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Wage Rates on the Erie Canal, 1828–1881*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Walter B. Smith
Walter B. Smith
Affiliation:
Claremont Men's College
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Extract

Wage rate statistics are available for common labor, carpenters, masons, and “teamworkers” for a span of sixty years or more in the nineteenth century in the Erie Canal Papers now on deposit in the New York State Library in Albany. The data are abundant, the documents in which wage reports were made are well preserved, the wage record is for a well defined area and by 1828 the data are un ambiguous.Within three years of the completion of the canal theforeman of repairs had learned to write reports specifying clearly the kind of work each man in his gang performed, to distinguish between wage payments and wage rates, and to record the dates and continuity of employment. Over the fifty-four years covered by our series the operation of the canal did not greatly change, the kinds of work done were not altered from year to year, and this conservatism of the management of the canal had at least one merit from our point of view, it rendered our series homogeneous. Nor did the social environmentin which the wage bargains were determined show much modification; the nascent trade union movement was without perceptible influenceon wages on the canal and, though employment on the canal was a matter of interest to legislators in Albany, public regulation did little to influence the wage determination process.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1963 , pp. 298 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1963

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References

1 The difference between the mode and the arithmetic mean was not great. The average deviation of the means from the corresponding modes for common labor in the eastern division for the month of June (1828–81) was eight tenths of a cent. In thirty-one out of forty-eight years for which data existed, the means and the modes were identical. The recordfor 1857, a good year for testing the differences between the mean and the mode, disclosedthat out of 778 cases of wage rates for common labor in the eastern division, 759 men receivedone dollar a day and only 19 a dollar twelve and a half cents. The mean exceeded themode by three tenths of a cent.

2 At a later date I expect to publish monthly wage data not only for the Erie Canal but also for semiskilled labor in an east coast market.

3 Abbott, Edith, “The Wages of Unskilled Labor in the United States, 1850–1900,” The Journal of Political Economy, XIII (June 1905), 321–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Layer, Robert, Earnings of Cotton Mill Operatives, 1825–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 18–20Google Scholar.

5 Adams, T. M., Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers, for Goods and Services, and Received by Them for Farm Products, 1790–1940: Wages of Vermont Farm Labor, 1780–1940 (Burlington-Vermont Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 507, 1944), pp. 88–89Google Scholar.

6 Occasionally, men were paid one or two shillings more than the standard rate for working at night or in the water. In the earlier years the reports of the Superintendents of Repairs recorded the purchase of whiskey, accompanied by an explanatory comment that whiskey was for men working in water. In later years no mention was made of this fringe benefit.

7 Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Index of Estimated Cost of Living in the United States. (Mimeographed material.)

8 Ethel D. Hoover, exhibit: Table 2, Consumer Price Index, 1800–1958. U. S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Hearings, Part 2, “Historical and Comparative Rates of Production, Productivity, and Prices,” 86th Congress, 1st Session, 1959. (April 9, p. 397.)

9 The growth rates for the years 1828 to 1881 computed from statistics in the well-knownstudy by Professor Alvin Hansen are about the same as our growth rates for skilled workers in line 3 of Table 2. See Alvin H. Hansen, “Factors Affecting the Trend of Real Wages,” American Economic Review, XV (March 1925), 32. Annual growth in real wage rates calculated by using the index number of prices paid for commodities by Vermont farmers was higher than the two above calculations.

10 Various computations indicate that carpenters' wages were about 51 per cent in excess of common labor rates in 1828, about 63 per cent above in the middle of the period, and approximately 76 per cent above in 1881.

11 Niles' National Register, LXIX (Sept. 1845), 7.

12 Myron Holley, Albany, N. Y., to his father, April 3, 1817. Manuscript collection, New York State Library, Albany, N. Y.