§3.As Ruskin and many others have remarked, the lie is given to this assumption in an increasing number of kinds of work where the highest qualities of human power, the finest sorts of mental skill and responsibility, are involved.Public servants of all grades, from Cabinet Masters and Judges down to municipal dustmen, are paid by salaries, not by piece-wages.The same is true of the more remunerative and more responsible work in private businesses.No Government, no private firm, buys the services of its most valuable employees at the lowest market-price, or attempts to apply to them a piece-work scale.It would not pay them to do so, and they know it.Nor is this merely because some sorts of work do not easily admit of being measured by the piece.It would be possible to pay Judges, as counsel are paid, by the case.Cabinet Ministers might be paid on piece-wages for Laws measured by the number or length of their clauses.The chief reason for adopting payment by fixed salary is that it is reckoned a wise mode of securing good individual services.It is recognised that each piece of work will be better done, if the workers set about it in a thoroughly disinterested manner, concentrated in their thoughts and feelings entirely on the work itself, and not entangled in the consideration of what they are to get out of it.This is supposed to be the difference between the professional man and the tradesman, that the former performs a function and incidentally receives a fee, while the latter, by the very acts of buying and selling that constitute his business, keeps his mind set upon the profit from each several transaction.
But the fixed and guaranteed salary for public servants has another ground.It may profit a business firm to practise an economy of sweating, to drive its employees and consume their health and strength by a few years'
excessive toil, to take on new casual workers for brief spurts of trade, to sack employees ruthlessly, as soon as trade begins to flag, or their individual powers of work are impaired by age.A piece-work system, with no guarantee of employment or of weekly wage, may be a sound business economy for a private firm.It cannot be a sound economy for a State or a Municipality.
For a large and increasing share of the work and the expenditure of most States and Municipalities is applied in trying to mend or alleviate damages or dangers to the health, security, intelligence, and character of the workers and their families, arising from insufficiency of work and wages or other defects of private industrialism.It would obviously be bad public economy to break down the lives and homes of public employees by underpaying or overworking them, or by dismissing and leaving them to starve when work was slack.For what was saved in the wage-bill of the particular department, would be squandered in poor-law, police, hospitals, old-age pensions, invalidity and employment relief.Nor is that all.Amass of ill-paid, ill-housed workers, alternately overworked and out of work, stands as a chief barrier in every one of those paths of social progress and national development which modern statecraft sets itself to follow.
The low wage of unskilled labour is to-day a source of infinite waste of the forces of national education.Still keeping our argument upon the narrowest lines of economy, we plainly realise that the financial resources, upon which the State can draw for all her services, depend in the last resort upon the general economic efficiency of the working population, and that a system of public employment which was, however indirectly, detrimental to this health, longevity and intelligence, would rank as bad business from the public standpoint.
It is possible that in this country the salary mode of payment is gaining ground.Apart from the public services, national and municipal, which now employ some 7 per cent of the total employed population, the great transport and the distributive industries are almost entirely run upon the salary basis.These departments of industry are constantly increasing, not only in absolute size, but in the proportion of the total employment they afford.
To them must be added the large class of domestic service.Such great salaried services cannot, indeed, be claimed as triumphs for the organic principle of distribution, or payment according to needs.For the most part they are very unsatisfactory modifications of the piece-wage or commodity view of labour.For, except for the small higher grades of officials, they mostly retain the two chief defects of the ordinary wage-system, a payment of weekly income not based on a proper computation of human needs, and a lack of adequate security of tenure.Over a large part of the field of industry and commerce where weekly fixed salaries are paid, there exists a flagrant disregard for all considerations of human subsistence.Some of the worse, though not the worst, forms of 'sweating' are found in shops, workshops and factories where women are employed on weekly salaries.
None the less, it remains true that the salary is a more rational form of payment for labour than the time or piece wage, and that, as the humanisation of industry proceeds, it will more and more displace the wage-system.For where salaries are paid, the consideration of needs or subsistence does tend always to qualify the mere commodity view of labour.
Piece-wage or time-wage ignores the worker as a human being and the supporter of a family: it ignores him as a personality and regards him merely as an instrument for giving out units of productive power to be paid for on the same terms as the units of mechanical power used in working machinery.
§4.The Labour Movement insists that the personal and human factor is fundamental as a condition in the labour bargain.If labour is treated as a mere commodity, its price affords no security of life to the labourer.
