Valdez daily prospector., 1913-04-30
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 1913.
MINIMUM WAGE-AND AFTER


 effects that will follow a mini- mum wage which are not gener- ally recognized by the advocates of that humanely intended meas ure. and which deserve careful at tention.
 For one thing, a law forbidding the payment of wage below a fixed amount is necessarily law forbidding any one to work for such lower/wage. If it be made illegal to give less than $8 week, then it must equally be illegal to take less than $8 week. The obvious mode of evading the law by increasing the hours of work will, of course, be included in the law. The theory of the support CTS of the measure is that a cer- tain sum is needed to meet decent living expenses; that this should be paid for kind and amount of work which can be performed without injury to the worker, and that the law, on careful inquiry into the facts, should regulate both work and pay. No'employer is to be allowed to give less pay or exact more labor than the law sanctions; no worker is to be all lowed to take less pay or to give more work. This leaves and must leave a certain number of work CTS, now employed, without en- ployment; a certain number who now receive an inadequate wage and with it secure an inadequate subsistence without any income and without any subsistence whatever. This number, more over, embraces, roughly, two classes, those who cannot earn the minimum wage and those who will not. one class includes the incompptent--usi that word not necessarily in any harsh scnse-- and the other the Shiftless. tn" lazy, the shirkS.
 It is plain that if the state in- tervencs tu forbid these classes to work for a wage lower than the proposed minimum, the state must care for them in some way. They cannot be left [" StarNc. If their case is bad now, when they do not get enough for a decent living, il would clearly be worse if they wcre prevented by law from getting anything whatever. It would not be safe to assume that all who now get less than the proposed minimum could not earn. or could not get, more. A good many employers would doubtless pay more, with the con- viction that they would get more value in better work. But there would still remain a large body of workers without the strength, the skill, or, perhaps, the will to ren- der service worth to their em- ployers the proposed wage. As we have said, they would have to be cared for, and any law which forbade them to work for the wage their work is really worth would be a cruel measure unless provision were in some way made for them. Not only is the stub born material aspect of the ques- tiOn to be considered. There is a moral aspect of the deepest im- portance. Provision for workers who can not, OF will not, earn a fixed wage would be terrible temptation to shirk. If any con- siderable number of men are to be relieved of the spur of stern need which urges them to provide for themselves and for their fam lilies, that number will tend to in crease. not merely at a growing cost to society, but to it's serious and increasing injury.
 On the other hand, if the stale is to forbid it's citizens to work for less than a fixed wage 1t is plainly the duty of the. state to do all it can to train the children of it's citizens for work that will be worth at least that wage. And this must ;be done not jn the loose, haphazard, intellectual way in which what is now called cdu- cation is given, but in careful, nractical comnrehenSiYe and eff