478 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



WAGES AND SALARIES IN ORGANIZED INDUSTRY 



By Db. SCOTT NEARING 



UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



I. The Narrowed Range of Information 



THE extreme differences between the various groups of gainfully 

 employed people in the United States take from the term " em- 

 ployed " any fixed meaning. Occupation, sex, geographical district and 

 the kind of industry, play havoc with any hope that the problem of 

 service income might be reduced to simple terms and treated as a unit. 

 It is manifestly impossible to look upon a man who is "gainfully em- 

 ployed" as having any particular income, since there is no fixed rela- 

 tion between the fact of employment and the amount of income which 

 employment yields. 



Any treatment of service income limits itself arbitrarily because of 

 the lack of available facts. Professional people, people rendering per- 

 sonal services, and the small owner or independent producer necessarily 

 are eliminated. Those engaged in personal service and professional work 

 are gainfully employed in every real sense of the word ; the small pro- 

 ducer of flour, as an example, is a producer in the same sense that the 

 employees in a great flour mill are producers. At the present juncture, 

 income figures have been collected for none of these groups. All of 

 them perform useful social functions, yet regarding them there is only 

 meager information, and that, for the most part, of so unreliable a 

 character as to preclude the possibility of its use in any study that pur- 

 ports to be scientific. 



The data at hand do furnish an indication, though an incomplete 

 one, of the way in which income is apportioned among that vastly im- 

 portant part of the gainfully occupied world which is engaged with the 

 processes of organized industry. After all, it is in them that the most 

 permanent interest must center. Outside of agriculture, they consti- 

 tute the great majority of the population. They are the human part 

 of that system of organized industry toward which the world seems to 

 be moving; from their hands flows most of that stream of goods upon 

 which society subsists; to them is committed the imperative task of 

 feeding, clothing, housing and otherwise providing for the wants of 

 mankind. Although agriculture can not be included in the analysis 

 because of the extreme paucity of the information about agricultural 

 income, nevertheless the data about organized industry are profoundly 

 significant because they bespeak the income situation in the newest, and 

 it is probably fair to say the coming form of industrial organization. 



