§4.But leisure, as an economic asset, is not a mere question of hours.A shorter work-day might be dearly bought at the cost of an intensification of labour which left body and mind exhausted at the end of each day.The opposition of workers to a policy of speeding-up, or the use of pace-setters, is usually a sane act of self-defence, and not the fractious obstruction to industrial progress it is sometimes represented.No considerations of human endurance limit the pace at which machinery driven by mechanical power may be worked.Unless, therefore, restraints are put by law, custom or bargaining, upon the speed of machines, or the number which a worker is called upon to serve, competition may impose a work-day which, though not unduly long in hours, habitually exhausts the ordinary worker.It is not always realised how great a change took place when the weaver, the shoemaker, the smith, passed from the workshops, where the pace and other conditions of work were mostly regulated by their voluntary action, to the steam-driven factory.The shoemaker and the tailor under the old conditions had time, energy and liberty for thought while carrying on their work:
they could slacken, break off or speed up, their work, according to their inclination.The clicker or heeler in a shoe factory, the cutter-out in a clothing factory, have no such measure of freedom.This is, of course, a normal effect of modern industrialism.Closer and more continuous attention is demanded during the working hours.
Thus the real question of leisure is a question of spare human energy rather than of spare hours.The shorter working-day is chiefly needed as a condition favourable to spare energy.Though therefore, an eight-hours day may not unreasonably be taken as a proximate reform, for labour in general, there is no reason why the work-day in all occupations should be cut to this or any other exact measure.Such arithmetical equality would evidently work out most inequitably, as between trade and trade, or process and process in the same trade.In many large departments of industry, the transport and distributive trades in particular, numerous interstices of leisure are inserted in a day's work, easing the burden of the day, and sometimes affording opportunity for recreation and intercourse.In the more arduous processes of manufacture, mining, or in clerical and other routine brain work, there is little or no scope for such relaxation.
But while such considerations evidently affect the detailed policy of the shorter day in its pressure on the several occupations, they do not affect the general policy.
There can be no doubt that an excessive and injurious amount of specialised labour is exacted from the workers by the ordinary industrial conditions of to-day in nearly all industrial processes.
§5.The first plea for a shorter day is one which our analysis has made self-evident.
It will greatly reduce the human cost of production in most processes.
For, as we recognise, the strain of muscular and nervous fatigue, both conscious and unconscious, gathers force and grows with great rapidity during the later hours of the workday, Though the curve representing the variations of the human cost will of course differ in every sort of work and for different workers, their age, sex, strength, health and other personal conditions affecting it, the last hours of each shift will contain a disproportionate amount of fatigue, pain and other 'costs,' while the quality and quantity of the work done in these last hours will be inferior.
If out of any stock of material goods, we were able to separate the product of the last hour's work from that of the earlier hours in the work-day, and could subject it to the analysis of human cost and utility, which we have endeavoured to apply to the general income, what should we find? This last increment of the product would contain a heavier burden of human cost of production than any of the earlier increments.Again, turning to the consumption side, what should we find? This last increment must be considered as furnishing the smallest amount of human utility in its consumption.
Indeed, if we are right in holding that a considerable fraction of each supply, even of what are commonly classed as material necessaries of life, such as foods, clothings, etc., is wastefully or even detrimentally consumed by the well-to-do, there is reason to hold that this last increment of product, involving the largest human cost in its production, contains no utility but some amount of human disutility in its consumption.
If this analysis be true, the last hour's work may be doubly wasteful from the standpoint of human welfare.
Of the £2,000,000,000 which constitutes our income it may very likely be the case that £200,000,000 of it represents wealth, which, from the human standpoint, is 'illth,' alike in the mode of its production and of its consumption.If it had not been produced at all, the nation might have been far better off, for by abstaining from the production of this sham wealth, it would have produced a substantial amount of leisure.
It is of course true that the particular groups of producers, who by their last hour's labour made these goods, may not have been losers by doing so; their heavy toil may have been compensated by the enhanced wage which they could not otherwise have got, and the loss of which would have injured their standard of life.It is, indeed, the operation of competition upon wages that actually forces into existence this sham-wealth.Drawn out of over-wrought workers by the unequal conditions of the wage-bargain, it passes into wasteful consumption by the back-stroke of the same law of distribution, which pays it away as 'surplus' or 'unearned' wealth.
It is only the clear consideration of its production and consumption from the social standpoint that exhibits the waste of the last hour's product.
