A higher proportion of hand compositors are paid the basic scale than any craft except mailers and cylinder feeders.

The apprenticeship training of hand compositors is well organized and is operating with success. Opportunities for training machine compositors are very limited.

Cylinder pressmen requiring primary skill have the same percentage of premium men as paper handlers, who are little more than porters.

Cylinder feeders with 77.4 per cent and mailers with 97.4 per cent working at the basic scale are least benefited by premium wages.

Thirty-four per cent of all workers receive premiums of from $1 to $5 above the basic scales, and 56 per cent work at the basic scales. There is no organized procedure for training pressroom workers as in the case of the composing room.

Of the employers reporting, 75 to 80 per cent believe that premium wages are desirable for the industry.

Practically all agree that the development of accurate measures for determining premium wages are desirable. However, a few think that a satisfactory measure of production can not be developed in the printing industry. At present the bargaining ability of the individual workman, or of the employer considering also the supply of workmen, governs the amount of premium wages paid in all departments of the industry. In only a few plants is an accurate record kept upon which the man's premium scale can be based. There are a few large plants in this industry outside of New York which have found workable units of measure for practically all classes of printing work. There are so many difficulties, however, in the average printing plant and particularly in small printing plants, which make it practically impossible to measure production so that premium wages can be based upon the output of the workman. The judgment of the employer and the bargaining ability of the workman must in these cases continue to be the guide in determining premium wages.

TH

Wage Changes in Various Countries, 1914 to 1921.

1

HE International Labor Office has recently issued a report 1 showing changes in actual wages and in "real" wages since 1914. In the preparation of the report all the available statistics relating to wages, earnings, and cost of living were examined, but the lack of uniform statistical material limited the scope of the report.

The wage data were collected, as far as possible, from official sources, and for each wage series index numbers were calculated, taking the pre-war figure as the base, or 100. The index numbers of the "real" wages (i. e., the purchasing power of the "nominal” wages just mentioned) were then obtained by dividing the index numbers of the nominal (or money) wages by those of the cost of

1 International Labor Office. Studies and reports, wages and hours series No. 2: Wage changes in various countries. Geneva, July, 1922. 76 pp.

living and multiplying the result by 100. The cost-of-living figures used were in most instances taken from official sources.

In the report no account has been taken of "differences in the relative efficiency of workers in different countries, of changes in their efficiency as between pre-war and post-war years, or of changes in the productive efficiency of industrial organization, in the results of which the workers may claim to share." Neither has account been taken of the need for a higher standard for many groups of workers who were seriously underpaid before the war nor of increased expenditure necessary to maintain the pre-war standard of living.

The following table, compiled from the report, shows, for each of 12 countries, the actual nominal (or money) wages, index numbers of nominal wages, and index numbers of "real" wages in certain occupations before the war and in the years 1919, 1920, and 1921:

Coal mining: