THE WAR WORKER'S WAGES
By MARK BENNEY
OF the many thousands of workpeople who have gone into the engineering industries in the past two years the vast majority have been used to a regular weekly wage, simply assessed and un- varying save for periodical increments. But they have entered a group of industries that has never really made up its mind between the relative merits of time-work and piece-work, and whose system of wage-payments is the product, not of reason, but of conflict.
The engineering-worker's pay-envelope represents no simple monetary measure of time worked or production achieved, but instead the sum of four or five different accounts, based sometimes on the one standard and sometimes on the other, and each a mile- stone in the history of industrial negotiation. There is, first of all, the basic hourly rate, with a sliding scale of percentage increases for overtime. There is a fixed cost-of-living bonus, and also a fixed war bonus ; and while these two count as part of the basic rate for the purpose of calculating overtime payments, they do not count in the assessment of " payment-by-result " premium bonus earnings, which is still another account, and often the largest, in the war-worker's composite wage. To analyse the contents of a pay-envelope into its constituent elements, and to check them, requires at least an hour's work with a ready-reckoner, and few indeed are the workers who can calculate to a shilling how much is due to them on any Friday evening.
The payment of a premium bonus on output has been widely adopted since the outbreak of war, as an incentive to higher indivi- dual productivity ; and since the workman has often found that it enables him to double his weekly earnings, great importance is attached to it on both sides of the industrial fence. The particular system adopted in any one factory varies according to the nature of the work, but the one used throughout the aircraft industry is rela- tively simple and serves as a typical example. A standard time is fixed for an operation or group of operations. If the operative does the job in less than standard time he receives his war-time hourly rate for the time taken on the job, plus a payment at his basic hourly rate for the time he has saved. In other words, if a man is given a job timed for three hours, and takes only one hour to do it, he is paid, for his hour's work, three hours at the basic rate and the addi- tional fixed bonuses for one hour.
The value of such a scheme as an incentive obviously depends much on the method of computing the " standard time" for a job, or, as it is called, "rate-fixing." Rate-fixing is in theory a highly specialised and scientific procedure. Tables and charts cbvering every sort of mechanical and manual operation are available, and no matter how complicated the job, the rate-fixer has only to break it down into sub-processes, refer to his tables, and add together his findings. But this abstract procedure must necessarily undergo modification in practice. To start with, the tools at the workman's disposal may not be capable of the performance required in the tables and charts. The rate-fixer himself, who should be expert in all operations if he is to be trusted to visualise the various operations called for in any particular job, may have gaps in his experience. In practice the standard times arrived at invariably make allowances for these possibilities. Even so, the times fixed seldom reflect accurately, as they theoretically should, the rate of work " that can reasonably be expected of an operative of average skill."
Once a standard time has been set it cannot be altered except with the consent of both management and worker. In order, therefore, to prevent rate-fixing errors being perpetuated, the custom has grown up of setting a sort of probationary period after the introduction of standard time for a new job, during which time adjustments can be made. It is now usually regarded as reasonable that a skilled worker should be able to do the job in half the time allotted, and adjustments are claimed and made in reference to this understanding. This probationary period, however, does not automatically reveal all errors of rate-fixing, but only those which operate against the workman's interest. The workman who finds he has been set a standard time that allows him an unusually ample margin for bonus- earnings will take care not to exert himself too strenuously during the probationary period lest the time be reduced—and with it his potential earning-power. If, then, one asks the question, how far do individual bonus payments accurately reflect individual ability, the answer must be not very far. Every honest workman can give scores of examples where the bonus system of payments has slowed
down production in this way rather than accelerated it.
The standard time arrived at for any job, even in its final, " stabilised " form, seldom wholly excludes arbitrary factors. And naturally the degree in which the arbitrary enters varies from job to job. Because of this it is not at all unusual to find a highly skilled man working at the same bench as a newcomer who earns twice as much bonus money as he. Even greater are the inequalities produced between different sections of the factory, so that foremen (usually excluded from individual bonus schemes) find themselves receiving less money than the men under them, and toolmakers, whose work is not susceptible to rate-fixing, often draw less than semi-skilled fitters. The new demands now being made by the Amalgamated Engineering Union, against the advice of its executive, reflect some of the bitterness and jealousies produced by such inequalities.
But even those who benefit most by individual bonus payments are not without their discontents. The pace of production is not always directly under the worker's control ; shortage of supplies, shortage of labour in primary production stages, all mean an uneven flow of work to the operative, and therefore, under premium-bonus systems, an uneven rate of earning. These fluctuations, which make domestic budgeting difficult, and subtly promote the worker's interest in hazard rather than order, must be recognised as socially undesirable.
Not least of the disadvantages of premium-bonus systems is the way they operate to reduce the efficiency of woman-power in the war industries. Very frequently the most technically desirable method of using their labour is to pair them off with men. In this way, failing adequate preliminary training, they can acquire a more general knowledge of workshop practice as well as more quickly develop skilled habits, than when working with other women under the general supervision of a foreman. But where bonus schemes operate men object to women sharing their job-cards, since they believe that women fall as much below the rate-fixer's standard of average capacity as they can rise above it. Hence it has been found expedient in most factories to keep the sexes apart.
Underlying the system of bonus payments is the assumption that, given a sufficient monetary incentive, every workman will himself find the most efficient method of doing a particular lob. Hence those managerial functions which concern themselves with the efficiency of workshop practice tend to be rather neglected. The inadequate attention to motion-study, to industrial training and to small-tool dis- tribution in most of our factories springs from this source. This last is a factor of considerable practical importance. It is customary throughout the engineering industries for workers to provide the more common hand-tools of their trade for themselves, while the firm provides only the more expensive and less frequently used hand- tools. The acute shortage of small tools, together with the entry of large numbers of workers unwilling to buy tool-kits for a " duration " job, has modified the customary practices, and factory tool-stores now provide a far wider range of tools than in former days But the background of practice in this respect remains unchallenged ; the individual worker still maintains his own tool-chest, even if it is largely stocked with his firm's tools, and tries to retain as wide a variety of tools as possible, even though he may not use some of them for months on end, while in another corner of the factory work is being held up for lack of them. The bonus system encourages this hoarding of tools, by making men reluctant to " lose time " in going backwards and forwards to the tool-stores. The result is that workers in need of a particular hand-tool may spend hours in trying to track it down to one of several hundred tool-chests. The working time lost in this way would probably, if added up, rival absenteeism as a production problem.
A not inconsiderable amount of clerical and technical labour is diverted from more directly productive work to the maintenance of premium bonuses ; and any final estimate of their value must take account of this, particularly at a time when the war industries are being combed for surplus labour. The alternative of an adequate, simple standard wage, adjusted to broad differences of skill, and accompanied by a more vigorous exploration of non-pecuniary incentives, would certainly be more satisfactory to the trade unions and probably more economical of national resources. But it is not difficult to understand the employers' objection to any change that might weaken their position in post-war wage negotiations.
The greater part of this analysis may be summed up by saying that bonus payments, in placing excessive emphasis on pecuniary incentives, inhibit other, non-pecuniary, incentives. The worker is encouraged to think in terms of high earnings rather than of high production—terms that are by no means necessarily identical. In war time particularly other incentives to production are urgent and prominent, and their inhibition gives rise to undesirable conflicts— in the individual worker, between departments of the factory, and in the workers' organisations. If then we ask—as we must ask—whether the system of premium bonuses promotes industrial efficiency, these considerations make it difficult to give a convincingly affirmative answer.
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