Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/93

for the working-class family. Once accept the principle that wage-rates must follow the fluctuations of prices and profits, instability of wages and of standards of living follow as a necessary consequence. Now this instability of standards is the worst count in labour's indictment of the 'capitalist system.' It is the chief gravamen of the charge that labour is treated as 'a commodity' that is as a non-human factor of production. The demand that labour shall adapt itself in modes of life to industrial fluctuations over which it has very little control, accepting rises and falls of wages to correspond with these fluctuations, robs labour of the primary condition of progress in civilised life.

Yet this appears to be the policy urged by our business men and accepted by many of our economists, on the ground that a refusal on the part of labour defies the inevitable operation of economic laws.

It is just here that I would join issue both with the logic and the social utility of the policy. The laws which regulate prices, and through prices wages, are not inevitable in the sense that they operate by forces wholly external to the will and conduct of the workers. So long as labour in emergencies allows itself to be treated as a commodity in accepting wage reductions, employers will calculate upon such compliance and will make prices which take it into due account. That is to say, the habit of allowing wages to fall with falling prices is itself a cause of falling prices. If employers knew that wage-increases once obtained would be held, they might be slow to concede these increases, but they could not base future