§6.This interpretation of the Labour Movement as a half-conscious manifold endeavour to rescue the remuneration of Labour from the risks and defects of the competitive labour market, and to establish it on an economy of human needs, is not fully understood without some further reference to the action of organised society.The Labour Movement, in its endeavour to get a better distribution of the income, is not confined to trying to secure a satisfactory minimum or standard wage, fortified by greater security of work and personal insurance against unemployment.It seeks also to supplement its wages by cooperative and public provisions.
The cooperative movement is an attempt to convert into real wages some of the profits of employers and shareholders in manufacturing and commercial businesses, so enlarging the proportion of the real income of the nation which goes to the remuneration of labour.But the growing attachment of the Labour Organisations to politics is equally motived by the endeavour to secure from the State, not merely legal supports for higher wages and improved conditions of employment, but actual supplements to wages in the shape of contributions from the public services to their standard of living.
Free education, old-age pensions, and public subsidies towards insurance are a direct contribution from the State to the higher standard of life which modern civilised society demands.Health, education, recreation, and provision against emergencies, are coming more and more to be recognised as proper objects of governmental action, and other important services, such as transport, credit, art, music and literature, are far on the way to becoming communal supplies.Although these modes of social provision may be chiefly motived by considerations of public health and other common goods, they nevertheless must rank as contributions to the standard of comfort and well-being of the working-class families who are the special beneficiaries.Relieving, as they do in many instances, the private incomes of the workers from expenditure which otherwise the family would find it to its private interest to incur, these growing public services form a genuine and a considerable contribution to the available real income of the working-classes.So far as by taxation direct or indirect the cost of such public services can be considered a burden upon, or a deduction from the wage-income of the workers, it forms, of course, no net addition to their share, but is only a public control over methods of expenditure.
But inasmuch as the distinct tendency of modern taxation is towards an increasing taxation of the incomes and property of the non-working classes, these public services rank as supplementary income, paid in kind, and tending to equalise the standard of living of individual workers and grades of workers.The criticism sometimes directed against this State socialism, upon the ground that it tends to weaken the force of wage-bargaining and transfers to the shoulders of 'society' costs which employers would otherwise have to bear in the shape of higher money wages, would have considerable force, if the old laissez-faire principle of 'free contract' were allowed otherwise to work unimpeded.But this, as we see, is not the case.The growing policy of minimum and standard rates, supported by public opinion and, where necessary, by public law, and hardening into a policy of fixed salaries, is nowise inconsistent with a simultaneous development of communal supplies of goods and services which usually lie a little above the normal standard of comfort of those who are the chief beneficiaries.
The growing political activities of a labour movement which once eschewed State aids not merely attest the general growth of conscious democracy but imply a recognition of the direct contribution which the State is making towards a general distribution of the national income in accordance with an economy of human needs.
NOTES:
1.The width of variations in the weekly earnings, involving in most instances a nearly corresponding variety of family income, may be illustrated by the following estimate compiled by Mr.Webb, from a careful analysis of official wage returns.New Statesman , May 10, 1913.
