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).
