Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/487

Rh modern large-scale industry, from 3 to 4 dollars go to general officers, from 6 to 10 dollars go to other salaried employees (including clerks), and the great bulk, from 85 to 90 dollars, is paid in the form of wages to wage-earners. This formula will not hold good for individual industries, but it does express with a considerable degree of fairness the situation now existing in organized industry. Furthermore, the fact should not be lost sight of that in more highly organized industries, that is, in the industries which have evolved to the point which virtually all industries may be expected to reach in the process of their development, at least ninety out of every hundred dollars paid for compensation goes in the form of wages.

The point regarding the distribution of compensation among salaried employees and wage-earners is not stressed. For the purpose of this study no importance attaches to the distinction between a wage and a salary, since both payments are made for "services." Nevertheless, since most of the available figures relating to service income are wage figures, the critical reader will bear in mind the fact that the necessity which forced the use of such material bears every earmark of reasonableness, since the bulk of service payments are made in the form of wages.

The data regarding the apportionment of incomes among officers of all grades are meager in the extreme. The mass of figures cited in the last section give some idea of the general relation existing between "salaries" and "wages" in bulk. They are of no value in an analysis of income apportionment among individual salary and wage-earners.

Figures showing the apportionment of income among general officers are apparently non-existent in any usable form. Even for under officials the figures are so scanty as to be worthy of only the most cursory analysis. The reason for this paucity of data is apparent. On the one hand, several of the most reliable sources (the reports of classified wages in the manufacturing industries of Massachusetts and New Jersey, for example) include "wage-earners" only in their classification. On the other hand, much of the salary information relating to under officials is, for all practical purposes, unclassified. The latest report of the California Bureau of Labor Statistics is an excellent case in point. The income classification in that report includes, in its last category, incomes of $25 per week and over ($1,300 per year). For each city and under each industry "superintendents" or "managers" are listed, but in nine tenths of the instances they fall in this last class. That they receive more than $1,300 per year goes almost without saying. Exactly how much more the report does not state. The report