DIVISION OF WEALTH

Northern Advocate, 17 December 1919, Page 6

DIVISION OF WEALTH

SUBJECT LOOMING LARGE

AUTHORITIES QUOTED,

The question of a move equable distribution of the wealth produced by labour, is, says "Engineering," one bulks largely in nearly all programmes of industrial reconstruction. Briefly, the object of the claim as stated by Mr Sidney Webb is the recovery by the people of what John Stuart Mill calls "The enormous share which the possessors of industry are able to take of the total produce." As indicative of the amount of this share, so far as shipbuilding and engineering are concerned, the results of the investigation by two different authorities may be quoted. The first, a well-known Clyde shipmiilder, taking a statement of the dividends paid by 12 shipbuilding firms during the 13 years previous to the war, found that the average dividend of each firm varied from 12 to about 1J per cent., and the average of the whole number for 13 years is almost exactly 5 per cent. Dealing with the question of the share which the workmen should have, Mr Gerald Storey, in

a presidential address to Section E of the British Association, stated that the average capital expenditure in an engineering works per individual employed was before the war about £200.

This figure was confirmed by an investigation of shipbuilding yards, which gives £185, and by the Census of Production, which gives £214 per man. An analysis of the dividends paid shows them to be about 4 per cent, on the capital employed. "It means," Mr Story says, "that the shareholders get about £8 per year per individual employed; on the other hand, the average wages for men and boys skilled and unskilled, is about £70 per annum in normal times. This means that the worker gets between eight and nine times as much as the capitalist."

Mr J. R. Richmond, in his presidential address to the Glasgow University Engineering Society, considered this from another point of view; the total dividend of a large representative wellknown shipbuilding, engineering, and steel company for 1913-14, if divided amongst the employees, would give each as his share £3 6s 4d, or about ls 3d per week. Taking 1914-15 dividend, naturally a somewhat abnormal one, the same distribution would give each employee £4 2s lid, or ls 7d per week. All arc familiar with the revolution which has been wrought in engineering by the introduction of the Parsons turbines, and the sequence of developments which have followed. How much of the wealth produced by that invention should be allocated to labour, and how much to the inventor? If the royalties paid to the inventor were contrasted with the wages bill on turbine construction the proportion would be found to be a surprisingly small one, and the lion's share would be with the workers, tho steel founder, the machine tool maker, the turner, the fitter, and the erector. The older economists postulated the factors necessary for the production of wealth as land, labour and capital, but there is a fourth, which we may call ability or brains, the exercise of which is certainly a form of labour, but which is entirely distinct from the general acceptation of the term. "Labour in the general sense,'' to quote Mallock, "is a kind of exertion on the part of an individual which begins and ends with each separate task it is employed upon; but ability is a kind of exertion on the part of an individual which is capable of affecting simultaneously the labour of an indefinite number of individuals and thus hastening or perfecting the accomplishment of an indefinite number of tasks.'' So far we have not seen any attempt by those who clamour for a greater share of the wealth produced by industry to furnish any logical allocation of the amount of the share or even to place a limit on the amount which labour shoul-d take.