102 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Taken alone, this idea of wages treats of the supply of labour as being 
fixed independently of the wage, and of the wage as powerful only in 
directing the available supply. It is therefore a short-period consideration, 
dealing with market price rather than normal value; as in all short- 
period considerations, stress is laid on the quantitative side, on the notion 
of value falling with an increase in the supply of labour and rising with a 
limitation of supply. 
Secondly, there is the idea of wage payment which treats of work and 
wages as completely interdependent, since the product of each worker 
constitutes his payment. The product of each worker, represented by his 
wage, makes an effective demand for the produce of other workers. His 
addition to wealth is his claim upon it. Numbers are important only if 
with alteration in numbers there are consequent alterations in productive 
power per head, or if the proportions between the different types of labour 
required be ill-adjusted. 
Finally, we may take the aspect of wage payments which is concerned 
with their effect on work and on the supply of workers, the wage being 
regarded as something that maintains the worker. 
These three aspects of wages are not antagonistic. It is clear from the 
outset that there is no contradiction between the first two, between that 
from which they are regarded as a distributive force and that from which 
they are regarded as the actual product of the wage-earner. The idea that 
the worker produces so much wealth and that his work is paid in proportion 
to the wealth he produces is, indeed, associated with the idea that the 
demand for and supply of such labour as he has to offer determines its 
value. Wages so determined are known as ‘ fair’ or ‘normal’: fair in 
that they are equal to those of other workers of similar capacity, normal 
in that they are the wages that tend to be paid under conditions of free 
competition. 
Each worker on this reckoning tends to get what his work is worth. 
It may be worth little. This admission does not apply only to bad workers. 
It certainly does apply to them, whether the badness of their work be due 
to bad character, bad health, or bad mental equipment. But the question 
is not one only of efficiency but of the type of ability and of the number of 
other workers possessed of that particular type. Men and women may work 
hard and in their own line efficiently, but there may be so many others 
working hard and in the same line efficiently that the force of competition 
may give them a wage low compared with that given for work to which 
no more effort is devoted but for which the demand is greater in relation 
to the supply. 
Work which is not entirely unskilled may be ill-paid if the numbers 
competent to do it are great. This is, perhaps, especially the case with 
women’s work. No one can compare the work done in clothing factories 
in the machinery rooms in which women are employed with some of the 
work done in the cutting-rooms by men without admitting that the 
difference in the wage overestimates the difference in skill. Professor 
Edgeworth, in discussing from this Chair three years ago the low wages of 
women workers, gave as a powerful cause of such wages the overcrowding 
of women into certain occupations. 
Moreover, dull jobs; monotonous jobs, and unpleasant jobs largely 
tend to be done by workers receiving low wages. For the most part people 
