F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 109 
of dependants, and everyone present will call to mind cases of men who 
dare run no risk of losing their job because of their wives and children. 
In view of this, we may think it fortunate that the workers who get 
low wages so often have few needs. Young untrained workers whose 
productivity is low have no dependants. They have often, in fact, just 
ceased from being dependants themselves and become contributors to 
the family wage. If women are crowded into a somewhat small number of 
occupations with low rates of pay,it is some comfort to remember that they 
have comparatively few dependants to suffer from those low rates. 
| If we agree that the normal wage in some cases rises above and in many 
falls below the wage required by the worker for his maintenance in the 
future as well as the present, and for the maintenance of his wife and family 
in both the present and future, what should be our attitude towards the 
many persons and bodies who are concerned with raising the wage rate, 
with charging provision for unemployment and the future on to wages, 
and with readjusting wage rates? It is clear that we cannot expect the 
approximation of normal wages to wages adequate for such maintenance 
to be the main preoccupation of social reformers or statesmen. But for a 
short time we may make it ours. Measures concerned with wages may be 
put into three categories roughly coinciding with the three aspects of 
wages with which we began. First, there are those which are concerned 
with the mobility of labour, with seeing that labour is as swiftly as possible 
directed where it is most needed, by the dissemination of knowledge, by 
facilities for movement such as are offered by the Employment Exchanges, 
by vocational selection, by the efforts of Trade Unions to ensure that in 
every instance the rate received shall be at least the normal rate. Secondly, 
there are those which attempt to increase the productivity of the worker 
and raise him from one grade to another ; such as measures of educational 
reform, improved social conditions, even, when wages are very low, 
minimum wage rates which by improving the health of the worker increase 
his productive capacity. Thirdly, there are measures which attempt 
something further and try either to add to the normal wage rate or to 
‘stretch ’ the rate so that it will pay for things that it did not previously 
pay for. I do not propose to discuss the first two categories. Their value 
is obvious. 
_ But we are being forced increasingly to discuss the third category. 
Tt includes schemes for fixing such minimum wage rates as do not increase 
productivity: cost of living standards when they attempt something 
other than the maintenance of the normal wage; schemes for subsidising 
certain sections of wage-earners, such as Sir Alfred Mond’s scheme for 
subsidising wages in industries afflicted with unemployment from the 
unds of the Unemployment Insurance Scheme, and systems of Family 
lowances ; and schemes for stretching normal wages to cover certain 
osts, such as compulsory insurance schemes. 
Where these schemes ensure a given rate of wages their advocates 
esire that it should be secured without unemployment ensuing. They 
0 not wish either to raise the wages of the individual at the expense of 
is earnings or to raise his earnings at the expense of the unemployment 
of other workers. Where, as in compulsory and contributory insurance 
- schemes, a charge is levied on employer and employed, it is presumably 
=o desired that unemployment benefit should be provided by measures 
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