The Daily News. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1919. DIVIDING THE PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 June 1919, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1919. DIVIDING THE PRODUCTS OF INDUSTRY.

The question as to what should be the workers' fair share of the products of industry is one that forms the crux of the problem of industrial peace. Not until the wage earners have become thoroughly conversant with the true facts relating to industrial economy will there be any prospect of a satisfactory settlement of labor unrest. If the leaders would only place the true position before the rank and file and hammer away at the truth it would not be long before the various phases of the problem would become clearly impressed upon the public, but there appears to be a tendency to raise false issues and leave the truth hidden beneath a cloud of untenable assertions. It was only recently that Mr. Smillie, in giving evidence before the British Coal Commission, stated that, out of the total wealth produced in Great Britain before the war, only a third went to the workers, and he suggested that they were really entitled to the whole, but would be content, for the time being, with two-thirds. No doubt he considered this a very generous "iew to take inasmuch as it was the money f other people and not his own that was at stake. Unfortunately the statement, which was put forward as an incontrovertible fact, was sufficiently alluring to be readily accepted by thoughtless people, yet it was not a fact, merely an estimate, borrowed from a pamphlet by Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, and even as an estimate was untrue and deliberately misleading. Sir Hugh Bell was mr.ch nearer the mark when he said last year that, in any country it will be found that seventy-five per cent, of the total value of the commodities produced will have gone to pay the persons producing them. Some very interesting information, derived from unimpeachable official sources, is to be found on this subject in a pamphlet by Professor Bowley, who arrives at the general conclusion that in the whole group of industries for which adequate information is available, the persons employed in 1907 took sixty-eight per cent, of the net product, or rather more than the two-thirds Mr. Smillie desires. In the mining industry labor's share was and is still higher. Taking the value of the gross output in 1911, it is found that the wage earners took seventy-five per cent., the salaried officials three per cent., and the coal owners, for interest and profit, twenty-two per cent., so that th» miners really had three-fourths of the output. Professor Bowley emphasises most opportunely that the national income of Britain before the war was no more than enough to provide everyone with a modest sufficiency. To put it in another form, the average income of a family of five in 1913-14 was £IBO. It must be remembered that in dividing up the national income provision has to be made fo;* carrying on the Government, municipalities must have, their rates, a tee amoju^

mmt ke ?§>«*'; every ypa? ea aew saaeUiaepy, and. sg §a, \i tb§ wag a mi'mv is t§ be k§pl at wer-k s i&erepver, managers, clerics, and other officials must be paid, rent and interest cannot be abolished, and, finally, the employer must have the incentive of profit, including his own salary for supervision. Even if industries were nationalised, the workers would find that business charges of a similar nature would have to be met and provision made for depreciation and losses, so when it is seen that, under existing circumstances, labor takes nearly three-fourths of the output, there is not room for serious complaint. Professor Bowley's comments on the Socialist proposal for increasing workmen's wages by a redistribution of the product of industry are worthy of note. The '' idle rich," as he says, are, if not a mere figment of the imagination, a negligible quantity, and he demonstrates that, if every income had been reduced to a maximum of £l6O, there would have been at most two hundred and fifty million sterling available for levelling up wages, and even then the male wage earner would have received on the average no more than £1 15s 3d per week, and the woman wage earner £l. There are, of course, exceptional cases, but in the long run economic laws prevail and these exceptions disappear. The only way of increasing wages permanently is by increasing production, for if we all want more cake, we must increase the size of the cake, the division of the cake being settled on immutable principles. The Bolsheviks tried a new system of division by giving it all to criminals and illiterates, and now find they will soon have nothing to divide. While there is no fear of Bolshevik madness overtaking British workers, there is a fear that the false teaching of Socialists may disaffect the wage earners in the direction of giving minimum service for maximum wages. This is a real danger which, if allowed to spread, will surely be the doom of industry. High wages, as the London Spectator truly remarks, cannot be paid for reduced production and vanishing profit. The real welfare of the workers is based on the extent to which-they can increase and cheapen the national output.