In its economic life our country has rejected the long accepted law of a
limitation of the wage fund, which led to pessimism and despair because it
was the doctrine of perpetual poverty, and has substituted for it the
American conception that the only limit to profits and wages is production,
which is the doctrine of optimism and hope because it leads to prosperity.
Here and there the councils of labor are still darkened by the theory that
only by limiting individual production can there be any assurance of
permanent employment for increasing numbers, but in general, management and
wage earner alike have become emancipated from this doom and have entered a
new era in industrial thought which has unleashed the productive capacity
of the individual worker with an increasing scale of wages and profits, the
end of which is not yet. The application of this theory accounts for our
widening distribution of wealth. No discovery ever did more to increase the
happiness and prosperity of the people.
Since 1922 increasing production has increased wages in general 12.9 per
cent, while in certain selected trades they have run as high as 34.9 per
cent and 38 per cent. Even in the boot and shoe shops the increase is over
5 per cent and in woolen mills 8.4 per cent, although these industries have
not prospered like others. As the rise in living costs in this period is
negligible, these figures represent real wage increases.
The cause of constructive economy requires that the Government should
cooperate with private interests to eliminate the waste arising from
industrial accidents. This item, with all that has been done to reduce it,
still reaches enormous proportions with great suffering to the workman and
great loss to the country.