Professor of Sociology, London University.
Professor Hobhouse said:—The wages, hours, and general conditions of industrial workers are of interest to the community from two points of view. So far as the less skilled and lower paid workers are concerned, it is to the interest and it is the duty of the community to protect them from oppression, and to secure that every one of its members, who is willing and able to contribute honest and industrious work to the service of others, should be able in return to gain the means of a decent and civilised life. In this relation the establishment of a minimum wage is analogous to the restriction of hours or the provision for safety and health secured by Factory Legislation, and carries forward the provision for a minimum standard of life. The problem is to determine upon the minimum and adjust its enforcement to the conditions of trade in such wise as to avoid industrial dislocation and consequent unemployment.
With regard to workers of higher skill, who command wages or salaries on a more generous scale, the interest of the community is of a different kind. Such workers hardly stand in need of any special protection. They are well able to take care of themselves, and sometimes through combination are, in fact, the stronger party in the industrial bargain. In this region the interest of the community lies in maintaining industrial peace and securing the maximum of goodwill and co-operation. The intervention of the community in industrial disputes, however, has never been very popular with either party in the State. Both sides to a dispute are inclined to trust to their own strength, and are only ready to submit to an impartial judgment when convinced that they are momentarily the weaker. Nor is it easy when we once get above the minimum to lay down any general principles which a court of arbitration could apply in grading wages.
For these reasons the movement for compulsory arbitration has never in this country advanced very far. We have an Industrial Court which can investigate a dispute, find a solution which commends itself as reasonable, and publish its finding, but without any power of enforcement. The movement has for the present stuck there, and is likely to take a long time to get further. Yet every one recognises the damage inflicted by industrial disputes, and would admit in the abstract the desirability of a more rational method of settlement than that of pitting combination against combination. Such a method may, I would suggest, grow naturally out of the system which has been devised for the protection of unskilled and unorganised workers, of which a brief account may now be given.
The Establishment of Trade Boards
Utilising experience gained in Australia, Parliament in 1909 passed an Act empowering the Board of Trade (now the Ministry of Labour) to establish a Trade Board in any case where the rate of wages prevailing in any branch was “exceptionally low as compared with that in other employments.” The Board consisted of a number of persons selected by the Minister as representatives of employers, an equal number as representatives of the workers, with a chairman and generally two colleagues not associated with the trade, and known as the Appointed Members. These three members hold a kind of casting vote, and can in general secure a decision if the sides disagree.
No instruction was given in the statute as to the principles on which the Board should determine wages, but the Board has necessarily in mind on the one side the requirements of the worker, and on the other the economic position of the trade. The workers’ representatives naturally emphasise the one aspect and the employers the other, but the appointed members and the Board as a whole must take account of both. They must consider what the trade in general can afford to pay and yet continue to prosper and to give full employment to the workers. They must also consider the rate at which the worker can pay his way and live a decent, civilised life. Mere subsistence is not enough. It is a cardinal point of economic justice that a well-organised society will enable a man to earn the means of living as a healthy, developed, civilised being by honest and useful service to the community. I would venture to add that in a perfectly organised society he would not be able—charitable provision apart—to make a living by any other method. There is nothing in these principles to close the avenues to personal initiative or to deny a career to ability and enterprise. On the contrary, it is a point of justice that such qualities should have their scope, but not to the injury of others. For this, I suggest with confidence to a Liberal audience, is the condition by which all liberty must be defined.[1]
If we grant that it is the duty of the Boards to aim at a decent minimum—one which in Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s phrase would secure the “human needs” of labour—we have still some very difficult points of principle and of detail to settle. First and foremost, do we mean the needs of the individual worker or of a family, and if of the latter, how large a family? It has been generally thought that a man’s wages should suffice for a family on the ground that there ought to be no economic compulsion—though there should be full legal and social liberty—for the mother to eke out deficiencies in the father’s payment by going out to work. It has also been thought that a woman is not ordinarily under a similar obligation to maintain a family, so that her “human needs” would be met by a wage sufficient to maintain herself as an independent individual.
These views have been attacked as involving a differentiation unfair in the first instance to women, but in the second instance to men, because opening a way to undercutting. The remedy proposed is public provision for children under the industrial age, and for the mother in return for her work in looking after them. With this subvention, it is conceived, the rates for men or women might be equalised on the basis of a sufficiency for the individual alone. This would certainly simplify the wages question, but at the cost of a serious financial question. I do not, myself, think that “human needs” can be fully met without the common provision of certain essentials for children. One such essential—education, has been long recognised as too costly to be put upon the wages of the worker. We may find that we shall have to add to the list if we are to secure to growing children all that the community would desire for them. On the other hand, the main responsibility for directing its own life should be left to each family, and this carries the consequence, that the adult-man’s wage should be based not on personal but on family requirements.
[1] I may perhaps be allowed to refer to my Elements of Social Justice, Allen & Unwin, 1921, for the fuller elaboration of these principles.