Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 October 1908 — Cheap Labor Mabes Cheap Living. [ARTICLE]

Cheap Labor Mabes Cheap Living.

The pessimist still complains about the high price in food products and tries to make it appear that the advance in wages in the last ten years has not been commensurate with the increase in the cost of living. There has been only one careful investigation of this subject made, and that has been by the bureau of labor, which is composed of careful and conservative investigators, who have no partisan bias. In fact, they have been making their investigations year by year ever since the bureau was created under the administration of Grover Cleveland, and their figures have been made public in the labor bulletins every year, so while they are applicable in this discussion they were in no way intended for use in a political campaign. Take the figures any way one pleases to look at them, they show the error of this assumption. Comparing the last year of 1905 with that of 1894, there was an increase of 42 per cent in the employees who had work and wages; there was an increase of 21.5 per cent in the average earnings pei* hour; there was an increase of 16.7 per cent in the average weekly earnings per employee, and there was an average increase in the weekly earnings of all employees. On the other hand, there was an increase of 12.7 per cent in the retail prices of food. All the percentages on wages are greater than the percentages of increase In the cost of food, and only the reckless assertions of pessimists stand against the careful investigation of a large number of trained experts, who have no other purpose than to carry on the work for which the bureau of labor was created. It is all very well to complain of high prices and to demand cheap food and cheap clothing. But we had one era of cheapness in this generation, and the cheapest commodity then was labor. The last Democratic administration came pretty near demonstrating that as an absolute truth. Labor was then so cheap that men could not exchahge It for enough to give them a living. It was a carnival of soup and rags. Today labor Is the dearest product in the market. It Is just as well to be sober in judgment of these things when we are going to the polls to determine the policy of the government for the next four years. Do we want cheap labor or high priced labor? That Is the question.