Wages 100 Years Ago

[Subdeacon Joe]

#934 - Handbook of labor statistics / U.S. Department ... 1936. - Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library https://search.app/nniQYnT7i9RvdofS7

 

[Warden Callaway]

Dad talked about hoeing corn for a nickel a day. 

[Alpo]

Mama was born in '28. She said that during the depression her daddy owned a trucking company. Paid the best wages in town. Dollar a day.

 

Even if you work 6 days a week, that's only $25 a month.

[Injun Ryder, SASS #36201L]

I started working in 1965 for $5 a week! During the summer, I figured I was making about $0.10 an hour!

 

(I was thirteen and working in my father's and uncle's garage / service station / trucking business.)

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

I remember my dad telling me what he earned his first year as a school teacher.  I don't remember how much it was but he said if they had offered him $300.00 a month he would have signed a lifetime contract.  MY first year teaching I was paid $330.10 a month..... and we got by.

 

At the end of the year we moved to Pekin, IL and I went to work for Caterpillar for $780.00 an month and It went to $815.00 five weeks later when I finished my training.

 

When I sold my share of a four partner business and retired I was averaging a whole lot more.

[Alpo]

When Daddy got out of the Navy, in '61, he went to college on the GI Bill. And he worked part-time at the hospital. Got a dollar an hour. Mama was a registered nurse. She was making $2 an hour.

 

When he graduated - it was a junior college so it was just an AA - he told his boss that he was now a college graduate and needed more money. They bumped him to a buck and a quarter, but told him not to tell anybody, because everybody else working in the office still only made a dollar.

[Anvil Al #59168]

I remember making $1.00 am hour when I first started working. 

Was pretty excited when I got the bump to $1.25 an hour.  

[irish ike, SASS #43615]

1914 Ford offered $5/day for workers. That was unheard of. They brought out the local Guard/Army to help control the crowds wanting to work.

1968 I went to work at a gas station while still in HS Senior year. $1.5/hr min. wage. Within a few weeks he hands me the keys and says your now night manager. Shift was 4 to 10pm.  I got bumped to $1.65/hr.  Sure helped buying parts for my 55 Chevy .

[Blackwater 53393]

I was lucky!  I started mowing lawns in 1965 for $5.00 a lawn with a push mower. None of them were less than an acre and I had six that I cut once a week.

 

I was off from November to the first of March.

 

In ‘67, I went to work in evenings and on the weekends for a big camping and travel trailer outfit.  My job was assembling truck caps. I screwed and stapled the frames together, stretched the aluminum skins and fastened them down, and put the drip rails on ‘em. I wasn’t allowed to use the saws or routers for the first six months and I didn’t do the wiring.  I made $5.00 an hour. 
 

After that first six months, I was taught to use the table saw and the routers and I started installing the interior paneling and windows.

 

By summer of ‘69, I was sent to Airstream repair school and I was making $5.75 and working all day until school started in the fall.

 

I worked there until I graduated high school and went to work for Opryland in the summer of 1971.

[watab kid]

if my dad was still alive he would be just a bit over 100 , not old enough to remember the wages then , his memory would be to the 30s and we all know you were lucky to have wages in those years , lot of folks were unemployed 

[KatfishKid]

I start new hires at $14.50–$17 per hour for an entry-level position, and I often hear complaints that this isn’t considered a livable wage. However, this is a more than fair wage for the type of work being done, work that requires no prior skills and only asks that employees show up, follow simple instructions, and perform reliably.

My very first job when I was a kid was cutting tires at a salvage yard, I was paid 25 cents a tire and on average I made $10 or so in a day a few days a week. On the days I wasn't at the salvage yard, I cleaned horse stalls for $1 a stall and got an extra $5 a day when I fed and watered the 35 horses in the evening. When I entered the 9-5 world, I was paid $7.75 per hour and was at the wage for a couple of years while I started a family and also attended school. 

[irish ike, SASS #43615]

7 hours ago, KatfishKid said:

I often hear complaints that this isn’t considered a livable wage

I see posts like this all the time on Facebook.  I always ask, 'can someone define what a living wage is and what it pays for'?  Never get an answer.

[Barry Sloe]

When I joined the Navy in 1974 I was getting $383/month. When you average in 16 hour days, while at sea, it doesn't amount to much. The military couldn't afford to pay hourly wages.

 

BS

[El Sobrante Kid]

Regarding Minimum Wage-

 

[John Kloehr]

I can't remember if it was $1.35/hr or $2.35/hr when I started working. do know I was billing over 100 times that for my time (gross, net was minus significant expenses) when I finally got out of the rat race.

 

I do have a few thoughts on minimum wage.

 

1) Unions are heavily in favor of increasing minimum wage, it took me a while to understand why. Consider as an example someone who digs post holes my hand at minimum wage, and a union worker with power tools can dig post holes four times faster using power tools. If minimum wage goes up by $1 per hour, the union worker is instantly worth another $4 per hour (quibble about tool cost and maintenance, but 4X production makes it a quibble). No judgement, just an economic observation.

 

2) As the minimum wage rises, certain jobs are just no longer worth doing. For instance if I could make a profit by paying someone to pick up and sort roadside litter, paying for trash disposal and recycling found metal, glass, etc... But if I could only break even at half the minimum wage, then I can not do this business at all. This would be illegal. Again, no judgement, just a financial observation.

 

3) The only escape hatch to the minimum wage is self employment, either directly or through incorporation, either way without hiring employees. Minimum wage does require getting hired by someone else. The other forms require only gumption.  For those who take risk, there is less guarantee of reward compared to getting hired. Instead, there is a risk of loss with a possibility of reward. Without judgement for those who made different choices, I preferred the risk to being hourly or salaried, but it definitely is not for everyone.

 

A living wage? I rented rooms for years before I could afford a 1-bedroom apartment by myself. Some years later after saving a bunch of money, bought a house. I lived.

 

 

[Blackwater 53393]

I never worked for minimum wage. I was fortunate enough to have been taught from the age of eight to do things. I started learning to weld before my tenth birthday and I was turning bolts and the like a soon as I could read fractions so’s I’d know what wrench was which.

 

When other kids were going to work for $1.25 an hour, (the minimum wage in ‘69) I had some skills and had learned how to learn more skills, quickly and well.  I got a grown man’s job and did the work and the owners paid me for doing it!

 

I paid my folks room and board, starting in my senior year of high school and did so until I moved out.  
 

I started working for a paycheck as soon as I could get my provisional driver’s license at age fourteen and a half and I filed income tax and paid Social Security from then on. I paid cash for my first car and financed my second one without a co-signer. I paid my own insurance too.

 

When my son graduated high school, he went to college for a year, but he’d learned skills that made him worth more than minimum wage along the way. It has stood him in good stead.

 

My folks taught me how to make a living and I passed it on. We’re teaching the grandsons the same.

[Three Foot Johnson]

I had an uncle who passed at age 94 back in 2007 who used to tell of his days as a young man trying to find work during the Great Depression. He would say wages usually weren't even part of the equation, and if he found a ranch who fed him breakfast, maybe coffee & a biscuit at lunchtime, then a small supper, and let him sleep in the barn, he had a pretty damn good job. "Sometimes, after Sunday morning chores, I'd even get the rest of the morning off for church". 

He later joined the Civilian Conservation Corps where he was paid $30 a month. On December 7th, 1941, he was on a ship leaving San Francisco for Honolulu to build underground fuel storage tanks when word arrived that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Supposedly, many of the CCC onboard were taken off the ship and "drafted on the spot". He, and some others, sailed on to Hawaii where he spent the next couple years rebuilding, then he was sent to Alaska to work on the Alcan highway.

[watab kid]

i know i got $3 to mow an acre lawn my first job , my first work in the working sector was 75c an hour to assemble lawn mowers/bicycles/grilles in the basement of a hardware store , then i hit big time in advertising dept of a major international company at $1,35 , was getting about $2,75 when i worked in engineering department there , i was under $3 at the first architectural office part time in college , entry level in the 60s/70s 

 

came back to add the gas station work , the restraint work i supplemented with back then  i was under $3

Edited January 29 by watab kid