their utmost to keep down prices, by organizing the distribution of certain key foods at reduced prices and selling potatoes at cost.

Hemmed in on all sides by the belligerents in the war, Switzerland had a very difficult time as regards supplies. Some of this had been foreseen by the wholesale and its members, and they had accumulated large stocks of goods which enabled them to supply the members for some time.

Recognizing that the food situation might become critical, VSK was instrumental in starting a movement among the cooperatives, for the intensive cultivation of land not previously in use. Cooperative associations, individually and collectively, as well as their members, entered this movement, and several new associations were created for waste-land cultivation. At the peak (1942), 418 of VSK's 548 member associations were participating. The idea was later taken up on a nation-wide basis, and proved to be of great economic value as the war years lengthened.

Postwar Situation. When the European war was over, Swiss cooperators collected funds for aid to cooperative associations in countries devastated by the war. Over a million francs had been raised by the middle of 1945. Practical aid had already been given to the inhabitants of frontier towns bordering on Switzerland.

The liberation of France had brought renewal of contacts with the Allies but did not improve the food situation of Switzerland, and the emergency gardening and farm projects were continued. As soon as possible, large orders were placed in foreign countries by VSK, and these gradually began to filter into Switzerland as ports were opened by the armies of liberation. Coal was a real problem, and attempts were made to solve it, for the cooperators, by VSK s purchase of some peat bogs and of the operating rights in a coal mine. On a number of staple items, VSK and its members continued to keep their prices below those set by the Government.

On the basis of indexes of retail and wholesale prices (table 4) it appears that the retail associations have been handling a larger volume of business than before the war, but that the wholesale has lost some ground.

It was estimated that, at the end of 1946, about 42 percent of the 1,150,000 families in

SOURCES: This article is based on data from the following publications: Great Britain: Report of Annual Cooperative Congress (Manchester, The Cooperative Union), 1947 and 1947; People's Year Book (Manchester, Cooperative Wholesale Society), 1943, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948; The Cooperative Review (Manchester, The Cooperative Union), December 1946, and January, March, May, and August, 1947; Review of International Cooperation (International Cooperative Alliance, London), issues of November-December 1940, February and June 1941, February 1943, June, September, and November, 1944, and July and September 1947; Cooperative Information (International Labor Office, Geneva), No. 3, 1938; No. 5-6, 1945, No. 2-3, 1946, and No. 3, 1947; Midland Cooperator (Minneapolis, Minn.), June 11, 1947; The Cooperator (New York), January 20, 1947; Cooperative Builder (Superior, Wis.), January 11, 1945; Rochdale Cooperator (Chicago, Ill.), May-JuneJuly-August 1945; Cooperative News Service (Chicago, Ill.), September 28, October 26, and December 14, 1944, June 28, 1945, August 9, 1945, May 16 and June 13, 1947; A Century of Cooperation, by G. D. H. Cole (Manchester, The Cooperative Union, 1945); Manchester Guardian, April 2, 1945; and British Ministry of Labor Gazette (London), November 1946.

Belgium: Review of International Cooperation (International Cooperative Alliance London), January 1940, June 1940, October 1943, March-April 1945, and August and September 1947; Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science (Philadelphia), September 1946; Cooperative Information (International Labor Office, Geneva), No. 2, 1947; Belgian Rural Cooperation, by E. J. Ross (Milwaukee, Bruce Publishing Co., 1940); and Le Coopérateur Belge (Brussels), July and August 1946 and May 1947.

France: Annuaire Statistique, 1940-45 (Statistique Géneralé de la France, 1946); Somewhere in Cooperative France, by Margaret Digby (in English Economic History, by C. R. Fay, Cambridge, England, 1940); Cooperative Information (International Labor Office, Geneva), No. 5-6, 1945, No. 2-3,. 1946, and No. 4, 1947; Cooperative League News Service (New York), December 6, 1945; and Review of International Cooperation (International Cooperative Alliance, London), October 1943, June 1944, March-April and MayJune 1945, and August 1947.

Netherlands: Jaarcyfers voor Nederland, 1941-1942 (Netherlands, Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek); Holland and the War, by G. N. Clark (Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs No. 43, Oxford, England, 1941); Review of International Cooperation (International Cooperative Alliance, London), December 1923, February 1934, February 1940, March and September 1941, September 1942, and June and July 1945; Cooperative Information (International Labor Office, London), February 1940, July 1942, and October 1945; Co-op Magazine (Chicago), June 1946; and Cooperative Movement in the Netherlands (Nationale Cooperatieve Raad, 1947).

Switzerland: Review of International Cooperation (International Cooperative Alliance, London), January and August 1941, August 1942, January, July, and November 1944, July and November-December 1945, JulyAugust 1946, and July 1947; Cooperative Information (International Labor Office, Geneva), January 1946; La Coopération (Basel), February 8 and 15 and June 7, 1947; Schweiz. Konsum-Verein (Basel), April 19, June 21 and August 23, 1947 and Report No. 96 (October 20, 1944) from American Consu late General, Zurich.

Wages in

Home Offices of Life Insurance Companies

KERMIT B. MOHN 1

THE LIFE INSURANCE INDUSTRY provides employment to thousands of "white-collar" workers. Most of these are agents or professional specialists but clerical workers, typists, office machine operators, and others handling day-to-day paper work are also quite numerous. Home offices of life insurance companies alone employ more than 75,000 workers.2 The wage structure for a selected group of occupations in 271 of these home offices was studied in January 1947. Of necessity, the occupations included had to be largely confined to those covering nonprofessional and nontechnical duties, many of which are also found in other industries.

Women outnumbered men by a considerable margin in most of the occupations. Relatively large numbers of women were employed as file clerks, clerk-typists, and copy typists, jobs in which average weekly wages were $23.13, $29.25, and $29.52, respectively, for the country as a whole. The figures for file clerks and copy typists cover those groups performing the more routine types of work in those occupations. Women averaged less than $30 a week in 6 other occupations. In 23 of the 39 women's occupations, the average weekly wage was $30 or more but less than $40.

1 Of the Bureau's Wage Analysis Branch. The field work for the survey was under the direction of the Bureau's Regional Wage Analysts. A bulletin containing more detailed data will be issued in the near future.

'Excludes all home offices with less than eight workers; fraternal life insurance companies; miscellaneous carriers, such as State life insurance funds; and companies which carry life insurance as a minor part of their business. Coverage corresponds to industries 6811, 6812, 6813, and 6815 of the Standard Industrial Classification Manual issued by the Bureau of the Budget.

none as high as $50. Among the higher-pay jobs were underwriters, section heads, and claims adjusters.

Men's wages, on the average, were considerably higher than women's. In only 1 of the 23 jobs for which comparable figures for both men and women were available was the average weekly wage higher for women than for men. In all of the others men had the advantage, the margin being quite sizable in most instances. These differences were not necessarily due to variations in the rate structure of individual establishments but were influenced by other factors such as length of service and turn-over within establishments as well as differences in occupational structure among the establishments. As a result, the national averages for 8 of the 24 men's jobs were above $60 a week, with claims investigators averaging $86.56. Nine other jobs had averages between $40 and $60 and none was as low as $30. Office boys, with an average of $30.13 a week, were the lowest paid male workers.

In order to allow for differences in the workweek, rates of pay were also computed on an hourly basis, although wages in the industry are most commonly quoted on a monthly, semimonthly, biweekly, or weekly basis. Measured by the hour, the earnings of women file clerks, clerktypists, and copy typists (same groups as mentioned above) averaged 75, 78, and 80 cents, respectively. In all, 9 of 39 jobs had averages of less than 80 cents while none of the men's jobs was in that category. At the other extreme, $1.32 an hour was the highest average for any women's job; this figure was exceeded by men in 11 of 24 occupations, with a high of $2.40 an hour. Regional and Area Variations in Wages

About two-thirds of all home-office employment is located in the Middle Atlantic and New England regions, traditional centers of the industry.3 The

The regions used in this study are: New England.-Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont; Middle Atlantic.-New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania; Border States.-Dela ware, District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, and West Vir ginia; Southeast.-Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina; Great Lakes.-Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin; Middle West.-Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota; Southwest.-Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas; Mountain.-Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Mon tana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming; Pacific.-California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

2 jobs. The lowest rates were usually found in the Southeast, Middle West, or Mountain regions.

The position of individual companies in the industry's wage structure, coupled with the differences in composition of the work forces among the companies, produced some rather unusual wage relationships at the various levels of comparison. For example, the average rates for class C bookkeeping machine operators, class B correspondence clerks, and class B transcribing machine operators in the Middle Atlantic region were higher than the comparable averages for the next high class, primarily because of the relatively large numbers of workers employed in the lower grades by some of the large high-pay companies in which a greater division of labor existed. Within any single company the rates varied directly with the class of the occupation.

The New York-Newark area had about 30,000 workers in life insurance home offices, including most of the very large companies. Other important areas, although small in comparison with New York-Newark, are Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford, and Chicago. Wages in the New York-Newark area were generally above those in all other areas for which separate information could be prepared. Examples of the weekly wage levels in the New York metropolitan area are class A stenographers with an average of $44.00; class B stenographers, $37.82: general clerks, $35.37; and clerk-typists, copy-typists, and file clerks on routine work, between $30.00 and $32.00. All of these averages pertained to women workers. Variations in Wages by Size of Establishment

Although there are numerous life insurance companies in the United States, the bulk of the business and employment is centered in a relatively few large companies. It is estimated that over 60 percent of all workers in home offices are employed by approximately 25 large firms (over 500 home-office workers). As a group, these large companies paid higher wages, on the average, than the more numerous smaller companies. This condition existed in practically all occupations for which comparisons could be made on a national level as well as within the New England and Middle Atlantic regions. Furthermore, it existed when measured on a hourly as well as a weekly basis. In the Great Lakes region, third in im

portance in the industry, women's wages, measured on a weekly basis, tended to be higher in the smaller companies, although the margin in many cases averaged less than $1 a week. On an hourly rate basis the larger companies had the advantage in most of the occupations, indicating that the normal workweek in the larger companies as a group was shorter than in the smaller ones.

Wage and Related Practices

Well over half of the insurance companies, including most of the larger ones, had formalized their occupational rate structures. In practically all of these companies minimum and maximum rates had been set for each classification. Formal automatic progressions, depending on length of service, were established in only a small proportion of the cases. The more common practice was to grant increases within the established ranges after a periodic review of each employee's attainments. Generally these reviews were held semiannually or annually.

About 60 percent of the insurance companies had a normal workweek of less than 40 hours for men and women. All except a few of the remainder observed a 40-hour week. A workweek of less than 35 hours was reported in several cases; almost the same number regularly employed their workers more than 40 hours a week.

In the Middle Atlantic region the most common workweeks were 35 or some other standard less than 371⁄2 hours; the 40-hour week was standard in only 4 of 38 companies for men and in 3 for women, but none had a longer workweek. On the other hand, none of the companies in the Middle West and Pacific regions reported a workweek of less than 371⁄2 hours.

All except 3 of 270 companies for which information was available granted vacations with pay to their employees after 1 year of service. In 85 percent of these companies the vacation time was 2 weeks, including all of the companies in the New England and Pacific regions. In the Mountain region, 8 of the 10 companies granted 2 weeks and the other 2 granted a longer vacation period.

Formal provisions for paid sick leave after 1 year of service were in existence in about 45 percent of the companies, including a majority of the companies in the New England, Great Lakes and Middle West regions. Two weeks' allowance

with pay was provided in about half of these companies.

Two-thirds of the companies had adopted some type of insurance or pension plan for their employees, the costs of which were paid, at least in part, by the companies. Only half of the total studied provided life insurance plans. About 30 percent of all companies had health insurance programs and a quarter had retirement pension

plans. Pension plans were not nearly so prevalent in most of the other industries studied by the Bureau. A number of companies reported more than one type of insurance or pension plan.

Somewhat less than half of the companies awarded Christmas bonuses to their employees and more than 10 percent paid other types of nonproduction bonuses. In many cases the amounts paid were quite substantial.

Salaries in Public

Assistance Agencies, 1946

VISITORS WERE THE MOST NUMEROUS employees of local offices of State public assistance agencies covered in a personnel survey by the Social Security Administration.' Monthly salaries of 14,830 visitors early in 1946 ranged from less than $120 (for 3 percent) to $220 or more (for 1.2 percent); over a fourth of these workers received from $140 to $160, and almost a fourth, from $160 to $180. For all visitors, the median was $165, which was higher than rates paid by nearly two-thirds of the offices. This difference was attributed to the relatively high salaries (median $210) paid in New York State and the large proportion of visitors (over a fifth of the total) employed there. The median salary paid by the median agency was $155, and this was regarded as a more valid basis for interagency comparisons. All visitors in 5 States-Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Washington-were paid at a rate above $155, whereas none in 4 Southern States-Arkan

Federal Security Agency, Social Security Administration, Bureau of Public Assistance, Public Assistance Report No. 12: Personnel in Local Offices of State Public Assistance Agencies, 1946-Part I, Salaries. Washington, 1947.

sas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolinareceived as much as that amount. In cities having populations of 250,000 or more, the median was $185, this figure also showing the influence of the relatively high salaries and the appreciable proportion of such employees in New York State.

Within the same agency, visitors' salaries usually exceeded those of clerical workers, the next largest group (11,635) covered by the survey. The median of $165 for visitors was $30 higher than that for clerks, almost two-thirds of whom received under $140 a month. However, there were marked variations in the extent to which salaries for the two classes of workers differed. For example, in Connecticut the median for both classifications was $135, but in South Dakota and Texas the median for visitors exceeded that for clerks by $70. When comparisons were made between agencies, salaries for visitors in some agencies were found to be considerably below those for clerks in other agencies.

Salaries of the 2,491 directors represented in the survey ranged from less than $120 to $380 or more per month, the median being $185. The range for the 1,675 supervisors was from less than $160 to $320 or more, with a median of $210, and for the 439 field representatives, from less than $200 to $320 or more, with a median of $250.