Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/97

superior scientific training and other qualities of brain and organisation by which they achieved preeminence in many lines of industry.

Employers clamour in a single breath for wage-cutting and for increased productivity. But wage-cutting does nothing for the real and lasting increase of productivity. It only serves to increase the product by employing more men at lower rates, reducing somewhat the efficiency per man. If, instead, employers are driven in times of depression to devise technical, administrative and financial economies, they secure real and lasting increases of productivity per unit of capital and labour employed. Labour, therefore, does not, as is sometimes contended, obstruct industrial recovery and progress by its refusal to accept wage reductions. On the contrary, by taking the determined position: "First exhaust all other economies before you touch wages," it applies a powerful stimulus to the discovery and adoption of every sort of technical and administrative improvement. The experience of Trade Boards shows how the fixing of standard wages in a trade compels the backward businesses to adopt the ways of working which prevail among the best-equipped businesses. The slovenly-minded employer in every trade is prone to assume the permanence of the status quo. He thinks he has proved his case for a wage-cut, as against a wage-rise, by showing that under existing conditions he cannot make a 'fair' or any profit. Thus the acceptance by labour of wage reductions as inevitable in bad trade offers a premium on managerial inefficiency and lack of enterprise. It is, moreover, an anti-social policy. For a business