Methods of Industrial Remuneration

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: V CHAPTER II. THE COMMON BASIS OF ALL KINDS OF WAGES. The general character of the distinction between the diflferedt methods of paying for labour under the wage-system has been explained in the last chapter. Notwithstanding the important points of difference which exist between the various forms of wage-...
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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: V CHAPTER II. THE COMMON BASIS OF ALL KINDS OF WAGES. The general character of the distinction between the diflferedt methods of paying for labour under the wage-system has been explained in the last chapter. Notwithstanding the important points of difference which exist between the various forms of wage- payment, there can be recognised, underlying all these divergent types, a common basis, the nature of which it will be sought to make clear by illustrative facts. The two leading methods of wage-payment, as we have seen, are time-wage and piece-wage. The employee working on time-wage is paid in proportion to time worked, the piece-worker in proportion to work done. But in the practice of industry, whether a man be employed on time-wage or on piece-wage, both the time occupied and the work done are, as a rule, taken into account. To put it roughly, time- wage very often has a piece-basis, and piece-wage has in practically all cases a time-basis. First, as to the piece-basis of time-wage. Although under the method of time-wage the remuneration of the employee is fixed without any direct reference to the amount of labour which he shall perform within a given period, yet the performance of not less than, or not more than a given amount of work within a given period of time, forms, in many cases, virtually a part of the contract between the employee working on time-wages and his employer. On the one hand, the employer nearly always discharges all operatives who do not work at a certain minimum rate of speed; on the other, the operatives always object to working at a rate of speed greater than they think consistent with their reasonable well- being, and, in many trades, fix a certain maximum speed, which they, upon one ground or another, decline to exceed. Concerni...