Page talk:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/451
text of page edit
At the time this was uploaded, there was apparently some kind of problem with the scan. Going to the Google Books link given as the source on the Commons page shows a scan that includes this page. The text of page 429 from there is:
alternative which they consider to be the improbable one—that there will be a general diminution of individual production, and that work-people will do less in eight hours than they did before in nine.
And the fabric is more insubstantial than the foundation. It is virtually the old fallacy that a general diminution of production constitutes a sure means of providing work for the unemployed, and thereby raising wages through increasing the demand for labour. Our authors do not present the fallacy in its crudest form, for they are fully alive to the sober fact that the community will only have the same amount of work to give out if it continues to have the same amount of means to pay for it, and that the aggregate demand for labour cannot rise if the aggregate production fall. But then they hold that the aggregate production will not fall, because the unemployed who now produce nothing will then be producers, and their product will fill up the void in the aggregate left by other people's deficiency. In other words the fund which, according to Mr. Webb and Mr. Cox, is to provide work for the unemployed is the product of the unemployed's own labour; but if the product of their own labour can create such a demand for that labour as will keep them in constant employment under an eight hours system, why cannot it do the same thing now? Nay, if it cannot find them in work now, how can it possibly be expected to find them in work when, through a general diminution of production, employers have less means to invest in making commodities and customers in purchasing them? The unemployed must first be employed before there can be any product from their labour at all, and who is to employ them if the general demand for commodities declines in consequence of the general decrease of production? Mr. Webb and Mr. Cox speak as if the instant effect of shortening the day must be to force employers to take on new hands, but though that has been the case in certain special kinds of business—tramways for example— it has almost never happened in the general manufacturing and productive industries. Even where employers anticipated a diminution of product from the shorter hours, they have still universally tried the experiment first with the old staff and continued it with the old staff, in spite of a temporary diminution of sometimes months' duration. Often, of course, they get the old work out of the old staff from the beginning. Mr. Beaufoy, M.P.—to quote one of our authors' own witnesses—reduced the hours in his establishment to eight and abolished all overtime, without finding it necessary to take on a single fresh hand except three gatekeepers. There is no compressibility in gatekeeping. A man by energy and contrivance may do as much weaving in a short day as in a long one, but no man can do as much gatekeeping; and if you reduce the keeper's hours from twelve to eight, as Mr. Beaufoy did, you must simply take on a new keeper. But that is not the situation of the active industries, and indeed it pertains to so few industries comparatively that the number of hands so taken on cannot be expected to do much in thinning the ranks of the unemployed. Then again it may be very true, as our authors contend, that wages have always increased sooner or later after previous reductions of the hours of labour; but they have increased