LIBERTY TO WORK.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 175, 25 June 1926, Page 11

LIBERTY TO WORK.

LESSON FROM AMERICA.

“I spoke to a workman in America during last summer. He had come from England but it was not the question of higher wages that made him remain,away. When I asked what it was, he said he was a free man over there and not here/.’ writes Lord Buckmaster in the London Daily Mail. “It was the freedom to use his labour as he wished, to employ it under any conditions and to use it so as to produce the maximum result, that lie meant by liberty. It needs no vision to realise that the conditions in England and the conditions in the United States are wide apart. In the last resort there is opportunity on the land, both in the United States and in Canada, for any man of vigour and energy; and that fact, together with the multiplicity of their industries and the adaptability of labour, prevents workmen from being faced with the abyss of unemployment which in England has too often stared them in the faco. It is their dread of this catastrophe to which arc due all the influences that limit output. If _a i man lays 1000 bricks a day. he is, ; according to this view, doing the work of two men, each of whom could lav 500, and this fact obscures the greater fact that the larger the output the more work there is to do. The real lesson lies in this: that it is increased output and not lessened wages on which the prosperity of any industry depends, and thaj;, subject to all conditions being preserved that secure a man from excessive physical effort and fatigue, the more a man can possibly put out during his hours of labour the better it is for him and for all others similarly circumstanced.”