The Wages of Labour Author:William Graham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III NATURE OF THE WAGES SYSTEM—(continued) IN discussing the question of exceptional or even considerable exertion in work from the point of view o... more »f premature age or weakness in industrial life, other questions of importance have been suggested. As Professor Marshall has indicated, the workers who earn most in a week when paid at a given rate for the work are those who are cheapest to their employers, and ultimately to the community, unless, as he shows, they overstrain themselves and work themselves out prematurely. That argument was based on the fact that the speedier workers use only the same amount of fixed capital as their fellow-workers who are slower. Their output is greater, and each part of it carries a smaller charge on that account. The total cost of the work done by the more efficient, although they get the higher wages, is lower than the total cost of what is done by those who get the lower wages on the same basis of payment. This disposes of a suggestion that is often made that it does not matter to the employer how many people are employed provided that his total wages-bill for the work is the same. In a highly industrialized country, with an elaborate factory system and extreme specialization inmachinery and in its use, it will pay an employer to give a larger aggregate sum in wages to a smaller number of men than a smaller total sum to a larger number of men who happen to be less efficient. This raises another of the problems of modern scientific management, and it has also a direct bearing upon at least one phase of the doctrine of the economy of the good wage. Economic history—a subject which does not even to-day occupy its proper place in our educational curricula—shows that slave labour proved in the long run to be the dearest of all forms of ...« less