I am aware how difficult it is to translate these handsome aspirations into practical achievement.To urge the working-classes of this country, or even considerable sections of the middle-classes engaged in the trades and professions, to sacrifice some immediately attainable rise in their material and intellectual standard of comfort, in order thereby to purchase more leisure, will be taken to indicate a blank ignorance of the actual conditions of their lives.I shall be reminded that recent statistics of wages in this country show that about one-third of our working-class families are living upon precarious weekly incomes amounting to less than 25s.a week, and that this computation does not take into account a large body of the population living upon casual earnings indefinitely lower than this sum.Now Mr.Rowntree and other searchers into working-class expenditure have shown that 24s.will hardly purchase for an ordinary family in any English town a sufficiency of food, clothing, housing, fuel and other requisites to maintain its members in full physical efficiency.It will seem idle to contend that working-people in this case would do well to prefer a shortening of their working day, however long it be, to an increase of their wages.
None of the considerations I have urged relating to the better utilisation of their consumption will be held to justify so obviously wasteful a policy.
These workers simply cannot afford to buy more leisure at so high a price.
They dare not sacrifice any fraction of their current wages to procure a reduction of hours from ten hours to eight, even if the conditions of their trade otherwise admitted such a change; and if increasing prosperity in their trade presents them with the option of obtaining higher wages or shorter hours, their pressing demands for better food and housing will rightly compel them to choose the former of the two alternatives.
Nor is this reasoning refuted by dwelling upon the undeniable facts, that most standards of working-class comfort contain elements of conventional consumption which might be cut out with positive advantage, and that, apart from this, a more intelligent housekeeping would enable most of them to do much better with their actual incomes than they do.For when a due allowance has been made for such errors or extravagance, the ordinary labourer's wage in town and in country still remains below the margin of family efficiency.
Of course, in almost every occupation there will be a considerable number of workers who, having no family dependent on them, will have some means at their disposal for comforts, luxuries, saving or leisure.But the normal standard wage for unskilled or low-skilled labour in this country does not appear to have attained a height at which the purchase of a shorter working day is sound economy.We must always bear in mind, besides, that the existence in a trade of even a considerable minority of workers who could afford to take in increased leisure what they might take in enhanced wages, would not make this step practicable or desirable.For most trades are now so organised that a common standard working day is even more essential than a uniform rate of wages.
These facts enable us to realise why it is that so much elasticity or ambiguity attends the actual labour movement for a shorter working day.
The demand is seldom framed in such a way as to preclude the common use of over-time, though such a use of course defeats the aim for leisure, converting it into an aim for higher wages, the time and a half rate usually paid for over-time.
But, though this open or secret competition between more leisure and more wages continues to take place in trades where general conditions of labour are improving, the relative strength of the claim for leisure is advancing.There comes a point in the improved conditions of each working-class when the demand for liberty and ease and recreation begins to assert itself with so much insistence that it outweighs some part of the chronic demand for higher wages.Though workers are usually reluctant to admit the economic necessity of making a wage-sacrifice in order to purchase leisure, and will hardly ever claim a shorter day, if they know it to involve an actual fall of wages, they will sometimes risk this fall, and more often they will forego a portion of a contemplated rise of wage, so as to get a shorter day.The strength and effectiveness of this demand for leisure in comparison with wages must, of course, vary with the actual standard of comfort that obtains, the onerousness or irksomeness of the work, the age, sex and intelligence of the workers, and the variety and sorts of opportunities which increased leisure will place at their disposal.In the ordinary English feudal village, or even in the small country town, leisure commonly means torpor qualified by the public-house.The price of such leisure, in terms of sacrifice of wage, would be very low, for the utility in the sensational enjoyment of the leisure would be slight as compared with the substantial addition to the material standard of family comfort which even a shilling would afford.
On the other hand, to the better-paid mechanic, compositor, or skilled factory worker, where the family wage was relatively high, and where organised city life presented many opportunities for the use and enjoyment of leisure, it might seem well worth while to pay something in cash for the advantage of a longer evening.
