WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 1928 IT PAYS TO PAY GOOD WAGES !

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 403, 11 July 1928, Page 8

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 1928 IT PAYS TO PAY GOOD WAGES !

ONE of the lessons apparently well learnt by the Secretary of State for the Dominions in his recent tour of the Empire was the old and neglected truth that it pays capitalists to pay good wages. The Right Hon. L. S. Amery now presents the fact to liis conservative countrymen as a tremendous discovery. He told a crowded assembly of industrial peacemakers and Empire traders at the Mansion House the other day that the unlimited resources of the Dominions were capable of providing profitable employment for millions more people provided that capitalists recognised the new economic truth that it was m their own interests for labour to be well paid. The report from London does not mention a word about an enthusiastic reception of a new truth, which to many other people has been old for a long time. It is an economic truth that has had a Himalayan plainness since the beginning of modern industrial history, and even for many generations before that date. Indeed, something of the same truth may have been in the mind of the British Prime Minister a few weeks ago when Sir. Stanley Baldwin, in one of those homely addresses which set him apart from the ruck of mouthing politicians, said that the Bible was a high explosive in the world. Long before economists mastered the technique of their art, which scientifically proves that nine nines make 81, the Scriptures taught or tried to teach capitalists that the labourer is worthy of his hire. Most of the causes for the great lack of peace in industries have been due in the main to a stiff-necked failure to accept the truth and practise it. Another speaker at the Mansion House meeting to which our own Prime Minister sent a cabled message of goodwill, deplored the wastefulness of strikes, and cited the estimate of British Labour members of Parliament that the direct losses due to strikes in Great Britain totalled between £15,000,000,000 and £25,000,000,000. It would be interesting to have an expert computation of the saving that could have been effected had the capitalists and employers concerned in those wasteful strikes exercised the new economic truth as to promoting their own interests, by paying labour a little more, without going as far as to incur the horrible experience of paying high wages. A great deal of the acute distress -on the British coalfields to-day is attributable to the demonstrable fact that the mineowners defied the recommendations of unbiased commissions and a multitude of experts, to set their muddled industry in order and pay a fayr wage to their employees. It is to he feared that it will take a long time to impress upon the bulk of “the hereditary and half-hereditary aristocracy of British capitalists” the value of Mr. Amery’s discovery. Why, only a month or two ago, Englishmen were astounded at the threat of a strike by the Textile and Dyeworkers’ Union for the retention of piecework rates of payment. Some of their employers, who had not then learnt Mr. Amery’s new economic truth, wanted to fix wages at a cut rate. Fortunately for the industrial future of Great Britain, all the capitalists are not blind to their own interests. As Lord Londonderry recently told the Tories of Durham, peace in industry was really the simplest thing in the world. “It was not a question for some quack or extraordinary remedy. Business men had found that apart from the humanitarian point of view, it- was no use sweating men and calling upon them to work long hours for low wages.” And so on. England is coming on steadily. More of her politicians should tour the Empire.