If the State or municipality were permitted to conduct business on ordinary commercial principles, it might indeed be expected to seize the opportunity afforded by a large supply of unemployed labour, to undertake new public works at a lower cost than usual.  But to take this advantage of the cheapness of labour is held to be “sweating.”  Public bodies are called upon to disregard the rise and fall of market wages, and to pay “a fair wage,” which practically means a wage which is the same whether labour is plentiful or scarce.  This refusal to permit the ordinary commercial inducement to operate in the case of public bodies, cuts off what might be regarded as a natural check to the accumulation of unemployed labour.  If public bodies are to employ more labour, when labour is excessive, and pay a wage which shall be above the market price, it must be clearly understood that the portion of the wages which represents the “uncommercial” aspect of the contract is just as much public charity as the half-crown paid as out-door relief under the present Poor Law.  Lastly, the establishment of State or municipal workshops for the “unemployed” has no economic connection with the “socialist” policy, by which the State or municipality should assume control and management of railways, mines, gas-works, tramways, and other works into which the element of monopoly enters.  Such a “socialist” policy, if carried out, would not directly afford any relief to the unemployed.  For, in the first place, the labour employed in these new public departments would be chiefly skilled, and not unskilled.  Moreover, so far as the condition of the “workers” was concerned, the nationalization, or municipalization of these works would not imply any increased demand for labour, but merely the transfer of a number of employes from private to the public service.  The public control of departments of industry, which are now in private hands, would not, so long as it was conducted on a commercial footing in the public interest, furnish either direct, or indirect, relief to “the unemployed.”  A reduction of hours of labour in the case of workers transferred to the public service, might afford employment to an increased number of skilled labourers, and might indirectly operate in reducing the number of unemployed.  But such reduction of hours of labour, like the payment of wages above the market rate, forms no essential part of a “socialist” policy, but is rather a charitable appendage.

Sec. 8.  State Business on uncommercial terms.—­It cannot be too clearly recognized that the payment by a public body of wages which are above the market price, the payment of pensions, the reduction of hours of labour, and any other advantages freely conferred, which place public servants in a better position than private servants, stand on precisely the same economic footing with the establishment of public workshops for the relief of the unemployed, in which wages are paid for work which is deficient in commercial value.  In each case the work done has some value, unless the unemployed are used to dig holes in the ground and fill them up again; in each case the wages paid for that work are in excess of the market rate.