FAULT WITH BRITAIN

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 65, 14 September 1923, Page 7

FAULT WITH BRITAIN

CURE OF UNEMPLOYMENT

WAGES-A STHVIULUS TO WORK

PRODUCTION CAUSE NOT THE 1 EFFECT OF EXPANSION.

(UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION.—COPYRIGHT.)

(AUSTRALIAN . NEW ZEALAND CABLE ASSOCIATION.) (Received 14th September, 10 a.m.) LONDON, 13th September.

Mr. C. A. M'Curdy, in his second article in. the " Daily Chronicle " on unemployment, says: ■" Measured not by money, but by. the things money buys, the real wages of the American worker are probably more Mian double those of British workers. Is' this due to Pro^ tection or Prohibition? I think not. The difference existed long before the war. The official returns for 1907-9 show that the American productive capacity, man for man, was two-and-a-half times Britain's.

"The explanation is partly physiological, partly material. The American manufacturer does not believe in the doctrine of a limited market; The American worker has no use for ca'-cannv. methods. The Americans abandoned the fallacy of the restriction of output thirty years ago, just when the British worker adopted ca'-cannyism.

COMPARISON WITH AMERICA.

'■' As Lord Leverhulme recently showed, four million British workers each produced £75 to £100 worth of goods annually. In America's chief"industries the per capita production is three to five times as great.

" The result is that Ihe British worker is going shoit of half the wealth he should be, first, producing, and then consuming. American experience Bhows that efficient production is the cause, and not the effect,' of an expansion of the market. " We talk so much about the overseas market that we forget that even our present home market absorbs twothirds of our total production. If we could raise the British t 0 the American standard of living, it would double home production and consumption. "Improvement in the British home and foreign trade must commence with cheapened production, higher, wages, and a standard of living sufficient to enable the home consumer to use more goods aiid at the same time to better equip ourselves by cheaper production for more foreign trade. _ The first step must be the removal i n the workers' mind of the sense of distrust and insecurity and the feeling that improved production methods mean unemployment." ■