The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc (books under 200 pages .txt) 📕

It is a short step from the calculation of unemployment benefit (its being fixed by statute at a certain level, and that level determined by something which is regarded as the just remuneration of labour in that trade); it is a short step, I say, from that to a statutory fixing of the sums paid during employment.

The state says to the serf: “I saw to it that you should have so much when you were unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to your getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed, yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man to work, or to make him take any particular trouble to get work. I must see to this.”

The provision of a fixed schedule during unemployment thus inevitably leads to the examination, the defining, and at last the imposition of a minimum wage during employment; and every compulsory provision for unemployed benefits is the seed of a minimum wage.

Of still greater effect is the mere presence of state regulation in such a matter. The fact that the state has begun to gather statistics of wages over these large areas of industry, and to do so not for a mere statistical object, but a practical one, and the fact that the state has begun to immix the action of positive law and constraint with the older system of free bargaining, mean that the whole weight of its influence is now in favour of regulation. It is no rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our industrial society will see a gradually extending area of industry in which from two sides the fixing of wages by statute shall appear. From the one side it will come in the form of the state examining the conditions of labour in connection with its own schemes for establishing sufficiency and security by insurance. From the other side it will come through the reasonable proposals to make contracts enforceable in the courts between groups of labour and groups of capital.

So much, then, for the principle of a minimum wage. It has already appeared in our laws. It is certain to spread. But how does the presence of this introduction of a minimum form part of the advance towards the servile state?

I have said that the principle of a minimum wage involves as its converse the principle of compulsory labour. Indeed, most of the importance which the principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry lies in that converse necessity of compulsory labour which it involves.

But as the connection between the two may not be clear at first sight, we must do more than take it for granted. We must establish it by process of reason.

There are two distinct forms in which the whole policy of enforcing security and sufficiency by law for the proletariat produce a corresponding policy of compulsory labour.

The first of these forms is the compulsion which the courts will exercise upon either of the parties concerned in the giving and in the receiving of the minimum wage. The second form is the necessity under which society will find itself, when once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded, coupled with the principle of sufficiency and security, to control those whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment.

As to the first form:⁠—

A proletarian group has struck a bargain with a group of capitalists to the effect that it will produce for that capital ten measures of value in a year, will be content to receive six measures of value for itself, and will leave four measures as surplus value for the capitalists. The bargain is ratified; the courts have the power to enforce it. If the capitalists by some trick of fines or by bluntly breaking their word pay out in wages less than the six measures, the courts must have some power of constraining them. In other words, there must be some sanction to the action of the law. There must be some power of punishment, and, through punishment, of compulsion. Conversely, if the men, having struck this bargain, go back upon their word; if individuals among them or sections among them cease work with a new demand for seven measures instead of six, the courts must have the power of constraining and of punishing them. Where the bargain is ephemeral or at any rate extended over only reasonable limits of time, it would be straining language perhaps to say that each individual case of constraint exercised against the workmen would be a case of compulsory labour. But extend the system over a long period of years, make it normal to industry and accepted as a habit in men’s daily conception of the way in which their lives should be conducted, and the method is necessarily transformed into a system of compulsory labour. In trades where wages fluctuate little this will obviously be the case. “You, the agricultural labourers of this district, have taken fifteen shillings a week for a very long time. It has worked perfectly well. There seems no reason why you should have more. Nay, you put your hands to it through your officials in the year so-and-so that you regarded that sum as sufficient. Such and such of your members are now refusing to perform what this court regards as a contract. They must return within the limits of that contract or suffer the consequences.”

Remember what power analogy exercises over men’s minds, and how, when systems of the sort are common to many trades, they will tend to create a general point of view for all trades. Remember also how comparatively slight a threat is already sufficient to control men in our industrial society, the proletarian mass of which is accustomed to live from week to week under peril of discharge, and has grown readily amenable to the