The Sunday Pictorial, October 6th, 1929, gives prominence to an article by Mr. G. Ward Price, who, according to the headlines, “shows that industry is suffering from several definite ailments. If it were “rationalised and brought up to date, we should not have a capable worker unemployed. There is no mystery about what is wrong with the great British export trades,” says Mr. Price. “Their costs of production are too high.”
Further, he says, “There are only two “remedies for unemployment. . . . One is the compulsory rationalisation of our big industries on lines of which America and Germany furnish the example, and the other is the reduction of Trade Union restriction.”
Mr. Price may be guilty of some slight exaggeration when he says the result will be jobs for every capable worker. That fulness of employment has not yet been reached by America or Germany, although, he says, they furnish examples of rationalisation we might copy.
There is no question with the capitalist about reducing unemployment. So far as he is concerned he desires to increase it. If he rationalises his concern he reduces the number of workers employed while increasing the amount of the product. He may not, it is true, reduce the number of workers in his own factory, but workers must be displaced somewhere if he succeeds in capturing markets previously held by his competitors.
[From an article “Work for all” by F. Foan, Socialist Standard November 1929.]
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