"Standardized Living"

Four rooms & bath, a car, a radio--that is the "standard of living" of a Ford workman in Detroit according to experts of the International Labor Office at Geneva (TIME, April 7). Last week these experts started on the second phase of the investigation they are conducting at Mr. Ford's request. In Poland and in Denmark they began asking about house rents, started pricing cars, radios, clothes, food, amusements. They showed startled shopkeepers whole trunkfuls of clothes and underclothes previously worn by Detroit workmen and their families, asked: "How much will garments of exactly the same quality cost here?"

When the survey is complete Mr. Ford plans to pay all his workmen throughout the world an "equivalent wage," equivalent not in gold but in what the wage will buy in the place where the worker works. Already there is anxious talk among statesmen that if Mr. Ford's program of "standardized living" goes into effect at his European plants it will provoke a social industrial revolution. Last week James Ramsay MacDonald was said to be on pins & needles lest the Ford survey soon to begin in London and in Manchester, should prove that a shilling is worth more in one of those English cities than in the other. Inevitably such proof would rouse the British Labor Party to all kinds of imperative demands upon the Prime Minister which he dare not face. At Scot MacDonald's urgent request, the Ford investigators will probably announce their English findings on the basis of an average struck between the Manchester shilling and the London shilling.*

Preliminary "leaks" from the investigators in Warsaw and Copenhagen last week may be thus summarized: Local officials were aghast at the idea that a workman & family should occupy four rooms, surprised at the notion that they should want a bath. Local workmen appeared to be content with two rooms per family, accustomed to dropping in at the municipal baths when dirty. In a terminology more European than American the conclusion seemed to be that an office worker or petit bourgeois is about the lowest class of wage earner who might (possibly) or should (perhaps) have a bathroom in his home, but in Poland and Denmark many, many petits bourgeois have none. As for the suggestion that a Polish or Danish factory hand should own an automobile--that was called "fantastic." But the questioners, stubborn, questioned on.

* Recent surveys suggest that in Salt Lake City $1 will buy more than in any other U. S. city of equal or greater size.

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