Another fact to which attention should be called is the adjustment in
family life required by contact with the modern industrial system.
Some of the immigrant groups come from countries more developed in an
industrial way than others, but none of the newer groups come from any
country in which the factory system has become so prevalent as in the
United States. In the old country the family still exercised
productive functions as a unit. It had access to tillable land, and
was an essential part of an industrial system that is still
organically related to the stage of development of the country. It
had, therefore, within itself, the sources of self-support and
self-determination. The civilization of which it was a part may be a
declining civilization; but the conditions of life were those to which
the wife and mother were accustomed. She took them for granted, felt
at home among them, and was not conscious of being overwhelmed by
them.
In the modern American industrial community, however, the family as a
whole is generally divorced from land. It is not a unit in relation to
the industrial organization, but in its productive function is usually
broken up by it. For the family must live, and yet its income is
dependent, not upon its size nor the volume of its needs, but upon the
wage-earning capacity of the man under the prevailing system of
bargaining. That the resulting income has often been wholly
inadequate, even according to the modest standards set by dietetic
experts and by social investigators, is testified to by an enormous
body of data gathered during the decade preceding the Great War.[7]
It is unnecessary to review these studies in detail, but attention may
be called to the findings of the Immigration Commission. Of the
foreign-born male heads of households studied, 4,506, or 34.1 per
cent, earned less than four hundred dollars a year at a time when
dietetic experts agreed that five hundred dollars was a minimum below
which it was dangerous for families to fall. Seventy per cent earned
less than six hundred dollars.
These figures may be said to come from "far away and long ago," but
while there has not been time for widespread inquiry, there is a
considerable body of evidence indicating that the same condition
prevails to-day. Wages have increased greatly during the war, but with
the increase in prices there is doubt as to whether real wages have
increased or decreased. Certainly the increase has been irregular and
uneven, affecting the workers in some industries much more than in
others.
The New York State Industrial Commission made a study of the average
weekly earnings of labor in the factories of the state. They found
that between June, 1914, and June, 1918, wages had increased 64 per
cent.[8] The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics made a study of
food. Taking the year 1913 as the base, or 100, wages in 1907 were 92
and the retail prices of food, 82, and in 1918 wages were 130 and food
168. That is, the price of food increased much more rapidly than the
average union wage scale between 1907 and 1918.[9]
As a result of these low earnings, the wife and children in many
immigrant families have been forced into the industrial field and even
then the resulting incomes have often been inadequate. The Immigration
Commission found that almost one third of the foreign-born families
studied had a total family income of under five hundred dollars, and
almost two thirds had incomes less than seven hundred and fifty
dollars.
Not only is the family income often inadequate and composite, but
precarious and uncertain. The need for food is a regularly recurring
need; the demand for labor may be seasonal, periodically interrupted,
and in time of crisis wholly uncertain.
Although child labor laws have been enacted in many states and by the
United States Congress, they are comparatively recent. Their absence
in earlier years has had its inevitable effect on many foreign born.
Many of the leaders in the immigrant groups who came here when they
were still children, tell of stopping school and going to work. One
Lithuanian woman, who is among the more prosperous of the group in
Chicago, said that she stopped school when she was twelve, and went to
work in a fruit-packing concern, working ten hours a day and earning
five dollars a week, which she gave to her father. Another worked as a
cash girl in a downtown store at the age of thirteen. Similarly, in
one of the Russian families now living in Chicago, the girls were
fourteen and nine when they came to this country and settled in a New
Jersey town. The older was sent to work at once, and the younger a
year later. Now, after nine years in this country, neither girl can
speak English.
The present laws are not always efficiently enforced, and the child of
the foreign born suffers especially from such failure to enforce the
law. In one of the mining communities of Illinois, visited in the
spring of 1919, Italian boys as young as twelve were found working in
the mines. In New Mexico, children of twelve and ten, and even
younger, were taken out of school each year in the spring to go with
their fathers to work on other men's farms or to herd sheep. Our
investigator was impressed, in Rolling Prairie, with the need of
including agriculture among the occupations from which young children
are prohibited as wage earners.