SHORTER HOURS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 451, 8 February 1933, Page 3

SHORTER HOURS

MUST AFFECT EITHER PRICES OR WAGES. ' (Published by Arrangemerit with the Auckland Exeeutive of the Farmers' Union.) What more simple, the simple ask, than tp double employment by halving the hours of labour? It is like falling off a log. But if those expensive people who ask the question would absent themselves from the felicity of bridge long enough to listen to the answer, even they could be made to understand that, as 'a device for rationing employment, halving the hours of labo rr would have to be either at the expense of wages (because the present wages would have ditional burden that would fall upon prices (because the present wagecosts of production would be doubled). Now the most abnormal of the professors at the London School of Economics would hesitate to demand such an "elasticity" of labour as the acceptance of a cut of 50 per cent. in wages would imply, while, on the 1 other hand, the effect of the doubling" of labour costs would, among other things, nullify the advantage of doubling nominal wages by roughly halving their purchasing power. Attractive, therefore as the suggestion may be, and long overdue as a general reduction in working hours undoubtedly is, any such measure would, under the present monetary system, prove either impracticable 01* nugatory. — The New English Weekly.