ABSTRACT
The worker's judgement of his pay depends, of course, on his pay; but not necessarily in a simple and obvious sense. Pay is not a thing or a process with visible characteristics; it is a means of exchanging services for goods or other services. It is both a reward for doing something and an instrument for doing something else. The worker's statement of his total take-home pay was precise in all cases; but in many cases it was subject to the qualification that pay varies with overtime and with other elements. The first step in the analysis of the workers' judgements of their pay was to define their rate of pay, or gross amount of weekly pay. The combined features of the pay system and the task are not associated with family responsibilities, so that a generalization that included both the main findings should be true for more persons than is either finding alone, though not necessarily for many more.
