LABOUR UNREST

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 154, 29 June 1912, Page 16

LABOUR UNREST

TWELVE-AND-SIX A WEEK. Mr. Jerome K. Jerome novelist and humorist, author of "Three Men in a. Boat" and numerous other works, delivered a thoughtful and witty speech at the Cambridge University Liberal Club on "Labour Unrest." "There is," he said, "I am given to understand, a reprehensible spirit abroad, among the lower classes, generally alluded to as TJabour Unrest.'" Fiom Hodge in his — perhaps a little damp and dilapidated but nevertheless picturesque cottage, rearing up his brood on 12s 6d a week — I am told that in certain favoured localities it reaches to as high a figure as 18s, but in the part of the country I know 12s 6d ie much nearer to the average — from Hodge on his 12s 6d a week to the miner — tha-t plutocrat of labour — ■who, by working for eight hours a day under conditions that Dante might have imagined for an extra circle to his "Jnferno," and at ever present rick to his life, , can earn in a single month a sum equal to the average yearly subscription to a decent golf club ; from the scattered peasant in his lonely valley' to the serried army of organised workers Labour is growing restive. Labour, to put it bluntly, is becoming a perfect nuisance. l The comfortable man is being annoyed and irritated; something has got to be done. The community — and when, we speak of the "community" we mean, of course, ladies and gentlemen with incomes of £500 a year and,upwards — the community, through its chorus of able editors — convinced that human discontent originated with Lloyd George's Lhnehouse speech— demands that Labour unrest shall cease. One is irresistibly reminded of aya v somewhat similar demand addressed long ago by a certain King Canute to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. It is almost pathetic, this passion on the part of the well-to-do classes for a. golden age of security. The world is to be made a safe place — for the comfortable man ; Consols must not be allowed to fluctuate; the comfortable man's income is to be made secure. Was the poor man's income ever secure? His world »cure against unemployment? Against s'all in wages? Against rise in prices — If it is suggested, the comfortable man replies with brave talk about the law of supply and. demand, the baneful effects of State interference with the Economic Law. The wage-earner must be content to abide by the fluctuations of the labour market, but Consols— if you please— must be a fixed quantity. THE HORSE AND THE OX They tell you that if you grant the minimum wage to the one trade the time will come when you will have to grant the minimum wage to, all ; and, between ourselves — I hope it will go no further — 1 am inclined to think they are right. For 6ome workers the minimum wage has existed ' since the beginning of human industry. The human labourer in 1912 is, after all, only demanding what hao been acceded to without question in the case of the ox and the ass since prehistoric times. I never heard a farmer suggest that the price of corn per bushel being what it is, he its quite unable to give his horse more than half its proper rations. The horse has a very effective way of insisting on his minimum wage. The horse does not go out on strike, he just lies down and dies ; and the farmer finds it cheaper — whatver may be the state of the agricultural market — to accede to his demands. Practically speaking, the farm labourer does get his minimum wage. He can't live on 12s 6d a week and bring up a wife and cix children. It can't be done. Charity has to step .in and make good the difference. Where the minimum wage is not paid— the wage that .enables a man and his family to live — the charitable publk has to make good the difference. It is a good thing for the charitable public; it is good for their morals, it is good for their hope of a future reward. . But it is bad for the labourer; it turns him into a pauper, it robs him of his self-respect. It is bad for the employer; it makes him also nothing eke than a pauper, going round to the charitable public, cap in hand, whining, "Help me to pay my wages. Have pity, land gentlemen, on a poor employer of labour." It makes ihe employer also a pauper; if it doe&n't, it ought to rob him of his self-respect.