Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/28

involved in the practice of 'ca'canny' or slowing down of production, due to a fear on the part of employers of glutting the market, on the part of workmen of unemployment. There is no need to accept the fallacious comparisons between the relative productivity of American and British labour based on censuses of production, adduced to prove the double or triple productivity of the American worker in many staple trades. There is, however, a mass of evidence from war-time industry to show how much more could be produced in this country than is produced under normal conditions.

Speeding up, longer hours, and more continuous employment only account in part for this expansion of output during the war. It was compassed in large part by squeezing out of the distributive trades and certain sections of transport the excessive numbers employed in them, and by calling into productive service large numbers of persons otherwise 'unoccupied.' By such means it came to pass that, after upwards of four millions of the pick of our working population had been, taken into the fighting services, and some three millions more drafted into munitions and other war supplies, the national output was large enough to maintain the general body of the population on a distinctly higher level of consumption than before the war. This is not, of course, the whole story. A better, i.e. more equal, class distribution of income and consumption during these years, the rich consuming less (in spite of profiteering) the workers more, together with some letting down of capital, contributed to this result.