denunciation) in the columns of _Charities_ that a night nursery might
enable women to work at night after they have cared for their children
by day! A shameful spectacle visible every night in our cities is the
army of widowed mothers on their knees scrubbing the floors of railway
stations, stores and office buildings. This noxious task is sacred
to them because the work is so ill paid and so loathsome that men
will not do it. The opportunity to enlist in this pitiable cohort of
night toilers is commonly obtained for the widowed mothers by their
influential philanthropic friends.
And in all these cases the obvious fact is overlooked that such
charitable effort is inevitably self-defeating. Overworked mothers,
like other overworked human beings, break down and are added to that
burden of the dependent sick which society perpetually creates for
itself.
We have preferred to live in a fool’s paradise, ignoring the social
implications of our stupendous industrial development. We have,
therefore, adopted only one of all the palliatives with which other
industrial nations have been experimenting during the past sixty years.
In our textile manufacturing states the men (though a minority of
employes in the industry) have succeeded in so bringing to bear their
trade organizations and their votes as to obtain legal restrictions
upon the working hours of women in industry. For married women the
net result of this palliative measure has, however, proved largely
illusory. Every shortening of the working day tends to be followed by
speeding up of the machinery to keep the output as large as before, or
by a cut in wages due to reduced output if no change is made in the
speed. Now married women, particularly when mothers of young children,
are inevitably the least organized and self-defending part of the
adult working class. And they have, in fact, suffered both speeding up
and the worst rates of wages in their branches of industry. Thus the
numbers of married women enabled to continue in industrial employment
without breaking down have not necessarily been greatly increased by
our one attempt at legislation in behalf of their health.
Because we have never observed or recorded the facts in relation to
the industrial work of married women we have no statutory provision
for rest before and after confinement, yet many textile manufacturing
communities have their body of knowledge (common and appalling
knowledge) of children born in the mill, or of mothers returning to
looms or spinning frames when their babies are but three or four days
old.
Those industrial nations which scorn the fool’s paradise gather the
facts, face the truth, and act upon it. Thus Bavaria, which accepts
as inevitable the factory work of mothers of young children, began in
1908 to encourage employers to establish nurseries in the mills and
permit mothers to go to them at regular intervals. The government
voted 50,000 marks for payment to physicians and nurses who supervise
the nurseries. The avowed object of these institutions is to reduce
the disease which has ravaged bottle-fed babies left to the care of
neighbors and of older brothers and sisters. In Italy, also, for
several years employers have been constrained by law to give to mothers
regular intervals for nursing their babies.
Fourteen nations of Europe, and the state of Massachusetts, have
abolished night work by women in manufacture. This is obviously a boon
to working mothers.
For the protection alike of the community and the workers, England,
Germany, Austria and New York state have all been vainly striving for
twenty years to devise legislation which would minimize the evils
attending homework, yet would not abolish it. During this effort the
tenement houses licensed for homework in New York City alone have
reached the appalling number of twelve thousand.
In England a long agitation has resulted in the enactment of the
trade boards law, in force since January 1st, 1910, providing for the
creation of minimum wage boards and the establishment of minimum wage
scales. How effective this may prove time alone can tell.
Several lines of action are clearly desirable and possible:
1. There must be a body of knowledge which we do not yet possess as to
the number of married women at work and the industries which employ
them, and this must be kept up to date from year to year. Why have the
federal and state bureaus of labor statistics hitherto neglected this
inquiry?
2. Such laws as are already in force against deserting husbands and
fathers can be more rigorously enforced than is common at present, and
their scope can be widened.
3. Orphans and widowed mothers of young children can be pensioned and
removed from the labor market. This is the most useful palliative yet
attempted.
4. The lives and working careers of husbands and fathers can be
prolonged by prevention of accidents and disease. Effort in a large way
to this end is only now beginning.
5. Those legislative measures which make work more endurable for all
women (such as the obligatory provision of seats) can be promoted with
especial reference to the urgent needs of married women.
6. A campaign of education among philanthropists can be carried on to
induce them to cease from their cruelty to widows and deserted wives,
and to lead them to imagine how any one of themselves would feel if she
had to work all day in a mill or factory or laundry and then gather her
babies from the day nursery for the night.
7. Public opinion can be created in favor of a minimum wage sufficient
to enable fathers to support their families without help from
wage-earning wives.
8. Finally, effort to substitute coöperative work for competitive
work can be promoted. And herein lies the ultimate solution of the
problem of married women’s industrial employment. For it is only in
the coöperative commonwealth that they can find just and beneficent
conditions in which to carry on those industries which were theirs from
the foundation of human life.
THE ECONOMICS OF “EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK” IN THE SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK
CITY
JOHN MARTIN
Board of Education, New York City
For some time the Interborough Association of Women Teachers in
New York City has conducted a vigorous agitation under the banner
“Equal pay for equal work”. This motto has won wide acceptance. Taken
literally “Equal pay for equal work” is self-evidently just and
reasonable, and persons or governing bodies who oppose it are put on
the defensive. But in connection with the schools the phrase is not to
be taken literally.
It is a factory phrase. For manual workers equal pay for equal work is
embodied in the piece-work system, a system generally preferred when
the work is of a routine character and when the output of each worker
under exactly the same conditions can be measured with precision. A
fixed piece price is paid for spinning a yard of cotton, for cutting a
dozen coats, for rolling a ton of steel, for making a gross of paper
boxes, for stitching a score of shirtwaists. Though in fact men and
women rarely perform the same process, even when they work in the same
factory, yet the pay per unit is fixed regardless of the age, sex,
color, or competence of the worker. There is equal pay for equal work.
Superior skill means superior speed and increased output, and pay is
proportioned simply to output.
But nobody has ever found a satisfactory way to measure the output of
a teacher. In England one way has been tried. In the early seventies,
when the public schools were made in part an imperial charge, the
manufacturers, who were dominant in Parliament, were anxious lest the
imperial grants should be so awarded as to encourage laziness among
teachers. Somebody hit on the phrase, “Payment by results.” That
settled the matter. The phrase caught the fancy of men who ran woolen
mills and iron works, men who wanted some rule of thumb by which to
measure whether the nation was getting what it paid for. So every
year an imperial inspector visited the schools and put to each boy
and girl a test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and so on. The exact
number of sums worked without mistake, and of misspelt words in the
dictation exercises, the precise number of errors each youngster made
in reading--all were written down, and the money paid by the government
to help that school was proportioned to those returns.
Sometimes a teacher’s salary consisted of the grants so obtained;
always the teacher’s professional standing and promotion were
determined by these miscalled “results.” In consequence the teacher
who was most cruel, who kept children late in school, who sacrificed
most relentlessly the finer parts of education, who drove the helpless
youngsters at the bayonet’s point, as it were, who wasted no precious
moments in merely training the faculties--that teacher got the most
money and the most rapid advancement. To their honor be it said that
the teachers of England for decades combated the hideous system. At
last they convinced legislators that the growth of a child’s mind, the
emanations of a teacher’s spirit, cannot be measured by yard stick or
quart pot, and the system of “payment by results” was relegated to
museums of instruments of torture.
America has been free from any factory method of attempting to gauge
the teacher’s work. Nobody has ever seriously proposed to establish
piecework in schools and so give equal pay for equal work. The battle
cry, like most political catch-words, is inexact and misleading. The
Interborough Association means by the “equal pay” principle the merging
of the salary schedules where the schedules now distinguish between men
and women, so that, whatever other differences of qualification the
schedules take into account, they shall ignore differences of sex in
the teachers.
To determine the economic and pedagogical results which would flow
from the adoption of this principle it is necessary to examine first
the system upon which the existing schedules are constructed. Why are
thirty-one complicated schedules, which group teachers by a variety of
standards, adopted at all? Why is not each teacher judged individually?
Because, in New York, where the army of teachers, instructors,
directors, principals and superintendents numbers 17,073, individual
treatment is physically impossible, and, if it were tried, the schools
would be permeated with politics. Perforce the army is divided into a
few groups and the members of the same group are paid upon principles
which ignore their individual differences of quality.
In constructing salary schedules what elements are taken into account?
A number can be detected, of which the chief are: 1. A living wage. 2.
Years of experience or age. 3. Length and quality of preparation for
the work. 4. Responsibility of the duty performed. 5. Total demand upon
the taxpayer which the schedules entail and willingness of the taxpayer
to meet the demand. 6. Adjustment over a long period of the supply of
teachers to the demand.
Consider these elements separately.
1. A teacher is expected from the first month of work to be
self-supporting and to live in a manner befitting the dignity of the
profession. Not simply a bare subsistence, but refined recreation and
continued culture as well as freedom from economic anxiety about the
future are essential to the discharge of the teacher’s high duties.
On what sum can a young person in New York secure these advantages?
That sum must fix the minimum paid even though stark necessity would
force sufficient unfortunates to accept less, temporarily, if less were
offered. For some years the New York minimum has been $600 for the
first year, an amount, as I shall show later, admitted to be inadequate
at present.
2. Normally, by added experience, a teacher for several years becomes
more valuable year by year. Therefore an annual increase of salary is
granted automatically, falling like the rain upon the just and the
unjust, except that the eighth and thirteenth increments are given
only upon satisfactory reports of the teacher’s work. In practice the
increment is hardly ever withheld. But no attempt is made to determine
at what age a teacher reaches maximum efficiency. Maximum salary
for grade work in the elementary schools is reached by women in 16
years and by men in 12 years, not because the men reach their maximum
efficiency more rapidly than women, but because a more rapid advance
to their highest salary has been judged necessary to hold them in the
profession. Probably most men and women are as efficient after five or
six years’ service as they ever become for grade work.
3. A minimum qualification of scholarship, character and experience is
set for all teachers, but the minimum for a teacher of the graduating
class in the elementary schools is higher than for the lower grades and
for the high schools higher than for the graduating class. Therefore
the salaries for these upper positions are also higher.
Even if additional academic preparation be not requisite for teaching
higher grades, it is desirable to have some “plums” in the schools,
that can be given to the pick of the staff for encouragement. Some
breaks in the monotony of equal pay for equal age stimulate a body of
workers to do their best in competition for the “plums.” Therefore
extra emoluments have been given to teachers of the seventh and eight
years.
4. Further, the greater the responsibility the higher the pay.
Principals are paid more than class teachers, superintendents more than
principals.
5. Schedules must be so adjusted as not to make upon the taxpayer a
larger gross demand than he will honor. Quite properly the cost of
education mounts ever higher; but, in any year, there is a maximum
which the taxpayer will allow without rebellion, a highest measure
compounded of his ability to pay, the value he sets upon education and
the influence of the most enlightened citizens upon him. Presumably if
teachers were paid the salaries of ambassadors the highest talent in
the country would be attracted to the profession. But ambassadorial
emoluments, however desirable they might be both for the nation and for
the teachers, are practically unattainable. Taxpayers will not adopt,
thus far, Froebel’s injunction: “Let us live for our children.”
6. Over a long period the supply of teachers of requisite quality
should equal the demand, and salaries that will attract the supply must
be paid. What is the requisite quality? There’s the rub. Examinations
tell only part of the truth; college training cannot make “silk purses
out of sows’ ears.” Only roughly can the expert superintendent tell
whether the quality among ten thousand teachers is as good today
as it was ten years ago. Teaching is an art for which the elusive
quality of personality--the product of heredity, early surroundings,
home influences, native gifts--is as essential as for painting. Of
two painters who have had precisely the same masters and the same
experience, one may produce masterpieces fit for an imperial gallery
and the other daubs fit for a saloon; just so of two teachers of equal
academic training, one may radiate noble, the other ignoble influences.
Who shall measure the personality of the teacher or compass the growth
of the pupil’s intelligence? No radiometer can register the emanations
of a teacher’s spirit, no X-rays expose the buddings of a child’s mind.
When the refined daughters of Massachusetts left the cotton mills of
Lowell and their places were supplied by peasant immigrants who could
not read the “Lowell Offering” which their predecessors published,
the quality of the cotton sheeting did not deteriorate, because the
character of the operator is not embodied in cotton goods. But, should
the same change occur among teachers, the quality of the children at
graduation would inevitably run down; for the teacher’s spirit, partly
reproduced in the children, is the most precious element of their
education. Therefore, no requirement for the schools is more sternly
peremptory than that salaries for teachers shall be sufficient to
attract a high quality of persons.
At this point we encounter the central claim of the Interborough
Association of Women Teachers. For reasons over which the educational
authorities have no control men teachers of as high a personal quality
as women teachers cannot, over a long period, be secured and held for
the same pay. That fact is demonstrated by the present experience of
the high schools.
After extended investigation Mr. Frederick H. Paine says:
The board of education appointed during the period September 1909 to
February 1910, 100 men, of whom 22 refused appointment, leaving a
total of 78 places filled, while 116 vacancies still exist.
The eligible list now contains 61 names, of all classes, who will
accept appointment, but, as experience shows, a large proportion
will not be available by the time appointment here is offered
them. Examinations for license have been held frequently. The last
examination, held in November, 1909, added but sixty-four men to the
lists, a totally insufficient supply.
Substitutes, an inexperienced teaching force, must be used in boys’
schools, and only women can be appointed to mixed high schools.
An inquiry of the deans of various New England and New York colleges
shows that the number of graduates of those institutions who enter the
teaching profession has greatly diminished within ten years. At Yale
University the decrease is from 12 per cent to less than 2 per cent.
On the average, private schools pay higher salaries to men than the
public high schools, although paying lower salaries than do the public
high schools to women, and, accordingly, women are more attracted to
the public high schools.
It is plain, therefore, that more is involved in the request of the
Interborough Association than the removal of artificial, irritating
distinctions. The recognition of the element of supply and demand
involves the recognition of sex among teachers.
Before examining the effects, economic and pedagogic, which would
follow upon the adoption of the suggestions of the organized women
teachers it must be reiterated that salary schedules, in point of
fact, are not and cannot be constructed in conformity to any abstract
principle. They are necessarily a resultant of many forces, the
best solution of a vexing problem by the authorities, after due
consideration of all the factors. Salaries are settled by the pragmatic
method. Whatever schedules work out best in practice, not so much for
the teachers as for the children, those schedules are most “just,” most
“moral,” most in harmony with the will of the universe.
That the Interborough Association found the problem insoluble upon
ideal principles is shown by the latest schedules which they themselves
have presented for adoption. These schedules maintain all but one of
the elements which appear in the existing schedules; and, even that
one, sex, is acknowledged by the provision that teachers of boys’
classes shall receive $180 a year more than teachers of girls’ classes.
This acknowledgment strips their contention of that moral quality
with which some have endowed it. “A new commandment I give unto you,
that you pay men and women of the same age the same salary” has been
presented as the twentieth century addition to the decalogue. But if
the priestesses who announce this amendment to the moral law themselves
assert that it is harder to teach boys than girls, perhaps educational
authorities are not altogether wicked when they acknowledge that it is
harder to secure boys than girls as teachers, when they grow up.
Neither do the schedules proposed by the Interborough Association, any
more than the official schedules, “provide but one salary for one and
the same position.” On the contrary, under them any position between
the kindergarten and the seventh grade may be filled by teachers with
salaries varying from $720 to $1,515. One teacher of the graduating
class may receive less than a thousand dollars (the scales are not
definite enough to show the exact minimum), another $2,400. Positions
in high schools of exactly the same character and difficulty may
be filled by assistant teachers at salaries varying from $1,300 to
$2,400. The only positions for which the schedules of the Interborough
Association “provide but one salary for one and the same position” are
the city superintendent of schools, the associate city superintendents,
the members of the board of examiners and some directors of special
branches.
If the principle of the same salary schedules for men and for
women were mandatory, either the women’s salaries might be raised
or the men’s salaries reduced. Either process would have palpable
consequences, economic and pedagogic. Consider the results of each
method separately.
1. To equalize the salaries of all women who were teaching in the same
grades as men, with those of the men employed in such grades, in May
1909, would have entailed a cost that year of $7,837,662. But since
that date men who were teaching in grades below the sixth have been
transferred, so that today, it is estimated, the cost would be below
seven million dollars per annum. A large part of that increase would be
of the nature of a “bonus” to the women, a bonus, say some legislators,
no more justifiable than would be an extra price paid for goods by city
officers to women because they were charming.
If the board of education, when appointing new teachers, would save
no money by appointing women in preference to men, it is certain that
the proportion of men appointed, supposing the rates of pay were high
enough to attract men at all, would be much increased. Men would drive
out women just as women when they were cheaper have driven out men.
Most authorities would agree that such a result would be beneficial
to the schools, which sadly need more men; and some approve the dogma
of “equal pay” because they desire such a result. The same result
could be won at much less cost if the board of education determined to
ignore the savings to be made by appointing women and, for the sake of
keeping the virile elements in the school, should appoint under its own
schedules the dearer men.
2. If the salaries of men were reduced so as to conform to the salaries
of women the effects would be considerable.
The cost for teachers would decrease by an amount which nobody has
cared to waste labor in estimating, because nobody imagines that either
the authorities or the men teachers would permit that experiment and
the women teachers would be no more content than anybody else to see
it tried. Naturally they do not wish the “equal pay” principle to be
applied in a way to put no more money into their pockets. Primarily and
properly they seek higher salaries; they would burn no incense to a
dogma which promised them no increase.
The pedagogical results of lowering the schedules for men would be
disastrous, for, unless the standard of quality in candidates were
shamefully lowered, new men would not enter the system and the little
band of 2,099 men teachers who now add the male influence to the female
influence of their 14,974 women colleagues would fast diminish and soon
approach extinction. Then the schools would be entirely feminized, an
outcome so bad that even enthusiasts for economy hardly dare openly
advocate reducing the men’s pay.
Is the agitation of the women teachers, then, altogether unjustifiable
and doomed to be fruitless? Not at all. Already it has had two good
effects.