The Manawatu Daily Times Technocracy in Britain

Manawatu Times, Volume LIX, Issue 7493, 18 June 1934, Page 6

The Manawatu Daily Times Technocracy in Britain

Lord Trent, the chairman of the largest iirm of retail chemists in Great Britain, has announced that, having ieeonstructed their factories and installed up-to-date machinery, they propose to reduce working time to live days a week, without reducing pay. For the retail assistants in their chain of shops throughout the country they will provide extra holidays on full salary. The experiment represents an attempt to make increased use of the machine as an ally of the worker instead of as an enemy. .It is a method applicable to a time of depression, or at least one when markets are not rapidly expanding. Unlike the method commonly associated with the name of Henry Ford, which by improvement of machinery makes high wages possible, but depends upon a constantly expanding market, the experiment of Lord Trent’s iirm turns the labour-saving into shorter hours instead of reduced numbers of workers. Thus the saving effected by the machine may be applied to paying full wages for the shorter working week rather than cut prices for the products. If all goes according to plan, the economy effected by the machine will be used directly for. the advantage of the industrial worker. The possible snag lies in the fact that less enlightened firms may refuse to adopt the same methods. They may use mechanical advantages, not to improve the position of their employees but to undersell competitors. So the less enlightened may force the-hand of the more enlightened, with the result that we may be back where we were before in the old chaos, with consuming power lagging behind productive power. The remedy lies either in good will leading to agreement, or in some measure of compulsion. Lord Trent suggests that payment for holidays should be made compulsory in the case of all shop assistants in the retail trade; and legislation on these lines would not be contrary to tradition in Great Britain, where so many Acts have been passed restricting hours of labour, regulating hours of opening for shops, and modifying conditions in factories. It is possible—and a Bill now before Parliament dealing with the cotton trade is an example—to pass a law under 'which a minority of industrialists will be compelled to conform to an agreement arrived at by a majority of their representatives. Meanwhile it is at least a great step forward that leaders in industry should be recognising that the profits arising from the machine should not be ruthlessly abstracted from the industry—a procedure which, if generally adopted, leads to ruin —but that the economy should go to the benefit both of the productive workers and those engaged in distribution. Using improved methods for the betterment of the workers concerned seems to be the object on which industrialists to-day should be persuaded to concentrate. It is one of the means by which consuming power can be maintained and the paradox of want in the midst of plenty avoided.