III. Abolition of the Wages System
In this study of the wages system we are not concerned with some imaginary system which does not, has never, and is not likely to exist. Nor shall we discuss what would be the effect of the wages system if it were entirely different. We are content with the scientific method of observing what exists and from careful observation forming our generations. This is economics, not metaphysics, and economics ought to be objective. Primitive men seeing lightning and hearing thunder imagined them to be the signs of an angry god. The growth of scientific knowledge dispelled this view and enabled man to control this force.
We do not seek to explain economic manifestations by referring to good or bad employers or good or bad governments. We seek nothing less than the abolition of the wages system, for it is the system which is wrong. Without a knowledge of social economy we are as the savage facing natural forces. With knowledge of the subject we can control our social course.
What Is Wages?
We live in a commodity society where everything is made for sale. In other societies this was not the case. Savages and barbarians gathered or grew food for their own use and not for sale; built houses to shelter themselves and not to rent. Truly medieval society produced most things for consumption in the immediate locality, and even household, and sold only the surplus.
Capitalist society, however, produces everything for a market. The coal-owner is interested in the production of coal, not for his own hearth, but to put upon the market. The mill initiates the manufacture of cloth not, like those of old, because he needs a coat, but to sell the produce on the market. Everything is capitalism is for sale. Books and beer, coal and cosmetics, horses and haberdashery. And not only manufactured goods, but every human relationship is offered for sale—politicians and patriots, love and friendship, art and science, and (see Major Barbara) even the soul’s salvation.
Thrust, at an unripe age, into this World market, the worker, the proletarian, the man without property, finds he can live only by selling and buying. But what has he to sell? Without patrimony, having no goods and lacking access to natural resources, he must sell the only thing left to him, his labor power, his ability to work. He sells his time, portions of his life. That part of his life which he hires to his employer, eight, nine or ten hours a day, is not his, he has sold that part of his life. And the price of this labor commodity is called wages.
How Are Wages Governed?
If we consider how the price of a commodity is arrived at we shall understand the nature of the wages system. In a free market the final factors in fixing prices are supply and demand. Of course there are substantial economic reasons for the existence of any supply or demand, but for the purpose of this article we shall be content to consider the final factors. We all know if a certain commodity is scarce and the demand is great the price tends to rise sharply. If there is a glut of another commodity and a small demand (as herrings in the height of the season) the price will fall, if the free market exists.
Wages too, are so regulated in a free labor market. If labor is relatively scarce and jobs are plentiful, wages rise; but when depression comes and jobs are scarce and millions of unemployed seek jobs, then wages fall. The same principle applies to particular industries and jobs. A certain industry, as engineering in the twenties of this century, may have more workers than jobs; then wages fall in that industry. Another industry, as the building trade in the twenties, may have almost more jobs than workers; there, wages will, compared with other industries, rise.
The Vanishing Craftsmen
Another example we shall take is that of the craftsman. Before the war of 1914—18 craftsmen received wages about double that of laborers (Provincial engineering craftsmen 37 to 39 shillings per week; their laborers 18 shillings per week). Now some persons believed the employer paid the craftsman double the laborer’s wage because he admired his skill. Some even believed that he did it just to make the workers jealous of one another. The truth is that the employer could not hire men at less than the market price of 37 shillings per week. And if he paid more than he needed to he would soon cease to be a capitalist. A worker does not pay 10 shillings for an article whose market value is 5 shillings nor can he hope to obtain it for 2 shillings and 6 pence. Likewise the capitalist does not attempt to put himself out of business by defying the principles of economics.
The truth of the foregoing is testified to by economic tendencies during and after the last war. Engineering employers successfully sought to lessen the demand for craftsmen by creating semi-skilled and unskilled jobs through the further subdivision of labor, by developing the use of machinery and the use of war-time dilutees, and breaking down the old time apprenticeship custom.
At the same time the wages of many unskilled workers were creeping comparatively upwards by the slackening of the supply of cheap unskilled labor much of which had come from oversees, as Irish labor in the chemical and constructional industries and Polish labor in the Scottish mines and jute mills. Further, certain sections of unskilled labor combined to limit the supply of labor to their job, as the dockers. So the tendency of economic development has been to greatly lessen the 100% gap between skilled and unskilled labor. I have known highly skilled craftsmen who threw up their engineering jobs at 1 shilling and 2 ½ pence per hour to take employment as dockers at 1 shilling and 6 pence per hour. The development of the wages system has almost completely destroyed the craftsman myth.
Let us here generalize our views of the wages system by declaring that in a free market wages rise and fall with supply and demand. The worker may by strike action increase the one or lessen the other, but he cannot change the general tendency. During trade depressions the Employing Class allows the free labor market to operate, but during great labor booms, as in the present war, they seek to close the free market by the use of such measures as Bevin’s Essential Works Order. Thus while the worker may, once or twice in his life enjoy a boom period, the general tendency of the wages system is to push him down to subsistence level; that is, to allow him little more than sufficient to fuel himself for the performance of his master’s work and to raise more little wage slaves to replace him when he wears out.
Reforms and the Wages System
Rather than oppose the wages system reformists have proposed modifications and additions which leave the system substantially intact. The wages system mocks reforms. Let us consider a few examples of reforms which have but strengthened it. Free education has been on every Socialist reform list from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto to the latest Labour Party election program. Such free education as the State supplies has benefitted the employers, not the workers. More general elementary education has increased the supply of apprentices and shop assistants. Scholarship matriculation has produced cheap clerks and vacuum cleaner salesmen. Working Class access to university degrees has lowered the wages of thousands of technicians to that of general labor, as the Association of Scientific Workers so often testifies.
Pensions are another good old stand-by of the reform merchants. Some years ago the granting of 10 shillings per week pensions to State-insured men over 65 years of age was hailed as a great step to the millennium. But the worker of 65 could not live on 10 shillings a week, he must continue work and many employers quickly reduced the wages of such men by 10 shillings per week. It was useless to try to disguise one’s age for the State issued special insurance cards to the 65’s and over. The 10 shilling pension went to the employer, not to the worker. It was the same in the case of war pensions. From the end of the last war to the beginning of the present armament boom, one might read any Labour Exchange advertisements of jobs which ended “For disabled ex-service-men only” or “Only men with disability pensions need apply.” It was not gratitude to the men who fought which led certain employers to insert such clauses in their wants. A glance at the wages offered soon convinced us that only a man with a pension could hope to live on such work. The employer was the true recipient of the ex-soldier’s pension. We all know cases of ex-policemen retiring on pensions and sharply competing for the jobs of public house managers and nightwatchmen.
One further example of the negation of reforms by the operation of the wages system. There have been many attempts to raise or pay wages by Acts of Parliament and trade Boards, but the solid fact remains that in the trade and industries affected wages fall during depression as they do in uncontrolled industries. To prove this one could produce enough statistics to fill a hay wain.
The Machine and Wages
Not only reforms but other doubtful forms of progress fail to benefit the wage worker. New machinery, which by increasing production, ought to enrich the worker and lighten his toil serves only to enslave and impoverish him. Let us imagine the case of a factory owner who employs 100 men working on 100 machines. New machines which can produce twice as much are introduced so that 50 men may do the work previously performed by 100. In a saner society the 100 would cut their working hours by half or increase their income by 100%. Not so in this case. 50 workers are sacked and swell the ranks of the unemployed. The remaining 50 dare not demand a share of the increased productivity because of the threatened competition of the 50 unemployed. Indeed it often happens that the retained machinists are faced by a wages cut.
It is not obvious that there is no hope of any substantial or permanent improvement of workers’ conditions so long as the wages system exists?
Wages in the Fifteenth Century
Lest some of our readers are yet unconvinced, let us examine the progress of the wages system over the greater length of existence. Bourgeois economists usually point to the period of 100 to 150 years ago and contrast it against to-day, crying, “Look at the wonderful progress we have made.” They attempt to conceal the fact that at that period labor had sunk to its lowest economic level of more than 1,000 years. During the period in question modern British capitalism was getting into its full stride and in order to attain speedy supremacy reduced the workers and peasants to almost unbelievable depths. To get a true comparison of the progress of the wages system we must examine a longer period. Let us look back 500 years.
Professor Thorold Rogers, M.P. in the best standard work on the subject Six centuries of Work and Wages in illustrating the wages of the mid-fifteenth century takes as example a recorded building job at Oxford 1449 to 1450. The head mason was paid 4 shillings a week and the other masons 3 shillings 4 pence a week. What could be bought with the 4 shillings or 3 shillings 4 pence then? Thorold Rogers gives a list of average prices for those years.
Wheat 5 shillings 10 pence a quarter; oatmeal, 5 shillings; beef 5 shillings 1 penny the hundredweight; mutton 4 shillings 6 pence; pork, 5 shillings; geese 4 pence each; fowls, 1 1/2 pence each; pigeons 4 pence a dozen; candles, 1 shilling 1 penny the dozen pounds; cheese, one-third of a penny a pound; butter, 1/2 penny a pound; eggs, 5 3/4 pence for 120; firewood 1 shilling 10 1/4 pence the load; shirting, 6 pence a yard; and cloth 1 shilling 5 1/4 pence; Thus, a week’s wages could purchase 112 pounds of beef, or 12 geese or 96 pounds of butter, and so on.
Rent, now the largest item in a worker’s budget, often one third of his income, was in the fifteenth and earlier centuries, about a halfpenny or less per week. The peasant for 2 shillings a year rented a cottage and very large garden; he had also a share in the common pasture; he was able to keep poultry, pigs and a cow. He had the concession of collecting loppings and wind wood from the woods.
Rogers demonstrates that the working day the was of eight hours. “The artisan who is demanding at this time an eight hours’ day in the building trades is simply striving to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.” Nor was the work very hard or wearisome, for tired or hurried men cannot produce good workmanship.
Socialism and Wages
Almost alone among the movements claiming the support of the workers, Syndicalism opposes the wages system. While Marx opposed the wages system, most of the parties calling themselves Marxist or Socialist support it. The Communist Party approves of it, and calls upon Marx to witness their orthodoxy, while in Soviet Russia the wages system has been extended, consolidated and become more extreme.
The Independent Labour Party has never advocated its abolition. On the contrary the I.L.P. at one time advocated a “Living Wage Policy” which they alternatively called “Socialism in Our Time.” The Labour Party has never looked beyond nationalization of certain industries on the Post Office model. Now, even that is modified to “public utility corporations” on the lines of the London Passenger Transport Board, their own creation.
Syndicalism fights against the existence of the wages system, against a method of distribution based upon mens’ market value and for a society based upon their needs and the infinite capacity of society to satisfy them.