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The Structure of Wages in the American Iron and Steel Industry, 1860–1890*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

David E. Novack  and
Richard Perlman
David E. Novack
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Richard Perlman
Affiliation:
Adelphi College
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Extract

The literature of American economic history is replete with discussions of the crucial role of the ferrous industries in nineteenth-century economic development. Analysis of the internal wage structure in the industry, however, has been somewhat neglected in the historical treatment.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 1962 , pp. 334 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1962

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References

1 Clark, Victor S., History of Manufacturers in the United States (New York: Peter Smith, 1929), II, ch. III.Google Scholar

2 The effect of the tariff on production, prices, exports, and imports is considered in detail in Berglund, Abraham and Wright, Philip G., The Tariff on Iron and Steel (Washington, D. C: The Brookjngs Institution, 1929), ch. V.Google Scholar

3 For example, the Annual Report of the Secretary of the American Iron and Steel Association (James M. Swank) for 1876, pp. 59–114.

4 Although the American Immigrant Company, which attempted to induce immigration of skilled contract labor, claimed the importation of “thousands” of skilled operators during the period 1864 to 1866, the number of contracts actually registered with Federal authorities was only in the hundreds for all industries combined. Erickson, Charlotte, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The widening tendency of the differential during the Civil War period differed from the usual pattern of narrowing trends that accompanied later wars. The theoretical argument advanced for explanation of this later narrowing, that the supply of the unskilled reached its limit, while upgrading of the unskilled and semiskilled allowed expansion of the skilled workers (see Reder, Melvin W., “The Theory of Occupational Wage Differentials,” American Economic Review, XLV, No. 5 [Dec. 1955], 836–52Google Scholar) does not apply for the iron and steel industry.

A greater supply of agricultural labor was available for unskilled industrial jobs in the Civil War period than during later wars. In the steel industry itself, the possibility of upgrading the unskilled into skilled workers faced more severe barriers than in later war periods. In the first place, rungs in the industrial ladder were missing; the absence of semiskilled prevented the gentle movement of step-by-step upgrading that would take place in later periods. Second, differences in skill in the industry that represented differences not only in technical superiority but in social and national background made the concept of on-the-job training anachronistic.

Further, wage structures in twentieth-century war periods were subject to the narrowing influences of union demands for equal across-the-board increases and governmental wageequalizing policies, practices that were unheard of during the Civil War era.

6 Berglund and Wright, The Tariff on Iron and Steel, p. 112.

7 Goldstein, Harold, “The Changing Occupational Structure,” Monthly Labor Review, 70, No. 12 (Dec. 1947), 657.Google Scholar

8 This argument has been advanced elsewhere. See Perlman, Richard, “Forces Widening Occupational Wage Differentials,” Review of Economics and Statistics, XL, No. 2 (May 1958), 112–13.Google Scholar

9 Clark, History of Manufactures, II, 72.

10 Fitch, John A., The Steel Workers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), p. 33.Google Scholar

11 For a more extensive discussion of the effects of technological change upon the occupational wage structure, see Brody, David, Steelworkers in America, the Nonunion Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 1–49.Google Scholar

12 A detailed statistical analysis of the changes in the character of output in the ferrous industry for these years is found in U.S. Congress, Senate, Report on Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, Senate Doc. No. 110, 62nd Cong., 1st Sess., Ill, 33–38.

13 Pennsylvania's share of the total output of iron and steel during this period ranged from 40 to 60 per cent of the total.

14 Clark, History of Manufactures, II, 260, and U. S. Congress, Senate, Report on Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, p. 37.

15 U. S. Labor Statistics Bureau, History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928, Bulletin No. 604 (Washington, D. C: Govt. Printing Office, 1934), pp. 241–50.Google Scholar