Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/139

 Though experience in this country of wage-boards in “sweated” industries shows that improved wages and other conditions of labour may induce employers to make such improvements in their methods of production as to meet the higher labour costs without a loss, this experience cannot have a general application. A policy of State-enforced humanization of private enterprises must in many cases prove impossible for the employer who is called upon to raise substantially his labour costs without the liberty to raise his selling prices. Indeed, when an industry operates largely in the world market, it is easy to perceive that any purely national policy of “humanization” along these lines is impracticable. It is the recognition of this truth that underlies the efforts of the International Labour Office to get the nations competing in world trade to agree upon simultaneous measures for shortening hours. The difficulties confronting such a “humanist” policy at present appear unsurmountable, for nations which go further than others in this direction seem likely to suffer in their export trade at a time when increases of export trade are held to be essential to recovery and progress. It is true that this may be a short-sighted view. For any damage to export trade due to rising costs of home production will to some extent be compensated out of the higher wage-incomes of the workers and the increased employment which shorter hours may bring in the essential industries. But certain British export