Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/546

 524 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL proprietors had since then increased their number of permanent hands, and classified the rest into three separate lists, each of which should receive the offer of work, only after those in the previous list had been exhausted. Mr. W. G. Hubbard, chairman of Joint Committee of the Dock Companies, contended that this arrangement must act beneficially to the dock labourers, because it lessened the chances of the new coiners and must therefore prevent their excessive influx to the docks. Some difficulty appeared in ascertaining very exactly the average wages earned by a docker in the year, inasmuch as many of them did not come to the docks every day, but got work elsewhere. The great evils, however, of the inconstancy of employment at the docks, were not denied; and Mr. Tilleft saw no cure except the municip- alisation of the docks so that they might be managed on the principle of giving employment to the greatest number, together with the supplementary remedies of establishing municipal workshops in every district of the country to keep the local unemployed supplied with work and prevent them aggregating in London, and of securing to the agricultural labourers more access to the occupation of land. Both he and several other witnesses further proposed to prohibit the labour of old men, providing them at sixty with state pensions, and they would either impose a tax on all new labour-saving machinery, or else force the benefit of it to be given wholly or in part to the. labourers it, displaced. On this point of new machinery curious differences of opinion were recorded among the working men of different industries. The stevedores, Mr. Cridge said, had no fault to find with it, for in their case it had led to more men, and not fewer, being employed; and the cot- ton operatives, once so hostile to it, were unanimous in stating to the Labour Commission that they now al'ays elcomed it, believing it was indispensable in order to keep pace with foreign competition. Mr. Tilleft asked also for a ministry of labour, local bureaus of labour, a state board of arbitration, a forty-eight hours a week law, a right of men to inspect the accounts of the firm they wrought for, and the institution of the system of co-operative gangs, with right of the labourers to make up their own gangs by free association. On this last, point, Mr. Beckeft Hill, as a shipowner, said he thought middlemen were necessary, and Mr. Hubbard, for the dock companies, explained that they had no objection to the co-operative system, and that the only reason why they had themselves assumed the control of the coin- position of the gang, was that they found the union men trying to exclude the non-union men, and get the whole work into their own hands. One of the special points most pressingly urged was more effective provision against accidents, by modifications of the Employers' Liability Act, like those already mentioned. Conflicting, or at any rate diverse estimates were given of the number of accidents in the year, but, all made it high, and one witness suggested that they occurred largely during overtime or when the men were othel,ise unduly fatigued. JOHN RAE