The new industrial revolution and wages

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1804651486

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-193069

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Lauck, William Jett http://d-nb.info/gnd/173237126

Title:: The new industrial revolution and wages

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Funk & Wagnalls

Year of publication:: 1929

Scope:: ix, 308 S.; graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VII. Acceptance of the theory of an adequate basic wage

Collection:: Economics Books

ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 123 which they may work with zest and spirit and pride of accomplishment. When zest departs, labor becomes drudgery. When exhaustion enters, labor becomes slavery. Zest is partly a matter of physical condition, but it is also largely influenced by mental reactions. These are common to all of us in every position. Are we doing well with our lives? Are we providing for our families—not merely clothes and food and shelter while we are working, but an insurance for them when our working time is ended either by age, dis- ability, or death? Are we providing more cultural oppor- tunities for ourselves and our children? In a word, are we free men? Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality in economic opportunity? No man is wholly free until he is both politically and economically free. No man with an uneconomic and failing business is free. He is unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society, and to himself. No man with an inadequate wage is free. He is unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society and to himself. No man is free who can provide only for physical needs. He must also be in a position to take advantage of cultural opportunities. Business, as the process of coordi- nating men’s capital and effort in all fields of activity, will not have accomplished its full service until it shall have pro- vided the opportunity for all men to be economically free. [ have referred elsewhere to the cultural wage. I repeat it here as an appropriate term with which to measure the right earnings of every member of a sound society competent and willing to work. ... The worker must be made to feel, must be made to realize, that he is a property owner. General Electric is operating, in a modest measure, along these lines now. A consciousness of independence must be created—at least a feeling on the part of the man, that he is working toward complete independence, and that what he gets in the world he earns—it is not handed out to him as pap. Not merely a living wage, but a cultural wage, must be the basis for the solving of the economic system of to-morrow.

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