ADVANCING LABOUR.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 79, 5 April 1910, Page 6

ADVANCING LABOUR.

« Whatever may be the cause, the widespread increase of wages of which reports have come to hand during tho last few days from the United States are very gratifying. Companies employing 45,000 "unorganised bituminous miners" in Maryland and Virginia have voluntarily increased wages by five per cent. The Steel Trust is raising the wages of 225,000 of its employees by six per cent. The Central Railway has increased by seven per cent, the salaries of all employees who are receiving less than 200 dollars a month who are employed eastward of Buffalo. Altogether, it is estimated that the general upward movement of wages which is now in progress will give to the workers of the United States an aggregate of £100,000,000 in advance of what they received last year. What is tho cause of this extraordinary increase, which in one of the three cases mentioned is expressly stated to have been voluntary on the part of the employers, and to have benefited employees who had no organisation to back them, and in none of the cases appears to have been preceded by any dangerous degree of friction or controversy ? The principal cause is doubtless the leaps and bounds by which the commercial and industrial prosperity of the United States has been advancing during the last twelve months. The United States was the first country to feel the great depression of trade which began towards the close of 1907, and rapidly spread over the whole world, and it has also been ihe first country to make a complete recovery. The crash in Wall-street signalized the outbreak of the Btorm, and a boom in Wall-street marked the return of fair weather to the United States while other countries were still labouring us before. For every country and by every test the year 1908 was an exceptionally bad one. Two items relevant lo the matter in hand will suffice to show how tno United States was ulfectcd. The blow to capital is indicated by the fact that tho production of pig iron m the United States was 38 per cent. Jees in 100b than it. tho preceding year. The increase of the percentage of unemployed members of all the Trade Unions of New York from 12.6 to 27.7 — v proportion almost double the highest figures of the preceding eight years — proves how cruelly labour suffered at ths cams titnu. How Tar wages were affected by the depression to whirh those figures eloquently testify v.c have not been informed, and probably there is no actuinto record. But there must have been a considerable drtlinc and labour is now getting its shair of returning prosperity. IVo »p«ua! i antes may &»ve co-operatad ta hatten the proceu mid .

to bring it about smoothly. The outcry against the Payne Tariff— which has added to the consumer's burden, instead of bringing him the relief which he anticipated — has focussed public attention on the alarming increase in the cost of living which constitutes the seamy side, or ono of the seamy sides, of American prosperity. A Brooklyn (N.Y.) clergyman, writing in January to the New York Evening Post, complained that in ten years, while his salary remained stationary, the cost of living had increased by forty per cent. The official testimony of the Labour Department of the same State is that in seven years the cost of living in New York had increased tw«nty-two per cent., and an even larger rise has been recorded in other States. On the principles applied by the New Zealand Arbitration Court tho American worker is therefore entitled to a rise in wages, even if they were not reduced during the depression. The unpopularity of the trusts and the big corporations, and the attacks which are being made upon them in the courts and the Legislatures, may supply their managers with an additional reason for consenting to the inevitable with as good a grace as possible, and so that they may seem to be rather conferring a favour than paying under pressure an instalment of an overdue debt. Whatever may be the motives at work, labour has scored, and the whole community is the better for it.