F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 125 



ment would have taken place whether the impulse came from a scarcity, 

 or from a disproportionate rise in the cost, of the necessary skilled labour. 

 Trade union control of wages, and the analogous control by pubhc 

 wage-fixing authorities, may be most simply regarded as an application 

 of monopoly price policy to labour. The monopoly is seldom, if ever, 

 complete ; but what monopoly is ? It gives the seller of labour no 

 control over the demand for his services ; it merely enables him, so far 

 as it is effective, to select the point on the demand curve at which he 

 will hold the price, until a general rise in demand absorbs at that price 

 all the union members, instead of allowing competition for employment 

 always to force wages down to the point at which the whole supply of 

 labour is absorbed. It is a policy that can be pursued without causing 

 more than temporary unemployment, under two conditions ; first, that 

 the wealth of society is steadily growing, so that continually higher wage- 

 rates can be paid without causing unemployment: secondly, that it is 

 practised only by a minority of the trades in the community. The latter 

 condition no longer obtains. 



IV. 



The industries of the country are co-operant agents in the production 

 of the commodities and services that industry sells. So long as everybody 

 was not organised to attempt it, it was always possible that favoured 

 trades, by means of a monopolistic organisation, might secure for them- 

 selves a larger share of the final price received for industry's products. 

 Marshall illustrated this possibility by a hypothetical case, which has 

 recently been illustrated in actual experience, that of plasterers, whose 

 services were jointly demanded with other kinds of building and building- 

 material labour ; but the possibilities are wider. Mr. Rowe has recently 

 shown us that the true rate of advance of wages (average of skilled, 

 semi-skilled, and unskilled grades) between 1886 and 1913 was 47 per cent, 

 in coal-mining ; as compared with 9 per cent, in the case of railways, 

 and an average of about 25 per cent, for the five representative industries 

 he studied. Mining is one of the instances Mr. and Mrs. Webb take, 

 and the enormous growth of the industry in the period shows that the 

 advances that the unions were able to secure certainly did not prevent 

 growth. They may also have had some influence upon the efficiency of 

 the industry ; but any such increase in efficiency was not latterly sufficient 

 to counteract the opposing influence of exhaustion of supplies ; output 

 per head in tons declined from 1907 onwards. Now the final price to 

 the consumer of coal has to cover not only the getting of the coal, but 

 the transport of it, and such transport is an important source of revenue 

 to the railways. May it not be that railwaymen would have got more, 

 and miners less, of the final price, if the railwaymen had been organised 

 and the miners unorganised ? * 



Just before the war the railwaymen completed an effective union 

 organisation, which the circumstances of the war and the post-war period 



' South Africa appears to offer the extreme case of a distribution of the final 

 pnce of coal in favour of railwaymen. The pit-head price of coal in the Northern 

 Transvaal in 1923 was 5s. 3d. per ton, the railway rate per ton per 100 miles 7s. 4d. ; 

 miners' wages averaged £45 a year, railwaymens' £117. (Calculated from figures 

 given in Union Year Book, No. 7.) 



