s of workers with the greatest
minuteness. But the great object, and the principal effect of all
these agreements, is this: it is to ensure uniformity of remuneration,
the same wage for the same work, and to protect the most necessitous
and most helpless workers from being forced to take less than the
employers can afford to pay. Broadly speaking, the rate of pay, in
these highly organised industries, is determined by the value of the
work and not by the need of the worker. That makes an enormous
difference. But in sweated industries this is not the case. Sweated
industries are the unorganised industries, those in which there is no
possibility of organisation among the workers. Here the individual
worker, without resources and without backing, is left, in the
struggle of unregulated competition, to take whatever he can get,
regardless of what others may be getting for the same work and-of the
value of the work itself. Hence the extraordinary inequality of
payment for the same kind of work and the generally low average of
payment which are the distinguishing features of all sweated
industries.

Now, if you have followed this rather dry argument, I shall probably
have your concurrence when I say, that the proposal that the State
should intervene to secure, not an all-round minimum wage, but the
same wages for the same work, and nothing less than the standard rate
of his particular work for every worker, is not a proposition that the
State should do something new, or exceptional, or impracticable. It is
a proposal that the State should do for the weakest and most helpless
trades what the strongly-organised trades already do for themselves. I
cannot see that there is anything unreasonable, much less
revolutionary or subversive, in that suggestion.

This proposal has taken practical form in a Bill presented to the
House of Commons last session. Whether the measure reached its second
reading or not I do not know. It was a Bill for the establishment of
Wages Boards in certain industries employing great numbers of
workpeople, such as tailoring, shirtmaking, and so on. The industries
selected were those in which the employes, though numerous, are
hopelessly disorganised and unable to make a bargain for themselves.
And the Bill provided that where any six persons, whether masters or
employes, applied to the Home Secretary for the establishment of a
Wages Board, such a Board should be created in the particular industry
and dist