The Experts Look at Unemployment, II.
Ryan, John A.
636 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, I929 THE EXPERTS LOOK AT UNEMPLOYMEN II. A SHORTER WORK PERIOD By JOHN A. RYAN HILE higher wages for the majority of the laboring class is the...
...Increased employment would increase the total amount of wages received, not only because more workers would be employed, but because the greater demand for labor would keep wage rates above what they would have been in the absence of increased employment...
...Talked to me about the aesthetic appeal of the Church as he found it in the Latin South...
...Indeed, the movement toward this goal is already well under way...
...The program suggested by Stuart Chase is more in harmony with humanity and reason than the suggestions of the Committee on Recent Economic Changes...
...Charity constrains us to give the Committee the benefit of the doubt...
...A vast amount of them would still be demanded by the possessors of unusually large purchasing power...
...To be sure, the increased leisure would not immediately be all utilized for intellectual and moral improvement...
...However, that is not an argument against the proposal...
...Describing this ethical discipline as it was taking final shape at the end of the seventeenth century, R. H. Tawney writes in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism : The worship of production and ever greater production-the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his unhappy servants--was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same compelling creed...
...What is needed is increased demand for labor, not the ability of labor to turn out more goods in a given number of hours...
...His was a clear-cut objective...
...None of these clean-cut alternatives has of course been taken...
...Industrial well-being and the principles of justice can be practically harmonized...
...The latter is a problem of education which we have no right to assume is insoluble...
...With a shorter work-day or work-week, a given demand for goods would require more laborers, thus decreasing unemployment...
...A SHORTER WORK PERIOD By JOHN A. RYAN HILE higher wages for the majority of the laboring class is the primary and direct solution of the problem of chronic or technological unemployment, it is not the only solution...
...Charity constrains us to assume that on account of their great appreciation of our recent industrial progress and their preoccupation with "prosperity," the members of the Committee failed to perceive the false and disagreeable implications of their loose talk about "insatiable wants...
...Could not very well help it...
...Instead, hours have fallen a little, output has increased considerably, but the present financial control neither releases sufficient purchasing power to enlarge output as far as the machine is readily capable of enlarging it unhindered, nor promotes the kind of output which necessarily makes for the good life...
...This arrangement can easily be substituted for the first whenever the demand warrants the larger use of machinery and plant...
...As stated in a previous paragraph, the shorter work period "would promote a better social order than that which results from the development of new wants...
...one man replaces ten...
...It is quoted here, not necessarily as correct in detail but as indicating the right approach and method: Let me recapitulate...
...Society is going to provide opportunity for man to pay his own way or is going to pay for him...
...So many young people are...
...The shorter work period would check or retard the production of new luxuries because the workers' increased demand for necessities and comforts would tend to keep capital fully employed in industries that are already established...
...But while he talked about Carnacco, I began (mentally, of course) planning an Italian trip for him...
...Read much of him ?" I asked casually, only to find that the boy was well-nigh d'Annunzionized...
...Whoever had suggested the European trip to the boy doubtless rendered worthy service to his country, and need one say more than that...
...In their preoccupation with a conception of prosperity which logically implies a belief in production for its own sake, the members of the Committee are in line with our baneful tradition of Puritan industrial ethics...
...President Green of the American Federation of Labor recently estimated the number of men who have obtained the five-day week at 500,000...
...Nevertheless, one of the two underlying principles of the Puritan ethics of work and production has been incontinently rejected by the Committee as by all American industrialists...
...In all probability the greater part of it would, for a considerable time, be spent uselessly, if not foolishly...
...But as an alternative, all can continue to work for half as many hours in the day...
...These workers are found chiefly in the building trades, the printing trades, foundries and machine shops, the clothing industries and the automobile industry...
...The ideal result would be something in the nature of hours reduced a third, and output of sound necessities and comforts increased two-thirds...
...A certain number of these men are needed to build and service the new machine, but some of them are permanently displace...
...The other half are on the park bench...
...In any industry where this would happen, the shorter work-day would obviously fail to reduce unemployment...
...Let us charitably assume that they had no intention of identifying this conception of prosperity with industrial sanity, social well-being or desirable human life...
...Men must first get leisure before they can learn to use it wisely...
...Yet he did not come to Italy to wander in and out of churches...
...By suggestion and by implication they convey the idea that national prosperity and national welfare are dependent upon the indefinite expansion of human wants and the indefinite multiplication of luxuries...
...Of course, a shorter work period would not entirely prevent the production of luxuries...
...The immediate effect of each of these arrangements would be to increase employment...
...The shorter work period for labor seems to provide an effective method...
...Let us charitably assume that the members of the Committee merely overlooked the fact that the productive capacity of our men and machines could all be utilized to a reasonable extent in turning out goods for the satisfaction of wants already known and felt, particularly the elementary and rational wants of the majority...
...We should frankly realize that the problem is not one of more productive power but of better distribution of purchasing power...
...The most reassuring and the most significant truths that emerge from an objective study of American conditions today are these: In the United States, at least, the prosperity of the industrial system is consistent with and dependent upon the welfare of the toiling masses...
...The increased wages would provide increased purchasing power for the products of many industries, thereby extending further the demand for labor...
...The shorter work-day is sometimes advocated on the ground that it results in as large a production per capita as a longer day...
...The doctrine of the living wage and all the other humane doctrines taught by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical, On the Condition of Labor, can no longer be stigmatized as visionary by any intelligent student of our industrial achievements and potentialities...
...For example, a plant might be operated for twelve hours a day, six days in the week, and yet employ no laborer for more than six hours per day or five days per week...
...Twenty-two and golden-haired and blue-eyed and six feet two at that l Yale--or was it Harvard ?--a decent old family background, an unbounded enthusiasm for all he saw and heard, some highly poetical acquaintance with the renaissance, particularly where the latter touched Italy and a dreamy Della Robbia-esque longing after art-ecclesiastical art at that...
...636 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, I929 THE EXPERTS LOOK AT UNEMPLOYMEN II...
...Some boldness suggestive of a Phoenician sailor, he intimately conversant with stellar ways...
...On the one hand, it would provide the laboring classes with greater leisure and thus make possible the development of a higher intellectual and moral life...
...The objection that the same or higher wages could not be paid for producing a smaller or the same amount of goods has been dealt with in a preceding paragraph...
...Since production is justified only as a means to rational and beneficial consumption, it ought to be so organized as to yield the maximum of the good life for all...
...George O'Brien says, in the Economic Effects of the Reformation: The desire for ever-increasing production, which is a feature of the capitalist spirit, was encouraged not only by the Puritan conception of the fulfilment of the vocation, but also by the other branch of Puritan ascetic teaching--namely, the observance of strict frugality and austerity...
...On the other hand, the Ford automobile factory is busy six days in the week, although none of the employees works more than five...
...The order of events would be directly contrary to that set in motion when men are thrown out of work...
...And a rather venturesome one, too...
...The elementary necessities and comforts and the material conditions of reasonable leisure and progressive mental October 23, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 637 and moral development ought to be placed within the reach of all the people, while the supply of useful and harmful luxuries should be kept down to a minimum...
...For the sake of the intellectual, not to say the moral, reputations of the Committee on Recent Economic Changes, let us hope that this interpretation and inference will turn out to have been unforeseen and unintended, however necessarily it may follow according to the strict processes of logic...
...Carnacco drew him on...
...The thing can be accomplished if only the masters of industry and of politics will devote to the problem a small part of the energies that they habitually spend in making and selling goods and in pursuing profits...
...In the first, labor has shorter hours while the machinery and plants are operated full time...
...This would end hard work and poverty forever...
...Although the Report of the Unemployment in the United States provides no adequate guidance along this line for either industrialists or statesmen, it contains one paragraph which gives full recognition to the urgency of the problem and the obligation of society to solve the problem...
...No competent person doubts that our industries are capable of producing the required volume of goods...
...You see, he loved letters as much as painting...
...After all, wages are the money equivalent of goods...
...Now if the articles called for remain the same, and the financial system remains the same, sooner or later half the workers (let us say) in the country can produce what once required 638 THE COMMONWEAL October 23, 1929 the labor of all the workers...
...There is an important secondary remedy which would reinforce higher wages and promote a better social order than that which results from the development of new wants...
...Moreover, we will charitably assume that they are not so lacking in economic knowledge or in the capacity for straight economic thinking as to suppose that our industries can be kept going at a reasonable rate or for a reasonable period of time per week only on condition that the multitude shall continue to work eight or ten hours per day in order to satisfy the "extravagant desires for luxury" felt by the economically powerful minority...
...I did not quite gather what his creed was, but a remark or two enlightened me as to the fact that his father was Episcopalian and his mother a rather indifferent Baptist, neither of which creeds seemed to make any appeal to the son...
...The choice between these methods in any industry would be determined by the amount of demand for its products...
...Machinery saves labor in a given process...
...There's too much sheer beauty in it...
...Reverence and shyness there were about him and in plenty, and something else, too, which utterly escaped a downright definition...
...Having personally never been to America, I fell in love with her people after about twenty minutes' talk with this youth...
...In the last two years considerable progress has been made toward the introduction of the five-day week...
...It speaks of the reaching out for luxuries which make possible the expansion of new industries, and says that the United States has only touched the fringes of its potentialities...
...Full time for machinery and reduced time for the workers is evidently the more desirable arrangement, for it means not only more workers employed but a more economical use of capital...
...if the goods can be produced, their wage equivalent will be potentially available...
...Wants, it declares, are insatiable, and one want satisfied makes room for another, and economically there is a boundless field for development...
...You just can't be prosaic if you're a Catholic, can you ?" he flung at me, bending that golden head of his over some engravings of the cathedral he had just bought...
...To establish universal living wages and to abolish all excessive labor, as regards persons, quality and hours, would be the most direct, prompt and effective means of meeting the menace of chronic unemployment and of ensuring prosperity for our industries...
...Two situations may be conceived...
...Of course he meant to go to Carnacco...
...In all probability the movement can be extended more rapidly than the movement for higher wages to the underpaid...
...And so on--enrapturedly, ecstatically--from which I could gather that his idea of the Church would hardly ever shift from the highly colored conception of Ghirlandajo frescoes and Della Robbia plaques...
...This secondary remedy is a shorter work-day or a shorter work-week, or both...
...The average working time per week per employee in factories decreased 15 percent between I9oo and I923...
...Let us charitably assume that they did not mean to say that genuine prosperity "is largely based on the limitless desires of humanity for pleasure and luxury...
...Whether this new emphasis upon limitless consumption is more rational, or less, than the traditional maxims of frugality and saving, it constitutes, at any rate, eloquent testimony to the capacity of our industries for overproduction...
...Of course he talked a lot of delightful nonsense...
...The quantity turned out, however, and the proportion of productive energy thus engaged, would be considerably reduced, while the proportion of productive power used to meet the rational needs of the masses would be considerably greater than is the case in our present arrangements...
...in the second, the plant and the employees, are active during a shorter day or a smaller number of days per week...
...Instead of urging men to strive for greater production through "frugality and austerity," the Committee points to the inexhaustible spring of "almost insatiable wants...
...The following paragraph expresses the views of the senators themselves who conducted the hearings: It may as well be remembered that society is going to provide an opportunity for man to sustain himself, or is going to have to sustain man...
...The report seems to suggest that material prosperity is largely based on the limitless desires of humanity for pleasure and luxury, that no great prosperity can be based merety upon the satisfaction of the primary needs for food, shelter and clothing...
...That was where I met him, that delightful American youth, who seemed perfect sartorially and lured you with some as yet indefinite promise of widely spanned achievements in his maturer years...
...Unfortunately, certain statements of the Committee on Recent Economic Changes tend to endorse the contrary doctrine...
...ITALIAN JOURNEY By E. M. ALMEDINGEN HE real story began at Milan...
...He spoke of d'Annunzio with a neophyte's bated breath, referred to him as "master," the blue eyes dreamier than ever...
...It suggests that if people are encouraged to have extravagant desires for luxury they will work for these and multitudes of people will be given employment, while the Spartan country will always be poor, however virtuous its people may be...
...A touch of a Greek disc-thrower, glad of the sun and of his supple limbs...
...Society may as well make every effort to do the job constructively because no society can be strong in which its members are encouraged or forced to adopt the position or place of those seeking charity...
...on the other hand, it would tend to retard the invention of new luxuries...
...Called it the refuge for all poets and dreamers in the world--this immediately after his return from the Duorno, which, so far as I could gather, had come to him in terms of a white-winged eagle...
...In the following section of an editorial by George Russell in the Irish Statesman, this construction is unhesitatingly put upon the Committee's language: There is an interesting passage in the Report of the Committee on Recent Economic Changes, of which President Hoover is chairman...
...This would be an immense gain for the good life...
...At present the building trades in some cities are on a five-day-week basis because there is not sufficient demand to require operation for six days...
...The only difficulty is to get into operation the process of converting the goods into wages...
...Or all can combine to work a full day and produce twice as much...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 25
