It is all very well to say of a woman that "she is working for her living," but suppose she is working and not making her living. What are you to say then? You can remark that you are indeed very sorry, and leave the matter there. Or you can say with more piety than wisdom that wages are determined by natural laws which man must let alone. Or you can insist that she is being sweated; that a business which does not pay a living wage is not paying its labor costs; that such businesses are guilty of as bad business practice and far worse moral practice than aif they were paying dividends out of assets.
Everyone knows what to think of a get-rich-quick concern which asks people to subscribe to its capital stock, and then uses the money invested to pay profits. We call it fraud. When a railroad goes on paying dividends without charging up deterioration, people speak of it not as a fraud but as bad business.
But when a mercantile establishment pays its labor less than labor can live on, it is combining the evils of the mismanaged railroad and the get-rich-quick concern. It is showing a profit it has not honorably earned, it is paying a dividend out of its vital assets, that is, out of the lives, the health, and the happiness of its employees. A business that exists on labor paid less than a living wage is not a business at all, for it is not paying its fixed charges. They are being paid either by the family o[f] the woman worker, or by her friends, or by private charities, or by the girl herself in slow starvation.
It would be absurd to assume the minimum-wage legislation is a kind of omnibus for paradise. To fix a "living standard" would be a great advance over what we have, but by every civilized criterion it is a grudging and miserable thing. In those moments of lucidity when we forget our hesitancy befor brute obstruction, it seems like a kind of madness that we should have to argue and scrape in order that we may secure to millions of women enough income to "live." If we had not witnessed whole nations glowering at each other all winter from holes in the mud, it would be hard to believe that America with all its riches could still be primitive enough to grunt and protest at a living wage—a living wage, mind you; not a wage so its women can live well, not enough to make life a rich and welcome experience, but just enough to secure existence and drudgery in grey boardinghouses and cheap restaurants.
We may fail to secure that. So far as the press is concerned, the issue hardly exists. It lies at the moment stifled in platitudes and half truths about "not hurting business." From the little comment there is, we might think that a business was sound if it rested on the degredation of its labor; might think that businessmen were a lot of jumping neurotics ready to shrivel up and burst into tears at a proposal to increase their wages bill a penny or two on the dollar; might think, from the exclamations of Mr. Brown and his friend John Smith, that a campaign against sweating would do no less than ruin the country.
But you cannot ruin a country by conserving its life. You can ruin a country only by stupidity, waste and greed.
New Republic, March 27, 1915 was my source's source. My source was Leon Stein, editor, Out of the Sweatshop: the struggle for industrial democracy (New York: Quadrangle/the New York Times Book Co., Inc., 1977). I borrowed it from the Boston Public Library.