CHAPTER VIII

LABOUR AS A COMMODITY

What is a “fair wage”—Two meanings of “worth”—What work costs to the worker—Work done below cost price—How the worker may lose upon his work—The effect upon commodities in general of free competition—The effect upon labour—The robber employer—Eventual powerlessness of the single employer—Cost to the nation of the underpaid worker—Difference in essence between labour and other commodities—Ambiguity of word “law”—Recognition of the true cost of labour the basis of reform.

There are few phrases more current than those which include the expression “a fair wage.” All workers conceive that they have a right to it; and I never met an employer who did not maintain that he paid it—although I have met more than one who admitted that his “fair wage” was one upon which the worker who received it could not live. To any enquirer venturing to point out this peculiarity, the reply is given: “But the work is not worth more,” and the reply generally silences the enquirer for the moment—whereby the employer comes to believe it unanswerable.

In the enquirer’s mind two questions eventually arise: “Can a wage be fair upon which the worker cannot live?” and: “Has labour a worth measurable otherwise than by the market price?”

We begin presently to perceive that there are two faces to that word “worth”; that it represents sometimes the price to the buyer and sometimes the cost to the worker. The price to the buyer—the “worth” of the work in the answer quoted above—is neither more nor less than its market price, or, in other words, the price brought about by the balance of competition between those who want to buy labour and those who want to sell it. This price is regulated solely by the numbers competing on either hand and by their greater or less degree of combined action. But the cost of work to the worker is the expenditure of energy which he has made upon it. Every hour’s work of a man or woman takes out of that man or that woman a certain fixed amount of strength, of energy,—in short, a certain amount of life. When we work, we spend, literally, something of our substance. To make up that expenditure, we must have both a certain amount of nourishment and a certain amount of rest. If our work is not paid at such a rate as to give us that, we lose something in every hour we work. We spend a little more life than is restored to us. Even if we are paid at a rate that enables us just to make up what we have spent, we have earned nothing—we have only had our outlay repaid to us. The purchaser who pays a worker just enough to make him as fit for work afterwards as before, has only paid the worker’s expenses; he has not yet begun to pay him for his work. The worker in such a case is precisely in the position of a capitalist who has lent money, and got it back, but has made no profit on its use.

The wage of much labour in this and in other countries is on that scale. So accustomed, indeed, are we to this state of things that many of us think a worker quite well paid if he receives enough to keep him in good bodily condition. Yet the same people who hold this opinion in regard to that labour which is the sole capital of the worker, consider themselves to have made a very bad bargain if they so invest their pecuniary capital as to receive no interest upon it. It would be well if we should bear in mind that the worker who receives no more than enough to make up the strength expended, is in exactly that financial position.

But there is a financial stage lower than this: the stage of the worker who not only gets no interest upon his capital, but does not get even back the whole of his capital. That labour is so often yielded for less than its cost is one reason why a working man’s expectation of life is considerably less than that of a professional man; or, to put it in other words, why the dock labourer and the omnibus conductor die younger than the lawyer and the clergyman.

There are two ways in either (or both) of which any worker may lose upon his work, and the names of them are Long Hours and Low Wages. For instance, a railway company or an omnibus company that keeps a man at work for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four uses up more of that man’s vitality than the other eight hours can restore. Though he were to be paid, like Miss Edna May, at a salary of £200 a week he would still lose on the bargain. At no price can his employers repay him. They have consumed some of his capital, and capital of that sort when once spent is spent for ever.

Or the worker may receive for each hour’s work, even though the stretch of hours be not unduly long, too little money to pay for those necessaries by which alone his outlay can be made up. On each transaction he pays out a little more than is returned to him. He becomes, at each step, a little poorer in bodily resources; he is never quite sufficiently fed, never quite sufficiently clothed nor healthily housed, and he never has that reasonable certainty of to-morrow’s provision which goes so far towards giving peace of mind and health of body. Finally, like other persons who spend more than they receive, he becomes bankrupt; that is to say, he either dies several years earlier than the average of men who are better paid, or he sinks into the invalid condition of the pauper. “Labour,” says Mr Schoenhof, “is an expenditure of vital force. Unless this is replaced by wholesome nutrition (air, light, sanitation and even cheerful surroundings are part of wholesome nutrition) the frame will work itself out and the labour will become economically of smaller and smaller value.”[67]

The cost, then, of labour as a commodity is the cost of the worker’s existence, a cost paid by the worker not in money, but in exhaustion, in hunger, in actual flesh and blood. This is the point in which labour differs from every other commodity, and the reason for which it should not be treated in the same way as other commodities.

In regard to all commodities, the tendency of free competition is, as we all know, to bring down the selling price to a figure very little above the cost of production; and in regard to all commodities other than labour, it is easy enough to see that this result is advantageous to the buyer. It is less easy to see, but is probably no less true that, in the long run, it is advantageous also to the seller, and that every hindrance to free competition in goods tends to diminish the volume of production and consequently that of human enjoyment.

But when we come to consider that exceptional commodity, labour, we find a different result ensuing from free competition; we find the inevitable consequences to be impoverishment of the seller, deterioration of the product and increase of human misery. The underpaid worker is not only inevitably wretched and inevitably unhealthy; he is also a danger and a burden to the country in which he lives. Since he—or more often she—receives less than a living wage for his work, and since he continues to live, it is obvious that some one else is in part supporting him.

I can never forget the impression made upon me in the first factory which I ever visited by a little scene of which I was a silent witness. The head of the firm had shown us over various departments, and incidentally had talked of how some of his children had just gone to the other side of the world in a yacht. He was himself a man beginning to be elderly, well grown, well groomed, fresh coloured, speaking with an educated accent and presenting that air of prosperous content which is common with elderly business men who are making money. He presently took us into a department where very young and very poor-looking little girls were employed; and one of our party shyly asked what were their wages. “Four shillings a week,” was the answer. The first speaker, himself an employer who pays high wages by choice, said deprecatingly: “But—surely—they can’t live on that!” “Oh, no!” returned their employer, cheerfully. “They live at home with their parents.” And I, new, then, to the facts of commercial life, stood staring, silent, at this well fed gentleman, with sons and daughters of his own, who frankly confessed that poor men’s daughters had to be supported by their parents in order that he might have their work for less than it cost. He seemed to me to be owning himself a thief. And that, indeed, was exactly what he was—although, strangely enough, he failed to perceive the fact. He was committing a daily robbery upon persons too weak to withstand his demands. His being, however, a variety of robbery not recognised by the laws, he pursued his course not only unremorseful and unpunished, but with great profit, and died, leaving behind him a large fortune which only a small minority of his fellow countrymen consider to have been disgracefully acquired. Yet his course was attended with much more suffering to other people than that of any highwayman. It was akin rather to that of the mediæval baron who by force of arms extracted a reluctant toll from all his poorer neighbours. The girls submitted to the extortion because it is even worse to starve than to be robbed, and because they lacked the combination that might have enabled them to resist both robbery and starvation.

The individual worker whose skill is but the dexterity born of constant practice—the worker, that is to say, who has no sort of monopoly—is no more able to regulate the payment of his services than an apple or a sack is able to regulate its market price. Nor, at a certain stage of the downward course, is any individual employer able to regulate it. It is, for instance, probable enough that at the present moment not the Brothers Cheeryble themselves could sell safety pins at a profit if they paid a living wage to the women who “cap” them.[68]

For, in the long run, the process of competition generally succeeds in filching from the employer that unfair profit which he had originally filched from the worker. It is now the public at large which, by paying for safety pins a fraction less than they really cost, pockets the balance of the worker’s living wage. For the manufacturer who desires to pay his workers better there are now two courses open; he must either, if he can, find out some improved method, which, by diminishing his other expenses, will allow him to pay higher for labour, or must combine with his fellow manufacturers to raise the selling price. In practice, he generally does neither of these things, but continues to take advantage of his workers and to say—not without some show of justification—that he cannot help it, and that they would be worse off if he gave up business. The public at large, meanwhile, though it automatically pockets the unfair profits, does not, in the long run, gain by the transaction. For the underpaid worker who fails to be wholly supported by the proceeds of his own labour is inevitably supported in part out of the pocket of some other person or persons. Moreover, both the health and the work of the underpaid worker presently deteriorates. He contributes less than he might and ought to the general wealth, and, by and by, when his health fails sufficiently, he becomes a charge upon the public. Finally, he dies before his natural time, so that his country fails to receive the full natural return for those costly and unproductive years of childhood during which he was supported. Furthermore, his working life is one of continued hardship, fatigue and suffering. His existence is not an addition to, but a deduction from, the total general happiness, the rather that underpayment is a burden not only to its victim but also to the onlooker. No person of ordinary sensibilities can fail to be depressed by the knowledge that large numbers of his fellow citizens are struggling, to their physical, moral and mental detriment, in hopeless poverty. Yet this state of things arises inevitably if labour is left, like any other commodity, at the mercy of unrestricted competition.

This difference in kind, between labour and other commodities, is the justification of trade unionism, and the explanation of how it is that a man can logically be at the same time a free trader and a trade unionist. Except the trade unionists and the professed socialists, however, no great body of persons seems to have perceived this peculiarity of labour; and while underpayment is very generally deplored, the various efforts of the benevolent are mostly directed either towards supplementing inadequate wages or towards transferring the underpaid to other branches of work, rather than towards securing better payment for the work at present done. In the eyes of the average Briton, the settling of wages by free competition appears, for some unexplained reason, as a sacred and permanent principle. Perhaps, if this attitude could be exhaustively analysed, we should find at its root a vague respect for “the laws of political economy,” which respect is, in the last resort, but the result of a confusion of mind about two aspects of the word “law.” Laws in the moral world are, of course, different from laws in the scientific world. The moral (or social) law is a command; the scientific law merely a statement of effects. This we see, plainly enough, when the effects are material and immediate. We do not dream of regarding the law that fire burns as a command to put our fingers in the flame. But when we come to consider the results of wide-spread human action, we seem to ourselves to be in the region rather of morals than of science, and without clearly realising our attitude, we begin, many of us, to regard the laws that govern these matters rather as precepts to be obeyed than as sequences to be avoided. The law that free competition in labour leads to starvation wages is a law of the same kind as the law that a dose of prussic acid leads to death; and the conclusion to be drawn in each case is that if we wish to avoid the result we must avoid the cause. Persons who are not desirous of committing suicide must abstain from prussic acid; persons who desire to see underpayment vanish must resist free competition in labour.

If the nature of labour were as generally apprehended as is the nature of prussic acid, the laws of our country (which are laws of the other kind—laws of command) would gradually be so altered as to prevent and punish that kind of robbery which was practised, for years, by that prosperous gentleman who, year after year, paid girls for their work at a trifle under a penny an hour, and died thereafter wealthy and highly respected. It is more than conceivable that persons now living may survive to a day in which wealth so accumulated will be held as discreditable as wealth accumulated by slave trading, and when the stealing of labour will be held no less criminal than the stealing of cash. The foundation upon which any such reform must rest will be the recognition that labour is a commodity differing in its nature from every other commodity; and that while there is, intrinsically, no such thing as a fair price, there is, intrinsically, and in every case, such a thing as a fair wage.

PART II THE MINIMUM WAGE