Now employers who are in a
position like this are morally responsible for the hardship and
degradation they inflict if they pay wages insufficient for decent
maintenance. Their excuse that they are paying the market rate of wages,
and that if their men do not choose to work for this rate there are
plenty of others who will, is no exoneration of their conduct unless it
be distinctly admitted that "moral considerations" have no place in
commerce. Employers who in the enjoyment of this superior position pay
bare subsistance wages, and defend themselves by the plea that they pay
the "market rate," are "sweaters," and the blame of sweating will
rightly attach to them.
But this is not to be regarded as the normal position of employers.
Among firms unsheltered by a monopoly, and exposed to the full force of
capitalist competition, the rate of profit is also at "the minimum of
subsistence," that is to say, if higher wages were paid to the employes,
the rate of profit would either become a negative quantity, or would be
so low that capital could no longer be obtained for investment in such a
trade. Generally it may be said that a joint-stock company and a private
firm, trading as most firms do chiefly on borrowed capital, could not
pay higher wages and stand its ground in the competition with other
firms. If a benevolent employer engaged in a manufacture exposed to open
competition undertook to raise the wages of his men twenty per cent, in
order to lift them to a level of comfort which satisfied his
benevolence, he must first sacrifice the whole of his "wage of
superintendence," and he will then find that he can only pay the
necessary interest on his borrowed capital out of his own pocket: in
fact he would find he had essayed to do what in the long run was
impossible.
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