At first glance the principles involved in the legislation limiting hours and those in minimum wage legislation may seem to be the same.  But an important difference soon appears.  In the former case the evil is that of a too long working period, injurious to health, and this can be reached directly and stopped by an efficiently administered law.  But in the latter case the real evil is industrial weakness and incapacity such that the workers are unable to command “a living wage” in a competitive market.  A minimum wage law, by itself, neither cures the industrial incapacity nor ensures employment to the industrially weak at any wage.  The law does not attempt to compel employers to employ at the legal minimum wage every one who wishes to work; it merely declares that the employer shall not employ any one whom, in his employ, he finds to be not worth that high a wage.

Sec. 10. #Some problems of the minimum wage#.  Unless the demand for a particular kind of service is absolutely inelastic (a rare if not impossible situation in a large market), there must be fewer jobs for the less capable workers at high than at low wages, other prices remaining the same.  Further, some of the less capable workers must be crowded out of such jobs as remain; for an artificially higher wage attracts into an occupation some from other occupations before paid more highly.  It seems to be admitted by the friends of minimum wage legislation that this result is logically to be expected and that to some degree it appears.  Of course it is never possible to tell to just what extent workers have been and are being excluded in this way from any particular establishment or occupation.  Forbidden to earn what they can, the poorer workers must become dependent on charity.  It may be said, and perhaps truly:  better this than underpaid labor destructive to the health of the workers and evil in its competitive effects upon other wage workers.

In most discussions of the wages of women there is a ready confusion of sympathetic ideals of what one would like to see with the cold facts as they are.  Women’s services (especially those of young women) have increasingly of late been coming upon the labor market in such a way as to cause abnormal congestion in a few occupations.  Employers have not caused low wages in these cases.  Partly these occupations are the clean, light, and agreeable ones, partly they have a relative social glamour, largely they can be followed for a few years near the home of the worker, nearly always they may be undertaken with brief training and little skill.  Investigation has shown that at least eighty per cent of this group of girl workers live at home.  A wage that is amply a “living wage” when used as a pro-rata contribution to an American family income is frequently insufficient for the girl living “independently.”  Such a girl is, under the conditions, unable to earn a living in her chosen occupation, and it may be better to recognize that fact and to deal with such individual cases as appear among the one fifth of all girls employed.