INDUSTRIAL WORLD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21360, 13 June 1931, Page 20

INDUSTRIAL WORLD

•NEWS AND NOTES By J. T. Paul. •' Dr Keynes has been saying that very soon machinery will reduce the working hours of man to three or four per diem. What on earth are people going to do with that enormous amount of leisure? If people spend it as they are mostly doing now society would go to the devil in a decade. We are unfitted for such a state of things. Neither Nature nor education has prepared us for it. —Dr P. L. Jacks. PURCHASING POWER. . “ Standards of living are f determined, not by the number of dollars' per hour or per day a man is paic( for working, but by what he can buy with the total number of dollars he receives,” says the National City Bank of New York in discussing the question of maintaining buying power. That depends, it remarks, upon preservation of the balance between the different groups* of producers and consumers. “If the price of labour or any other item entering into the cost of manufactured goods is too high in terms of what large groups of consumers such as farmers and producers of raw materials can pay, the mechanism of exchange is thrown out of gear, production slows down, people are thrown out of work, and purchasing ability everywhere is curtailed. . . . Perhaps the simplest statement, of buying power is that it is the product of hourly wage rates multiplied by hours of employment, divided by prices of the things bought. The desirable high quotient must be sought through equitable adjustment of all three elements. It is as necessary to keep the man at work and to sell him goods cheaply as it is to pay him a high nominal wage scale.” WAGE REDUCTIONS IN AMERICA. Recent reports from the United States describe notable progress in the reduction of costs of production and selling prices through lower prices of raw materials, economies in organisation, increases in productive efficiency, and salary and wage reductions. Last year the largest number of wage reductions reported by the Department of Labour was 133 in August; this year there were 335 in January, 228 in February, and 175 in March, “Wagecutting has been considerably more widespread than has generally been realised,” says a recent issue of a trade journal, the Business Week. Basing its calculations on statistics supplied to the Department of Labour by 13,000 firms, employing 30 per cent, of the manufacturing workers, the paper estimates that about 1,000,000 employees in this section of industry have suffered wage reductions averaging 10 per cent, in the past 18 months. Farm labour wages have dropped 26 per cent., and the pay of many miners, builders, and “ white collar ” employees is known also to have been reduced appreciably. Over the whole field of industrial labour, the paper estimates, average earnings have been reduced through unemployment, part-time and wage cute by approximately 20 per cent., while the cost of living has declined only 13 per cent. As an illustration of the axiom that hard times produce hard work, another authority states that in the latter part of 1929 bricklayers in the metropolitan district of New York were receiving 1 dollar 87£ cents an hour, and laying an average of 250 to 300 face bricks or 7(}o common bricks daily. Now they are receiving 1 dollar 92J cents an hour,-but laying 400 to 500 face bricks and _ 1200 to 1400 common bricks daily, an increase of approximately 80 per cent, in efficiency. DIVIDED LABOUR. An open declaration of war against Federal Labour throughout Australia has been declared by the Lang gang of Labour disrupters in New South Wales (says the Worker). >• In a statement made last week Mr J’. C. Eldridge, the most garrulous of the Lang group in the Federal House, said that candidates supporting the Lang plan would contest seats iii every State at the next Federal elections. In Victoria, Eldridge says, a special campaign would be conducted against the Prime Minister (Mr J. H. Sculliu) in Yarra, the Attorney-genera! (Mr F. Brennan) in Batman, and the Assistant Minister for Industry (Mr E. J. Holloway) who holds Flinders, but may contest Melbourne Ports, i The spearhead of the attack in New South Wales will be against the Treasurer (Mr E. G. Theodore) in Dailey, but other Ministers’ seats as well as those of several Labour rank and file members will be contested. In South Australia it is intended to launch an intensive campaign against Mr N. J.» Makin in Hindmarsh, Mr A. W. Lacey in Grey, and Mr G. B. Yates in Adelaide, as well as against the two Labour rats —Mr Gabb in Angas and Mr Price in Boothby. In Queensland (concludes the Worker) Lang candidates will contest every Federal Queensland seat now held by Labour. WAGES AND ENDOWMENT. By its recent decision the Queensland State Industrial Court has registered its third reduction of the basic wage within 10 months. The new basic wage, to come into operation on July 1, is £3 14s per week for adult males, and £1 19s for adult females, the reductions being from £3 17s and £1 19s 6d (3s and 6d) respectively. The members of the court all differed in their views. The president (Judge Webb) favoured a reduction of 5s for adult males and 2s for adult females. Commissioner Fdrry was opposed to any reduction whatsoever. Acting Commissioner Wallace’s decision was for reducing the rates by 3s for adult males and 6d for adult females, and this became the judgment of the court. The basic wage, fixed by statute, was originally £4 5s per week (adult females £2 lir Justice Webb Stated that a reduction to £3 12s a week for adult males and £1 17s 6d for adult females, with proportionate reductions in other rates, was nothing more than a cost of living reduction, such as would be made in normal times, following a fall in the cost of living, and in the absence of any increase in the capacity of industry to pay the existing rates. It was not a reduction due to the prevailing depression. In this respect it differed from that recently made by the Federal Court. That was a reduction by 10 per cent, of the bare living wage, known as the Harvester rate, plus the Powers 3s. The Federal basic wage for Brisbane (without the 10 per cent, reduction) was now £3 -7e 6d.

“ However, I regret that it again becomes necessary to reduce wages,” said the judge. “ A reduction of wages strikes hardest the most deserving section of the community—the people of the poorer classes who have many dependent children, and who endeavour to take proper care of those children. It is not too much to claim that such families provide us with most of our best citizens. Already these good people—and there are thousands of them in this community—do not receive enough wages to meet their actual needs and for them even a small reduction is little short of a tragedy. “ This is not the fault of the court or the employers. It is the result of the law which requires that the young man of 21 without a soul in the world depending upon him for support shall get a wage not less than sufficient for a man, wife, and three children, and which fails to make any extra provision for the man who has a wife and more than three children. "This law decrees the declaration of a wage based on needs, and then proceeds to disregard needs in its direction as to who shall receive that wage. In this way it prevents the wages fund from being distributed so as to meet actual needs. It is probable that the present wages fund, if applied according to actual needs, would provide for all wage-earners and their dependents the high standard of living proposed by the 1920 Basic Wage Commission presided over by Mr A. B. Piddington, K.C. (now Mr Justice Piddington), and still leave a large surplus for the expansion of industry and the consequent absorption of the unemployed. “The single man without dependents may claim that he works just as hard, and that he is quite as efficient as the married man, and so should receive the same wage. But the fact is that his basic wage is fixed not in relation to what he earns, but by requirements which in his case are wholly fictional. “ I have referred to the single men without dependents. There arc, of course, many single men and women with dependents, such as younger brothers and sisters, and others for whom no provision is made by way of invalid or old age pensions. It would be, necessary, in order to do com-

plete justice, that provision should be made for these dependents of unmarried people. “ The remedy for this state of affairs may be found in child endowment, but Parliament alone can bring that about, and the difficulty in Parliament’s way will be understood when it is realised that the great majority, perhaps twothirds. of the persons who vote at State and Federal elections are single or childless. These persons may fear that the money for any such scheme must come out of wages. There is a considerable body of opinion that taxation, both existing and in prospect, renders it impossible to impose this burden on employers who, even now in many cases, are unable to carry on without rationing. “ That, however, is a political question upon which I must not be taken as indicating any view. But if the money for child endowment must come out of wages the shoulders of the single man without dependents should take the weight of this measure of social justice. The weight would not necessarily be heavy. “A reduction of tne basic wage by Is would be sufficient to provide quite a reasonable endowment. In New South Wales the endowment of 5s per week per child (limited* to two-children) adds to the weekly wage bill at the rate of only Is per worker. “ A reduction of the wage of the single man without dependents to £3 10s would enable provision to be made for an endowment on a liberal scale for all actual dependents. whilst still leaving the single man with a basic wage above the high standard of 1921. “ But whatever may be the difficulties in the way, they can be overcome. Mr Lang and Mr Bavin were able to agree to have a child endowment scheme in New South Wales, where it appears to have come to stay. “This is not the first time that the court has expressed the opinion that child endowment should be tried.”