THE MINISTRY OF LABOUR AND THE TRADE BOARDS.
THE Trade Boards have been getting into trouble, as we always feared that they would. Instead of helping the luckless and depressed worker " according to plan," they do him a bad turn, and he—or in most cases she—is turning against them and protesting. For by rather casually, if not arbitrarily, fixing wages at a rate which an industry cannot bear the Boards check trade, and the first person to suffer from dwindling trade is the manual worker. The fixed rates of pay when they take more out of an industry than that industry can yield cause several things to happen. For instance, the price of the goods produced has to be raised to keep the industry solvent, and then the 'home purchaser, exercising his inalienable right not to buy what he cannot afford, lets the goods lie in the shops unbought. Orders cease to flow in from the various markets. Further, the foreigner- finds that he can buy more cheaply what is produced in his own country. He, too, cuts off his orders. Next he discovers that it will pay him to send his goods into the British market since he can manufacture more cheaply than we can.
When the Trade Boards Act was passed in 1903 we pointed out what the result would probably be. During times of good trade nobody bothered about or even noticed the signs which were really warnings. As the demand for goods increased, and it seemed that British manufac- turers could hardly produce enough, the Trade Boards fixed wages in the scheduled trades higher and higher, and those who had advocated the Boards pointed out with triumph that the sweated worker had been saved and that none of the ruin to trade which had been pro- phesied had come about. Now that trade is in a very bad way the Trade Boards are being fastened upon as one of the prime causes of the inability of certain trades to save themselves from collapse. We must say that the criticism and the abuse come very ill from a large number of people who heartily supported the Trade Board; Bill when it was introduced.
Let us look back and see what was said about that measure but is now forgotten by many persons who raid it. Ample majorities, both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, voted for the Bill. It was declared that it was merely an instrument to rescue sweated workers who were the victims of intolerable and quite unnecessary conditions and of particularly heartless employers. It was believed that the Trade Boards could be set up without affecting the volume of British trade—that they would be simply a beneficial influence in a few hole-and-corner industries which, if ever it came to the point, had much better be abolished than continue to disgrace British industry. It was argued that under the law of the land even the brute beasts must be properly fed and tended. How much more, then, the human sufferers in sweated industries ! With these general sentiments of course we heartily agree. Sweating is a disgrace. It ought never be necessary again to write a " Song of the Shirt " in England. But the mistake lay in supposing that the remedy for ills which we must all fully admit lay in the creation of the Trade Boards. It used to be said that in the trades with which the Act deals there were three classes of employers : those who already paid fair wages ; those who would like to pay them if they were not afraid of having the prices of their goods cut by other employers ; and the sweaters proper who paid cruelly low wages out of sheer heartlessness or lust of profits. The argument was that the first class would not be touched by the Boards ; that the second class would be actually helped as they would be guaranteed against cutting ; and that the third class, which would be the only class hit by the Act, deserved no mercy from any decent person.
Now, let us look at the results in these present gloomy times. Last week at Portsmouth, to take an example, some Portsmouth drapers were summoned for paying their women employees 84d. an hour when the national rate fixed by the Board was 1014. an hour. It appears that the women concerned voluntarily petitioned the Board to leave them alone as they stated that they would rather be continuously employed at the lower wage than have casual employment at the higher wage. The magis- trates dismissed the cases on the ground that the Board had been " ill-advised to prosecute in view of the bad state of trade in Portsmouth." It is a question whether the magistrates were not themselves ill-advised in dis- missing the summonses which under the law the Board was bound to issue. Conviction just as much as dismissal might have called attention to the disservices of the Board and brought matters to a head. In any case we are glad to know that Dr. Macnamara, the Minister of Labour, has admitted that the whole of the Trade Board system needs overhauling. That system, which was originally intended in certain trades to save the weak and the oppressed who had no power of organizing themselves, has been gradually extended to other trades. It may be said that a breach of the law by employers . is particularly uncalled for, as employers need only appeal for a reconsideration of the wage-rate to have every chance of an equitable adjustment. Unfortunately, this does not happen in practice. The 13oards.are composed of equal numbers of employers and employees, and impartial outsiders are appointed by the Ministry of Labour to mediate and judge between the two parties. In a large number of cases the impartial outsiders, who do not know very much about the trades concerned, simply split the differences between the demand of the workers and the wage offered by the employer. When a wage has been settled it is impossible to alter it for a period of from three to six months. This delay is a tremendous handicap upon the trade of an employer who is naturally alert and wants to bid for particular markets as he sees his oppor- tunities. If he were allowed to pay the wages which his undertaking would yield, he might take on a great many new hands at a few hours' notice. If he is compelled by law to pay more, he abandons his enterprise. The sufferers are those who might have been employed but remain unemployed. If the Boards had never done anything more than fix a minimum wage above the sweating level they would not be so easy a target for criticism as they are now, but there has been a tendency for them to go far beyond their original province and to fix a standard wage. No one detests sweating more intensely than we do, but these Boards are really standing in the way of a revival of trade. Very quick adaptation to competition and market fluctuations is necessary, and the cumbrous and slow-moving machinery of the Ministry of Labour is always a barrier. Yet we pay for this paralysing Ministry at the rate of 0,000,000 a year for tho administrative expenses of the Ministry alone quite apart from the much larger expenses of which it is the cause.
As we have said over and over again, we wish that the Ministry and all its works could be abolished, and abolished quickly. The effects of overhauling the Trade Boards will last but a short time. Overhauling will soon be needed again. Trade would go on much faster and much expense would be saved if the Ministry disappeared. The real solution for the grievances of underpaid men and women is partly combination and partly Joint Industrial Councils. Joint Industrial Councils which have flourished in several trades do untold good ; they work easily and amicably and almost without expense. They arc no tax upon the particular trade or on the public. The action of the State at all events should be reduced to the fixing of a minimum wage in the few scheduled industries of bad repute.
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