§1.In endeavouring to estimate the human costs of labour in terms of physical wear and tear and the conscious pains and penalties entailed by the conditions under which many industrial processes are carried on, we have hitherto considered these costs as borne by workers, irrespective of age, sex, or other discriminations.But it is self-evident that a given strain upon muscles or nerves over a period of time will vary greatly, both in the organic cost and in the conscious pain which it entails, according to the strength and endurance, nervous structure, physical and moral sensitiveness, of the different sorts of workers.Indeed, a given output of productive energy will evidently entail a different human cost in every person called upon to give it out: for every difference of strength, skill, capacity and character must to some extent affect the organic burden of the task.
In endeavouring, therefore, to relate the human to the economic costs of production of any quantity of material wealth or services, it would be necessary to consider how far the conditions of employment tend to economise human costs by distributing the burden proportionately to the power to bear it.The human wastes or excessive costs, entailed by conditions of employment which impose unequal burdens upon workers with equal capacity to bear them, or which distribute the burden unequally in time over the same set of workers, alternating slack periods with periods of excessive over-time, are obvious.Unfortunately the operation of our industrial system has not hitherto taken these into sufficient account.Though the physical, moral and social injuries, due to alternating periods of over and under work, are generally admitted, the full costs of such irregularity, human and even economic, are far from being adequately realised.While some attempts at 'decasualisation' are being made, the larger and more wasteful irregularities of seasonal and cyclical fluctuations are still regarded as irremediable.
By the workers themselves and even by social reformers, the injury inflicted upon wages and the standard of living by irregularity of employment is appreciated far more adequately than the related injury inflicted on the physique and morale of the worker by sandwiching periods of over-exertion between intervals of idleness.
This brief survey, however, is no place for a discussion of the causes and remedies of irregular employment.It must suffice to note that over a large number of the fields of industry the excesses and defects of such irregularity prevail to an extent which adds greatly to the total human cost of the products.So far as our nation is concerned, there is no reason to hold that this waste is increasing.Evidence of hours of labour and of unemployment, indeed, appear to indicate that it is somewhat diminishing.
But the unequal time-distribution of human costs must continue to rank as a great enhancement of the aggregate of such costs.
§2.But not less injurious than the unequal treatment of equals, is the equal treatment of unequals.The bad human economy of working immature children is a lesson which even the most 'civilised' nations have been exceedingly slow to learn.The bad human economy of working old persons of declining vigour, when able-bodied adult labour is available, is so far from being generally recognised that employers are actually commended on the ground of humanity for keeping at labour their aged employees, when younger and stronger workers are available.Fortunately, the larger provision for retiring pensions attests the growing recognition of this aggravation of the human costs of industry.In both cases alike, the employment of the young and of the old, the error arises from a short-sighted view of the interests of the single person or his single family, instead of a far-sighted view of the welfare of the community.It is often a source of immediate gain to a working-class family to put the children out to wage-earning as early as possible, and to keep old people working as long as they can get work to do.It does not pay the nation, even in the economic sense, that either of these things should be done.The case of child-labour is, of course, the more serious, in that it evidently entails not merely a wasteful strain upon feeble organisms, but an even heavier future cost in stunted growth and impaired efficiency throughout an entire life.
