15. Wages and Working Conditions in Canton
There is so little exact data on wages and working conditions in China, that every bit of information that can be added to the store of information on the subject is of value. Therefore, I have recorded the most important observations made on this subject during a five-month visit covering the Provinces of Kwantung, Kiangsi, Hupeh and Hunan.
Canton (Kwantung Province) was our first point of investigation. This is a city of over a million population, the Southern gateway to China, the center of the Nationalist movement for years, and the only place in China where trade unions were legal before the middle of last year. Canton was the headquarters of the All-China Labor Federation from 1922 to the beginning of 1927. It is not, however, a modern industrial city, like Shanghai or Hankow, but almost entirely commercial and handicraft industries. However, the workers of Canton were enjoying conditions better than we found later in any other place.
There are approximately 230,000 workers in Canton organized in the trade unions. Of these about 10,000 are industrial workers in the modern sense, the rest being artisans, shop clerks, and coolies. These industrial workers constitute a sort of economic aristocracy, their wages and working conditions being much higher than the rest of the working classs. They consist of, in the main, seamen, railway workers, chauffeurs, electric light and waterworks employes, arsenal workers, the employes of a few small textile mills and machine shops, and modern printing plants.
The ordinary, usual wage of workers in these lines is $30 per month. ($1 Chinese is nominally about the same as 1 ruble Russian, or 50 cents U. S., but Chinese currencies are almost universally depreciated about 20% at this time.) This wage allows for no rest days; Sundays are worked the same as other days, this being true in Canton for ALL workers. The railroad workers get a wage somewhat above this average, because, although they also work on Sundays, they now get paid double-time for
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