Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1929. ONE'S RIGHT TO FIX ONE'S SALARY

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 120, 16 November 1929, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1929. ONE'S RIGHT TO FIX ONE'S SALARY

- A refusal by the new Railway Commissioner of New South Wales, Mr. Cleary, to accept more than the salary of his predecessor, Mr. Fraser, has been commented upon in the Press as,far.away as London. There might be various reasons why a man should prefer to work for £5000" a year rather than for £7500 a year— for instance, 'he might consider fives lucky and sevens unlucky—but in this case it appears that Mr. Cleary has no. superstitious objection; he merely sees no cause why he should be pai3 more than Mr. Fraser. It is much the same job as Mr. Fraser's, and Mr. Cleary rejects the implication that the importance of the new holder should compare with the importance of the old holder in the ratio of H to 5 (expressed in thousands) . There seems to be no suggestion whatever that the new railways chief regards money as the root of all evil, and that therefore "of two evils one should choose the less." If that had been his line of thought, its novelty might have aroused an even more widespread interest in his action v Not that there is anything novel in the concept that money is the root of evil.- It is, however, notorious that even those who would not contest that moralisation jn theory are yet prone, in practice, to choose not the, lesser evil but the greater. For *a present and living example one need not look further than the New Zealand House of Representatives, which added £7000 to its collective salary just as Mr. Cleary was deducting £2500 from his. It would not need much ingenuity to find altruistic reasons for both processes, opposite though they/ may appear. For instance, if one argues from the standpoint not of deserts nor of values, but of personal needs, it is easy to sKow that a legislator at about five hundred pounds is worse ott than a railways manager at about five thousand pounds. And that conclusion would not lie affected by the fact that the railwayman had written down'his own salary by~33 per cent, A legislator might come to the conclusion that it is demoralr ising to the electors to allow their parliamentary corps to continue to be sweated by the payment of about as many hundreds as the railwayman receives in thousands. Having reached that point in the argument, it might be easy to go a step farther and invest with- a moral aura the transaction that put an Wd to such a degrading state of public affairs by scaling up. each member's salary tt.'- '" Unfortunately> the morality of this Parliamentary surprise packet is undermined by the circumstance that the real giver of the £7000 did not know about it; and it is no answer to say that Mr. Cleary likewise acted without his employer's knowledge, for there is a slight difference between the two transactions —the difference between giving and receiving. Wilfulness. in the revision of one's own salary is pardonable when the revision is downwards; otherwise, one's motives are sure to be questioned, and one must enter into that mixed category which lorn Bracken envisioned when he wrote "Not Understood." Members of the New Zealand Parliament have suffered even worse, for all over the country many sharp judgments are being passed thaf. suggest that—at any rate in the opinion of the judges —the Parliamentarians are understood only too well. There may be something Pharisaical in these reflectipna passed by the man in the street on the politicians' self-ap-P™sement. But they themselves should hardly be surprised at the reaction, especially in the light of contrast with such a unique act of personal self-denial as the rendering back_unto Caesar by a State servant oi 2500 pieces of gold per annum. 10 approach the subject from the standpoint of personal need is, however, only to touch the fringe of it. kven if agreement could be secured as to a minimum Jiving wage for workers, for members of Parliament, for film actresses, and for other leaders of civilisation, the problem of the propriety pf the higher salaries would remain. It may be argued that the Parliamentarian's five hundred pounds is on the bread line, because the meaning of bread has long ago been extended to include motor-cars; but few people would see any connection between the bread line and Mr. Cleary's partly.rejected £7500 a year. This sentence is written with a knowledge of the report that Lord Birkenhead estimates his cost of living at £20,000 a year, and that he left the sweated ranks of £5000,a-year Cabinet Ministers in order to earn something like £15,000 a yea.r on a newspaper. But that report influences us no more than it could have influenced Mr. Cleary. A cost of living of £20,000 a year, though Aye have had absolutely no experience of it, we consider to be too exceptional to weigh in this consideration. As to the remuneration paid on newspapers, we stand on very much better known ground, and further comment on Lord Bjrkenhead's reported £15,000 a year is therefore needless, Putting his Lordship's

peculiar case on one side, the. absence ! of any recognised code concerning the height of salaries—or the height of profits—has to be admitted. Is it therefore possible to" deterriiine what is proper or improper where no practical standard exists? % _ We can discern no guiding principle except this —that there, is an undoubted right in the individual to lower his own salary ad lib., but that no man ipso facto may raise his own salary —unless he happens to be a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. Sociologically, the big salary question is a blind alley. To make the salary fit the work is as difficult as to make the punishment fit the crime. A Howard League for the toleration of big salaries could make out a very plausible "case, and the Howard League itself might as well, in its propaganda, include the big salary taker with its other pet criminals. The League might possibly point out to the small-salaried man that conditions and atmosphere (although a family cannot live on it) may in certain circumstances count for even more than pay, and that a worker's real reward is not what he receives in his pay envelope, etc. Of course, a propaganda like that would be bound to-meet with the bitter and determined opposition of the Employers' Federation. Any attempt to reason, on the lines of cause and effect, from individual salaries to collective results, is doomed to failure because, of the complexity of. naodern business^ Every employee in a big industrial undertaking knows who really does the work, but no two of them agree. Amid this Babel, big employers will pay big when and where and whom it suits them, and to the extent that it suits them, and the selection will often seem, except to the selected, to be capri- j cious and unjustifiable. But where the public selects the large-salaried person, as appears to be the case at Hollywood, the result is often still more capricious, if not absurd. Employers do bid high.for personality, but not for face powder-— at any rate, not in their businesses. To sum iip, there is no remedy for the salary trouble, unless 'everyone can fix his own salary, and the lead , given •in the dying hours of the Parliamentary session has somehow failed to arouse, outside the walls of Parliament, one solitary cheer. It is no whatever to the social problems that legislators are athirst to solve. It is the sort of charity that begins at home, and ends there.