110 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
which, by making labour costs high, increase unemployment, or that 
hypothetical widows and fatherless children should be provided for by 
schemes which, by reducing wages, stint actual wives and the children of 
those whose fathers are living. 
Minimum wage rates may be maintained without unemployment 
following when, as has already been suggested, through their reaction on 
efficiency they increase the value of the work done, and also where the 
demand for the labour employed is inelastic. Trade Boards have proved 
this. And it may further be argued that, when normal wages are too low 
to provide adequate maintenance for all workers belonging to a given 
grade, it is better to enforce a wage adequate for the maintenance of a 
certain number, and, having so produced a certain amount of unemploy- 
ment and defined the problem, take steps to deal with the unemployment. 
It may be better to have eighty or even fifty per cent. of workers of a 
given grade adequately paid and the remaining twenty or fifty per cent. 
unemployed, than to have a hundred per cent. inadequately paid. 
But when the question is one not of the minimum needed for efficient 
sustenance but of the relative rates in different occupations, according 
to the degree of skill required and the customary rates for work of a given 
kind, the problem becomes different, as in the case of cost of living 
standards. There is nothing sacred about relative wage rates; they are 
exceedingly arbitrary as between different occupations and between 
different types of skill in the same occupation. Wage rates normal in 
the past are not normal in the present and will not be normal in the 
future. They are subject to infinite variations in accordance with the 
changes in demand (including changes in the scale of the market), changes 
in the structure of industry, and the progress of invention. The alterations 
in industry which took place during and immediately after the war must 
have been as bewildering for the unskilled labourer in this country, who 
found himself better off in 1922 than in 1914, as for the skilled labourer 
who found himself worse off.4 It was not unnatural that in the case of 
the second bewilderment should be accompanied by resentment and 
succeeded by efforts to restore the former balance. But the balance is 
mobile and cannot be stereotyped. It is a pomted commentary on this 
fact that the Cave Committee reporting on the Trade Board Acts in 1922 
advised that the Boards should in future confine their activities to the 
settlement of wages when such wages are unduly low and no other 
adequate machinery exists for their effective regulation. The report 
further deprecated the attempt to fix a national minimum wage for all 
trades, on the ground that it raised® ‘ highly controversial questions, not 
only as to the principle upon which a general minimum wage should be 
based, but also as to the relationship of men’s and women’s wages, the 
provision to be made for dependants, and the possibility of distinguishing 
between district and district.’ This report and consequent legislation 
marked the abandonment of one attempt to legislate on relative wage 
rates. But if one attempt was abandoned, others remain. The minimum 
wage rate in the coal-mining industry is being hotly discussed, and, apart 
from legislative enactments, cost of living standards as a basis not for 
« Manchester Guardian Commercial, Oct. 1922. 
® Report to the Minister of Labour of the Committee appointed to inquire into the 
working and effects of the Trade Board Acts, 1922. 
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