United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
An inspection of the available material seems to show that in times of rapidly rising prices the relative differentials between the lower grades of wage earners and the upper grades decrease, while the absolute differentials increase and the reverse in times of rapidly declining prices.
And no element in the whole policy of wage settlement should stand in the way of the payment of a higher wage than that fixed by the central authority for any type of work. Thus no fear would have to be entertained that any industry would be faced with a shortage of labor due to the difficulty of getting precise knowledge on which to base wage differentials.
For such adjectives inevitably suggest that the condition to which they are applied corresponds to a set of facts from which divergence can be only temporary, and is probably accidental. That, however, is not true in regard to the wage differentials which exist at any given time.
The wage differentials that are established should be such as will make it reasonably certain that industry will be provided with at least the existing proportion of the more skilled grades of labor, and to make it reasonably certain also that the more arduous, dangerous, irregular, and disagreeable work will command the service of as much labor as at present.
First, there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the non-human boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which, by all our experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is that indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving from the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the schoolman, common sense; a general appreciation which transcends particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of evidence.
See also account in Lord Askwith's "Industrial Problems and Disputes" of the influence of customary differentials upon wage movements during the war, pp. 400-26. Ind. Reports, The Furniture Trades Case. Section 1. The transactions of distribution arranged in terms of money. How does this affect the outcome of distribution as regards wages? Section 2. The characteristics of price movements.
Secondly, it may be commented that the experience of the past does not, in general, support the contention. In many industries the same standard wage scale applies over an area in which there are real differences of the kind set forth above, and no differentials as between the different points within the area have arisen as, for example, on the railroads.
As complete a knowledge as is obtainable of the various forces which produce these differentials is absolutely necessary to any project of wage regulation. Secondly, although they represent a large variety of actual forces, it is misleading to apply such adjectives as "normal" or "natural" to them.
Word Of The Day