CURRENT CLASSIFIED WEEKLY WAGES FOR MALES AND FEMALES, AND NUMBER OF HOURS EMPLOYED PER DAY, BY ESTABLISHMENTS. There are but two methods of presenting statistics of wages; first, by averages, and, second, by a classification of rates and the presentation of the actual number of persons to whom each rate is paid. The second method accurately gives the standard wage prevailing in the establishment or industry under consideration, while the first, although very generally used, seldom produces even a reasonable approximation to it. The expression, average rate of wages, is used everywhere in economic discussion notwithstanding that owing to the minute subdivisions of employment, the classes of operatives employed in the same industry are so different with respect to skill, the number of males and females, children and adults, that no single average can be found from such a wide range of dissimilar units which will truthfully represent the wage-rate of any of them. There is certainly a limited number of occupations for which a fairly truthful average may be found; those who work with machinery that is necessarily similar for all, and where the difference in favor of one operative over another is entirely a matter of steady application to work, the degree of skill required being necessarily very similar, there can be no very great variation in wages; such an occupation as weavers, for instance, on any of the textile fabrics, or where no machinery at all is used, as in the case of bricklayers or glassblowers, the units here being alike in all essential respects, an average rate of wages may be regarded as truthful. The machinist trade is one in which the degree of skill required, and consequently the wages paid, varies very widely; take for illustration, and similar cases are very common in manufacturing estab lishments where a small force of machinists are employed to keep machinery in order for the main business of the establishment, one man is paid $30 per week and two are paid $10 each. The average wages of machinists in such a case would be $16.66 per week, which is so much above the lowest and below the highest that it conveys no correct notion of either. The occupation of bookkeeping is another in which the range of ability and compensation is very wide, including as it does persons who occupy positions of great responsibility and trust and receive salaries that run into the thousands per year, and others, through all the gradations of ability and wages down to or below $5 per week. Manifestly there can be here no average rate of wages that will convey any idea of the wage standard of such an occupation. In fact, owing, as before stated, to the minute subdivisions of industry and wide dissimilarity in the degree of skill required in the various lines of activity running through our industrial life, the truth regarding wages cannot be presented in any such concrete form. In these tables are presented the actual wages paid to the specified number of employes engaged in the same establishment, classified according to the different rates, and also, so far as that information could be obtained, according to the subdivisions of employment. The number of establishments represented is 163, and the classified wages quoted stand for upward of 14,000 persons; these, taken with the classified wages which are presented with the statistics of manufactures in Part I., give a total of 665 establishments, employing nearly 75,000 persons, from which the wage statistics presented in this report have been obtained. This classification, including as it does all the principal industries carried on in the State, affords a very reliable view of the range of wages paid in each; it will also be useful as a basis of comparison with similar data in the future for the purpose of determining whether wages are tending upward or downward in each industry. The range of variation in the number of hours worked per day, from 6 to 12, is very interesting, showing as it does the presence of some influence peculiar to certain industries, which is operating in favor of a reduction of the hours of labor independent of any organized movement to that end, and also that it is being done without a reduction of wages; indeed, the reverse in that respect is generally the |