§1.Leisure, regarded as an economic good, comes under the general law of distribution of wealth.But the notorious defects of its distribution, and their human consequences, are such as to claim for it a separate place in our enquiry.Modern industrialism by its large unearned surplus has greatly increased the size of the leisure classes.For wherever such surplus goes, there is the possibility and probability of a life of leisure.In our study of Consumption we traced the part played by conspicuous leisure as an element of pride and power in the economy of the rich.In Great Britain the size of this leisure class is by no means measured by the number of those who stand in the census as 'unoccupied.' In the top stratum of the business world we find considerable numbers of the directing and managerial class who are seldom or ever 'busy.' Their office hours are short and irregular, their week-ends extend from Friday to Tuesday, their holidays are long and frequent.
Most of their leisure is accompanied by profuse consumption, involving thus from the standpoint of society a double waste, a waste of time and of substance.Where does all this leisure come from? The answer to this question seems tolerably simple.It has often been observed that labour-saving machinery and other devices for abridging human toil have done very little to lighten or shorten the work-day for the workers.What then has become of the labour that is saved? Most of it has gone to enlarge the leisure of the leisured class, or perhaps we should say, of the leisured classes.
For we saw that there existed a lower as well as an upper leisure class, a necessary product of the same mal-distribution of resources as sustains the latter.For an industrial system that grinds out unproductive surplus breaks down the physical and moral efficiency of large numbers of actual or potential workers as a by-product of the overdriving and underfeeding process.The reckless breeding of the class thus broken down furnishes a horde of weaklings, shirkers and nomads, unassimilated, unassimilable by the industrial system.These beings, kept alive by charity and poor-laws, have grown with modern industrialism and constitute the class known as 'unemployables.' They are often described as a 'standing menace to civilisation,'
and are in fact the most pitiable product of the mal-distribution of wealth.
§2.But the irregularities of modern production and consumption are also responsible for a vast amount of involuntary and injurious leisure among the genuine working-classes.That leisure is commonly termed 'unemployment.'
it is not true leisure, in the sense of time for recreation or enjoyment, though it might become so.For the most part it is at present wasteful and demoralising idleness.
A certain amount of unemployment is of course unavoidable in any organisation of industry.There will be some leakage of time between jobs and unpredictable irregularities of weather and climate will involve some idleness.Expansions and contractions of special trades, changes in methods of production and of consumption, the necessary elasticity of economic life, will continue to account for the temporary displacement of groups of workers.There is, of course, no social wastage in this process, if it is properly safeguarded.
But hitherto it has been a great source of individual and social waste.
Society is only beginning to realise the duty, or indeed the possibility, of taking active steps to reduce the quantity of this unemployment and to utilise what is unavoidable for the benefit of the unemployed and of society.The cultivation of these spare plots of time in the normal life of the workers may become a highly serviceable art.
If all unemployment could be spread evenly over the working year, taken out in a shortening of the ordinary working-day and in the provision of periodic and sufficient holidays, an immense addition would be made to the sum of industrial welfare.Thus, without any reduction in the aggregate of labour-time, a sensible reduction in the human cost of labour might be achieved, if law, custom, or organised labour policy made it impossible for employers to vary violently or suddenly the volume of employment and to sandwich periods of over-time with periods of short-time.These baneful irregularities of employment appear inevitable so long as they remain permissible, as do sweating wages and other bad conditions of labour.When they are no longer permissible, the organised intelligence of the trade will adjust itself to the new conditions, generally with little or no loss, often with positive gain.
If there are trades upon which season, fashion, or other uncontrollable factors impose great irregularity of employment, a sound social policy will have close regard to the nature of this irregularity.Where an essentially irregular trade is engaged in supplying some necessary or convenience of life, as, for instance, in gas-works and certain branches of transport, alternative trades may be found whose fluctuations tend to vary inversely with those of the former trades, and which can furnish work suitable in kind and place to those who are out.
