Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/22

12 —Concurrently with, the general increase in recent years in the amount and purchasing power of moneywages throughout the civilized world, the hours of labor have been also generally reduced. In the case of Great Britain, Mr. Giffen is of the opinion that the reduction during the last fifty years in the textile, house-building, and engineering trades has been at least 20 per cent, and that the British workman now gets from 50 to 100 per cent more money for 20 per cent less work.

In the United States, the data afforded by the census returns of 1880 indicate that in 1830, 81·1 per cent of the recipients of regular wages worked in excess of ten hours per day; but for 1880, the number so working was about 26·5 per cent. In 1830, 13·5 per cent worked in excess of thirteen hours; but in 1880 this ratio had been reduced to 2.5. For the entire country the most common number of hours constituting a day's labor in 1880 was ten.

That the conclusions of Mr. Giffen respecting the general effect in Great Britain of the increase in wages and reduction in the hours of labor, as above stated, find a correspondence in the United States, might, if space permitted, be shown by a great amount and variety of testimony. A single example—drawn from the experience of the lowest class of labor—is, however, especially worthy of record. In 1860, before the war, the average amount of work expected of spade-laborers on the western divisions of the Erie Canal, in the State of New York, was five cubic yards of earth excavation for each man per day; and for this work the average wages were seventy-five cents per day. At the present time the average daily excavation of each man employed on precisely the same kind of work, and on the same canal, is