THE INFLUENCE OF HIGH WAGES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3115, 26 November 1913, Page 14

THE INFLUENCE OF HIGH WAGES.

In connection with the present unfortunate industrial strife, some remarks made in The Times hy Mr W. A. Spooner will bear repeating. Mr Spooner wrote: “ There can be no doubt that up to a certain point a rise in wanes is beneficial to everyone employed and employer alike benefit by it. The workman who is well fed, well housed, and hopeful, works better and faster and more efficiently than one who is starved, ill-housed, and hopeless and discontented. But if wages are increased beyond this point—beyond, that is, the point of greatest economic efficiency for the workman—one of two results must inevitably follow. Either the cost of production will be kept down by the substitution in some part of the process of production of machinery for the manual labourer, or the cost o'f production, and with it the price of the articles will rise. If, again, a workman is not allowed to do his best, to exert his powers to the full, then again he is rendered economically inefficient, and one or other of the results above indicated will surely take place. But the policy of the trade unions has tended in recent years in both of these directions. They have attempted to maintain in certain favoured trades wages at an artificially higher level, and they have also endeavoured, generally in these same trades, artificially to limit the output oi the individual labourer. Can we wonder that in some of these trades machinery has largely taken the place of manual labour, and that in others the cost of production, and so the price of the articles produced has been enhanced? And the trades in which this policy has been most successfully pursued have been unfortunately trades in which the working classes as consumers are most directly interested. To mention only three, coal, building, and transport are all of them businesses in which any rise of prices tells most directly on the cost of living for the working classes, for the cost of fuel, rent, and food ail depend directly upon them. It cannot, therefore, but be disastrous to the whole labouring population that these should have been the special businesses selected in which the experiment, of increasing wages by a more or loss general strike should have been tried. We see the unhappy results in higher priced coal, increased rents, and dearer food.’-' It is merely an incident that the small-fruit season is rapidly approaching, and that no sugar is available for jam-making, preserves, etc. These, along with all other imported food products, will be put up in price for 12 months at least. The work overtaken by those who have replaced the strikers at the waterfront in Wellington makes it abundantly clear that, despite high wages, the ‘service given in return was quits inadequate, and must have had considerable influence on the high cost of living in the capita] city.