The Dominion. FRIDAY, JUNE 30, 1911. THE LABOUR FALLACY.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1167, 30 June 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. FRIDAY, JUNE 30, 1911. THE LABOUR FALLACY.

On Wednesday we printed some striking observations by Judge Heydon, president of the New South Wales Industrial Court, upon the unwisdom of placing heavy fetters upon "the energies, the brains, and the freedom of the organisers and managers of industries." That the opinion o~i the average worker is entirely in concord with the policy and the statements of the Labour agitators and trade union leaders is, we arc convinced, a gross delusion, and Judge Heydon's remarks will probably receive from many workers an emphatic approval. The burden of the Judge's argument was the necessity for mutual understanding and fairness on both sides—a general agreement that while the worker is entitled to an honest wage and decent conditions the employer is entitled to resist the notion that ho shall be at the command of his employees and manage his business according to their • ideas. If we could have industry regulated by a Wages Board system under which employers and employees could settle their differences free from the shadow of agitator-breeding legislation, we should have much better conditions for everybody. As matters stand, however, the workers have been led by a bad law into such a position that they must appear as holding that employers are enemies upon whom it is their business to wage war. They have nobody in their own ranks to tell them that industry must always consist of the co-opciration of capital and labour, that the community must live on the products of this co-operation, and that whatever reduces these products must reduce tho total .distributable wealth of the community. Widely as they sometimes disagree as to the corollaries of the established axioms and propositions of industry, all economists are agreed upon the fact, which is indeed beyond dispute, that the more wealth that is produced, the more there will be to divide: And since everybody who is not fuddled with ■ the nonsense of Socialist theories is convinced that the inequalities of humanity unfortunately guarantee inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the workers obviously must fare best when production is free and vigorous. But the tendency of the leaders of organised Labour is all against free and vigorous production. Their policy is simply the diminution of production. They ask- for shorter and shorter hours; they oppose the idea that a skilful worker should use his skill for . his own benefit and the benefit of the community; and on top of this they wage relentless war upon capital, with the natural result that capital is crippled in its wealthproducing activity. Pushed to its logical conclusion the policy of scaring capital out of the business would simply result in the crippling of production and the impoverishment of everybody.

"Create wealth largely, distribute ■ it fairly" was the maxim laid down by Judge Heydon. But neither of these ends can be properly, achieved under any system of compulsory arbitration—not that compulsory arbitration as a principle is of itself necessarily hostile cither to free production or fair distribution, but because it cannot exist in vacuo, but must bring into being, as New Zealand's experience proves, forces that strike at the very heart of peace and efficiency in industry. Commenting on Judge Heydon's observations the tii/duey Morning Herald said that "there is only one thing that can destroy industrial arbitration as a means of industrial peace, and that is the narrow selfishness and fractious recalcitrance of labour itself." Tho reference is apparently to compulsory arbitration; and it is a little surprising that the Herald should not have reflected that the "only thing" that prevents compulsory arbitration from securing industrial peace and efficiency is a thing that is a necessary result of compulsory arbitration. It is impossible that the current delusion of a section of Labour that Capital is the enemy can endure for ever. The end of the delusion will not come, however, until the real opinion of the average intelligent worker that the employer deserves fair play becomes the policy of organised Labour. The still wilder delusion that the employer has an independent store of wealth upon which the workers may draw as freely as they please cannot last very much longer in any country. The employer has no greater source out of which to pay wages than tho products of his employees. But the workers arc not •allowed by their leaders to believe this, They arc encouraged in the belief that they cannot only wring greater and greater sums from the employer, but can do so while at the same time rendering less and less service to industry. They do not properly realise that their wages come, not from a private stocking, but from the industry in which they are engaged. As a recent English writer well puts it:

They aro firm believers in their capacity to work the miracle of producing loss that more may come. They imagine that by shortening tho hours of labour, by sterilising labour-saying appliances, by decreasing tho output of tho individual through such devices as tho discouragement of piecework, they will increase (lie renin ncralion of the worker, deducing tho total amount in the teapot is, they hold, the suro way to get a fuller cup for everybody.

The very fact that all their activities, all the remedies provided in answer to their demands during the past seventeen years, have left them much where they were—this and their present-day clamour for relief should convince them that'their policy is based on fallacy.