F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 1138 
of interest as being attempts to stretch the normal wage to meet the 
needs of maintenance when, in terms of that wage, the worker is not 
always worth a rate which will enable him to meet all the demands made 
upon him for his own immediate support and that of his family. 
The normal wage is defiantly rigid. It is also brutally erratic. It 
- will not be stretched to meet any but the most immediate needs of workers 
in low grades ; it is capable in times of depression of falling below even 
that low standard. In the process of asserting itself it drives men ruth- 
lessly from occupations for the products of which demand has fallen. 
The secret of its mastery lies in the fact that it offers the one price at 
which all labour of any given grade can be absorbed in the occupations 
to which it is admitted. Whatever be the rights of the coal dispute, it 
is true that a point may come at which any industry or any single firm 
in an industry may be unable to pay a living wage to all those occupied 
init. The normal wage commonly offered in other occupations for the 
same grade of labour will only be given in such an industry when enough 
men have left it to make the rate even throughout the grade. In the mean- 
time labour may suffer greatly, and the productive power of all industry 
may suffer, since nothing is so destructive to a man’s capacity or more 
likely to force him into a lower scale of labour than a prolonged spell 
of unemployment. 
There are those who hope that in time the normal wage may in all 
ranks of labour be at least adequate to maintain workers and their families 
through all uncertainties and vicissitudes. They believe that the progress 
of invention will immensely increase productivity; that improved 
business methods on the one side and rising standards of work on the 
other will make each worker more productive; that ultimately education 
will raise all workers to the ranks of those whose work is worth much. 
But until that Utopia arrives it is well to recognise that, except by making 
wages abnormal, we cannot at present expect them in all cases to do what 
is required of them. The normal wage may be subsidised, either by addi- 
tions to it by the State with all the attendant difficulties, or by Trade 
Union action, effective where demand is inelastic, in making the consumer 
pay a tax in the form of a higher price for the products of labour. 
Monopolistic action limiting entries to a trade or limiting output, beyond 
the point at which such a limitation is important for the health of the 
worker, may raise the wage payments above what is normal, but at the 
expense of making them abnormally low elsewhere in the first case and 
making the country poorer in the second. 
_ It is blindness to pretend that the normal wage must necessarily 
provide for all needs, or that the worker is necessarily to blame if it does 
t. Those more fortunately placed among the workers, as well as 
among other classes of the community, often gain by the cheapness of 
the goods made by workers whose work is worth little because their 
‘humbers are great. But the community as a whole does not gain because 
the workers receiving low wages are part of the community. 
_ It isroughly true that the normal wage distributes labour well through 
stributing wealth ill. Redistribution of wealth is therefore necessary. 
Redistribution in the name of wages tends to interfere withthe distribution 
of labour ; for this reason it may be well to leave wages to mean normal 
wages and to redistribute wealth by other methods. 
1925 E 
