightly varying rates; in other words, it tended to standardize
 workmen upward to the highest rate of an allaround
 journeyman. In a few other cases, all workers