Utilising experience gained in Australia, Parliament in 1909 passed an
Act empowering the Board of Trade (now the Ministry of Labour) to
establish a Trade Board in any case where the rate of wages prevailing
in any branch was "exceptionally low as compared with that in other
employments." The Board consisted of a number of persons selected by the
Minister as representatives of employers, an equal number as
representatives of the workers, with a chairman and generally two
colleagues not associated with the trade, and known as the Appointed
Members. These three members hold a kind of casting vote, and can in
general secure a decision if the sides disagree.
No instruction was given in the statute as to the principles on which
the Board should determine wages, but the Board has necessarily in mind
on the one side the requirements of the worker, and on the other the
economic position of the trade. The workers' representatives naturally
emphasise the one aspect and the employers the other, but the appointed
members and the Board as a whole must take account of both. They must
consider what the trade in general can afford to pay and yet continue to
prosper and to give full employment to the workers. They must also
consider the rate at which the worker can pay his way and live a decent,
civilised life. Mere subsistence is not enough. It is a cardinal point
of economic justice that a well-organised society will enable a man to
earn the means of living as a healthy, developed, civilised being by
honest and useful service to the community. I would venture to add that
in a perfectly organised society he would not be able--charitable
provision apart--to make a living by any other method. There is nothing
in these principles to close the avenues to personal initiative or to
deny a career to ability and enterprise. On the contrary, it is a point
of justice that such qualities should have their scope, but not to the
injury of others. For this, I suggest with confidence to a Liberal
audience, is the condition by which all liberty must be defined.[1]
[Footnote 1: I may perhaps be allowed to refer to my _Elements of Social
Justice_, Allen & Unwin, 1921, for the fuller elaboration of these
principles.]
If we grant that it is the duty of the Boards to aim at a decent
minimum--one which in Mr. Seebohm Rowntree's phrase would secure the
"human needs" of labour--we have still some very difficult points of
principle and of detail to settle. First and foremost, do we mean the
needs of the individual worker or of a family, and if of the latter, how
large a family? It has been generally thought that a man's wages should
suffice for a family on the ground that there ought to be no economic
compulsion--though there should be full legal and social liberty--for
the mother to eke out deficiencies in the father's payment by going out
to work. It has also been thought that a woman is not ordinarily under a
similar obligation to maintain a family, so that her "human needs" would
be met by a wage sufficient to maintain herself as an independent
individual.
These views have been attacked as involving a differentiation unfair in
the first instance to women, but in the second instance to men, because
opening a way to undercutting. The remedy proposed is public provision
for children under the industrial age, and for the mother in return for
her work in looking after them. With this subvention, it is conceived,
the rates for men or women might be equalised on the basis of a
sufficiency for the individual alone. This would certainly simplify the
wages question, but at the cost of a serious financial question. I do
not, myself, think that "human needs" can be fully met without the
common provision of certain essentials for children. One such
essential--education, has been long recognised as too costly to be put
upon the wages of the worker. We may find that we shall have to add to
the list if we are to secure to growing children all that the community
would desire for them. On the other hand, the main responsibility for
directing its own life should be left to each family, and this carries
the consequence, that the adult-man's wage should be based not on
personal but on family requirements.