State intervention in the determination of the rate of wages is often proposed either for the purpose of settling trade disputes on the subject, or for the purpose of suppressing what is called starvation wages and fixing a legal minimum rate. As for arbitration in trade disputes, the object is, of course, in no way socialistic, for it is strictly allied with the ordinary judicial work of the State, and a public and permanent tribunal would probably answer the purpose much better than a private and merely occasional one; for even although it might not be able to enforce its judgments in all cases by compulsion on the parties, it would be more likely than the other to command their confidence and secure by its moral authority their voluntary submission, and this authority would increase with the experience of the court.
In certain cases compulsory arbitration seems to be required. There are trades in which the public interest may require strikes to be prohibited, in order to prevent a whole community suffering grave privations, perhaps being starved of its supply of a necessary of life. The Trades Union Act imposes express restrictions on combinations among the labourers at gas and water works, and the recent railway strike in Scotland, which not only paralyzed trade for a time, but stopped the supply of coal to whole districts in the middle of the severest winter of the last part of the century, suggested to many minds the propriety of similar interference in railway disputes. But if the State interfered to stop the strike, the State must needs in equity interfere to decide upon the cause of quarrel. And happily these are the very cases which are best fitted for compulsory arbitration, because the trades concerned are not subject to the market fluctuations to which other trades are liable, and are therefore better suited for fixed settlements of definite and considerable duration.
But what socialists claim is a universal determination of normal wages, so as to give every man the full product of his labour, as the full product of his labour is understood upon their theory. For the present, however, they are content to ask for at least the establishment of a legal minimum rate of wages; in fact, an international minimum rate of wages and an international eight hours working day are the two demands on which their agitation is in the meantime most strenuously concentrated. In their recent policy they have reverted to the kind of remedies they used to speak of with such lofty disdain as mere palliatives, and have only preserved their separate identity from other reformers by asking for these palliatives in their least practicable form. An international compulsory minimum wage is impossible, for even a national one is so, and that is the only objection, but a very sufficient one, to the proposal. If you could wipe out starvation wages by passing an Act of Parliament, let the Act be passed to-morrow, for starvation wages is surely the worst and most exasperating of all the enemies of humane living. To starve for want of power to work is bad; to starve for want of work is worse; but to work and yet starve, to work a long, long day without obtaining the bread that should be its natural reward, is a third and worst degree of misfortune, for it mocks the fitness and equity of things, and seizes the mind like a wrong. If it is right to suppress starvation by law, it would seem more right still to suppress starvation wages; and if the socialist contention were in the least true, that in consequence of the "iron and cruel law" all wages are starvation wages, and all work sweaters' work, that work and starve is the inevitable rule under the present system of things, there would be no good answer to their demand for the abolition of the present system of things. But as a matter of fact working and starving is the condition of only exceptional groups of workpeople, and the right to a minimum wage, in the sense of a wage above starvation point, would have no bearing on the great majority of the labouring classes, inasmuch as they stand already on a considerably higher level of remuneration.
Ought the State, however, to fix a legal minimum of wages for the protection of the exceptional groups of workpeople to whose situation such a measure might have relation? The objection to this course comes less from want of justice in the claim than from want of power in the State to realize it. The fixing of a legal minimum rate of wages is a task which it is beyond the State's power to accomplish, except by paying up the minimum out of its own funds; for, though the law fixed a minimum to-morrow, it could not compel employers to engage workmen at that minimum; and if employers found it unprofitable to do so, the only effect of the legislation would be to throw numbers of men out of work, and make their maintenance at the legal minimum an obligation of the public treasury. Of the results of paying wages out of the rates we have had plenty of experience. To suppress starvation wages in this way by direct statute is merely impossible, however, and there would be no taint of socialism in it, if it could be done. Much less can the like objection be made against any milder remedies. The only danger is that they would not prove effectual, and would address themselves to false causes. Take the sweating system of the East End of London, in which, bad conditions of labour always going together, we find starvation wages combined with long hours and unwholesome work-rooms. Two of the favourite remedies are the abolition of sub-contracting and the prohibition of pauper Jewish immigration; but neither of these things is the cause of sweating. The sweating contractor of the East End is not a sub-contractor at all; he is the only contractor in the business, and even if he were a sub-contractor, we know that sub-contractors often pay far better wages than the chief contractor can, because they know their men better, and get better work out of them.
A temporary increase in the Jewish immigration may occasion a temporary aggravation of the difficulty, but the permanent causes lie elsewhere, and even in the way of aggravation a matter of a thousand Jews more, or a thousand Jews less, cannot play an all-important part in a system affecting some hundred thousand workpeople. Sweating is no more incident to Jewish labour than to English labour. The cheap clothing trade of Birmingham is certainly in the hands of Jews, yet sweating is—or at least was when the factory inspector reported in 1879—absolutely unknown. The wages, he said, were good, the hours were not long, and there were no overcrowded dens. On the other hand, sweating has not only been for years endemic in the East End of London, but has even appeared in a very acute form, apart from any alien influence, in the tailoring trade in Melbourne, the paradise of working people, as it is sometimes not unjustly denominated. The sweating there was conducted largely by ladies who took in bands of learners, and, according to the evidence before the Shopkeepers' Commission, of 1883, every second house in some of the suburbs was a shop of that kind. There was an excessive influx of labour into that trade, because little other work could be found for women who entertained, as they do generally in that colony, a prejudice against both factory labour and domestic service. On the other hand, this overflow was diverted in Birmingham into other channels by the comparative abundance of light employments the district afforded. But apart from temporary or local circumstances that serve to aggravate things or alleviate them, the tailor trade is everywhere naturally subject beyond all others to over-competition: (1) because the work can be done at home; (2) because it can be learnt in a few weeks or months well enough to earn starvation wages in a long day at some sorts of work; (3) because it needs as little capital for the contractor to start business as it needs training for the operatives; and (4) because the operatives being scattered about in their own homes, or in small workshops here and there, have a natural difficulty in coming to any concerted action that might otherwise mitigate the effects of the over-competition, and if there is any general remedy for sweating, it must deal with these causes. To replace homework by common work in wholesome workshops, as far as that can be done, might interfere with what some poor persons found a convenient resource, but would do no harm to the working class generally. The work it was less convenient for some to do would be done by others. The change would remove at once one of the evils of sweating—the unhealthy work-places—and it would contribute to remove the others, first by facilitating combination, and second by improving the personal efficiency of the labourer and the amount of his production. Dr. Watts, of Manchester, speaking from long experience, tells us in his "Facts of the Cotton Famine" (p. 44) that "men often care more about being employed in a good mill (i.e., a mill with plenty of room, air, and light) than about the exact price per pound for spinning, or per piece for weaving, for they know practically what is the effect of these conditions upon the weekly wages." Various measures have been suggested which have some such end in view—the compulsory registration of the contractor's workrooms and his outworkers, the requiring him to provide workshops for all his hands, the joint liability of the clothier with him for the wholesomeness of the workplaces, the erection of public workshops where workpeople may be accommodated for hire; they may be open to various objections—and there is no space to indicate or discuss them here—but if they are effectual for the purpose contemplated, that purpose saves them at least from the reproach of socialism.
The international compulsory eight hours day is attended with like difficulty. The eight hours day is no necessary plank of socialism, though socialists have at present united to demand it. Rodbertus, the most learned and scientific of modern socialists, always contended that the normal working-day ought not to be of uniform length, but should vary inversely with the relative strain of the several trades, and Mr. Bellamy, under his system of absolute equality of income, makes differences in the hours of labour answer the purpose of regulating the choice of occupation, and preventing too many persons running into the easier trades, and too few into the harder. Nor, indeed, apart from the element of universal compulsion, has the eight hours day anything of socialism in it at all. In some trades it is probably a simple necessity for protecting the workpeople in normal conditions of health; but above all its sanitary benefits it would confer upon the workpeople of every trade alike the much grander blessing of admitting them to a reasonable share of the intellectual, social, domestic, religious, and political life of their time. If the State could bestow upon them this sovereign blessing without forcing them to accept a reduction of wages, which might deprive them of things even more essential for their elevation, and which would only breed among them an intolerable discontent, by all means let the State declare the glad decree. But experience shows that in matters of this kind the State—and especially the democratic State—is a very limited agent, and cannot successfully enforce its decrees upon unwilling trades. In certain special cases, when the short day is demanded for the purpose of averting admitted dangers to health, as with the miners, or for the safety of the public, as with the railway service, there is a recognised stringency of obligation which is exceptional; but in the great run of trades the question is virtually one of mere preference between an hour's leisure and an hour's pay, and in these circumstances a law has too little moral authority behind it to be practically enforceable by penalties in the absence of decided working-class opinion in its favour in the affected trades. In Victoria more than fifty separate trades have obtained the eight hours day without any parliamentary assistance, and almost the only remaining trades which do not yet enjoy it are the very trades which have been protected by an eight hours Factory Act since 1874. As soon as the Act was passed, the operatives, men and women both, petitioned the Chief Secretary for its suspension, and it has remained in suspended animation to this day. A democratic government cannot risk incurring the discontent of a body of the people merely to prevent them from working an hour more when they want to earn a little more. California has had an Eight Hours Act on the statute-book for even a longer period, but it has remained a mere dead letter, because employers began to pay wages by the hour or the piece, and the men found they did not earn so much in the short day as they used to earn in the long. The same thing has happened in others of the American States, and the friends of the eight hours movement in that country are beginning to think that the reason their long and often hot struggle has hitherto been so fruitless is because they have been wasting their strength in political agitation when they ought to have been cultivating and organizing opinion among the working class themselves trade by trade. The weakness of statutory eight hours movements has generally flowed from two sources. One is that what their promoters really wanted was not shorter hours, but more wages. Numbers of them sought only to shorten regular time in order to lengthen overtime, and numbers more got themselves persuaded that a general reduction of hours was the grand means of effecting a general rise of wages, either by removing the competition of the unemployed, or in some other way; and it has often been only the few—always the very élite of labour—who fought for the eight hours day because they valued the leisure enough to make, if necessary, some little sacrifice for so noble a boon. When, therefore, wages, instead of rising, begin to get reduced, general disappointment is inevitable, and they get reduced—and reduced lower than they otherwise might be—through the second weakness of such movements, which is simply this, that a trades union which is not strong enough to get an eight hours day by their own unaided efforts, without the assistance of the law, is not strong enough to prevent their wages from sinking, and in this matter the law can do nothing to help them. The eight hours day can only be an abiding possession if it come through the successive growth of opinion and organization in one trade after another. The history of the movement in Victoria is the history of such successive triumphs of opinion and organization; as soon as a trade has come to want the eight hours day earnestly enough to be willing to sacrifice something for it, the trade has always got it. In the result they have had to sacrifice very little; scarce one of them suffered a fall of wages by the change, for the simple reason that there was no serious fall in their daily production. The difference between the ten hours day and the eight hours day in Victoria was not two hours, but only three-quarters of an hour, for—at least in the important trades—the old day was ten hours, with an hour and a quarter off for meals; and in eight hours with only one break the men probably did near as much as they did before in the eight hours and three-quarters with a double break. Still, most of the trades took twenty or five-and-twenty years before they ventured to join the movement; and though no country in the world is so much under the control of working-class opinion as Victoria, the proposal of a general legal eight hours day which has repeatedly come before the Legislature has never been carried into law.
In one sense the eight hours day is the least socialistic of all reforms proposed in the interest of the working class, for it is impossible to make the other classes of society pay for the boon. It may not, perhaps, be quite certain that there will be anything to pay for it at all, for many people assure us production will suffer nothing by the change, and some promise us it will be even increased. But one thing at least is certain: if there is anything to pay, it is the working classes themselves who in the end will and must pay it. The reduction can make no great difference to employers, except on running contracts, or where for any reason they refuse to keep their plant in use by an extra shift, for in the matter of wages they will do under an eight hours system exactly what they do now—pay the men for the amount of work they get out of them and no more; and as they thus produce their goods at the old cost, they can export them at the old price. It need not, therefore, have any permanent effect worth speaking of on the general trade of the country. But if the men do less, their wages will be less too,[10] and nothing can long keep them what they were. This wages question is the eight hours question; and while it is a question for the men more than for the masters, it is essential they should keep clear of all misconception in deciding it.
There is no way of getting ten hours' pay for eight hours' work except by doing the work of ten hours in the eight. An Eight Hours Act would give working men no new power to raise the rate of wages; and if they cannot by combination get twelve hours' pay for ten hours' work to-day, they cannot by combination get ten hours' pay for eight hours' work to-morrow. It is, indeed, a very current delusion, that a restriction of production must increase wages by necessitating the employment of the unemployed, whose competition tends at present to prevent wages from rising. But that effect could only occur if the same demand for commodities remained, and although that might be the case if the restriction were confined to a single branch of industry, while all the rest continued to produce as much as before, it would not be so if the restriction were carried out simultaneously all round. The various trades are one another's customers; the commodities one supplies constitute the demand for the labour of the others; and if the supply is reduced all round, the demand will be reduced all round. To say there is at any moment a fixed amount of work that has to be done whatever the produce of the labour, is, as Professor Marshall very happily observes, to set up a Work Fund Dogma exactly analogous to the old Wages Fund Doctrine of the schools, and, he might have added, a dogma even more dangerous to the prosperity of the working-man. Yet the idea is abroad; it appears in the trade-union policy of "making work"—that is, making work for to-morrow by not doing it to-day; it is a kind of mercantilist delusion of the present century, by which each trade is to cut some advantage for itself out of the sides of the others until they all come to practise the trick in turn and fall to mysterious ruin together.
If the eight hours day is to raise wages, it will not be by limiting production, but by improving it. That the productivity of labour is capable of improving—nay, that it is certain to improve to such an extent as to earn by-and-by more wages in an eight hours day than it now does in a ten—is scarce matter of doubt. Apart from the influence of machinery and invention, there is a great reserve of personal efficiency, especially in English labour, still capable of development. Mr. Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, said that he noticed when watching his men at work, that most of them spent at least two-thirds of their time, not in working, but in criticising their work with the square and the straight-edge, which the few dexterous workmen among them almost never required to use. An increase of dexterity might, therefore, make up for a reduction of the day in these trades even to four hours. But the present question is about the probable effect of the reduction itself upon the efficiency of labour, and experience certainly does not justify those who declare that it would increase the daily product. The effect of a reduction from ten hours or nine to eight is, of course, an entirely different question from the effect of a reduction from twelve or thirteen to ten, because the last two hours' labour in a very long and exhausting day may bear little comparison with the last two hours of a shorter day; and of the exact effect of the particular reduction from ten to eight we possess but scanty evidence, though much might easily be obtained, one would think, from establishments that run, as many do, ten hours in summer and eight hours in winter, or ten hours in busy times and eight hours in slack. We have some American evidence of this sort, but it is very contradictory, a few employers saying that quite as much work was done in the eight hours as in the ten, and others that as much would have been done had the men made a better use of their leisure, while several more complained that the men really did less, and that their energies were positively slackened under the short hours—this also perhaps being a result of the use they made of their leisure. In Victoria the production seems to have been reduced a little, but really so little as to have no very perceptible results, and the leisure is used so well that the working class have made a distinct rise in the scale of being, and have developed a remarkable love of outdoor sports, and spare energy enough to produce some of the most famous cricketers and scullers in the world. There are some trades in which it is possible for production to diminish and yet wages to remain the same, because the difference can be thrown into the price of the product. These are trades supplying a commodity in general and necessary demand of which the consumers will stand a very considerable rise in the price before they will seriously shorten their purchases. Coal is a good example of such a commodity, and the miners are therefore very happily situated for the adoption of an eight hours day. They are more able than most other trades to prevent such a measure from resulting in any fall of wages, and consequently a legal enactment on the subject is less likely with them to create subsequent disappointment, and remain dead letter. They need State help in the matter less than most trades, for they are strong and well organized; but an Eight Hours Act would be more easily enforced among them. Very few trades, however, are in this exceptional position. On the whole, the risk of material loss incurred by the reduction is slight compared with the certainty and greatness of the moral gain; the material loss will, in any case, be soon made up by industrial improvements, if things progress as they are doing; and if the reduction is more likely to come through the union and organization of the trades themselves rather than by either national or international action, the trades at least need have no serious fear to make the venture.