Current Topics.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1060, 23 June 1892, Page 31

Current Topics.

THE CO-OPERATIVE LABOUR SYSTEM.

The success of the co-operative system on the public works has a very much more important bearing than meets the eye at the first glance. The first glance presents the system merely as a convenient and most excellent substitute in some important respects for the system of contract. But the success of so many labourers of all sorts and conditions under the co-operative system carries much further than that. It actually touches the root of the greatest social problem of the age ; viz., the problem of how to employ the unemployed. In the great centres of the world’s population there are vast aggegations of labour either unemployed altogether, or employed fitfully and to but little purpose. One school of thinkers, a fast diminishing school in our days, virtually regards these people as criminals who, having transgressed the sacred law of supply and demand, must be condemned to death and handed over to that ruthless executioner known as the 11 survival of the fittest.” Another school, a growing one fortunately, considers them as so much valuable capital, the most valuable a nation c*n have, being a capital of brains and muscle, lying wasteful and unproductive. For the first school the problem presents no difficulties ; as these people are doomed to death by the laws of economy, and the highest authority has said that “the poor are always with us,” there is nothing more to be said or thought about the 'question by economists, who retire in favour of the thoughtless benevolent. With the second the problem is a burning question involving the bodies and souls of multitudes of human beings, a question therefore pressing for settlement.

These conceive it to be the duty of the State to discover methods of employment by which all this vast national human capital may be made both selfsupporting and productive. To them the other school makes reply that it is impossible to find reproductive employment, because the proportion of inferior labour —inferior from various causes, vice, indolence, physical incapacity—among the unemployed of the world is too great for the economical success of any possible scheme of production devised for their benefit. That argument we have just read in the Sydney Morning Herald, in an article discussing the various schemes proposed in its correspondence columns for the permanent settlement of the unemployed problem, which at the present moment so grievously distresses every right thinking person in the New South Wales capital. It was supported by the allegation that the relief works at the North Shore, then in progress, had required a subsidy from the Government in order to bring up to a living level the wages earned by the relieved. From this it was concluded that if the State were to establish farms for the unemployed, as recommended by one of the Herald's correspondents, the average of them would never be able to produce fruit, vegetables, corn, milk, butter, wine, or any other thing with profit to themselves at the ordinary prices ruling in the markets. To that the success of the work done on the co-operative works is a very good reply. The men were in no case navvies; but were labourers of various kind, many of them without any experience of the work, and some of them of not par ticularly robust physique. But after a steady spell of work it has been found that the average they have earned at the business is from seven shillings a day to over eight. The same work done by naivies under the contract system would have employed fewer men, at a higher average, paid the contractor a profit, and not cost the State a penny more. The earnings, therefore, in these cases under the cooperative system cannot be said to have been eked out with Government subsidies. A similar story of success has been told by the village settlements, some of which have been worked by people of no experience in agriculture and no capital,to great advantage,the most striking success having been obtained by a woman tenderly nurtured, quite unacquainted with hard work and farm pursuits. The value of these instances consists mainly iu their bearing on the causes of the want of employment. The Morning Herald disposes of the question of the causes by begging that question. It contends that the large number of persons unemployed proves the unfitness of most of them to earn their living by labour at all. On that hopeless basis the Herald constructs its criticisms adverse to all propositions of amendment. It is a strangely unreasonable attitude for any intelligent b. ing to occupy, but what is even more strange is that a great many people in the world occupy it, besides the newspaper in question. “Out of work, therefore unfit for work, you shall not prevail,” is the essence of their theory. “ Ready for any work, able to make any work pay, you shall never be subsidised paupers,” is the essence of the more hopeful theory, which it is satisfactory to see is supported by the experience of the systems of co-operation and village settlement in force in this Colony.