It may even be urged that the claims of the State to maintenance and progress are equal to the claims of individuals upon the surplus.For it is evident that industrial progress demands that both individual and social stimuli and nutriment of progress must be provided from the surplus by some considered adjustment of their several claims.A surplus, thus properly apportioned in extra-subsistence wages and other payments to producers and in public income, would be productively expended and would thus contribute to the maximum promotion of human welfare.7§10.But though in such a society as ours a certain part of the surplus is thus 'productively' applied, and is represented in industrial and human progress, a large part is not so expended in 'costs of progress'.
A large quantity of 'surplus' is everywhere diverted into unproductive channels.The income which should go to raise the efficiency of labour, to evoke more saving, and to improve the public services, is largely taken by private owners of some factor of production who are in a position to extort from society a payment which evokes no increase of productive efficacy, but is sheer waste.This power to extort superfluous and unearned income is at the root of every social-economic malady.Indeed, it often goes beyond the diversion of surplus from productive into unproductive channels.It often encroaches upon costs of maintenance.For the vital statistics of large classes of labour show that the food, housing and other elements of real wages, are insufficient for the upkeep of a normal working life and for the rearing of a healthy and efficient offspring.This means that surplus is actually eating into 'costs', in that the costs of maintenance, which sound business administration automatically secures for the capital employed, are not secured for the labour.The reason why this policy, which from the social standpoint is suicidal, can nevertheless be practised, is obvious.For the capital 'belongs to' the business, in a sense in which the labour does not.A sweating economy which 'lets down' the instruments of capital is of necessity unprofitable to the individual firms: a similar sweating economy applied to the instruments of labour need not be unprofitable.
To the nation as a whole, indeed, regarded merely as a goods-producing body, any such withholding of the true costs of maintenance must be unprofitable.
But there are businesses, or trades, where 'sweated' labour may be profitable to the employers or the owners of capital.There are many more where such a wage-policy, though not really profitable, appears so, and is actually practised as 'sound business'.How large a proportion of the 14,000,000wage-earners whose incomes are paid out of our £2,000,000,000 come under this category of 'sweated' workers, we cannot here profitably discuss.
But, apart from the great bulk of casual workers in all less skilled trades, there are large strata of skilled and trained adult-labour in the staple trades of the country which are not paid a full subsistence wage.Such are the large bodies of women employed in factories and workshops and in retail trade, at wages varying between eight and fourteen shillings.Indeed, it may safely be asserted that the average wage of an adult working-woman in this country, not in domestic service, is a sweating wage, definitely below true economic maintenance, and still more below the decent human requirements of life.The same statement also holds of the wage of agricultural labour in most districts of the middle and southern counties of England.
In such employments the true economic 'costs' of maintenance are not provided out of the present distribution of the national income.Of a far wider range of labour is it true that the true wages of progressive efficiency, which we have seen are vital to the economic progress of the nation, are withheld.Though this deprivation does not form the whole case for labour as stated from the 'human' standpoint, it constitutes the heaviest economic count against the current distribution of wealth.The full physical and spiritual nutriment, the material comforts, the education, leisure, recreation, mobility and broad experience of life, requisite for an alert, resourceful, intelligent, responsible, progressive working-class, are not provided either by the present wage-system, or by the growing supplements which the communal action of the State and the municipality are making to the individual incomes of the workers.Out of the £2,000,000,000 a wholly insufficient sum is distributed in wages of progressive efficiency for labour.
In certain other respects also the current 'costs' distribution is exceedingly defective.The saving which goes to provide for the enlargement of the capital structure of industry is very wastefully provided.A large proportion of such savings as are contributed out of working-class incomes involves an encroachment upon their costs of progressive efficiency, and represents, from the standpoint both of the individual family and of society, bad economy.Moreover, the methods of collection and of application of such capital are so wasteful and so insecure as to render working-class thrift a byword in the annals of business administration.
§11.But these deficiencies in the economy of 'costs' can only be understood by a study of that large section of the national income which in its distribution furnishes no food or stimulus whatever to any form of productive energy.Even in the idealist laissez-faire economics we saw that rent of land was distinguished from the wages, interest and profits, which constituted the 'costs of production', and was described as 'surplus'.
