THE PUTARURU PRESS. THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1926. HIGH WAGES.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 134, 27 May 1926, Page 4

THE PUTARURU PRESS.

THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1926. HIGH WAGES.

Office ----- Main Street ’Phone 28 - - - P.O. Box 44 (Lewis, Portas and Dallimtwre’s Buildings.)

SEVEN or eight months ago two young English engineers, Mr. Bertram Austin and Mr. W. Francis Lloyd, went to America at their own expense to find out, if they could, the real explanation of America’s amazing industrial prog-ress. The result was a volume which the Observer says “ it is a dereliction of duty not to read,” and which the Spectator wants to see reduced in price from one shilling- to threepence and circulated, if necessary by interested private aid, among all employers and workmen throughout the United King'ljm. America’s secret, these two observers say, is simply the intelligent application of eight -or nine fundamental principles : promotion by merit, the reduction of prices without any drop in quality ; rapidity of turnover ; the boldest use of labour-aiding machinery ; payment by results without any t limit to the individual’s earning- ; power ; the pooling of ideas, even I

among- rivals; the elimination of waste; scrupulous attention to the welfare of workers; unceasing research and experiment. What American business in genera! is doing is in fact what most people know in a dim j way that Mr. Henry Ford has already done. Ford is not the Ameri- , : can exception but the American type. He has gone farther than other manufacturers and travelled faster, not because he has employed different methods, but because he set out with more personal capacity. No doubt also he is of tougher moral fibre. The point is, however, that what he has achieved on a stupendous scale the | average American manufacturer and merchant is achieving on a modest ; scale, and the American nation as a whole on a scale that has never be- | fore been paralleled in history. As the Observer says, perhaps with some exaggeration, but with a sufficiently near approach to t'-uth for our pre- ' sent purposes, the United States, by contrast with Britain, is “ the thing nearest to El Dorado that actual human society has known.” Its citizens, | on the average, are four or five times jas prosperous per head. Its population is nearly three times, its aggregate wealth perhaps ten times, that cf the United Kingdom, while “ the rank and file of its democracy have attained standards of earnings and comfort and possession and rational ; enjoyment beyond anything that the i ordinary man in Britain conceives.” J Yet the authors of the “Secret” say I that this “ gigantic vindication of ! Capitalism,” as the Spectator calls it, | has r.o other foundation than adheri once to the few leading principles we ! : have already mentioned. They say j that what America is doing Britain t should also be doing, and can and ' would be doing if the Government and people would face the established facts of modern industry. It might be going too far to say that there would have been no coal crisis if coal were mined in the United Kingdom with the efficiency exhibited in the same industry in the United States, but it can certainly be said that if ■ ! English workmen had never contraetI ed their stupid fear of over-pvoduc-j lion, and English employers their no j less stupid hostility to high wages, i the Homeland would not be suffering j to-day from what the authors of the

“ Secret ” call that “ retrogression in civilisation ” in which wages are falling faster than prices. The American method—-perhaps we should say the American ideal—is to reduce prices as often and as far as improved methods of production will permit, while simultaneously maintaining or improving the quality. The British method is far too often the production of a good’ article without much regard to market or price. But the cor.chasion cf the whole matter is that given by the Spectator —viz., that high wages and low prices go together when there is no limitation 'of output; that “ ca’ canny ” is.he end of national prosneritv: that the American method could be followed as successfully in the United Kingdom,as in the United States; and that the result, cheap articles and plenty of money to buy them, is the “nearest thing to an industrial Paradise that has yet been found upon this earth.”