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Updated: June 3, 2025
Since the same quantity of low-skilled work would require to be done, employment would now be provided for a large number of those who would otherwise have been unemployed. In fact, if the shorter day is accompanied by an absolute prohibition of over-time, it seems possible that work would thus be found for the whole army of "unemployed." Nor is this all.
If no relief is found from these, it seems not unlikely that a democratic government will some day decide that such artificial prohibition of foreign labour, and the foreign goods which compete with the goods produced by low-skilled English labour, will benefit the low-skilled workers in their capacity as wage-earners, more than the consequent rise of prices will injure them in their capacity as consumers.
Society is constantly engaged in endeavouring, feebly, slowly, and blindly, to relieve the stress of poverty, and the industrial weakness of low-skilled labour, by laying hands upon certain functions and certain portions of wealth formerly left to private individuals, and claiming them as social functions and social wealth to be administered for the social welfare.
This is the past and present contribution of "socialistic legislation" towards a solution of the problem of poverty, and it seems not unlikely that the claims of society upon these forms of social property will be larger and more systematically enforced in the future. The Industrial Outlook of Low-Skilled Labour. The Concentration of Capital.
Relation of Low-skilled Labour to the wider Movement. The relation in which this large industrial evolution stands to our problem of the poor low-skilled worker is not obscure. In comparing the movement of capital with that of labour we saw that in one respect the former was clearer and more perfect.
The constant influx of unskilled labour from the rural districts and from abroad, swollen by the numbers of skilled workmen whose skill has been robbed of its value by machinery, keeps a large continual margin of unemployed, able and willing to undertake any kind of unskilled or low-skilled labour, which will provide a minimum subsistence wage.
If, by a crusade of temperance pure and simple, you made teetotalers of the mass of low-skilled workers, their wages would indisputably fall, although they might be more competent workers than before.
These irregularities and leakages seem to explain why, at any given time, a certain considerable number of fairly efficient and willing workmen may be out of work. It is often urged that this class of "unemployed" must be regarded as quite distinct from the superfluity of low-skilled and inefficient workers found in our towns, and that the two classes present different problems for solution.
Every period of "depressed trade" feeds the pool of low-skilled labour from a hundred different channels. The connection between the two classes of "unemployed" is, therefore, a close and vital one. To drain off this pool would, in fact, be of little permanent use unless those irregularities of trade, which are constantly feeding it, are also checked.
The competition described in this picture only differs from other competitions for low-skilled town labour in as much as the conditions of tender gave a tragical concentration to the display of industrial forces.
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