Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/583

Rh and the firm pays one half. The reason for serving breakfast is to insure that the men start work in the morning on nourishing food. Baths, including soap and towel, are provided at 2 cents.

The Swiss Locomotive and Machinery Works, Winterthur, are undertaking a limited amount of welfare work. About fifty families are housed in neat dwellings owned by the company. The rent varies from $41.68 per year for three rooms to $57.90 for four rooms of medium size and $69.48 for four large rooms. Nearly all of the men residing in these houses are members of the firm's fire brigade. Baths are provided here as at Oerlikon. In general, Europe has made considerable advancement in providing houses, meals, baths, and pensions for workingmen.

Berlin workmen in machine shops obtain, as a rule, better wages than those in other parts of the empire, and the Berlin workmen are unexcelled at their respective trades. In the machine-tool plant of the Ludwig Loewe A. G. Works, at Berlin, the workmen can usually make on piece work 20.23 cents per hour. The lowest guaranteed wage is 12.614 cents per hour. Workmen can obtain houses of one room and a kitchen at an annual rental of $57.12 to $64.26 and houses of two rooms and a kitchen at $119.96 to $134.24. In the Hohenzollern A. G. Locomotive Works, Grafenberg-Düsseldorf, and the Hanover Locomotive Works, respectively, expert workmen receive, on the average, 16.6 cents per hour. The Hanover works own about 150 houses which rent at an average of $3.57 per month—a sum merely sufficient to keep them in repair. The houses contain from four to six rooms and may be occupied by one or two families. In many cases one room and a kitchen suffice, but two rooms and a kitchen are more common. The Benrather Works, at Benrath, board and lodge their unmarried workmen for 23.8 cents per day.

In the textile industries lower wages are paid than in the machine shops. Barmen is a great center for textile industries. Wages average 80 cents per day, but are increasing. Weavers on special work get as high as $1.43 a day. In the most important single cotton mill in Germany, at Augsburg, Bavaria, the picker-room hands and the carders get 50 to 70 cents a day. On two 900 self-actor mules the spinner averages about 90 cents a day, the piecer 71 cents, and each of the two creelers 35 cents. Weavers, on an average, run three looms apiece and make about 80 cents a day. The term of apprenticeship is two years, during the first six months of which 24 cents a day is usually paid. Houses of three rooms rent for $23.80 to $33.32 a year. The working day is ten hours. Wages in the mills in Saxony are distressingly low. At Plauen, Saxony, overseers receive $5.71 to $9.52 a week, rarely more. Operatives average $3.81 a week. Man, wife and several children live on this wage, although the wife is sometimes a wage earner. Eent of