ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 157 
will undoubtedly thue be invoked and applied to the un- 
skilled worker, with the addition of reasonable advances 
in the differentials above the unskilled which custom and 
tradition have heretofore sanctioned for the more skilled, 
hazardous, and responsible occupations. 
Through the force of this inevitable tendency, the living 
or savings-wage principle will increasingly receive formal 
acceptance and practical application. Outside of the activi- 
ties of organized labor itself, it will be stimulated by those 
industrial students and leaders who already believe that 
the maintenance of existing prosperity can be best assured 
by making possible higher earnings and, as a consequence, 
increased purchasing power for the millions of unskilled 
or semi-skilled industrial workers. 
The productivity theory of wage payments, in other 
words, and its corollaries, have become predominant. They 
assume the “living wage” principle or the fixing of an 
adequate basic rate of compensation for those lowest in 
the industrial scale. This is implied and accepted as a 
starting point. The procedure of the new industrial order, 
in this respect, was well expressed by Mr. Lewis E. 
Pierson, former President of the United States Chamber 
of Commerce, in an address before that body in Wash- 
ington in May, 1928, when he said: 
We forgot the old idea of the living wage and asserted a 
new American doctrine which enlisted the cooperation of the 
worker with the implied declaration that his earnings were 
to be measured largely by his power to produce. . . . 
It was evident that if, through the use of power machinery, 
‘he individual worker could be brought to produce more in 
2 given time, he would be able to earn a corresponding 
increase in pay. We found that production and consumption 
must go hand in hand, that high wages represented the com- 
mon denominator of both.