Federal Clerks Receive Small Salaries

1910

By Arthur Blanchard

Government clerks are generally thought to have an easy time by many outsiders, who envy the short hours and supposedly large pay of those who labor in the big department buildings of Washington.

The facts are entirely at variance with the popular conception. The employees of Uncle Sam have had no increase of salary for years and most of them are getting exactly the same pay their predecessors drew 50 years ago.

This affects a multitude of honest, hard-working men and women who are just able to make ends meet on their scanty stipends. The condition, indeed, so far from being enviable, is pitiable.

Realizing that conditions had vastly changed and that it requires far more to live decently now than it did in 1880, or even later, Congress, a little while back, raised the salaries of senators and members of the House from $5,000 to $7,500 a year, an increase of 50 per cent.

The country at large found no fault with this piece of self-conferred liberality.

Now it is up to Congress to be as just toward many thousands of government clerks as it was generous toward itself.

Investigations lately made show that a lot of these people are forced to take their children from school to help in the family support while others are continually in the clutches of usurious money lenders.