Scales of Living and Wage Earners' Budgets
| Published date | 01 March 1951 |
| Author | Dorothy S. Brady |
| DOI | 10.1177/000271625127400106 |
| Date | 01 March 1951 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
32
Scales
of
Living
and
Wage
Earners’
Budgets
By
DOROTHY
S.
BRADY
I NVESTIGATIONS
of
the
workers’
&dquo;cost
of
living&dquo;
have
multiplied
over
the
years,
more
than
keeping
pace
with
the
growth
in
the
relative
number
of
wage
earners
in
the
population.
Be-
tween
the
Civil
War
and
the
present
time
state
government
bureaus,
philan-
thropic
groups,
welfare
agencies,
indi-
vidual
social
scientists,
and
the
federal
government
have
made
hundreds
of
sur-
veys
of
the
workers’
manner
of
living.
Some
of
these
were
small
inquiries
cov-
ering
only
a
few
families
in
a
single
lo-
cality ;
some
were
among
the
largest
sta-
itstical
investigations
ever
made
in this
country.
The
published
surveys,
all
undertaken
to
obtain
facts
about
the
workers’
family
living,
offer
an
impres-
sive
volume
of
statistics
on
the
income,
expenditures,
and
possessions
of
wage-
earner
families
on
various
dates.
Here,
it
would
seem,
is
a
remarkable
illustration
of
the
American
propensity
to
accumulate
facts
and
figures
to
use
in
the
deliberations
on
pressing
current
problems.
Yet
these
statistics
on
work-
ers’
living
costs
have
seldom
contributed
directly
to
an
understanding
of
the
crit-
ical
questions
that
have
arisen
in
the
expanding
field
of
labor
problems.
SUBJECTIVITY
OF
&dquo;STANDARDS
OF
LIVING&dquo;
In
the
great
anthracite
coal
strike
at
the
beginning
of
this
century,
the
union
asserted
that
the
annual
earnings
of
the
mine
workers
were
not
sufficient
to
main-
tain
the
&dquo;American
standard
of
living&dquo;
and
that
low
wages
forced
the
miners
to
take
their
children
out
of
school
and
put
them
to
work.
The
President’s
Coal
Commission
stated
in
its
report
that
the
conditions
of
the
life
of
mine
workers
&dquo;do
not
fully
justify&dquo;
the miners’
claims.
The
Commission
had
inspected
mining
communities
and
had
heard
voluminous
testimony
on
the
part
of
the
union
and
on
the
part
of
the
operators
regarding
annual
earnings
and
the
level
of
living
of
miners’
families.
The
evidence
pre-
sented
in
the
hearings
made
no
refer-
ence
to
the
comprehensive
statistics
on
workers’
income
and
expenditures
which
had
just
been
assembled
by
the
United
States
Department
of
Commerce
and
Labor.
Then
and
later
the
figures
on
workers’
family
living
expenditures
were
used
only
indirectly
and
were
never
viewed
as
a
direct
source
of
empirical
fact
on
the
questions
that
the
unions
raised
and
continued
increasingly
to
stress
up
to
the
present
time.
The
relation
of
wages
to
the
American
&dquo;standard
of
living&dquo;;
the
effect
of
price
changes
on
the
workers’
scale
of
living;
the
influence
of
the
irregularity
of
in-
come
on
the
workers’
manner
of
living;
the
effect
of
low
wages
on
the
next
gen-
eration ;
the
primary
sources
of
dissatis-
faction
in
the
workers’
lives;
these
and
many
related
questions
have been
de-
bated
over
the
past
fifty
years
without
the aid
of
an
accepted
body
of
objective
observations.
Matters
of
interpretation
and
policy
have
been
obscured
by
con-
fusing,
contradictory,
incomplete,
and
obviously
biased
evidence
relating
to
the
facts
in
the
issue.
The
wealth
of
raw
material
in
the
sta-
tistics
on
workers’
family
living
has
scarcely
ever
been
processed
in
an
at-
tempt
to
produce
the relevant
facts,
and
the
investigators
were
not
often-pressed
to
find
answers
to
the
current
problems
in
their
data.
Instead
the
statistics
were
used
for
abstract
studies,
and
the
prac-
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