MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
201 
THE SIGNIFICxLNCE OF WAGES IN THE PRESENT LABOR 
PROBLEM. 
EDWARD M. ARNOS. 
The problem kna<ji as the labor problem may be properly divided 
into two distinct parts ; that is, the conditions of the place of employ- 
ment, and the conditions of the payment for the service of labor. I 
shall attempt to analyze the problem according to this definition, and 
deduce some conclusions from the analysis. 
I. THE CONDITIONS OF THE PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT. 
Students of the pre-industrial revolutionary period agree that the 
laborer’s problem then was to be able to produce enough. The condi- 
tions of the place of employment were well enough regulated so that 
none of the problems of today, such as accident and employer’s lia- 
bility, compensation acts, industrial diseases, long hours and excessive 
work, confronted them in the sense that labor is confronted by them 
now. I am not unmindful that the hours of labor were long, and that 
the sanitary condition of the place of employment was not excellent ; 
but those conditions were under the supervision of the employees them- 
selves, and were due not to negligence but to ignorance, and are there- 
fore not condemned by the same principle. Their problem, namely, the 
problem of production, was solved by the introduction of the factory 
system. The thing that made it possible for them to produce more, so 
that the question of production was removed, was the thing that created 
our present labor problems. It transferred the laborer from one place 
of employment to another. His home ceased to be his factory. Along 
with that transference of the place of employment went his power to 
control the conditions of the place of employment, and also the power 
of society to justly determine the amount of product which each laborer 
added to society, in that, as the division of labor became more extensive 
under the factory system, no one could tell how much each laborer 
produced, as could be done when the laborer worked in his own home 
and produced the commodity to a finished product. 
1. Machinery — The greatest of the forces of danger brought to the 
laborer by the factory is that by machinery. I have been unable to 
find satisfactory statistics of industrial fatalities due to machinery; 
but statistics collected by individual investigators, the Pittsburg Sur- 
vey in “Work, Accident, and the Law,” p. 14, shows the number killed 
bv machinery in Allegheny County for one year as 520, as the number 
that came to their notice. Probably more occurred. Indeed that is 
an extreme case, but represents the importance of the laborer’s prob- 
lem with machinery. This does not consider the suffering and loss due 
to non-fatal accidents. The same investigation shows also that the 
great percentage of these accidents were preventable. That being the 
