Earnings of fathers.-The income of men operating for themselves was based on the tonnage of their cargoes, From their gross income, which was often several thousand dollars, they had to deduct heavy expenses for towage, equipment, repairs, wages of a crew if they had no boys or young men in their own families, and other charges such as taxes, insurance, registration, clearance, fees, and dockage. One captain who ran two boats from New York to Quebec said he expected to clear $1,000 a trip, making two and sometimes three trips in a season. The expenses of towing, he said, just about "ate up" the returns on one boat.
Men on a salary basis were sure of their pay and were subject to very little if any expense connected with boating. Company rates of pay ranged from $110 a month for the captain of a consort to $165 for the master pilot. Mates received $90 a month. In addition to the monthly wage, a per diem allowance of from 90 cents to $1 per day for food was made by some companies and was ordinarily paid over to the ship's cook. Since she was usually the captain's wife and the mother of tho family she tried to procure provisions for the entire family out of this per diem allowance.
The majority of men whose boat earnings for the season of 1920 were reported earned $1,250 or over, showling much better financial returns from their work than wore found on other canals. Proportionately fewer had supplemented their boat earnings by winter employment. Among the captains interviewed were men who owned and operated several boats and whose net returns amounted to several thousand dollars; others had had a bad season and had barely been able to make ends meet.
Earnings of children.-Whereas on both the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Pennsylvania canals the great majority of the cllildrrn helped with the boat work, very few assisted in operating the boats on the New York canals. The reason for this was that, the operations performed by children on the mule-driven vessels were not called for in operating steam-towed barges. There were no mules to drive and the boats were much too heavy for a child to steer. Out of a total of 179 children living on the New York boats only 19 reported that they had done boat work during the season.
Ten of these 19 boys were reported by their fathers as helping with the boat work without pay. The other 9 boys had been employed as deck hands at regular rates; 1 at $80 a month, 5 at $90 a month, and 1 at $100. Those boys, from whom the full work of an adult was expected, were employed in the fleets of which their fathers were the captains, but they were paid by the company operating the boats. T'he youngest of them was 12 years of ago, another was 15, and tho others were 16 and 17. The 12-year-old worked one month during the school vacation; the 17-year-old who received $80 was employed only one month; the others worked during the entire canal season. The season's earnings for some of those hoys amountod to $700 or $800.
The child labor laws in New York State at the time of the study made no reference to boat employees, but no child under 11 years of age was allowed to undertake any kind of work during school hours. Only three children living on canal boats reported work other than that connected with the boats. One 17-year-old girl, while her father's boat was docked in New York Harbor, had been employed at $20 a week as an inspector in a sweater factory; one boy had been a salesman in a dry goods store at $10 a week; and one of the boys who had been a paid deck hand during the summer had worked for two weeks in the winter in a box factory.