well as industrial wages. There was a wide difference between the highest and lowest wages in the same states. In many cases the better paid received five and even eight times as much as the poorest. Women were paid much less than men—as a rule rather less than the class of men workers who were most poorly paid.[1]
The highest wage reported as paid to any Mexican laborers in industrial work was $3.00, the lowest 12 cents. The highest wage for women was $1.50, the lowest six cents. No attempt is made to state an average—in fact the conditions surrounding Mexican labor are such that no estimate has great value. The lowest figures announced above, for example, may be for children and represent but few individuals. The highest were paid, it appears, in comparatively few cases.
The practice in individual industrial establishments or groups of establishments gives the best illustration of the upward trend of wages. In 1906, wages for adults in El Oro mine varied from 37½ to 50 cents a day. It seems to be the general consensus of opinion that prior to the revolution the average daily wage for farm laborers was about 50 cents. Unskilled laborers on the railroads received from 62½ cents to $1.75 a day.
Laborers in the oil regions about Tampico received 75 cents a day in 1908-9 and $2.00 and even $3.00 in 1914. The average wage of several thousand laborers in this district was announced as $2.10. In the mining districts wages ranged as high as $1.70 to $2.50 per day,
- ↑ These comparisons are based on tables in Erie Gunther, Handbuch von Mexico, Leipzig, 1912, p. 179 et seq. The wage figures are in Mexican currency.
