The opposition to a minimum wage law for women is curiously compounded of interested employers, abstract theorists and conservative and radical unionists. It presents a picture of the I.W.W., department store managers, Samuel Gompers, and a half dozen professional economists fighting side by side. The relation between republican France and autocratic Russia is a simple harmony compared this group of allies so single-minded for such various reasons. We do not pretend to have fathomed the reasons, for they range all the way from the reasons of employers who liked sweating, through those of thinkers who believe in laissez-faire, to those of labor unionists who wish to monopolize the interests of the workers. In this network of confused opposition the New York State Factory Investigation Commission is now hesitating. The Commission is to report to the Legislature in January, but its decision is now in the making, and there is danger that the strength of the opposition may balk its recommendations.
Against every form of opposition must be weighted the supreme fact that there are industries in the State which do no pay enough wages to support life. Even if the minimum wage did not have behind it a long record of fairly successful practice, any proposal to end such a condition would be an experiment which New York State could afford to try, and should. No other agency has yet been suggested which reaches the most deeply exploited groups of women workers, and none which proposes in direct and dignified fashion to place them within the state bulwarks below which American civilization shall not sink.
To those who complain that the sweated industries could not survive, the obvious and irrefutable answer is that industries which can’t support themselves are uneconomic and should not be subsidized out of the health and sanity of their employees. If any subsidy is necessary, if the real cause of bad conditions isn’t an intolerable inefficiency, then the subsidy should be public and frank. To those who fear State interference the answer is that voluntary action has failed. To those who point out that much of this sweated labor is incompetent the reply is that it must either be made competent of treated openly as a public charge. To those who realize the administrative difficulties of minimum wage legislation the reply is that wisdom and skill are made by experience.