verage wage
in sweated industries still is five, eight and ten cents an hour,
and these earnings represent, on the average, forty weeks' work
out of a fifty-two week year. Further, in the report of the New
York State Factory Investigation Commission we find that out of a
total of 104,000 men and women 13,000 receive less than $5.00 a
week, 34,000 less than $7.00 a week, 68,000 less than $10.00 a
week and only 17,000 receive $15.00 a week or more. These low
wages are not only paid to apprentices either in factories or
stores but to large numbers of women who have been continuously
in industry for years. Again, the New York State Factory
Investigating Commission tells us that half of those who have five
years' experience in stores are receiving less than $8.00 a week,
and only half of those with ten years' experience receive $10.00 a
week. Dr. Howard Woolston of the Commission has pointed out: "Even
for identical work in the same locality, striking differences in
pay are found. In one wholesale candy factory in Manhattan no male
laborer and no female hand-dipper is paid as much as $8 a week,
nor does any female packer receive as much as $5.50. In another
establishment of the same class in the same borough every male
laborer gets $8 or over, and more than half the female dippers and
packers exceed the rates given in the former plant. Again, one
large department store in Manhattan pays 86 per cent. of its
saleswomen $10 or over; another pays 86 per cent. of them less.
When a representative paper-box manufacturer learned that cutters
in neighboring factories receive as little as $10 a week, he
expressed surprise, because he always pays $15 or more. This
indicates that there is no well-established standard at wages in
certain trades. The amounts are fixed by individual bargain, and
labor is 'worth' as much as the employer agrees to pay."

It has been estimated by the Commission that to raise the wages of two
thousand girls in the candy factories from $5.75 to $8.00 a week, the
confectioners in order to cover the cost will have to charge eighteen
cents more per hundred pounds of candy. It is also estimated that if
work shirts cost $3.00 a dozen, and the workers receive sixty cents
for sewing them we can raise the wages ten per cent. and make the
labor cost sixty-six cents. The price of those dozen shirts has been