Real wage

“ Wages in the first sense, the wages on which the labourer's comfort depends, we will call real wages, or wages in kind. Wages in the second sense, we may be permitted to call, for the present, money wages; assuming, as it is allowable to do, that money remains for the time an invariable standard, no alteration taking place in the conditions under which the circulating medium itself is produced or obtained. If money itself undergoes no variation in cost, the money price of labour is an exact measure of the Cost of Labour, and may be made use of as a convenient symbol to express it. ”

“ Real wages are a very different thing from the Cost of Labour, and are generally highest at the times and places where, from the easy terms on which the land yields all the produce as yet required from it, the value and price of food being low, the cost of labour to the employer, notwithstanding its ample remuneration, is comparatively cheap, and the rate of profit consequently high. ”

“ There has never been a free people, a civilized nation, a real republic on this earth. Human society has always consisted of masters and slaves, and the slaves have always been and are today, the foundation stones of the social fabric.
Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact. ”

“ These can only be understood by a study of the economic facts and arrangements which govern distribution, and by weighing many questions of social and economic expediency. To talk about basing wages solely on the effort of the worker is to ignore the obvious fact that much of the most laborious work is the worst paid.
The exponents of scientific management have not discovered a law of wages; they have simply elaborated a method of wage payment. ”

“ When we try to regulate wages according to the cost of living, we are imitating a dog chasing his tail. And, anyhow, who is competent to say just what kind of living we shall base the costs on? Let us broaden our view and see what a wage is to the workmen--and what it ought to be.
The wage carries all the worker's obligations outside the shop; it carries all that is necessary in the way of service and management inside the shop. The day's productive work is the most valuable mine of wealth that has ever been opened. Certainly it ought to bear not less than all the worker's outside obligations. ”

“ And, secondly, what may be called for a lack of a better name, the doctrine of special reward—by which is meant, that the wage differentials between the standard wage levels of different types of labor should be regarded as special rewards, given in order to make it reasonably certain that industry will be provided with at least the existing proportion of the more skilled grades of labor, and to make it reasonably certain also that the more arduous, irregular, dangerous and disagreeable work will command the service of as much labor as at present. ”

“ The wage worker receives his wages. That he is exploited by his employer. But when he goes to buy shoes, food, meat or clothes, he finds the owner of these commodities selling them at a higher price than he can pay. Then the reformers conclude that these merchants are exploiting the workers also. These people do not understand that the value of A (the necessities of life) determine wages.
Not all individual workingmen or women receive the value of their labor-power. Some men and women receive a little more than the value of labor-power. ”

“ With the increasing complexity of society, many other problems presented themselves to the worker, but for the most part they were subsidiary to the main question of wages. As long as man’s place was fixed by law or custom, a customary wage left small margin for controversy. But when fixed status gave way to voluntary contract, when payment was made in money, when workmen were free to journey from town to town, labor became both free and fluid, bargaining took the place of custom, 12 and the wage controversy began to assume definite proportions. ”

“ That argument is that it will prove impossible to maintain uniform standard wage rates throughout an industry in which the various enterprises are distributed over a wide area; in the several parts of which area the cost of living, the general conditions of labor, and the demand and supply situation for labor differ considerably. ”

“ As an applied doctrine, the doctrine of the unity of wage income and of the wage earners means that the same wage should be paid throughout industry for work which requires approximately the same human qualities, and which makes approximately the same demands upon the individual. The common effort involved in production is emphasized, rather than the differences between the work performed by workers in different parts of the field of production. ”

“ If the productive organization has at its command a plentiful supply of capital; if in the community there are many men possessed of a high order of business ability; if then, 55 labor for the commoner tasks of production is relatively scarce, the work of the ordinary wage earner will be a means of adding considerably to the total of market values produced. Or, as it is sometimes put, each use of labor will be an important use. Labor will be in great demand, and wages will be high. ”

“ Were the business of the country in the active condition in which it could not avoid being if our money system were perfectly adjusted to industry, and if employers were competing for laborers with the same degree of eagerness that laborers are competing for employment, the average wage of a day for a working man would not be less than $2. ”

“ Where there exists a constant over-supply of labour competing for what must be regarded at any particular time as a fixed quantity of employment, wages are determined with tolerably close reference to the lowest standard of living among that class of workers, and not by any fixed or customary money wage. ”

“ Any exact correspondence between wages and the price of the product would exclude the wage-earners, as such, from all share in the advantages of improvements in production, cheapening of carriage, and the fall in the rate of interest, which might otherwise be turned to account in an advance in the workman’s Standard of Life. ”

“ It may, perhaps, be said:55 “There is this difference— where a man works for himself, or where, when working for an employer, he takes his wages in kind, his wages depend upon the result of his labor. Should that, from any misadventure, prove futile, he gets nothing. When he works for an employer, however, he gets his wages anyhow—they depend upon the performance of the labor, not upon the result of the labor.” But this is evidently not a real distinction. For on the average, the labor that is rendered for fixed wages not only yields the amount of the wages, but more ”

“ The standard of life and comfort affects the wages of labor, and there is constant effort to make the wage correspond to this standard. It is an unending and often bitter struggle, nowhere better summed up than by Thorold Rogers in his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages,"—a work upon which economists, however different their conclusions, rely alike for facts and figures.
We must then admit in degree the tendency of wages to a minimum, especially those of unskilled labor, and accept it as one more motive for persistent effort to alter existing conditions and prevent any such culmination. ”

“ There is, therefore, in the politico-economic sense of the term wages no distinction as to the kind of labour, or as to whether its reward is received through an employer or not. Wages means the return received for the exertion of labour, as distinguished from the return received for the use of capital, and the return received by the landholder for the use of land.
The man who cultivates the soil for himself receives his wages in its produce, just as, if he uses his own capital and owns his own land, he may also receive interest and rent. ”

“ It is not merely the wage scale that must be kept up but the amount of wages that a worker receives over the course of a year. This is only another way of saying that what we need, fundamentally, is a broader distribution of the profits of industry. ”

“ If these assumptions were realized in fact, it would be correct to view the problem of wages as the study of one set of relationships that governed a basic level of wages—called the general rate of wages—with purely supplementary studies of the circumstances governing equalizing differences. The problem of wages would be a study of forces which were uniformly influential in relation to the wages of all labor. ”

“ It is difficult to compare wages without making a close investigation in different localities and in many trades, and testing, by a comparison with the cost of living, the real and not merely the money value of wages, but there is a general agreement among authorities that wages on the whole have not kept pace with the workers' necessary expenditures. ”

“ And, therefore, even if the view that each individual should get what he produces were found to be acceptable as a basis for distribution, any attempt to base wages solely upon considerations of individual or group output must rest on a false assumption. Any laws or principles for the determination of wages must reckon with a far wider and more numerous set of considerations than those taken into account by the scientific management theories of wages. ”

“ Why do you talk of wages? The money with which you pay the wages of the laborers remunerates them for only a few years of the perpetual possession which they have abandoned to you. Wages is the cost of the daily maintenance and refreshment of the laborer. You are wrong in calling it the price of a sale. The workingman has sold nothing; he knows neither his right, nor the extent of the concession which he has made to you, nor the meaning of the contract which you pretend to have made with him. ”

“ Wages paid by an employer Production is always the mother of wages. Without production, wages would not and could not be. It is from the produce of labour, not from the advances of capital that wages come. Wherever we analyse the facts this will be found to be true. For labour always precedes wages. This is as universally true of wages received by the labourer from an employer as it is of wages taken directly by the labourer who is his own employer. In the one class of cases as in the other, reward is conditioned upon exertion. ”

“ If the wages of all classes or groups of wage earners are to be increased when the profits return in industry as a whole is above the approved level, the question arises as to the best way to calculate the wage increases, and the 255 most satisfactory basis for distributing them among the different groups of wage earners. ”

“ If the numbers in any group of wage earners are high relative to the uses in which the employment of the members of that group results in a considerable addition to the product of market values, the wages of that group will be low, and vice versa. The need of the productive system for any kind of labor, relative to the supply available to fill that need is an important factor in determining the reward paid for that labor. ”

“ It should be observed, first of all, that neither 220 of these two doctrines upholds the rights of particular groups of wage earners. They aim to bring all wage earning groups to perceive that they are part of a larger whole; they emphasize the fact that the wages of each group are what they are, more because the total wage income is what it is, than because of the special type of work performed by the group. ”

“ That is to say, whether any measure can be elaborated by which all wages could be adjusted, according as profits in industry as a whole exceeded, approximated, or fell below the profits level that is taken to mark just and sound distribution of the product of industry. ”

“ That presumption arises from the fact that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, the higher range of unstandardized wages indicates what wages may be enforced throughout the occupation without causing great disturbance and unemployment. ”

“ In the other, the wage earner is viewed primarily as a member of an occupational group or class, whose wages should be regulated by the standard of life of his group or class, rather than by strict measurement 142 of his own individual capacity. ”

“ Therefore, the payment of wages presupposes production by labour for which wages are paid. And as the employer generally makes a profit, the payment of wages is, so far as he is concerned, but the return to the labourer of a portion of the wealth he has received from labour. So far as the employee is concerned, it is but the receipt of a portion of the wealth his labour has previously produced. As the value paid in wages is thus exchanged for a value brought into being by labour, how can it be said that wages are advanced by capital? ”

“ Wage variations are interdependent It is indeed evident from observation, as it must be from theory, that whatever be the circumstances which produce the difference of wages in different occupations, and although they frequently vary in relation to each other (producing, as between time and time, and place and place, greater or less relative differences) yet the rate of wages in one occupation is always dependent on the rate in another ”

“ If then in this medium, which had not varied in value, the wages of the labourer should be found to have fallen, it will not the less be a real fall, because they might furnish him with a greater quantity of cheap commodities, than his former wages. ”

“ Furthermore, the statements in regard to the interactions to which the action of the factor of relative plenty or scarcity was subject, apply with equal force to the problem under discussion. Every human quality plays its part in the actual 82 processes and negotiations by which the wages of the various groups of wage earners are settled. ”