Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/50

 30 1885-87. The boot-makers, becoming an eight hours trade in 1885, were still paid in 1887 at the old rates, but then these were piece rates. The tanners adopted the system in 1886, and were still paid the same old rate of wages in 1887. The saddlers, who first joined the procession in 1885, had £2 to £3 a week in 1883-85, and still had £2 to £3 a week in 1886-88. The printers and hatters, who were paid by the piece, effected a small rise, but whether enough to keep their daily earnings the same as before I am unable to say; and the farriers' wages, which did not rise the first two years after the change, showed a tendency to rise in the next two. The bakers, who had been paid 40s. a week up to 1881, received only from 25s. to 35s. in 1882 and 1883, but after the reduction of their hours from 15 to 10 in the latter year, their wages rose to 50s., and when their hours were a few months afterwards again reduced from 10 to 8, their wages remained unchanged, and have been 50s. a week ever since. The experience of the coachbuilders is a little peculiar. They got the eight hours day in 1883 or 1884, when their wages had been for some years from £3 10s. to £5 or £6 a week, and for the first year thereafter—1885—their wages continued at the same figure; but in 1886 they sank a little, and for the three years 1886-88 they stood at from £3 to £4. The peculiarity is that this fall in wages took place, as will presently appear, simultaneously with a considerable and progressive increase in the number of hands employed, and in the annual production of the coach works.

The very notable rise in bakers' wages was a result of the same agitation which procured the shortening of their hours, but was not occasioned by any increased demand for labour that shortening may have caused. When the first reduction of their hours from fifteen to ten took place, only thirty of the unemployed bakers were taken on, and sixty still remained. The short day had only been introduced into 50 out of the 200 bakeshops of Melbourne, but these 50 shops employed not less than 200 men, and yet, though the hours of these 200 men were suddenly reduced by a third, it needed less than a sixth more new hands to do the same work. If the reduction from fifteen hours to ten made so little difference in the number of the unemployed, the reduction from ten to eight would make less.

The prevailing idea that a uniform eight hours day will abolish the unemployed is of course chimerical, because shortening the hours of labour reaches none of the more common causes that produce the unemployed; and in Victoria the problem of the unemployed often assumes much graver proportions than it does