The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 13, 1912. WAGES AND CAPITAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 271, 13 May 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, MAY 13, 1912. WAGES AND CAPITAL.

We were told at the time the British Government were bringing down its Minimum Wage Bill to settle the great coal strike, that were the provisions of this Bill enforced many of the coal companies would be forced into the Bankruptcy Court, and that the state of the industry and competition were such as to make it impossible for them to pay in wages any more than they had been paying. The British capitalist is, speaking collectively, a heartless brute, who is more concerned about dividends than the welfare of the agent who makes these dividends possible, and seems quite indisposed to share with the worker any of the huge profits that it can be proved he is making. Despite labor troubles, past, present and prospective, capital has been increasing while wages have been declining. By common admission, supported now by statistics, capital has been during the last twelve months walking on velvet with "roses, roses, roses all the way," what time labor has been treading nearer and nearer to the cold stone floor of destitution. Let us look first at the railways as the resume of the past year is displayed in the London Times and elsewhere to the satisfaction of railway shareholders. It is well known that the year 1907 was, in respect of traffic and profits, a boom 1 year for English railway lines. In that year the total net profits amounted to 45 millions sterling, a sum nearly equal to the total amount paid to the six or seven hundred thousand men engaged in labor on the lines. Taking the figures of the twenty-seven chief lines alone, the Times estimates that the number of men employed was 6ome 479,000. Within three years, however, this total of 479,000 was reduced by lflyOOO. On the same lines during the year 1010-11 the number of men employed had aunk from 479,000 to 463,000, with what effect, do you suppose, on profits and wages? Profits for the same year leaped up from. 45 millions, the | boom and record of 1907, to 48 millions in 1910-11, an increase equal to the total profits on the British post office. Wages, on the other hand, despite the reduction in employment by some 16,000 men, fell by just about a penny per week per man. The Times, however, goes on to Temark that large as this profit may appear when compared absolutely with wages, the return on the capital which it represents is small, some three or three and a-quartcr per cent. This return is so infinitesimal fin ; comparison, that is, with other investments) that the directors will be expected to spare no

pains to economise in management still further. The daughters of the horseleech cry for more and more profits. Nevertheless, the situation is difficult. Referring to the means hitherto taken to conceal the real profits on the railways, the Times remarks on the "disastrous over-capitalisation" of chief companies. liailway stock has been "watered," the Times- calculates, by at least 18% per cent. In addition, a thousand little ingenuities have been practised in the form of bonuses, writing ofT capital, reserves, etc., to make the declared profits look less than they are. The New Age points out that for some reason or other the accounts of the colliery companies—mostly family concerns, it is true—are rather less fraudulent than the public balancesheets of the railway companies. Except in, say, 50 per cent, of the instances the profits shown are probably not more than 50 per cent, below the profits actually earned. From a list the New Age has seen of about a score of the leading collieries' balance-sheets, it calculates that the average rate of dividend confessed and revealed is 10 per cent., which means that the total capital of the coal industry is repaid to its proprietors every decade. "This, average, however, is composed of collieries that scarcely pay at all, as well as of collieries that pay so handsomely that we wonder their owners are not ashamed to look their workmen in the face," says the New Age. "In one Welsh colliery, for example, the dividend actually amounts to nearly 70 per cent, per annum; and this in a district where 'labor unrest' has been occasioned by the demand of miners, not for an increase of wages, but for the restoration of wages to their former purchasing level." The paper from which we have quoted touches briefly on two other illustrations of the general case that wages are falling while profits are rising. It will be remembered that last year the seamen were put to the trouble and expense of attempting to raise their wages by means of a strike. We were certain at the time that the strike would prove to be justified by the figures of the trade. Strikes hardly ever occur, in. fact, without excellent cause and justification. The shipping Federation, however, acting after the usual manner of capitalists, declared through the columns of the Times that the state of trade was such that the smallest increase of wages would cripple it. Dozens of firms would have to close down and hundreds of vessels would have to be laid up to rot into firewood and scrap-iron. It is now well known that at the very moment of these protestations of impending bankruptcy the shipping industry in general was having the year of its life. Nothing like the trade either in traffic or in building has been seen before in the history of this planet. The year 1911, remarkable in so many other respects, was in the matter of shipbuilding an annus mirahilis. Of the traffic the record imports and exports—6o per cent, of the world's total carried in British bottoms—bear witness. In shipbuilding, three British ports each by itself alone topped the entire ship-building of the whole German Empire. No fewer than five ports each turned out as much tonnage as the whole of the United States; each of seven ports easily surpassed the total shipping industry of France. It was in this annus mirabilis that a decline in wages was only arrested by the expenditure of thousands of pounds by the seamen's unions. On the morrow of the shipping strike the capitalists calmly raised fares and freights to make a profit out of their losses. Within a few hours of concluding the railway settlement the public were informed that fares and freights—already in England the highest in the world-would be still further raised. Even before the coal strike began and long before a farthing had been spent by the coal-owners in defeating the strike, prices of coal were raised some 15 to 20 per cent. Not much public respect, fear, or consideration in that, comments the New Age. The paper concludes by arguing that "a single leader of brains and courage would have put himself at the head of the industrial unrest of the last year, given it eyes and led it to a conquest of higher wages, which would have relieved not only wage-earners of poverty, but the rest of us from the stupefying contemplation of poverty. There were two objectivesone immediate, the other more remote but none the less real. The immediate objective was and always must be to raise wages. The secondary objective was to establish the foundation of an entirely new order of industry in which the unions shall be co-partners, as unions, with the employers."